The presentation here goes a long way in cementing my belief that this is one of the best adventure modules – good organization, a pull-out of player maps and monster stats and that welcome Avalon Hill polish makes the material shine extra bright.

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One of the most interesting this about the adventure is that the authors were at great pains to include multiple plausible reasons for adventurers to visit the hollow. As a place rich in local history, it makes sense that a number of people with diverse interests would be keen to encourage adventurers to delve into the caves. More importantly, the multiple hooks provides a distinction from D&D modules, which often assume exploration to be completed in a single expedition – Snake Pipe Hollow is meant to be visited multiple times, and to change with each visit.

I’d like to draw your attention to the book’s subtitle: Adventures in the Caverns of Chaos. Astute roleplayers will note the similarity between that name and the Caves of Chaos, the name of the region of exploration in the D&D module B2: Keep on the Borderlands. Both that and Snake Pipe Hollow were both published in 1979 and, as is often the case in early TSR and Chaosium products, there is a lot of (nearly) simultaneous inspiration going on (I haven’t been able to confirm the exact original publication date for Snake Pipe Hollow, but seeing as how B2 was released in December, I suspect Chaosium’s adventure was in the world first – take that for what you will).

Structurally, the regions of both modules are extremely similar: an untamed wilderness surrounding an elaborate and confusing system of interconnected cave populated by diverse monster tribes that are often at odds with each other. B2’s caves are a good deal less thought out and the whole thing hangs together a lot less realistically than Snake Pipe Hollow (you know, as realistic as caves filled with monsters can be). If you’re of the mind that B2 is one of the best D&D modules ever written, you owe it to yourself to check out Snake Pipe Hollow…

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I’d like to talk about the creature on the cover for a minute. It is called a walktapus. Not kidding at all. Within the context of RuneQuest’s lore, the creature makes a certain amount of sense – Chaos creates all sorts of abominations. In the meta sense, my goodness, it is hard to take the monster, let alone its name, seriously. It is also, at least as far as I am concerned, hard to not be delighted but such a creature. This is the sort of thing that makes early RPGs so wonderful – designers threw in whatever they wanted. The conventions of fantasy games weren’t so set in stone back then – if you tried to come up with something so doofy as the walktapus now, you’d probably be accused of trying too hard and it would get edited out anyway.

Whether or not you take the walktapus seriously, it can mess you up. Bad. And that is maybe the most beautiful thing about it – your players are bound to underestimate a monster like this.

Another thing worth thinking about – Snake Pipe Hollow is one of few early Chaosium products to get several reprints, so in the covers you can see the company’s increasingly refined professionalism and design sense evolve.

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Snake Pipe Hollow presents a wilderness region and cave system that is thought out with surprising detail. Once the site of a temple of good earth deities, a terrible clash with Chaos turned the hollow into a place of horrors – these events are central to the history and mythology of Glorantha. What begins as a standard dungeon crawl reveals that complex history to players in a slow, methodical, bite-sized way. Once the scenario is done, your players will come away with a significant understanding of how the world works – the adventure is also a teaching tool for future RuneQuest games.

It is written with a fair amount of dynamism for the time. There is a good variety of creatures populating the hollow, each with their own needs and wants. Together, they form an ecosystem of sorts that makes sense, which is something of a rarity for D&D adventures of the time. How many times have you fought a monster in D&D and wondered why the hell it was in that room? The answer is usually because the DM is trying to be a dick and keep you off balance. It is possible for players to explore the Hollow and come to understand its inhabitants, even play them off against one another, in ways that are often impossible in D&D scenarios (see: White Plume Mountain, much as I love that module).

Perhaps most interesting, the authors were at great pains to include multiple plausible reasons for adventurers to visit the hollow. As a place rich in local history, it makes sense that a number of people with diverse interests would be keen to encourage adventurers to delve into the caves. More importantly, the multiple hooks provides a distinction from D&D modules, which often assume exploration to be completed in a single expedition – Snake Pipe Hollow is meant to be visited multiple times, and to change with each visit.

Not a lot of art in the book, though, aside of this kind of not good dragon snail that shows up in every subsequent edition for some reason…

PS: I wish I had thought to come up with a badass DM name like Kalvan the Sinister.

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