Palace of the Silver Princess

An expansion module, coded B3, for the Dungeons & Dragons Basic ruleset. Like all D&D modules, "Palace of the Silver Princess" contains a single adventure, laid out in a format suitable for use in running a gaming session, including game maps contained on the unattached outside cover of the publication.

The plot of "Palace of the Silver Princess" is not particularly unusual, revolving around a country frozen in time by a strange red light. The only seemingly unaffected location, and the apparent source of the glow, is the royal palace. Your adventurers must restore the flow of time and save the country. In short, nothing most D&D veterans haven't seen before.

What IS unusual about "Palace of the Silver Princess" is its history, much of which is recounted in exhaustive detail in [http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/dx20020121x7 B3. Palace of the Silver Princess], a fascinating article on the official Wizards of the Coast website. In brief, the original version of the module, which had an orange cover instead of the now-familiar forest green, contained several pieces of artwork that were decidedly "adult" in nature. On the eve of publication, the legend goes, TSR brass, apparently after having seen the finished product for the first time, immediately recalled the module and ordered the artwork replaced. All copies of the offending orange-covered version were consigned to a local landfill, a new version was published shortly thereafter with a different-colored cover and certain edits made for the sake of playability, and that was that.

Or not. As it happens, a number of TSR staffers had received preview copies of the original version, which were carefully hidden away, and are now worth a respectable amount of money to the avid collector.

Of course, much of the controversy over the artwork was a product of the times--conventional wisdom in 1980 was that role-playing games were strange and potentially dangerous tools of worshippers of malefic horned demons and whatnot. The release of the sensationalistic novel "Mazes and Monsters", about a deranged student involved in live-action role-playing in the steam tunnels under his campus, did nothing to help matters. As a result, game publishers had to be extra-watchful for anything that might draw unfavorable publicity to RPG's in general, or TSR, the market leader, in particular.

These days, the world has relaxed a bit on the subject of RPG's (or has simply been distracted by the spectre of violent video games), and the original version of "Palace of the Silver Princess" no longer carries the stigma it once did. As a result, Wizards of the Coast, which acquired TSR in the late 90's, included the cited article as part of its historical retrospective coinciding with the 30th anniversary of D&D, and made the original, risque version of "Palace" available for free download as an Acrobat .pdf file.

Sources:

John D. Rateliff, "Introduction," [http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/dx20020121x7 B3. Palace of the Silver Princess]

Original "banned" module, in .pdf format: [B3. Palace of the Silver Princess]