In 1978, Gary Gygax wrote "Village of Hommlet" as the first chapter in a saga revolving around a fell place known as "The Temple of Elemental Evil". A full six years elapsed before Frank Mentzer kept Gygax's promise to finish. Since "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" came out in 1998, WotC watchers have been just as anxiously awaiting the return of the far-superior Temple. We only had three years to wait this time. I published the first draught of this review in 23 June 2001, the day after I bought the book.
There are of course spoilers below, so players should hit the back button...
The first aspect of the new module to notice is its sheer size. There are 154 pages of adventure prior to the appendices, compared to 119 in the original. This thing is HUGE. Expect to spend a month or so on Hommlet and environs, and many months exploring the middle section of the module.
The ending initially reminded me of Daventry's remnant in King's Quest III; while corresponding with posters in rgfd I figured out why. Monte Cook structured the module as a plotted story, and the Temple dungeon as its endgame. The Zork-worshippers in rec.arts.int-fiction will tell you that endgames are best done linearly. If this module were a true dungeon crawl then you'd see more dungeon - as seen in the original, and in the middle section here.
I must also pause to praise the map, which is the best-quality map I've seen. Ever. If they can carry that over to the DQ series remake (and remember to redraw Gygax's original to be 3-D and realistic :^) sorry, pet hope of mine) we'll be singing that remake's praises for years to come.
There appear to be three ways to do a Return To module. The first way we've seen is to incorporate the original (with or without minor fixes) wholesale, such that the PC's don't return to the scene so much as re-experience it in a new context. This was how they did it in the original A and T compilations, as well as "Return to Tomb of Horrors" and all four iterations of "Against the Giants". The second way is to redo it as if it were the same place, several years later: "Return to the Keep on the Borderlands". And then there's the do-it-again-entirely-differently way of "Slavers".
This module mixes the second and third methods: it starts and ends on familiar ground, but makes a colossal detour halfway through. In Part One - the first 37 pages - Hommlet is laid out for at least a fourth time (after T1, T1-4, and "Return to Hommlet" in Oerth Journal 10, although this last wasn't used), the moathouse definitely for a third time, and Nulb and the upper Temple a second time. That takes us to page 42 of the original T1-4, right before the dungeon.
Hommlet is given an update befitting its laid-back character. It is trimmed down some; but I'll admit the original was a bit long on nondescript herdsman cottages. The only townsman I missed was the leatherworker's wife's brother, the "simpleton who does not bear arms". Every village needs an idiot. Have fun naming the guy :^)
We start seeing serious divergence at the moathouse. Now we learn that it hides a temple of Tharizdun (players, I already warned you about spoilers! shame on you!). The "New Master" Lareth, He Of The 18 Charisma, is now Lareth "the Beautiful", a disfigured messiah unwittingly awaiting his second coming. Lareth has moved out of the moathouse and lives as a hermit in old Nulb, in turn, a haunted ruin. The old Temple is now standing over a collapsed dungeon and serves only to host the occasional itinerant troupe of bandits - in other words, "there is nothing to see here, move along".
The lion's share of the module is entirely new, in a ruined dwarf mine in the Lortmils. This takes up a full hundred pages and well over a hundred locations. There could be even more space to explore if the DM wills it; a number of the monsters wandered in from the wider Underdark.
This enormous dungeon takes the place of the original Temple dungeon. The original dungeon does reappear at the conclusion - the module title is something of a pun here - but truncated to the rooms necessary to get from the surface to the Node of Fire. DM's fortunate enough to have T1-4 might be tempted to re-expand those layers and nodes; if so, they're going to be playing this thing at the nursing home.
Tharizdun is the real star of the module, finally interacting with the world that cast him out. He speaks to the party, raises undead, and makes alliances with elemental princes. I hardly need add he also grants spells to clerics; one has to ask how "imprisoned" Tharizdun really is. At the module's conclusion, Tharizdun becomes a known antagonist of the Flanaess.
I can foresee complaints from people who have developed campaigns based on other understandings of the source material. In particular some may disapprove of bringing Tharizdun so far into the limelight. Maybe it was Tharizdun's avatar which is communicating with the Doomdreamers, much as Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep serves as conduit for Azathoth. Anyway. If the DM wants to make Tharizdun's presence felt, this module is a great way for him to do it.
Perhaps the most significant contribution of the new module is within the Greyhawk setting, as an attempt to nail down the Greyhawk canon.
First, the background. The original T1 - "Village of Hommlet" - came out in 1979; the "original T1-4" is itself a remake of T1 plus Gygax's notes on the Temple, 1985, with Frank Mentzer serving as editor and co-author. In the early days of Greyhawk, all was happy-go-lucky dungeon stomping with little care for canon or ecology. Accordingly the temple of elemental evil ended up in the charge of a goddess of fungi. Mentzer in turn tried to reconcile this and also explain Lolth's involvement. The problem there was that Lolth had already been crippled (p. 29), in the course of the GDQ series. GDQ then got re-released too but as T's sequel, not prequel. And there was much confusion.
The T story arc pitted Lolth against Elemental Evil, as did the GDQ arc. The difference is that in GDQ, the Elder Elemental God actually existed, while the Elemental Evil in T was just a front for Zuggtmoy. But that also begged other questions: Whence are the priests of the elements receiving their spells? Why does the EEG look so much more like a tentacled Far Realm horror than it did Zuggtmoy or any elemental force? Why isn't there a fungal priestess in the Temple? - and so on.
Monte Cook decided on the ironic route: to have Zuggtmoy, she who used Elemental Evil to further her schemes in Oerth, be used herself - by the Elder Elemental God of GDQ. This was the way I played it in back in '86 - as it turns out, not far off the mark. According to the Oerth Journal #12, Gygax himself put the EEG in the lowest level of the Temple as an "anomaly" but did not inform Mentzer.
But this led to another problem: exactly because Mentzer had not used (nor even noticed) the EEG, for the "Gentle Reader" the EEG was still underdetailed.
The EEG was introduced in G3, "Hall of the Fire Giant King", as the drow deity in the days before Lolth was a twinkle in Gygax's eye. The EEG was a tentacled enigma. It wasn't even clear that it was evil; it could even help the PC's if they knew what to do. Carl Sargent tried to define it in DMGR4, but it ended up looking like a Tharizdun Lite. The Forgotten Realms then adopted it as Ghaunadaur, still unconvincingly.
Gygax would find a better fit for the drow in Lolth. The spider queen was the perfect icon of the drow, tapping deeply into the well of terror adolescent boys contain concerning strong women. Eclavdra's established connexion with the EEG was at that time explicable as a bid for independence from the drow priesthood. Her involvement with the surface was on the other hand now entirely inexplicable but in those days, who cared? The recent "Against the Giants" has sidelined Eclavdra anyway.
So while Cook's choice/recognition of the EEG solved a problem of canon, it was at the cost of reintroducing a then-ineffective villain. But after Gygax had developed the drow away from EEG towards the more worthy Lolth, he later developed his Tentacled Mystery idea into a second, truly evil being: Tharizdun. Monte Cook understandably concluded the Elder Elemental God and Tharizdun were one. This would, he thought, go far in explaining Tharizdun's motives and methods.
But recently Gary Gygax has let it be known that Carl Sargent had been right about one thing: the Elder Elemental God is not Tharizdun after all (Oerth Journal #12). Instead it manifests itself as "Vilp-akf'cho Rentaq" to the Oerth (and Ghaunadaur in Faerûn). It is not a strong god barely held back; it is a weak god barely holding itself together.
What, you wanted a review? :^) Don't worry. It's Monte. The new levels of the moathouse take their cue from WG4 and the temple in G3, aiming to puzzle and terrify. The Lortmils section is more like the T1-4 dungeon, filled with monsters and traps to bash around and/or break into. There's something for every kind of dungeon crawler.
I know that sounds like "any colour you like so long as it's brown". But if you prefer wilderness, cities, or wargaming - well, they didn't call this book "Land, City, and War of Elemental Evil", did they?
As for treasure and game balance, it seemed fair to me, compared with the original anyway. But I'm a terrible judge for those, so I hope other reviewers will enlighten us.
Monte Cook has attempted a Herculean and (for Greyhawk afficionados) necessary task in plugging the canonical holes. To borrow from another of his modules, he came close to the Last Word on the subject.
But one cannot criticise Monte Cook for not predicting that Gygax would assert the Elemental God's independence. Ultimately it scarcely matters. This module is a triumph of creativity and design, and for that reason deserves to last at least as long as its predecessor.