wanted to check and see i noticed that B3: Palace of the Silver Princess (Orange Cover) is like up there in price why is this? any one have a clue i picked up my copy in a big box of other books for 30$ and from what i am reading i have this why is it selling for so much like 300$ or more?

I thought I read some updates that there were more like several hundred or more in existence. I'll try and find a link to something, but I thought I remembered a thread where this was discussed at length...something to the effect of more people were actually holding on to these at the time.

MetamorphosisSigma wrote:Has the irony of the fact that EGG ordered these destroyed but retained one for his personal collection escaped everyone ? Perhaps he was the dumpster diver, or took one box and had the rest dumped. Who knows...

According to the interview with EGG in Hunters of Dragons, that wasn't his decision:

Gary Gygax wrote:Actually it was Kevin Blume who literally pitched a fit about the product, demanded it be recalled. I had no input into the matter and I would have quashed his objection had I been able to do so.

I heard or read (maybe it was here) that maybe a bigger problem with the module was that it was unplayable - that is, you couldn't make your way around the palace. I have the module in front of me- so I could probably read it to find out - but maybe someone already knows if there was any specific problem actually running the adventure.

There are stairs to traverse between the tower and the upper/lower level, although they are difficult to find.  What isn't clear is the orientation and placement of the of the stairs and the levels.  Issues with stair direction or placement of levels are fairly common with adventures from this era.  This probably stems from the fact that some of the authors that created the maps were artistic, but not necessarily architecturally inclined, or they simply added the connections between the levels as an afterthought.  One would think that playtesting, or a basic review by editors would have uncovered some of these issues, but it's evident that didn't always happen, as often as it should have, with some of the early adventures.

A fairly simple explanation that could be used in this adventure, is that some of the stairs and passages have collapsed.  The remaining stairs wind their way around to end up in the orientation desired to connect the levels.  Level placement on the other hand, could be a challenge, if the players question it, or if they try to get to the upper levels through other means such as climbing or flying.  It's also not clear from the upper level map what the palace actually looks like from the exterior.

With a lot of the early adventures, a thorough review and update by the DM is necessary to make this adventure playable.

I have run the adventure - the orange version released on the WotC site - and experienced no problems with playability. The way up to the upper level is some way from the dungeon entrance, but that is part of the challenge (it is a choke point, perfect for a guard post set by the evil cleric). The floorplan is "off", with not much resemblance to actual historical castles, but that's par for course in D&D, too. As dbartman notes, parts of the dungeon have caved in, which explains some of the weirdness going on (I added a few more passages in the collapsed areas to link up with other parts of the lower level).

While the module is not perfect, it has an eerie quality that's pretty cool, and it is in a different style from the TSR house standard. Subtract the office politics, and it is a neat mid-tier adventure. You have to do some stocking as you'd have to do with B1, but it plays well and runs well.

It was rumored Lou Zocchi held some back.

Sea-to-sky-games wrote in Palace of the Silver Princess mod B3:

Agent Cooper wrote in Palace of the Silver Princess mod B3: I could swear I read someplace that after the order to pulp all copies of this mod went out, not everybody at TSR turned theirs in.  Also, (the story goes) an additional box of them ended up in the dumpster instead of being pulped but somebody grabbed the box before it got taken to the landfill.  So there are (if this is true) more copies of orange B3 out there than originally supposed.

Jim Roslof kept his. I'm sure most other employees did as well. I would have to guess that most OB3 owners are on this site, so you could probably just open a thread here and have people post a pic with a newspaper and get an approximate tally.

What's a newspaper  

Agent Cooper wrote in Palace of the Silver Princess mod B3:

misterspock wrote in Palace of the Silver Princess mod B3:I thought I read some updates that there were more like several hundred or more in existence. I'll try and find a link to something, but I thought I remembered a thread where this was discussed at length...something to the effect of more people were actually holding on to these at the time.

Me too.  I could swear I read someplace that after the order to pulp all copies of this mod went out, not everybody at TSR turned theirs in.  Also, (the story goes) an additional box of them ended up in the dumpster instead of being pulped but somebody grabbed the box before it got taken to the landfill.  So there are (if this is true) more copies of orange B3 out there than originally supposed.

Of course, I have no idea if that's true or not but I've heard/read that version of the story or similar variations of it more than once.

Who knows what really happened.  There's so many rumors surrounding this mod.  It's one of the really great legends from the golden age of RPGs.

I've heard a few different versions of the story.  Supposedly, a lot of individual (employee) copies were not returned.  Also, boxes of the "returned" modules were allegedly smuggled out of the building, FWIW.