Right, so, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the original Dungeons & Dragons box set, and the subsequent birth of the RPG hobby. To celebrate, I’ve decided to, over the course of the year, post all of Mayfair Games’ Role Aids products that I own (well, the ones I haven’t posted yet, anyway—you’ll have to look in the archive for the Demons box sets and module based on the Michael Mann film The Keep). Role Aids was a line of third-party D&D supplements that irked TSR to various degrees for many years and inspired at least one lawsuit; TSR wound up buying them mothballing the brand when they couldn’t sue it out of existence in the mid-‘90s. Profiling these books seems somehow more appropriate a celebration to me, if nothing else because it highlights the importance of third-party creators in the hobby’s ecosystem (there’ll be plenty of official D&D stuff in the feed this year, too, never fear).

Anyway, this is Wizard’s Vale, the first in the series of adventures about Fez, the wizard of time travel. This is the 1987 second edition; the first was originally published in a folder with a cut-out cover that looks more appropriate for a small business’ P&L (as were the first three Role Aids adventures—they’re rare, expensive and I don’t own those). David Cherry did the cover art, Tim Bradstreet and Gerald O’Malley were on the interiors.

The Fez series is pretty well regarded. It isn’t the high point of the Role Aids line, but it’s still pretty great, funny and horrible in turn. The players use pre-generated characters, but awaken with amnesia and have to recover their memories. They are, as a group, instrumental in a prophecy to defeat Fez’s ancient enemy (Scarsnout the dragon), but that’s in danger of being disrupted by an untimely case of lycanthropy. It’s lightly plotted, moves at a brisk clip, and ends with the defeat of the dragon and the culmination of Fez’s saga. Sort of.