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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition
Ruins of Zhentil Keep
Visit the Heart of the Black Network
Known throughout the Realms as the headquarters of the Zhentarim, Zhentil Keep has long been a trade hub, a seat of power, and a nest of corruption at the edge of the Moonsea. This boxed set details Zhentil Keep in the days of Bane the Black Lord, before the Time of Troubles. It also presents the new Zhentil Keep, a city nearly destroyed by the insane Cyric, Prince of Lies.
This campaign expansion contains:
* A 128-page sourcebook detailing the old and new Zhentil Keep, the history of the city, the sinister Black Network, and important villains.
* A 64-page adventure book with three new perilous adventures that take heroes into Zhentil Keep, under it, and to nearby communities.
* A Monstrous Compendium Appendix booklet containing 16 new creatures.
* Three poster maps depicting the old Zhentil Keep, the new Zhentil Keep, and the activities of the malevolent Zhentarim.
* Eight cards describing areas containing some of the most nefarious NPCs and monsters ever to be associated with Zhentil Keep.
Enter and beware!
Known throughout the Realms as the headquarters of the Zhentarim, Zhentil Keep has long been a trade hub, a seat of power, and a nest of corruption at the edge of the Moonsea. This boxed set details Zhentil Keep in the days of Bane the Black Lord, before the Time of Troubles. It also presents the new Zhentil Keep, a city nearly destroyed by the insane Cyric, Prince of Lies.
This campaign expansion contains:
* A 128-page sourcebook detailing the old and new Zhentil Keep, the history of the city, the sinister Black Network, and important villains.
* A 64-page adventure book with three new perilous adventures that take heroes into Zhentil Keep, under it, and to nearby communities.
* A Monstrous Compendium Appendix booklet containing 16 new creatures.
* Three poster maps depicting the old Zhentil Keep, the new Zhentil Keep, and the activities of the malevolent Zhentarim.
* Eight cards describing areas containing some of the most nefarious NPCs and monsters ever to be associated with Zhentil Keep.
Enter and beware!
208 pages, Boxed Set
First published April 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 16, 2022
Pop quiz, dice bags: do you know the difference between a Zhentilar, a Zhentarim, and a Zhent?
I didn't think so. But don't despair! It's for reasons like this that David "Zeb" Cook, Kevin Melka and John Terra gave us the Ruins of Zhentil Keep boxed set in 1995. And if you've got a problem with that, then roll for initiative, screen monkey!
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Buckle up, we're taking another deep dive into the world of old school D&D history here.
* * * * *
Ruins of Zhentil Keep is one of the most fascinating boxed sets produced for the Realms. Back in the mid-90's, TSR had a sort of living, active history going on with their various properties. There was a drive to maintain a cohesive lore within their pen-and-paper, computer games, and fiction divisions. While a great idea in theory, and one which generally worked to the company's advantage, it could also be a tremendous pain in the posterior, especially when someone in the fiction stable penned a story that sent ripples through whatever corner of the playground they found themselves working within. Of course, being writers, every author strove for that kind of effect on the material. But while R.A. Salvatore was content to keep Drizzt and company's adventures relatively easy to incorporate into the tabletop lore, and Weis & Hickman's Dragonlance adventures were adapted into the railroad to end all railroads, the Realms lore suffered a series of brutal, successive haymakers to the nuts with 1989's 'Avatar' Trilogy.
Originally conceived as a pair of books written by Scott Ciencen and a third by Troy Denning, The Avatar Trilogy's paperbacks coincided with a trio of similarly-named AD&D modules all penned by Ed Greenwood. The purpose of these modules was to transition Greenwood's own Forgotten Realms from original, or 1st Edition, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to the product's new 2nd Edition line. And much like other products written for similar purposes such as Wrath of the Immortals and Die, Vecna, Die!, the Avatar modules and novels did this by violently rocking the world of Faerun with a cataclysm known as 'The Time of Troubles'.
Despite such an understated moniker, the Time of Troubles fundamentally re-wrote huge swaths of not just the rule books but the lore associated with them. Divine and Arcane magics were re-worked, classes like the Assassin and Monk were stripped out while others like the Bard were re-written from the ground up, and various divine beings fell, rose, became mortal, died, and were replaced by newly-ascended deities, shuffling the pantheon like the world's worst game of 52-Pick-Up. By 1990, the events depicted during the Time of Troubles were fully integrated into the tabletop game's mythos.
Then along came James Lowder who, in 1993, wrote Prince of Lies for TSR's fantasy paperback division.
The fourth book in the no-longer-accurately-named Avatar Trilogy, Prince jumps ahead ten years to see how the Company of the Lynx have adapted to life as nigh-omnipotent deities following the Time of Troubles. But rather than check in to see how the heroes of those books were holding up, Lowder focused on Cyric, one of the newly-crowned immortals who had taken on multiple pantheons formerly held by individual gods, and is the titular Prince. Suddenly becoming the literal patron god of Murder, Death, Strife, Deception, and Intrigue has, understandably, fractured Cyric's sanity. It's also made him more enemies than the Justice League and the Avengers combined.
Things come to a head when Cyric decides he wants the powers held by Mystra, the goddess of Magic itself. Part of his plan involves taking over Zhentil Keep, and using its agents to further his goals. To make matters worse, Cyric goes even more insane by reading a book that he himself had helped write (it makes sense in context, trust me), and Zhentil Keep gets flattened by a combined assault of White Dragons and Frost Giants that makes the siege at Helm's Deep look like a fist fight in the parking lot of a strip club.
So that's cool and all, but it left TSR with a problem: Zhentil Keep never got the comprehensive write-up the Forgotten Realms team always meant to give it. For years, Zhentil Keep was rumored (both in-universe and in publications like Dragon Magazine) as being on par with Undermountain as one of the most dangerous areas in Toril to go poking around. Players and Dungeon Masters alike had been begging for years to get their grubby paws on a supplement giving it the same treatment as Waterdeep got in its boxed set.
And now, James Lowder had just Godzilla'd the place, creating the mother of all headaches.
TSR couldn't very well pretend Prince of Lies hadn't happened. At the same time, not every gaming group set their campaigns contemporaneous with whatever was "currently" happening on Toril either. Zhentil Keep became Schrödinger's dungeon: depending on whether you were playing in a pre- or post-Prince of Lies world, it had either been destroyed or it still stood, but you could pick only one. How did TSR resolve this paradox?
They didn't.
* * * * *
If you want to see the most glorious excesses imaginable in the world of RPG publishing, 2nd Edition AD&D is where it's at. Fifth Edition hardcovers are things of beauty, to be sure, but I defy you to find me a single one as ridiculously stuffed to the gills with goodies as your average 2E boxed set. Zhentil Keep is no exception.
Wedged into this single $25 box are three 18"x24" poster maps, a 128-page campaign book, a 64-page adventure book, a 16-page Monstrous Compendium supplement, and 8 separate cardstock sheets with miniature maps, symbols of major deities, random encounter tables, NPCs, and more.
So why include all of this material in a supplement about a (maybe?) wrecked former outpost of depravity? Because I wasn't kidding when I said TSR didn't solve the conundrum of Zhentil Keep. Their answer to the question of, "Pre-ruin or post-ruin?" was a resounding, "Yes!"
That's right: this boxed set covers both incarnations of Zhentil Keep -- whether you want the pre-ruin, height-of-its-power format, or its Fallout 3 cosplay variant, Ruins of Zhentil Keep has everything you to need to torture your players for weeks. The Adventure Book includes three different quests, two keyed to a pre-Prince of Lies timeline, and the third taking place after the Keep has fallen. Of the three posters, one is a world map showing where Zhentil Keep is located with respect to Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Amn, and other landmarks of Faerun. The other two are pre-ruin and post-ruin maps, showing you what originally stood and what's left.
How large is Zhentil Keep? The non-ruined map is printed at a scale of 1" = 200 feet, and the Keep spans nearly the entire 18-inch width of the poster. The place is enormous, and that's just counting the above-ground area.
* * * * *
Are you beginning to understand how amazing this is yet? I love Wizards of the Coast and what they've done with the D&D rules over time, but stuff like this is why 2nd Edition will forever hold a place in my heart. WotC would never do something like this -- it would be too complex, time-consuming, and expensive. TSR in the mid-90's, on the other hand, was so flush with cash they could afford for this to be their standard. Sure it eventually led to their downfall, but damn, are the relics left behind fun to poke through.
So whether you use Zhentil Keep as a place for good-aligned PCs to sneak into and loot, or a site for evil PCs to find a dishonest day's work, or as a ruin where characters of all alignments can poke around to see if there was anything left after the siege depicted in Prince of Lies, there's something for everyone.
The only downside to this supplement is that, being 25 years out of print, complete copies have become stupidly expensive on the second-hand market. Expect to pay upwards of $50 for this one, with a price above $75 if you want the box in good shape. If that's too rich for your blood (and, really, unless you're a collector that's probably too much to pay for any single D&D supplement), DriveThruRPG has several different options to choose from, everything from a simple $9.99 PDF set to a $26.00 full-fledged, print-on-demand bound hardcover.
So that's Ruins of Zhentil Keep: a ridiculous boxed set made all the more absurd because a dude wrote a story which wiped a location off the map before TSR's designers could flesh it all out. Thanks, James Lowder -- they couldn't have done it without ya!
Man, I love Second Edition. Four and a half flaming skeletons out of five!
I didn't think so. But don't despair! It's for reasons like this that David "Zeb" Cook, Kevin Melka and John Terra gave us the Ruins of Zhentil Keep boxed set in 1995. And if you've got a problem with that, then roll for initiative, screen monkey!
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Buckle up, we're taking another deep dive into the world of old school D&D history here.
* * * * *
Ruins of Zhentil Keep is one of the most fascinating boxed sets produced for the Realms. Back in the mid-90's, TSR had a sort of living, active history going on with their various properties. There was a drive to maintain a cohesive lore within their pen-and-paper, computer games, and fiction divisions. While a great idea in theory, and one which generally worked to the company's advantage, it could also be a tremendous pain in the posterior, especially when someone in the fiction stable penned a story that sent ripples through whatever corner of the playground they found themselves working within. Of course, being writers, every author strove for that kind of effect on the material. But while R.A. Salvatore was content to keep Drizzt and company's adventures relatively easy to incorporate into the tabletop lore, and Weis & Hickman's Dragonlance adventures were adapted into the railroad to end all railroads, the Realms lore suffered a series of brutal, successive haymakers to the nuts with 1989's 'Avatar' Trilogy.
Originally conceived as a pair of books written by Scott Ciencen and a third by Troy Denning, The Avatar Trilogy's paperbacks coincided with a trio of similarly-named AD&D modules all penned by Ed Greenwood. The purpose of these modules was to transition Greenwood's own Forgotten Realms from original, or 1st Edition, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to the product's new 2nd Edition line. And much like other products written for similar purposes such as Wrath of the Immortals and Die, Vecna, Die!, the Avatar modules and novels did this by violently rocking the world of Faerun with a cataclysm known as 'The Time of Troubles'.
Despite such an understated moniker, the Time of Troubles fundamentally re-wrote huge swaths of not just the rule books but the lore associated with them. Divine and Arcane magics were re-worked, classes like the Assassin and Monk were stripped out while others like the Bard were re-written from the ground up, and various divine beings fell, rose, became mortal, died, and were replaced by newly-ascended deities, shuffling the pantheon like the world's worst game of 52-Pick-Up. By 1990, the events depicted during the Time of Troubles were fully integrated into the tabletop game's mythos.
Then along came James Lowder who, in 1993, wrote Prince of Lies for TSR's fantasy paperback division.
The fourth book in the no-longer-accurately-named Avatar Trilogy, Prince jumps ahead ten years to see how the Company of the Lynx have adapted to life as nigh-omnipotent deities following the Time of Troubles. But rather than check in to see how the heroes of those books were holding up, Lowder focused on Cyric, one of the newly-crowned immortals who had taken on multiple pantheons formerly held by individual gods, and is the titular Prince. Suddenly becoming the literal patron god of Murder, Death, Strife, Deception, and Intrigue has, understandably, fractured Cyric's sanity. It's also made him more enemies than the Justice League and the Avengers combined.
Things come to a head when Cyric decides he wants the powers held by Mystra, the goddess of Magic itself. Part of his plan involves taking over Zhentil Keep, and using its agents to further his goals. To make matters worse, Cyric goes even more insane by reading a book that he himself had helped write (it makes sense in context, trust me), and Zhentil Keep gets flattened by a combined assault of White Dragons and Frost Giants that makes the siege at Helm's Deep look like a fist fight in the parking lot of a strip club.
So that's cool and all, but it left TSR with a problem: Zhentil Keep never got the comprehensive write-up the Forgotten Realms team always meant to give it. For years, Zhentil Keep was rumored (both in-universe and in publications like Dragon Magazine) as being on par with Undermountain as one of the most dangerous areas in Toril to go poking around. Players and Dungeon Masters alike had been begging for years to get their grubby paws on a supplement giving it the same treatment as Waterdeep got in its boxed set.
And now, James Lowder had just Godzilla'd the place, creating the mother of all headaches.
TSR couldn't very well pretend Prince of Lies hadn't happened. At the same time, not every gaming group set their campaigns contemporaneous with whatever was "currently" happening on Toril either. Zhentil Keep became Schrödinger's dungeon: depending on whether you were playing in a pre- or post-Prince of Lies world, it had either been destroyed or it still stood, but you could pick only one. How did TSR resolve this paradox?
They didn't.
* * * * *
If you want to see the most glorious excesses imaginable in the world of RPG publishing, 2nd Edition AD&D is where it's at. Fifth Edition hardcovers are things of beauty, to be sure, but I defy you to find me a single one as ridiculously stuffed to the gills with goodies as your average 2E boxed set. Zhentil Keep is no exception.
Wedged into this single $25 box are three 18"x24" poster maps, a 128-page campaign book, a 64-page adventure book, a 16-page Monstrous Compendium supplement, and 8 separate cardstock sheets with miniature maps, symbols of major deities, random encounter tables, NPCs, and more.
So why include all of this material in a supplement about a (maybe?) wrecked former outpost of depravity? Because I wasn't kidding when I said TSR didn't solve the conundrum of Zhentil Keep. Their answer to the question of, "Pre-ruin or post-ruin?" was a resounding, "Yes!"
That's right: this boxed set covers both incarnations of Zhentil Keep -- whether you want the pre-ruin, height-of-its-power format, or its Fallout 3 cosplay variant, Ruins of Zhentil Keep has everything you to need to torture your players for weeks. The Adventure Book includes three different quests, two keyed to a pre-Prince of Lies timeline, and the third taking place after the Keep has fallen. Of the three posters, one is a world map showing where Zhentil Keep is located with respect to Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Amn, and other landmarks of Faerun. The other two are pre-ruin and post-ruin maps, showing you what originally stood and what's left.
How large is Zhentil Keep? The non-ruined map is printed at a scale of 1" = 200 feet, and the Keep spans nearly the entire 18-inch width of the poster. The place is enormous, and that's just counting the above-ground area.
* * * * *
Are you beginning to understand how amazing this is yet? I love Wizards of the Coast and what they've done with the D&D rules over time, but stuff like this is why 2nd Edition will forever hold a place in my heart. WotC would never do something like this -- it would be too complex, time-consuming, and expensive. TSR in the mid-90's, on the other hand, was so flush with cash they could afford for this to be their standard. Sure it eventually led to their downfall, but damn, are the relics left behind fun to poke through.
So whether you use Zhentil Keep as a place for good-aligned PCs to sneak into and loot, or a site for evil PCs to find a dishonest day's work, or as a ruin where characters of all alignments can poke around to see if there was anything left after the siege depicted in Prince of Lies, there's something for everyone.
The only downside to this supplement is that, being 25 years out of print, complete copies have become stupidly expensive on the second-hand market. Expect to pay upwards of $50 for this one, with a price above $75 if you want the box in good shape. If that's too rich for your blood (and, really, unless you're a collector that's probably too much to pay for any single D&D supplement), DriveThruRPG has several different options to choose from, everything from a simple $9.99 PDF set to a $26.00 full-fledged, print-on-demand bound hardcover.
So that's Ruins of Zhentil Keep: a ridiculous boxed set made all the more absurd because a dude wrote a story which wiped a location off the map before TSR's designers could flesh it all out. Thanks, James Lowder -- they couldn't have done it without ya!
Man, I love Second Edition. Four and a half flaming skeletons out of five!
Read
May 18, 2019The Zhents were a fun saturday-morning cartoon villain organization, but I never really got to implement them in my games as much as I might have liked.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews