An epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign, any player will tell you, can take many hours. It’s not just a few rolls of the dice. Yet there is one D&D quest that’s more difficult than even the most fiendish homebrew game run by the most sadistic dungeon master: Finding an original copy of the module known as "Palace of the Silver Princess."

"Palace" wasn’t your typical pre-packed, ready-to-play D&D module. It had dragons, sure, but it also featured an illustration of a woman tied up by her own hair—not too family-friendly, especially considering that the vaguely erotic image came at a time when parent company TSR was trying to get the role-playing game out of hobby shops and into big toy stores. The module was yanked almost immediately, doomed to become a piece of fabled D&D lore.

"Palace of the Silver Princess" began its life in 1980. Back then, the RPG was on the ascent, becoming the new hip thing on college campuses. It was also starting to attract the attention of religious groups and worried moms who painted D&D as a literal tool of the devil. So even as the game was on the rise, life at TSR headquarters in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was plagued with fears that moral outrage could end the good times at any moment.

And so, to ensure Dungeon Module B3 never became the spark that started that blaze, it was scrapped. Now that D&D is once again cool, we asked some TSR veterans to recount the story of what really happened with "Palace of the Silver Princess." Like all good adventures, the story involves sex, blood, and thievery. And a backhoe.

The Beginning

What became the “Palace of the Silver Princess” started as a project created by writer Jean Wells in 1980.

Kevin Hendryx, TSR game developer and designer, 1980-81: In essence, the philosophy of management [at that time] was that it was better to have anything to sell today than something of higher quality later, because the market was so hot and the demand so great that TSR was losing money by any delays. So crank out that product and damn the torpedoes.

That sort of outlook in TSR’s flush days was the poison that caused problems like a B3 module, and got up the nose of the product development people.

Lawrence Schick, TSR game developer and designer, 1979-81: Upper management regarded employees as second- or third-class citizens. They were obnoxious to work for. They were in another building uptown; we were downtown. Off by ourselves, it was a fun place to work. But management was high-handed, and not much interested in feedback that contradicted what they had in mind.

Kevin Hendryx: We had a very us-against-them attitude. As much as we were hot-headed little snots and not always the most professional, management was not the most professional either. Most of them were new to being in positions like that. They tended to treat it like a game, like we were just non-player characters being moved around the board.

They were warned. But management did not take these things seriously until the ["Palace of the Silver Princess"] module had been printed and somebody at the other office actually looked at it and flew into a fury.

Why the warnings and strong reaction? The original B3 module featured "The Illusion of the Decapus," a S&M-styled illustration showing a woman bound by her own hair and tortured by nine demonic-looking characters. And in a time when the "Satanic Panic" was gaining momentum, claiming that D&D was a gateway to devil worship, the image posed a very real threat to the company's bottom line.