''The Eight Kings'' is a fantasy

role-playing game A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...

adventure module An adventure is a playable scenario in a tabletop role-playing game. These can be constructed by gamemasters for their players, and are also released by game publishers as pre-made adventure modules. Different types of designs exist, including l ...

Plot summary

''The Eight Kings'' is a scenario for character levels 9-12, fourth and last in the "Maze of Zayene" series, the sequel to ''

Tower Chaos ''Tower Chaos'' is a fantasy role-playing game adventure module. Plot summary ''Tower Chaos'' is a scenario for character levels 9–12, third in the "Maze of Zayene" series. The heroes try again to assassinate mad King Orr, who is now protected ...

''. The heroes discover there are actually eight King Orrs, all created and re-created by the Zayene.

Publication history

''The Eight Kings'' was written by Robert Kuntz, and was published by

Creations Unlimited Creations Unlimited was a game publisher founded by Robert J. Kuntz, which published role-playing games in the 1980s. History Robert J. Kuntz left TSR when Gary Gygax was forced out of the company, and retained the rights to his intellectual prop ...

, Inc., in 1987 as a 32-page book. This adventure was part of the Maze of Zayene series, a set of four linked adventures set in the

World of Kalibruhn In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

; Kuntz began to work on them in 1986, and they were all published in 1987. ''Prisoners of the Maze'' and ''Dimensions of Flight'' were based on adventures that Kuntz had created while he was in college and that had been run in 1983 at EastCon. When Kuntz partnered with Necromancer Games years later, he was considering his unpublished ''City of Brass'' but decided it would be easier to begin the Maze of Zayene. However, there was a publication delay of several month between the first two Zayene adventures. While the first three Maze of Zayene adventures were published by Necromancer in 2001, the final fourth adventure was ultimately published by Different Worlds in 2004.

Reception

According to Shannon Appelcline, although the adventures of the Maze of Zayene series "were unforgiving 'gauntlets' of the type that Kuntz enjoyed, they were somewhat unusual for the time because they had a political veneer laid out upon them – centring on a plot to assassinate a king. They also feature the evil wizard Zayene, who Kuntz intended to be a recurring villain, constantly returning to bedevil players."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Eight Kings, The Fantasy role-playing game adventures Role-playing game supplements introduced in 1987