burial chamber, a very large single-level dungeon adventure which included an Arduin "Hell Spiral" and a pool where Mazmanian's corpse was entombed. Created by Hargrave as a tongue-in-cheek tribute, the adventure itself was essentially a quest to gain life-prolonging treasure while avoiding Mazmanian's wandering Avatar, an extremely powerful Lich-like entity who would either attack or help a party on random percentage roll. Reception In 2019, Goodreads carried a cumulative rating of 4.21 out of 5 for the first of the Arduin Trilogy publications, The Arduin Grimoire, Volume 1. The second Arduin volume, Welcome to Skull Tower, carried a 2019 rating of 4.08 of 5, and the final volume of the original Arduin trilogy, The Runes of Doom, a rating of 3.91. In the April–May 1979 edition of White Dwarf magazine (Issue 12), Don Turnbull gave the just-published Trilogy a below average rating of only 4 out of 10, finding it disorganized, hard to read, and "a mass of information, no doubt useless to some and useful to others." Turnbull concluded "I could not advise anyone to buy The Grimoire from which to learn the fantasy game hobby from scratch, but if you want what is in effect a D&D supplement, don't mind the price and are prepared to be selective in what you extract from it, there will no doubt be useful snippets you could find." In the Oct-Nov 1979 edition of Different Worlds (Issue 5), Mike Gunderloy admired the huge amount of supplementary information in the Arduin Trilogy that could be added to a D&D campaign. But he admitted the trilogy was not perfect, especially "the lack of organization. Rules relating to a single subject are often in different parts, even different volumes, of the trilogy. Worse, not only are there no cross-references to related sections, there is no index either." But Gunderloy concluded that any D&D gamemaster looking to improve their campaign world needed the trilogy: "No referee who has decided to expand his world should be without a copy of The Arduin Trilogy. Buy it, you'll be amply rewarded in the form of ideas and enjoyment." Lawrence Schick, in his 1991 book Heroic Worlds, described Arduin as a "Fantasy system, derivative of Original D&D. In fact, the first Arduin rulebooks were thinly-disguised supplement for D&D – only later did Arduin grow into a stand-alone system. Arduin rules and scenarios are frequently unencumbered by the restraints of conventional