Caliban Annotated

Caliban, Arduin Dungeon Number 1 written in 1979, has long held a mythical spot in my D&D ethos. The dungeon was the highest level in Hargrave's repertoire published for Arduin by Grimoire Games and went out of print in 1986 (other than in a short-lived Arduin compilation, Vaults of the Weaver, from 2006).

Caliban is described by Hargrave as "... an area that appears at random intervals and inside random dungeons, caverns, and the like. It is also known as the Chalice of Chance or Random Heart. It has appeared in Arduin only twice in all of the knowledge of Elf or Human."

Spacin-Jason from our old gaming group probably ran us through Caliban, but I do not have a distinct memory of it, ha, which actually is not surprising one way or another.

In 2008 published in The Arduin Trilogy (which I believe is the absolute best Arduin product available: content of the original 3 Arduin Grimoires, as written by Dave Hargrave, compiled by Becky Osiecki into single resources for monsters, spells, items, classes, history, etc, plus the complete Arduin Adventure basic set.) is Caliban's Seat, a supplement describing the 18,000-ft. high mountain of Caliban's last appearance as well as the gardens and gates entering the dungeon.

Given that I possess both The Arduin Trilogy and Vaults of the Weaver in addition to many, many other Arduin resources, my current project is to produce a work of Caliban that is annotated with the monsters, treasures, and spells from the greater Arduin encyclopedia, i.e. ready to run as-is without referencing other Arduin gaming resources.

I am in the early stages and the dungeon seems like it will fit right into 5th edition rules for The World's Most Popular Role Playing Game. Arduin in the 70s was proto-D&D and monster stats include the ubiquitous hit die, hit points, and armor class, and also helpfully include a creature's Dexterity attribute score.

Spells, magic items, and monsters are almost always unique to Arduin.

This should be fun to run which I will do for my home group and also probably Friday night (2/15/2019) at DunDraCon XLIII.