An epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign, any player will tell you, can take many hours. It’s not just a few rolls of the dice. Yet there is one D&D quest that’s more difficult than even the most fiendish homebrew game run by the most sadistic dungeon master: Finding an original copy of the module known as “Palace of the Silver Princess.”
“Palace” wasn’t your typical pre-packed, ready-to-play D&D module. It had dragons, sure, but it also featured an illustration of a woman tied up by her own hair—not too family-friendly, especially considering that the vaguely erotic image came at a time when parent company TSR was trying to get the role-playing game out of hobby shops and into big toy stores. The module was yanked almost immediately, doomed to become a piece of fabled D&D lore.
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“Palace of the Silver Princess” began its life in 1980. Back then, the RPG was on the ascent, becoming the new hip thing on college campuses. It was also starting to attract the attention of religious groups and worried moms who painted D&D as a literal tool of the devil. So even as the game was on the rise, life at TSR headquarters in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was plagued with fears that moral outrage could end the good times at any moment.
And so, to ensure Dungeon Module B3 never became the spark that started that blaze, it was scrapped. Now that D&D is once again cool, we asked some TSR veterans to recount the story of what really happened with “Palace of the Silver Princess.” Like all good adventures, the story involves sex, blood, and thievery. And a backhoe.
The Beginning
What became the “Palace of the Silver Princess” started as a project created by writer Jean Wells in 1980.
Kevin Hendryx, TSR game developer and designer, 1980-81: In essence, the philosophy of management [at that time] was that it was better to have anything to sell today than something of higher quality later, because the market was so hot and the demand so great that TSR was losing money by any delays. So crank out that product and damn the torpedoes.
That sort of outlook in TSR’s flush days was the poison that caused problems like a B3 module, and got up the nose of the product development people.
Lawrence Schick, TSR game developer and designer, 1979-81: Upper management regarded employees as second- or third-class citizens. They were obnoxious to work for. They were in another building uptown; we were downtown. Off by ourselves, it was a fun place to work. But management was high-handed, and not much interested in feedback that contradicted what they had in mind.
Kevin Hendryx: We had a very us-against-them attitude. As much as we were hot-headed little snots and not always the most professional, management was not the most professional either. Most of them were new to being in positions like that. They tended to treat it like a game, like we were just non-player characters being moved around the board.
They were warned. But management did not take these things seriously until the [“Palace of the Silver Princess”] module had been printed and somebody at the other office actually looked at it and flew into a fury.
Why the warnings and strong reaction? The original B3 module featured “The Illusion of the Decapus,” a S&M-styled illustration showing a woman bound by her own hair and tortured by nine demonic-looking characters. And in a time when the “Satanic Panic” was gaining momentum, claiming that D&D was a gateway to devil worship, the image posed a very real threat to the company’s bottom line.
Kevin Hendryx: They didn’t want anything that could be seen as or interpreted as in bad taste. They didn’t want anything that could be held up on a TV screen with someone saying, “Parents of America! Look at what your children are reading and playing!” An illustration like that was not going to fly.
The second problem? The original “Palace of the Silver Princess” had a full-page illustration the higher-ups couldn’t figure out at all. Management knew they were likenesses, and they thought they were being made fun of, but they weren’t sure.
Lawrence Schick: They were caricatures of people in development, not management. There were a lot of in-jokes in there. And if you aren’t “in” on the in-jokes, it can be easily misinterpreted. So it’s perilous to do that sort of thing. If you didn’t know who the caricatures were of, you might guess, and you might guess wrong.
Kevin Hendryx: The illustration alluded to recent terminations and employee unrest. Upper management was very sensitive about mutiny in the ranks at the time and took all these perceived slurs or snoot-cockings as an insult and a challenge.
The third problem? The module was navel-gazing pseudo-porn.
Bill Willingham, TSR artist, 1980-81: I was first to read the damn thing, and I was just shocked at how ridiculous it was. It was clearly the private fantasies of the author [Jean Wells, who died in 2012]. The Silver Princess character was also her persona in the Society of Creative Anachronism—a hauntingly lovely woman who destroyed hearts. I called it to the art director’s attention, and we went upstairs to editorial and Lawrence Schick. And at some point Lawrence, being the head of creative, called over to the business side and said, “Are you sure we want to do this?” And someone from the business side essentially said, “Hey, my wife plays mahjong with her, and she’ll give me shit if we don’t let her do her module. Just publish it. Don’t give us any more crap about this.”
Kevin Hendryx: Some of the people thought it was too suggestive. There was a lot of subliminal, Freudian-level erotica in there.
Bill Willingham: I used to call it “Phallus of the Silver Princess.” It was unprintable. It was badly written.
Stephen Sullivan, TSR editor and artist, 1980-84: Jean kind of straddled two camps. She was a good friend of mine, and very friendly with most of the designers. But she was also kind of part of management, and she was a good friend of [D&D co-creator] Gary Gygax’s. So when Jean sent this through, it came through with the same edict as Gary’s modules, which was, “Don’t touch this language.”
So when this thing came through, and the development people wanted to edit it, Jean went to Gary and said—and I know I’m going to make this sound more harsh than it actually was—”They’re changing my stuff, tell them not to do it.” And Gary reminded us all that we were not to change the designers’ word or intent in the work. We were just to proof it, do the production line, get it done. The artists didn’t want to work on it; it was so bad.
Kevin Hendryx: Most of us asked for our names to be taken off of it. That’s why you don’t see my name in the credits.
Bill Willingham: I quit TSR halfway through it. Someone else finished my illustrations.
Rolling the Dice
Ultimately, B3 was printed. It was given an orange cover and copies were distributed to the staff. Then chaos set in.
Lawrence Schick: There were some text passages that were deemed problematic. There was a tone to many of the illustrations, [staff artist] Erol Otus’ in particular, that were darkly humorous in a way that management didn’t like. But they would have overlooked that if it wasn’t for that one illustration with bondage overtones. D&D was under attack by religious conservatives at the time, and TSR thought that releasing the original B3 would be just throwing red meat to the mad dogs.
Kevin Hendryx: My vague memory is that the module came out late in the week, management caught wind of it over the weekend, and by Monday, they were recalling it. They were seizing the warehouse copies and grabbing the undistributed stock. It happened very, very fast. One day they were handing out our office copies, and one day we were told that supervisors were collecting copies, telling people to turn theirs in. Most of us, having got a whiff of what was going on, were busy squirreling ours away.
The land rush was on. D&D was aboil in the zeitgeist, and everyone knew the “banned” module would be a collectors’ item. Editorial staff members hid their single copies, and rumors persist to this day that management liberated cases at a time. The print run was ordered destroyed.
Stephen Sullivan: I don’t know how many were printed. My guess is between 5,000 and 10,000. I do know someone—who I’m not going to name now—that had direct knowledge of what was going on. The person I talked to said, and I quote, “The modules were buried at the Lake Geneva landfill along with all the rest of Lake Geneva’s trash. This I know for sure.” And I know that they made sure that someone was standing there, watching them get buried, and that person was [late TSR handyman] Dan Matheson. Now whether they had to hire another backhoe other than the usual one that would have been there at the landfill, I don’t know. That’s been a persistent rumor for a long time.
Kevin Hendryx: I find it funny that management was so concerned about anyone filching copies of B3 that they had employees like Dan—who was a big, imposing bear of a fellow, burly and bearded—riding shotgun on the garbage dump. But I don’t think there was a sacrificial pit with glyphs of warding put over it. It was more mundane than that.
The Great Quest
The module was totally rewritten, and four offending pieces of art were replaced. A new version of “Palace of the Silver Princess” was printed, this time with a green cover, in 1981.
By 1984, copies of the original, orange-covered version started sneaking out, selling at auction for as much as $300. By the 2000s, copies were trading for $1,000-$3,000. A YouTube video references a Jean Wells-signed copy that sold for $5,860. Soon fans were starting quests to find more of the modules.
Stephen Sullivan: The rumor was that they buried them behind the [management] building out on Sheridan Springs Road. And this person who I’ve spoken to, who has more direct knowledge of their fate, says that they were definitely buried in the landfill along with all the other garbage.
‘It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.’
Lawrence Schick, TSR game developer and designer, 1979-81
Mark Finn, author of Chance of a Lifetime: I was a hardcore Dungeons & Dragons player back in the 1980s. When Bill [Willingham] was in Austin, we started a weekly meetup group for fiction writers. One day, when telling TSR stories, Bill said, “I’ll tell you about the worst module we ever had to deal with,” and … I didn’t even remember “Palace of the Silver Princess.” But he launched into this whole thing, a backhoe, burying pallets of the module. The story bounced around in my head like a pachinko ball. For a brief moment, I thought, “We should go there! Dig ’em up! We should totally do this!” Ultimately, I chickened out. But I wrote the book.
You know, those are shrink-wrapped. I’ll bet they’re still there!
Stephen Sullivan: I suppose you could excavate the Lake Geneva landfill, like an archaeological dig. I suppose you could try.
TSR has largely made peace with its “Palace” past. The official D&D website even briefly had a full version of the original module you could download. And time provides perspective.
Lawrence Schick: I think that the reaction to the module is more interesting than the module itself. The actual content of it is only mildly eccentric by current standards. It’s more a matter of what a light it shines on the management reaction at the time, and the “Satanic Panic.” It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.
Kevin Hendryx: Too much of this gaming history is liable to be lost if journalists weren’t recording at least a little of it. Thanks.
Mark Finn: It’s very inside baseball. You have to know what this is to go looking for it. That said, I’ve had more than one person give me some iteration of this story: “Hey, I heard about this crazy module they had to destroy. You know anything about that?” I love this piece of gaming history. Nice that you’re giving it a folklorist’s treatment.
Bill Willingham: I call shenanigans. You call this an oral history. But you’re writing this down. This is an oral history in the sense that foothills are made of feet, or that a tiger shark is part tiger, part shark. Come to think of it, that could be a cool D&D creature.
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