LOL, I can’t even with this Jeff Easley cover. The hair, damn. The cheesecake. I don’t get it at all. At least the chainmail bikini covers usually involve swords and monsters or something that speaks to the experience of the game.

This is I9: Day of Al’Akbar (1986). You can tell from the title and cover alone that the adventure is going to indulge in Hollywood-style orientalism, an occurrence that is neither the first nor the last time for D&D. I’d take Al-Qadim over this, as at least there is some deep thought that went into the presentation there. Here, the Middle Eastern trapping are really just flavor layered on a fairly generic adventure that happens to feature old artifacts with an Arabic sounding name (the Cup and Talisman of Al’Akbar, which, that has got to just be a corruption of “Allahu Akbar,” right?). The actual adventure is probably fine, but the Middle Eastern veneer winds up being so tedious as to be entirely distracting. Big pass on this one from me. The mummies are good though, Mark Nelson on the interiors is never a bad thing!