Little-known D&D classics: Fez

In 1980, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Open tournament played much like D&D games at home. The scenarios included dungeon exploration and fights with a dash of problem solving. Success came from quick play and cooperation. The Against the Slave Lords adventures show the sort of game players could expect.

In 1979, Len Bland and James Robert tried to enter the AD&D Open at Gen Con, but were turned away, so they decided to create their own tournament for next year’s convention. In 1980, they introduced Fez, a tournament like the AD&D Open, only better. In 1981, my buddies and I, at our first Gen Con, stumbled into the Fez tournament and had a blast, more fun than we had in that year’s AD&D Open. For several years, even as our interests wandered from AD&D to other role-playing games, Fez remained the Gen Con event we most eagerly anticipated.

Plus, Fez featured a play style different from the typical D&D game, and it blew my impressionable mind.

FezI The Wizard’s Vale was originally printed as Fez I Valley of Trees

Fez I The Wizard’s Vale was originally printed as Fez I Valley of Trees

Fez I: Wizard’s Vale sets a pattern the tournament would follow for years to come. Players begin the game unfamiliar with their characters’ abilities. The players start with a brief description of their character and hints of what the character can do, but with no game stats, and with no knowledge of their goals. In Fez I, the characters begin the game waking with amnesia.

This setup points to what made Fez so brilliant. The character sheet lacked the pat solutions of skills and magic and THAC0. To succeed, players could only rely on their wits as and whatever solutions they could uncover in the game world.

In this blog, I’ve shown how a reliance of skill checks tends to encourage players to focus on their character stats and to lose interest in the game world. When a skill check solves any problem in the game world, the details of the problem become unimportant.

When I played Fez, little seemed to demand a roll. Behind the dungeon master’s screen, Fez was a D&D game complete with THAC0 and HP (or HTK as the module writes, perhaps as part of an agreement between Mayfair Games and TSR). From my player’s perspective, Fez factored rules out of the game, making immersion the game world all important. Normally, I would not want to play battles without character stats, but in Fez, the objective seemed to be to avoid fights.

In Fez, the characters always started without knowledge of their ultimate objectives. This convention started the players and their characters on the same footing. It enabled Bland and Robert to start the players with a puzzle—the task of learning their goal.

Fez II The Contract

Fez II The Contract

Each tournament offered more puzzles and mysteries beyond the first. In Fez II: The Contract, players must settle Fez’s bet with a demon by accomplishing seven impossible tasks. Every task offers a puzzle with a variety of solutions. For example, players can circle the world in a single day either by repairing a crashed spaceship and circling the world, or by going to a library, finding a map, and drawing a circle around the world.

In Fez II, characters are plucked from the modern day, and one is an engineer, so repairing the space ship is less impossible than it seems. Every Fez challenges players with novel characters. In the first Fez, one player gets a Lammasu character. In Fez III: Angry Wizard, everyone plays a polymorphed monster. In Fez V: Wizard’s Betrayal, someone plays this:

The Orbion from Fez V

The Orbion from Fez V

Much of the Fez’s charm comes from a gleeful mix of magic and technology. The game’s namesake, the wizard Fez, travels though time and frequently visits the modern day. The scenarios mix faerie and monsters, aliens and robots, with as much joy as a kid mixing action figures and toys for make believe. Despite the light tone, the first adventures still feel like D&D and avoid turning goofy.

Fez V Wizard’s Betrayal

Fez V Wizard’s Betrayal

After Fez V, Bland stopped writing the series, and the tone becomes sillier. For example, Fez VI: Wizard’s Dilemma includes a gag where the players overcome orcs by getting them to argue over whether a beer tastes great or is less filling. Years later, when I resampled Fez’s descendent, the NASCRAG tournament, it seemed to have lost any flavor of a D&D world to gags and pages from a puzzle book tacked to the dungeon wall.  For my taste, it lacked the old magic.

But before Len Bland passed the torch, he and James Robert finished with Fez V: Wizard’s Betrayal, an adventure that would blow my mind again. Fez V inspired me to do a Gen Con tournament of my own. More on that in a future post.

During the 80s, Mayfair Games published the Fez adventures as a series of modules. You can still find used copies at affordable prices.

7 thoughts on “Little-known D&D classics: Fez

  1. Jennings Cunningham

    Fez II is one of my favorite all time adventures. We played them without the amnesia and converted to AD&D 2E rules, the thinking and problem solving process is what I look for in an adventure. Outstanding work and craftsmanship for the writers.

    Reply
  2. VcdeChagn

    I barely remember playing Fez (honestly just the name) at the 1985 Gen Con (the only one I attended, being from Southeast Kansas).

    I remember, as a bit of an 18 year old munchkin thinking it was odd not to know anything about who you were or what your abilities were.

    GenCon was still one of the most memorable events of my life, though.

    Reply
    1. David Hartlage Post author

      Thanks for sharing your recollection. It brings me right back to those games in Wisconsin.

      Dave

      Reply
  3. Matt

    I’ve never been to GenCon, and in fact only came to AD&D when I was in middle school in the early 1990s. I found the Fez adventures about ten years ago when I was combing Amazon for out-of-print, non-WotC and pre-d20 game materials.

    They immediately changed my world.

    I would spend the next decade reading, absorbing, and preparing to run Fez with my own group of gamers – poor peasants whose frame of reference for D&D only begins around the year 2000 or so. I’m happy to report that we finished the first Fez adventure back in May, and I’m actively laying the groundwork to go into Fez II (which, IMO, is really the best in the series, in defiance of the law of sequels).

    When I ran Fez I, I modified the game somewhat to accomodate some of their expectations; the players did get to see their characters’ stats, but as they began as amnesiacs, they had to first do something that would trigger remembering *how* to do what they know how to do. Still, even with that modification of the source material, I found that the approach to adventure baked into the Fez formula was sufficient to engage them immediately.

    Fez has become one of our most memorable adventures. I highly recommend that anyone out there with a gaming group pick up these gaming classics and run them. Necessarily, it won’t be exactly like the Gen Con experience, but it will definitely be memorable and you will be hailed as a masterful DM by all and sundry.

    Reply
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