While unpacking some boxes of my magazines today, I ran across an issue of Dungeon magazine (number 116 to be precise, November 2004) that made me stop what I was doing and filled me with a desire to read the article advertised on the front cover. As a 30th anniversary celebration for Dungeons and Dragons, this issue listed the 30 greatest adventures of all time to appear under the D&D ruleset, any version. The list was chosen by the editors as well as a team comprised of some of the biggest names in adventure creation over the history of TSR and Wizards of the Coast, including Ed Greenwood (creator of Forgotten Realms) and Bruce R. Cordell (author of Return to the Tomb of Horrors, which incidentally is one of my favorite adventures of all time and got #10 on the list). While the editorial team didn't include adventures printed in Dungeon magazine (which existed to publish adventures submitted to them by fans) in their top 30, they did see fit to include a sidebar featuring their top 10 favorite Dungeon-printed adventures/scenarios. One of my favorites, "Siege of Kratys Freehold" from issue #33, made it to the 10-spot. My absolute favorite Dungeon adventure, however, failed to materialize on their list. This is a shame, because it is one of the few pre-written adventures I have ever had the pleasure of using to scare the bejeezus out of another player.

"Jacob's Well" is an innocuous title for such an adventure. It's written specifically to be run as a one-on-one scenario, with one DM and one PC anywhere from levels 2 - 4. This makes it ideal for those times when you only have time for a short session and one other person to play with. But while it's meant for one player, it is by no means easy, and it works even better when the player doesn't know what the devil he or she is trying to deal with.

The plot of the adventure revolves around the lone PC either getting separated from the rest of the party by some means (last person standing after an adventure, sent ahead to scout out the area, etc...) or just setting out on his or her own to find something exciting. The problem is that there's a terrible winter storm closing in on the character's heels, and the PC is going to have to find some place to hole up and ride out the weather or suffer the wrath of Mother Nature. Fortunately, just as all hope seems lost, the character finds a small outpost where a fire's burning, the food is being prepared, and a room is still available. This is "Jacob's Well," the property of a surly half-orc (named Jacob, naturally) and built around the deep well in the center of the outpost. A number of travellers have all found their way to Jacob's Well today: a trio of fur trappers, three barbarians, a ranger, a young mage, an orc chieftain and his two bodyguards. One of them has unwittingly brought something with them to the outpost, and in a few hours, with the storm raging overhead and dumping snow on the entire region, there will be a terror unleashed that will stalk the inhabitants of Jacob's Well relentlessly.

Author Randy Maxwell took the best themes from "Alien" and John Carpenter's "The Thing" (being cut off from the rest of the world and facing a horror that seems impossible to fight) and combined them to create this scarefest that runs the creep factor off the charts, rewards players who can make tough decisions quickly, and punishes players who try and hide or wait out the horror by slowly increasing the strength of the enemy while depleting the number of people at the Well who can help. In addition, the enemy faced by the player, while not a genius, is still very cunning and intelligent - it attacks when potential victims are alone and avoids taking on large groups, it seeks hiding places that are difficult or impossible for others to find, and even uses its resources to destroy parts of the outpost to limit the options of its food sources.

If you feel I'm being deliberately vague, it's for a good reason - I don't want players who have no experience with Jacob's Well to have the experience spoiled for them if they encounter it (I have D&D-playing friends who read this blog on occasion, and one of them is bound to get hit with this adventure by me sooner or later). Perhaps the best thing about the adventure though is one that the author points out in his own introduction: the best adventures are just plain fun to read. Jacob's Well is no exception to this, as it is written out as a sequence of events that take place, instead of the normal way (a list of encounters tied to areas of the map). This gives the adventure itself the sense of a short story format, but with enough details that a DM can respond to a player's tactics in any number of ways without railroading that player down the path into a no-win scenario.

Technically speaking, AD&D 1st edition is about as "retro" as you can get in terms of tabletop RPGs. I grew up playing it, and still play (and DM) every version up to v3.5 to this day. And while the adventures listed in Dungeon #116 are good, leaving "Jacob's Well" off the list was a major mistake that I felt the need to correct. It's AD&D horror done to perfection by putting the player between the proverbial rock and hard place, forcing him or her to become the R.J. MacReady or the Ellen Ripley of his or her own personal nightmare. Done right, it's a session that neither a player nor a DM will forget for a long, long time.