Castle Zagyg - The Upper Works (review)

Last week, I picked up Castle Zagyg: the Upper Works by Gary Gygax, a boxed adventure module detailing the upper levels of his original Castle Greyhawk dungeon, something for which I've been waiting a very long time indeed. The publication is by Troll Lord Games and should be arriving in game shops in the near future. This series of posts will form a serialised review of the product, as doing so will make it a much easier task to review it!

Feel free to comment on the review or to ask questions.

The adventure is designed for the Castles & Crusades game, and is very compatible with earlier iterations of D&D (oD&D, 1st & 2nd edition in particular). Part of the adventure was previously released, and my current 4e Greyhawk campaign uses it as the basis for the action therein. Some conversion work is necessary for 4e DMs, but I have considered it well worth the time and effort.

Overall, the boxed set consists of the following:

• Book 1: The Mouths of Madness - 44 pages, revised from the earlier release in the East Mark Gazetteer, detailing the caves around the base of the "moat" around the castle.
• Book 2: Ruins of the Castle Precincts - 48 pages, detailing the walls, towers, gatehouses and other buildings that stand on the surface over the dungeon.
• Book 3: East Wall Towers - 20 pages, detailing the two massive towers that flank the ruined castle.
• Book 4: Castle Fortress - 44 pages, detailing the actual fortress level itself.
• Book 5: Store Rooms - 44 pages, detailing the first real dungeon level of the Castle, along with new monsters, magic and NPCs.
• Maps & Illustration booklet - 36 pages, B&W illustrations and maps. About half the booklet is maps, the rest illustrations of encounters
• B&W Poster Map (28 cm x 42 cm) of the Mouths of Madness/Store Rooms
• B&W Poster Map (28 cm x 42 cm) of the Castle Precincts/Towers/Fortress
• Colour Poster Map (28 cm x 42 cm) of the wilderness around the castle.

The biggest problem I have with the entire package I'll put up front: Gary Gygax, in his later years, decided to go with a most unhistorical valuation of gold to silver, namely 50:1. (Historically, for most of the period D&D is derived from, it wandered between 10:1 and possibly 20:1, staying more near the former). Castle Zagyg also adopts a "silver standard".

The net result of these decisions is to throw the economy of the base D&D and C&C books completely off. It was not helped by the Yggsburgh book using misprinted costs, and then having most weapons being worth under 1 gp, whilst swords cost over 100 gp apiece!

Anyone using this adventure will need to adjust treasure values to fit the baseline of his or her campaign; it is a serious flaw in the adventure, and a grave misjudgement by the adventure's editors.

However, this may be redeemed by some entertaining encounters and descriptions: the real meat of the adventure. Does Castle Zagyg deliver? Read on and find out!

Cheers!

Book 1: The Mouths of Madness
For many older D&D gamers, their first experiences with the D&D game was through a module included in the Basic D&D set entitled The Keep on the Borderlands. This adventure mainly took place in the "Caves of Chaos", a canyon dotted with caves wherein lived many humanoid monsters. A basic wilderness adventure was also provided for the region of the caves.

Gygax returned to that adventure to gain inspiration for this part of the adventure. Instead of a canyon, you have the ruins of the castle standing on a bluff studded with caves. Each cave section contains a different tribe of humanoids, often possessing a rivalry against the other tribes, with some caves having access to the castle dungeons proper.

This part of the adventure was previously published in a preview product, "The Eastmark Gazetteer", and I've been using it in my 4e campaign for the past few months. There are nineteen different cave systems detailed, with the total number of encounter areas being 61. Kobolds, Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls, Bugbears - pretty much every humanoid monster from the original D&D can be found in these caves, living in discreet tribes. You also have a few unusual monsters turning up as well, just if you thought everything would be predictable.

The primary impression I gain from this section of the adventure is one of mundanity. It's not that such is bad; it's just that it isn't full of extravagant, fantastical encounters. The rivalries between the tribes are petty and utterly believable, and the descriptive passages of what each lair contains evoke misery and cruelness. There's a sense of reality to the encounters that isn't always achieved in D&D adventures.

Gygax included plenty of notes for characterising the tribes. The goblins have prisoners, the bugbears are forward scouts for the rest of their tribe, the hobgoblins are losing a war with the gnolls... A DM who wishes to include more than just one battle after another has plenty of material to work with.

I don't always appreciate the old-school form of Gygax's encounters: requiring the party to search for 30 minutes to find the treasure in some encounters rewards an overly slow and picky style of adventuring. However, with encounters like "Charlie the Ogre", who can be a really fun roleplaying experience for the party - he invites them in for tea and jam, but is lacking the jam (and the less said about the tea the better!) - there's the potential for some great adventures.

It's nice to see the various random encounter tables for the wilderness and caves environs, and the set-piece wilderness encounters draw a lot from old fairy-tale and mythical lore: the ogre who has kidnapped many children and forces them to work as slaves is a case in point. However, all of this is a distraction from the main part of the work: the dungeons.

Gygax notes in his preface to the work that this isn't the "original" Castle Greyhawk, but rather a distillation of all the versions he'd used in the past. He has described it as the "best" version of the work, being also in a form that your regular DM could use it (rather than the original, brief, handscribbled notes which were often used as the basis for improvising encounters).

Book 2: Ruins of the Castle Precincts

On the bluff, the exterior portion of Castle Zagyg awaits. This section was mainly ignored by the original Castle Greyhawk players, as a note from James Ward indicates: they went down into the dungeon levels, of which only one is included in this product.

What you have here are three sections of a walled castle: the cobbled (lower) courtyard, the grassy (middle) courtyard, and then the inner (garden) courtyard. Finally, the fortress stands at the back of all of these and is detailed in a later book.

Book 2 concentrates on the walls and outbuildings of the castle. These are primarily inhabited by goblin and human bandits, as well as giant rats, spiders and centipedes. The walls are breached in several areas, allowing a adventuring party access to areas that may be beyond its capabilities, although most of this is written with low level adventurers (levels 1-3) in mind.

The humanoids here have a more organised feel to them than the tribes of the Mouths of Madness below. Negotiation with bandits and humanoids is almost required for lower level parties in some areas, for although individual rooms have only a handful of creatures in them, the combined forces that may attack the party if alerted would be overwhelming.

This section of the adventure is the first to use additional maps from the Maps & Illustration booklet to expand upon individual buildings; in fact, the bulk of the maps in that booklet come from this section of the adventure.

39 buildings are covered in this book, although that number is misleading as several are split into many individual areas and rooms.

Boxed text is used to describe each encounter area, but there are times (as in previous Gygax adventures) where it becomes overlong and consumed by detail: it's great to read, perhaps not so great to read to players.

More of the fantastical (or whimsical) enters this book. We have a child's ghost, an animated statue of Zagyg, a temple to the god of Magic, and more shrines to various Egyptian gods, golems and other areas of wonder. There's even a goblin cobbler, who can provide an entertaining encounter for those willing to negotiate and role-play.

Hmm... Where's the beef?

Go on, this is a well-written and informative review.

Merric, any chance you could post this in the reviews section? Thanks!

I am so kicking myself for not picking this up at GenCon.

Thanks for the review.

Thanks for the review. Very informative as usual.

I'm really looking forward tot his product, but the treasure thing looks a bit annoying. You mentioned that a silver standard is used. Do you think that it would be enough to convert all silver to gold, in order to get a rough but decent result in a game like AD&D?

But, I ask again, how easy with 4E!?

Inferno! said:

I am so kicking myself for not picking this up at GenCon.

Click to expand...

Dangit. Me too.

Keep it coming Merric...this is one of those products I've always dreamed of. I've re-freshed the Greyhawk Ruins version a few too many times, yet my players always want more...

-Matt