In 2023, I covered Rogues’ Gallery, a supplement that is, for my money, one of the very worst in the 2E D&D era. It does have one good quality. Not a redeeming one, really, but an interesting one: it is the first D&D product that I am aware of that used loose leaf for something other than monsters. Now, again, this was totally squandered by using it on utterly boring NPCs. But the concept was intriguing.

Here we have Treasure Chest (1994), a collection of 16 adventures printed on 32 sheets of loose leaf. Each page has an illustration — the DM sheet usually has a map, the player sheet something useful to the scenario, usually a view of an important object or scene, a la Tomb of Horrors. The flip side of the DM sheet crams everything needed to run the scenario into a single page! The reverse of the player sheet is a little under-utilized, usually presenting a brief info box and some rumors. Even though that bit underwhelms, this is an excellent experiment in form.

Results are kind of mixed, to be honest. Some of the art is neat and evocative. Some…highly cringe. Pretty much all the art involving photography troubles me, though I like the ones involving modeled landscapes and buildings. In terms of substance, the one-page format enforces brevity — most of these are little more than a single adventure location and some loot. Yet they seem somehow more than the Lairs books — a lot of them use their space to get surprisingly strange (particularly love the rug with a spiral staircase depicted in the weave that is actually a gate to a labyrinth). All of them invite the DM to extrapolate and improvise. It’s a neat product, one with much more potential — folks should rip it off!