Automation in the Laboratory Book

In my project of reading (more-or-less) every title in my library, I decided to re-read some things I normally wouldn't have read in the first place; The Forge of Fury, the second in the core series of adventures for 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, is one of those books. Looking back at my star review when I originally added The Forge of Fury to Goodreads, I rated it with five stars out of five, and a re-reading confirms that assessment.

First off, designer Richard Baker clearly knew what he was doing; by the time he designed The Forge of Fury, he was already a D&D veteran, having co-designed (with Colin McComb) an entire award-winning campaign setting for 2nd Edition D&D, and he would go on, very shortly after this, to spearhead the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Indeed, for the 30th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the editors of Dungeon magazine named The Forge of Fury the 12th best adventure of all time, the only one of the core 3rd Edition adventures to so rate.

To that effect, The Forge of Fury succeeds in what it sets out to do: It's a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, where decisions the players make in-game matter and with real rewards to be had for seeing the adventure through. Take too much time to go through the adventure, and an already challenging adventure gets real hard, real fast, and take too little time, and players will miss some nice details that will help them down the road. Add to that that The Forge of Fury stands on its own, independently, without a connection to a larger story—as later adventures in the 4th Edition core campaign fell victim to—such that a Dungeon Master can fit it in anywhere into his or her larger campaign, and Wizards of the Coast had a winner on its hands.