As in the Witch Mountain adventure, I’ve got a title-irrelevant castle as the starting point, that leads down into the real adventure. Mages had a tendency to graduate to other planes, leaving behind strongholds perfect for adventurers to explore.
And of course the mages leave egocentric testaments to their power and yet are completely forgotten today. I came on Ozymandias by way of the Avengers 57. After the Avengers defeated Ultron, Roy Thomas used some of Shelly’s poem as a kid kicked the robot’s head around in the ghetto. That issue was then reprinted in the Avengers edition of Marvel Treasury, where I read it.
The city itself was meant to have originally been above ground—it’s just so old that the cavern has built up around it.
The Kopru from the Isle of Dread fascinated me, and I think I’d started reading Lovecraft about this time. Clearly, I did have the Monster Manual II, with its gibberers and newts.
I don’t know what the Legend of the City was for. I added it in green pencil after printing out the adventure (as I recall, my word processor was more of a glorified typewriter: it didn’t save). I’m not sure how much later I added that stuff. It references the Kingdom of Oberon, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I wrote it after writing Castle Oberon. I don’t recall the Oberon of the castle being a kingdom. But it’s been a long time. And in any case, the “in the days of the Kingdom of Oberon” was an addition to the addition.
The maps for this adventure are in worse shape than the others. Around 1987 or so we had a house fire; the fire department got there pretty quickly, so most things survived, but I’m guessing this adventure was on the top of the pile. It was damaged more by water than by fire.*
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