Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Well...so much for that idea.

Not everything will work.  Not everything will work well.
Sometimes though things do work, and do work well, but not in the way you thought they might.

Today's example was the giant post I had started and wanted to wrap up in the next day or so.
I was calling it "In Search Of...Castle Greyhawk".  A play on the old In Search Of TV show and by desire to uncover mysteries from my gaming past.



Sidebar: I found a bunch of stuff I had written decades ago on some old floppies.  There were a lot of treasures there but also a lot a things I was researching.  Back then I didn't have the resources I do now so research was a longer, more difficult process.

Back to In Search Of...

SO I wanted to post a lot on the historical Castle Greyhawk. What was it and how could I play it today.

Turns out all that work was done years ago.
I knew that +Joseph Bloch was the go to guy for this kind of information.  His blog Greyhawk Grognard is full of these sorts of tidbits and his game Adventures Dark and Deep is a love letter to the Gygaxian games that never were.
He has already done all the heavy lifting on this topic, in part of his working on Castle of the Mad Archmage.   In fact part of my own research was to look into how he wrote CotMA.

But he posted most of his own findings years ago.
http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/search/label/Castle%20Greyhawk
In particular this post is the most useful, http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/2008/12/getting-off-pot.html


Now I am a bigger fan of "Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk" than Joseph is. But I have the benefit of something he did not have back then; his completed Castle of the Mad Archmage.

So now my research is done. Admittedly by someone else.  I just need to see if I want to run a Castle Greyhawk adventure at all.

I'll start working on my next "In Search Of..." post.

5 comments:

Greyhawk Grognard said...

I will say, with the benefit of hindsight, that since I wrote those blog posts, and the core Castle of the Mad Archmage, more information has come to my attention. Nothing too too major, but I might have shuffled around some things had I known then what I know now.

Hopefully I'll be able to make up for it with the expansion modules. First one's due out this month!

Dr. Theda said...

There were some "twisted" things in that adventure.....
Mustard Jellies and all....
had almost forgotten that Adventure....(back in the late 80's) we bought it back at 1st edition.... some of the players really enjoyed that one.... it was more difficult on the poor DM (me).... But we still did so for the players.... we did "skip" one level and one had a bit of a re-write (crossed with another story-line to fill in the "gaps".... all in all it turned out well... they even ended up with a couple of characters from the game as new extra "henchmen"....
Thanks for bringing back these memories , good Sir...

Darnizhaan said...

Allan Grohe's Grodog website is also a good refrence, as well as re-reading the OD&D books!

http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/greyhawk.html

Greyhawk Grognard said...

And just by sheerest coincidence, the final proof came in today and the first expansion module is now available: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/148758/Castle-of-the-Mad-Archmage-Expansion--Level-Three-East

(Apologies for spamming your comments, it literally went live an hour after I left that comment mentioning it.)

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Dude! Spam away. I am glad to know it.