Surprisingly, in 1996, TSR took a third crack at using Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar as a D&D campaign setting (Lankhmar: City of Adventure originally came out in 1985 and was reissued for 2E in 1993). The resulting box set has the unwieldy title Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar: The New Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. A subtitle adds “The two most famous rogues of fantasy.” Much as I don’t really love Alan Pollack’s cover art, it does get at something essential about the pair’s tendency to screw up rather than win the day.

The idea here is to present a streamlined version of D&D, customized especially for Lankhmar. This isn’t too different from the way City of Adventure approached things, but this feels a bit more complete and self-contained. I could probably run this without pulling down the Player’s Handbook off the shelf. Which, don’t mistake that to mean this is an introductory set. More like it is pretending to be a discreet system.

It’s fine? It does seem to work a bit better than City of Adventure but it is also spread thinner, because it has all the rules in the box but also has to find space to detail Lankhmar itself and the broader world of Nehwon. It does the job, but it feels, well, like the cover — shot out an explosion, no time to catch your breath.

There is a good section called the Adventure Cookbook that gives you tools to make adventures with that is a pretty neat and functional toolkit. The map is gorgeous, too. But it is kind of weird that they ditched the back-alley geomorph scheme of City of Adventure, while also keeping the geomorphs. I dunno, it’s an odd box set released pretty much at the close of the line, what do you expect, really?

Big love for Dave Monson’s kind of weird indie comic-style illustrations tho.