Reception
While Different Worlds described it as "a good buy", RPGnet gave it a slightly more favorable rating of nearly 6.8 ("Good"). Latter day D&D writer James Wyatt described it as the first "Super adventure", and lamented that with another hundred pages of fleshing out, it could have been as memorable as the landmark Temple of Elemental Evil.
Jim Bambra of White Dwarf reviewed the adventure in the magazine's "Open Box" feature and gave it an overall rating of 5 out of 10, commenting that while presentation of the module was quite good (8/10), it seemed to be "hastily thrown together". Bambra gave the adventure playability and enjoyment ratings of 5/10, and skill and complexity ratings of 6/10. He felt the adventure was "very mundane" and "lacks any real cohesion". Bambra noted that parts of the adventure were created for tournament play. The tournament section deals with getting into the city, and he felt the rest of the module seemed to be tacked on to that. He did like the mini-campaign included in the adventure, and the ideas included on how to expand on it. However, he felt that any Dungeon Master who used Dwellers of the Forbidden City would have to expend so much effort to make it more than "just a series of encounters," that they were better off "starting from scratch". Bambra concluded that this adventure was "just not worth considering" with all the other better quality modules available from TSR.
Dwellers of the Forbidden City was ranked the 13th greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon magazine for the 30th anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons game in 2004. Judge Eric L. Boyd described it as a "classic adventure" in which Cook created a "lost city jungle in the great tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs". The players "battle their way into the city through a labyrinth of traps and monsters or find their own way into the sprawling, jungle-cloaked ruins... Cook provides a host of backgrounds to motivate exploration of the city, but the map itself is motivation enough." Judge Wolfgang Baur, editor of Dungeon magazine, described the adventures thus: "This adventure may be best remembered for its monsters—it was from Forbidden City that D&D gained the Aboleth, the mongrel-man, the tasloi, and the yuan-ti. The aboleth that guarded one of the entrances to the city was worshipped by the local mongrelmen as a god."
Read more about this topic: Dwellers Of The Forbidden City
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