This is the second Dark Sun retail adventure, Road to Urik (1992). Freedom is set during the slave revolt of Tyr. Road to Urik picks up directly where the previous module left off, with an army from the city-state of Urik threatening to seize Tyr after its sorcerer-king’s death. It lines up with the second Dark Sun novel, The Crimson Legion.

A couple more thoughts on the flip-book format. They’re certainly a novel approach to running a game, especially for novice DMs. They remind me a bit of the earlier One-on-One Adventure Gamebooks TSR from 1985-1987, and have their roots in the S-series modules, which also included art handouts for players. They’re also crazy hard to re-pack once you pull everything out of the folder. The resale value on my copy of Freedom just went way down a couple minute ago.

The action is split pretty evenly between faction-crawling to assemble the army in the city and then a big, Battlesystem battle. Kind of a snooze for me. Dark Sun changed a lot from conception to the store shelf, but the original concept of “War World” lingered in lots of weird ways, some good (undead war beetles!), some bad (all this mass combat). Of all the things that can happen on Athas, the one I am least interested is armies battling.