It wasn't without some trepidation that I picked up the latest Dungeon - after all, it was in a sealed plastic cover and I hate that - but there was a mention of Tharizdun on the cover. A cold wave of pure, violet darkness compelled me to pick that one up.
For those new to Greyhawk, Tharizdun started out in 1982 in Gygax's single-printing, postmodern module "WG4 - Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun". The WG stood for "World of Greyhawk". While the Dark God certainly has tendrils in other published game worlds, the name "Tharizdun" is specific to Greyhawk, and my focus is a Greyhawk adventure. This is a roundabout way of saying, my apologies to present devotees of Faerun and future devotees of Scarn if my review is Greyhawk-centric.
Those who've ventured into my website or read certain of my posts are probably aware that I've kept an eye on the Dark God and its published manifestations over the past few years. I liked the original, obviously, but starting with Carl Sargent in the early 1990's there has been a distressing tendency to turn the Unnameable One into just another eeeevil god, as if there weren't enough already. I was pissed off enough at James Jacobs's bestiary in Dragon Annual #5 that I wrote a semi-flame about it in here.
It turns out that Jacobs's article hasn't been fatal to the mystique. Tharizdun's description in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer was actually quite good (although I'm still skeptical about the dark spiral as a legitimate holy symbol). In addition Jacobs's later reference to Tharizdun was at least subdued ("Lord of the Scarlet Tide", Dungeon #85 pp. 43-44), as it did not venture beyond the front gate, although I'd still quibble with the demonic face.
Which brings us to Robert "Not E" Lee's "Cradle of Madness", Dungeon #87 pp. 48-75. This adventure adds a third temple to the Flanaess, not far from the second, in the Cairn Hills region. I had been fully resigned to reading another tiresome romp through a ruined temple with undead in it, much like Sargent's weak "Isle of Shadows" in "Night Below". The Dead God will soon be calling kip on the Astral, I'd thought.
But Lee has a Poe-ian beauty of a backstory, replete with incest, betrayal, and torture. He also recognises Tharizdun's debt to Lovecraft: the afflicted family is Danwick. PC's will discover from the spoor of these cultists that they are not the sort of wicked priests who sit around a big chest waiting for adventurers. The squeamish need not apply.
There are undead here, like in WG4 and Night Below, but these undead are here for a reason. There's a ghost whose force of will kept it on this plane (yeah I know, technically the Ethereal, but you know what I mean), and wraiths trapped here since the good old days. You won't think the author misspelled "Nerull", as I'd thought when I read Night Below.
There's even a new prestige class - and a worthy one: the Doomdreamer, a cleric with a Wisdom-derived Insanity score, as both boon and bane. This prestige class was so intriguing I almost forgot that Tharizdun's clerics weren't supposed to use spells. But said clerics are in a nexus of Tharizdun's power and, contrary to WG4, Tharizdun is here reaching out of his prison. This cleric is an exception and a harbinger of times to come. And there's more to come - the Doomdreamer will be fully described in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Tantalising!
The dungeon is also well-done, at least in its antechambers and "spiritual" areas like the library and the temple. Elsewhere the rooms are pretty generic - if you've seen one barracks, you've seen 'em all - but even an evil priest needs to eat and sleep. This is really a complaint that the ratio of mundane rooms to the Tharizdunic rooms is too high - that the adventure is too short!
An additional side effect of the module's shortness is that the full backstory isn't revealed to the players, and that which is revealed, comes in one document in the library. I would have liked to have seen the information trickle in, piece by piece, "House of Yes"-style.
A more nitpicky complaint is in the gratuitous inclusion of the kurge, one of Jacobs's abominations. Not that I object to throwing Jacobs a shout-out, but why the kurge? It's just another undead beastie, and mage-born at that. Mages at best can only make deals with powers, and I doubt Tharizdun can be reached that way. His gifts are for his servants - his priesthood. I would have used the Rogue Eidolon instead.
Tharizdun has always been difficult to pull off; how to portray a dead god that is at once (possibly) the most powerful being in the known universe? Gygax wrote the template, but his successors had until now failed to improve on it. Lee understands first that Tharizdun belongs to the orbit of Lovecraft, and second that the god has to be an active force to remain interesting. Amazingly, he found a way to revive him that is both internally consistent and chilling to the touch. Thanks to Lee, the Dark God has at last reemerged from the chains of mediocrity. Oh me of little faith! "That is not dead which can eternal lie".