Szass Tam

But there is one among them who wishes to change this.

Thay is also infamous as the home of Szass Tam, the dread lich who seeks to rule this nation and turn those who oppose him into undead minions.

Weary of the constant divisions in Thayan society, he has set plans into motion to sweep away the inner conflict and create a new and powerful Thay with himself as ruler.

One by one, the Zulkirs have moved away from their old allegiances, now declaring themselves for Tam, against him, or neutral.

Yet the lich Szass Tam's scheming threatens to make the situation even worse.

He plots to raise an unstoppable army of undead, killing thousands and crushing all opposition as he did over a century ago.

The lich envisions a Thay where loyal necromancers prop up his rule, and the populace is merely fodder from which to raise his terrifying hordes.

Do not speak of Thay, I beg you.

I have brought them into other campaigns that I have.

I think I've, I've had Szass Tam show up.

I think I had Szass Tam show up as a quest NPC in certain things like that.

So as campaign adventures go, it's actually, uh, a relatively smaller book than, like, your 256-page campaign adventures that they had published previously.

But the price is also significantly lower.

They kind of bill it as being like, this is a spy novel.

This is a John Le Carre spy novel in a D&D adventure, and it's like, well, other than the fact that you gave everybody code names, and the code names are kind of funny because, you know, in a world where you can do scrying and speak with dead and, and, uh, circle of truth and everything else, I don't know that those names are really...

You know, I'm not sure that calling him the Hydra is really gonna get Szass Tam to not figure out what the hell's going on, like the Archmage of Thay, right? [laughs] Like, I don't know if the code names are doing a whole lot, but it gives it kind of a spy move, and people like...

And, uh, yeah, I haven't had much time to r- read it yet.

Um, what I know is that Szass Tam's the BBEG, and the adventurers are working for the secret society of some kind.

So basically, it's like a James Bond secret agent high-level adventure that goes up against a lich, which sounds pretty good to me.

Yeah.