The Vault of Arik

Occasionally I like to post maps I hand drew back in the 1980s when I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons (Basic Edition).

This one has been sitting in an unused map folder for more than 30 years.  I probably drew it around 1983 but I am not certain.

I ran a long campaign during High School and University with the same group of friends. The first adventure was (B3) The Palace of the Silver Princess.  In this adventure the object is to keep an evil entity known only as Arik from entering the prime material plane My players learned of Arik and stopped him, acquiring his ruby sword in the process (not usable as a weapon).  Later in the campaign, I had the players encounter agents of Arik in a Haunted House adventure. After that, I wanted to have them travel to Arik’s prison and put a stop to him for good. That is how this map came about. The prison/lair is on a rock outcrop in a lake of lava. I never used the map.

The players got side-tracked by other adventures but continued to carry Arik’s ruby sword around with them for years. Eventually, I did write a final confrontation with Arik which we played through when the players had reached 9th level.  It was a very different concept then the prison map shown here. A dimension-hopping series of published TSR adventures (an Adventure Path before they were cool). They were all very heavily re-written to fit the story.

The Vault of Arik