A Forgotten TSR Project

 So, I've been skimming Flint Dille's memoir of his time in Hollywood. While it disappointing has much less about Gygax than I'd expected, it does have some glimpses of what went so disastrously wrong with TSR West Coast --that is, the first time. 

More interestingly, it makes mention of a project I'd never heard of before: THE SCEPTRE OF SEVEN SOULS. Dille describes this as "a genre-mormorphing story that connected all of TSR's franchises at the time". That is, the story began in a D&D world with a hero-vs.-evil-wizard plot. The wizard escapes at the end of the first episode/story arc, and hero and villain find themselves atop a train in a BOOT HILL setting (the wild west). From there the story(s) continue, taking in a TOP SECRET scenario, a Fu Manchu GANG BUSTERS story, a computer-gone-mad GAMMA WORLD piece, and wrapping up with, of all things, STAR FRONTIERS*

"The MacGuffin of the series was a sceptre forged by seven ancient sorcerers that divided into seven parts. Each part was a portal to a different world. I have no idea whether we thought we could fit all of this into one movie or we were selling them on seven movies or we had a 'back pocket' idea of a TV series". 

This of course sounds like it owes something to the Rod of Seven Parts, one of the powerful Artifacts listed in the AD&D DMG. 

 One hook Gygax & Dille hoped wd serve as a lure to Hollywood Powers That Be was a mooted casting of Orson Welles as the "Dungeon Master" (whether this is the same as the villain of the series is unclear). Plus Dille at least thought it cd be filmed cheaply using already-existing backlots. 

In the end nothing came of the project and Dille confesses that he's either lost or mislaid his copy. So it seems probable that no copy survives. Sad to say, judging from what little we know, I see no sign that had this actually made it to the screen there's nothing in this account that makes me think THE SCEPTRE OF SEVEN SOULS wd have been any less dreadful than the D&D Cartoon or the D&D Movie.   Pity.

--John R.

*That of course equals six. There's a suggestion that fitting in there somewhere as the seventh wd be XXVc (i.e. BUCK ROGERS)--except that came along much later (circa 1990), whereas the project described here is dated by Dille to 1984. This suggests Dille may be conflating events in his memory, as is easy to do.