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## About This Content
## D&D Classics: Night Below: An Underdark Campaign
A missing mage…
A ruthless band of kidnappers…
A sinister conspiracy…
Night Below, the first epic campaign adventure for the AD&D game, is designed
to take the player characters from 1st level to 10th level and beyond. The PCs
start as beginning adventures on a routine courier mission who soon become
drawn into combating a sinister plot that menaces the pleasant land of
Haranshire.
By the end of Book I, The Evils of Haranshire, the player characters should
have worked their way up to 5th level. Book II, Perils of the Underdark,
shifts the scene underground as the characters search the seemingly endless
realm of the underdark to discover the fate of the kidnappers’ victims. By the
time they reach the dark cavern of The Sunless Sea in Book III, they should
each be 10th level or above, ready at last to confront the ultimate evil
behind the far-reaching conspiracy.
Inside this box are
* Three books compromising a single grand-scale adventure, which can be placed in any AD&D world.
* 16 Player Handout sheets featuring art, maps, charts, and letters.
* 8 two-sided DUNGEON MASTER Reference Cards providing cutouts, monster rosters, and two new evil deities.
* An eight-page booklet of new MONSTROUS COMPENDIUM entries, detailing three new races and two new monsters.
* 6 full-color poster maps detailing all the important locations in the entire campaign setting.
Note on the print edition: All booklets, handouts, and maps have been merged
into a single collected book (the maps have been split into individual pages).
If you intend to use the handouts and maps at your table it is recommended
that you purchase the PDF+Print combo deal and print those out using the PDF.
Product History
Night Below: An Underdark Campaign (1995), by Carl Sargent, is a standalone
Underdark campaign. It was published in November 1995.
Origins (I): A Boxed Campaign. By the mid ’90s, TSR was producing generic
campaigns as boxed sets. Some were one-off campaign worlds, like Council of
Wyrms (1994) while others were really big adventures like Dragon Mountain
(1993) and now Night Below: An Underdark Campaign (1995).
Origins (II): The Return of D. Night Below: An Underdark Campaign (1995)
is clearly intended as a reinvention of Gary Gygax’s original series of “D”
adventures. Like that primordial campaign, Night Below is set in a peopled
underdark with monstrous cities and entire civilizations beneath the earth.
Night Below even includes an Underdark ocean called “The Sunless Sea”,
which is an obvious homage to the otherwise unexplored locale mentioned in D2:
“Shrine of the Kuo-Toa” (1978) and D3: “Vault of the Drow” (1978). Given Carl
Sargent’s past work as the main architect of Greyhawk, this has led some to
speculate that Night Below was originally intended as a Greyhawk campaign —
or perhaps as a trilogy of adventures, for its clearly broken up into three
equal parts. Unfortunately, author Carl Sargent would not be able to speak to
this speculation.
Origins (III): The Mysterious Disappearance of Carl Sargent. Night Below
was Carl Sargent’s last work for TSR. Around the same time he was hired by
FASA to become the new line developer for their Shadowrun game. He left
Nottingham, to catch a plane to Chicago to accept the job … and was never
heard from again.
Various reports have speculated that he was in a car accident, that he
suffered some other “medical problem”, or that he purposefully disappeared.
None of this has been confirmed. Some reports suggest that even his family
doesn’t know what happened to him. In any case, since 1995, Sargent has been
gone from the industry (and from his professional career). Paizo editor Erik
Mona made a new attempt to track down Sargent in the early ’10s and had one of
“Sargent’s most frequent collaborators,” tell him: “I’ve always thought that
if people want to disappear, they should be allowed.”
Adventures Styles: An Adventure Path. Night Below follows in the footsteps
of the “D” adventures in another way: it’s early adventure path, meant to
bring players from first level to somewhere in excess of tenth. However unlike
modern adventure paths, Night Below doesn’t really contain enough challenges
to level the characters up. Night Below alludes to this by suggesting that
players use “side-plots” and “mini-adventures” to flesh out the campaign and
give it more verisimilitude. Online, Dragon editor Dave Gross was more
adamant, saying, “Don’t forget that it’s highly recommended, even necessary
that you expand the Night Below campaign with short adventures”. Of course, he
suggested Dungeon Adventures as a great place to find those mini-adventures.
Adventure Styles: Locale-Based. Night Below is largely a locale-based
adventure. There’s a sandbox of a town for the first section, then a ruins
crawl, a mine crawl, and lots of underdark crawls.
Adventure Tropes: Bringing Down the House. The players must invade a few
different cities. The attack on the kuo-toan City of the Glass Pool is a pure
hack-and-slash. There’s even a “Social Collapse Point system” that describes
what happens as the players murder-hobo their way through the city.
The invasion of the Great City of the Aboleth could be equally violent, but
there are also suggestions for quieter infiltrations, which is more in tune
with how players were expected to interact with the great underground cities
of the original “D” adventures.
Adventure Tropes: Let’s Negotiate. In fact, there are lots of options for
negotiation in Night Below , trading in simple hack-and-slash for more
meaningful interactions with these Underdark cultures. But it’ll all depend on
the players …
Not Necessarily The Miniatures Tie-In. Wizards of the Coast apparently liked
the name “Night Below” because years later they released Night Below (2007)
as an expansion for the D &D Miniatures game. It has nothing to do with
Sargent’s adventure of a decade earlier.
Exploring Greyhawk. Though Night Below is a generic adventure, the
presence of a Sunless Sea has led many to place it in Greyhawk, beginning on
the opposite shore from the “D” adventures.
Monsters of Note. So who are the newest monsters filling the Underdark?
Sargent begins with some classics like illithids , kuo-tuo , and
svirfneblin . He also highlights the derro , who were mentioned in early
sources like the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide (1986), but who had been most
prominently featured in Greyhawk adventures. The drow are largely missing, but
have been replaced by the new rockseer elf race.
However, the aboleth are the most important monster to rise to newfound
Underdark prominence. Like the derro, they were mentioned in the Dungeoneer’s
Survival Guide , but this was their first notable Underdark appearance. It
would turn them into one of the major races of the under realms.
Monsters of Note: A History of Aboleth. The aboleth were created by David
“Zeb” Cook for I1: “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” (1981), where they’re
described as “an amphibious, fishlike abomination.” They quickly became
associated with Lovecraftian monstrosities, but fans have suggested that their
inspiration could just as easily have been any number of weird fish, including
agnathans or hagfish.
They were soon reprinted in the Monster Manual II (1983), then received a
complete “Ecology of the Aboleth” in Dragon #131 (March 1988), the “Descent
into Deepearth” issue. There, Brandon Grist introduced even more powerful
variants: the greater aboleth, the noble aboleth, the ruler aboleth, and the
grand aboleth. Their only other starring adventure role was in “Intrigue in
the Depths” in Dungeon #12 (July/August 1988), which also introduced the
saltwater aboleth.
The aboleth returned for AD&D 2e (1989) in MC2: Monstrous Compendium Volume
Two (1989), but only in its original form. That was it until the release of
Night Below (1995), the most aboleth-y adventure ever, and also the one that
introduced yet another variant: the aboleth savant.
About the Creators. Sargent was the master of Greyhawk throughout the From
the Ashes era, but this was his final release for TSR.
About the Product Historian
The history of this product was researched and written by Shannon Appelcline,
the editor-in-chief of RPGnet and the author of Designers & Dragons \- a
history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time.
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