Murlynd is not a character from Carroll's stories but rather from the early days of Gygax's own Greyhawk campaign. What specific content, you might ask? The first thing that immediately comes to mind is the wooden house of Murlynd. More important than the module's esthetics – vital though that is! – is its specific content. The result is a better complementarity between word and pictures than in Dungeonland. In my opinion, Holloway manages to thread the needle between these two poles in exactly the right fashion. Lewis Carroll's stories of Wonderland are famously weird, filled with characters and situations that are equal parts scary and humorous. There are a couple of reasons why this is so, starting with the aforementioned Holloway artwork. Much as I love Dungeonland, I've always preferred Magic Mirror. Unlike Dungeonland, whose interior artwork was inappropriately provided by Timothy Truman, Magic Mirror is almost entirely illustrated by the late, great Jim Holloway, whose darkly humorous style is perfect for an adventure module of this sort. Like Dungeonland, this module was first published in 1983, at the start of a period during which Gary Gygax was extraordinarily prolific, creating a number of very remarkable, if flawed, products for AD&D. My reading of White Dwarf #4 this week reminded me first of Gary Gygax's Dungeonland (which was the subject of a previous retrospective) and then of its sequel – companion? – The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror (hereafter Magic Mirror).
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