They can’t all be winners. This is The Phantastical Phantasmagorical Montie Haul Dungeon (1982). The front cover claims not Gamelords as the publisher, but No-Shamelords Unlimited. That gives you an excellent sense of the humor that you will encounter inside.

Like Compleat Tavern, this is a zine-sized book. It presents [deep breath] the Pyramid of Pallapot the Peripatetic, a senile old mage, and is, basically, one big goof in the style of, I dunno, say, those April Fool’s issues of Dragon Magazine I roll my eyes at so hard. I don’t really understand the compulsion RPG folks have for producing stuff like this occasionally, but honestly, I also don’t understand why they almost always leave me cold. RPGs can certainly be funny — Paranoia, Honey Heist and more do it intentionally, and I don’t know a single game I’ve ever run that hasn’t had at least one moment of sidesplitting laughter. But it seems like typing up these sorts of one-of joke modules drains any humor that might have been there out of the proceedings. They remind me of paperback books you used to see that would collect one-liner jokes. They try too hard to nail the punchline when really they should just be concentrating on setting up the gags for the players to riff on. Dismaying.

You might doubt me. Here, let me give you an example. One room riffs on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because of course it does. There’s a black knight you can defeat by hacking to pieces. The twist is that he’s the film’s knight’s younger brother, who is cursed to do everything backwards, like Bizarro, sort of. His actual name is “Knight Black The.” God, that hurt to type out.

Yea, no, I can’t go on.