Like World of Greyhawk, Greyhawk Ruins (1990) is a bit of a half-measure.
The ruins of Castle Greyhawk were the under-construction megadungeon where Gary Gygax playtested Dungeons & Dragons (there are actually two, Rob Kuntz developed and ran the second version so Gygax could play). This haphazard thing, created at the frantic rate of one level a week, was never published and, even if Gygax wanted to, was likely unpublishable as a game resource (it would be nice to have it as a historical document, though). Gygax mentioned the dungeon every so often, but obliquely. Three modules — Dungeonland, The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror and Isle of the Ape — take place on demi-planes that were accessible to Gygax’s players via portals contained in the dungeon, but the published versions downplay that connection. After Gygax left TSR, the parody of the dungeon, published as Castle Greyhawk, emerged, to the satisfaction of no one.
Greyhawk Ruins is the first serious attempt at creating a playable version of the legendary dungeon and, even though it has been mostly overlooked, I think it does an admirable job cobbling together the many hints Gygax made about its contents into a workable whole. There are really three dungeons, one underneath the ruins of the castle’s three partially remaining towers, though there are plenty of connections between the three shafts. To cram all the detail into 86 pages, the text is vanishingly small; a heap of color-coded map (each shift denoting a 5’ decrease in elevation) and some new monster sheets rounds it out. I quite like the clarity of the maps.
The thing I find most interesting about this whole thing is that in this moment, Greyhawk was getting more serious, with modules incrementally paving the way to From the Ashes, the setting’s grimmest point. The thing is, the old school Castle Greyhawk, which this module is at pains to emulate, is not serious, at least, not in the same way. Rather, it’s rather unhinged, with bizarre spaces and incongruous situations. It doesn’t have groaner jokes, but rather, as I mentioned yesterday, it leaves plenty of joke material laying around for the players to do with what they will. It doesn’t really surprise me that this book didn’t get much attention at the time, because it was so out of step, but it does make me a bit sad.
Fred Fields delivers a puzzling cover. I feel like I should know who the woman is, but I haven’t a clue. Her pose seems awkward to me, her desire to pick up a rock inscrutable. This is a view of the castle approach, the falcon statue is mentioned in the text (as a feature from a dungeon room inexplicably teleported to its current resting place). It’s fine, I guess, I just feel that a grander cover is in order. Interiors by Tom Baxa, Mark Nelson and Dave Simons, and I quite like all of them, they feel suitably old school.
Bored at work so I wrote Apologia for each of the evil gods in the standard D&D settings.
These are reasons why someone might convert to actively worshipping "Evil" gods beyond "idk they're just evil" or "idk they're just insane". This isn't me attempting to make a straw-cultural relativism "actually all gods are good if you already worship them" point, the people making these arguments will still probably be driven to do Villainous things, but it should lead to players hearing them out and going "Okay I can see why you came to the conclusion why that would be a good thing to do". I've also tried to stay within 'canon' as much as possible; it's easy to come up with reasons why people might pick a god if you just make stuff up whole cloth. If you want to use these in your own games, either as NPCs, Villains or Morally Complex PCs, feel free - just let me know how the other players respond, because I'd like to hear!
You know, I really wish WotC would allow settings other than Forgotten Realms to advance their timelines. Eberron is one thing because having a static starting point was always its thing, but the version of Greyhawk they have in the new Dungeon Master's Guide rewinds time back to 576 CY, and the Dragonlance adventure they put out took place during the War of the Lance. Heck, even FR barely gets to advance with how much the Sundering just reset things to an earlier state.
And, like, I get it. You want to give players a starting point to build from instead of a metaplot they might feel bound by. But at least let the past have happened.
