It began back in the late 80s, when I was invited to play in a AD&D campaign run by a fellow, Bruce, from a school I'd left and my brother still attended. Thinking back all these years now, I have no idea how it happened that we all lobbed together, but there we were - Bruce as DM, myself, my brother and one other playing through some of the classic D&D adventures.
The system we were using was a meld of AD&D 1st edition and 2nd edition, with a few other bits and pieces thrown in. However, the campaign world that it spawned is still sort of alive today, some twenty years later. Of course, the world isn't exactly the same as the one that Bruce used, for it's now very much my world, but it dates from those early seeds.
The First Campaign - Meliander and Brunak (198?)
In the beginning, there were four adventurers: Meliander (my magic-user), Brunak (my brother's fighter/barbarian type), Scarlett (Bruce's NPC) and Bardal (an elven rogue played by L. the fourth member of the group). We began by playing through a couple of minor adventures before we entered the first major classic adventure of the old times: The Temple of Elemental Evil.
By the end of the adventure, we'd rescued Prince Thrommel, and we were about 8th level or thereabouts. I'd picked up a wand of fire in the Temple, and watched Bruce's face fall as I used it with glee, creating walls of fire to protect us from the gargoyles and trolls as Brunak and Scarlett laid around them.
At this time, L left the group, and the game became primarily Bruce, my brother and me. Occasionally, another person would briefly join us, and then L. would pop up from time to time.
In any case, Brunak, Meliander and Scarlett soon found themselves helping save Furyondy and Veluna from a poisoned river (Sabre River) and then, when Scarlett's unusual sister turned up, going to the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth to recover Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn.
Our original ideas for our characters had Brunak a Frost Barbarian from the far north-east. I was playing the son of a cavalry officer from the County of Ulek - in the far south-west of the world. How did we meet up? Brunak had severe wanderlust, and we ended up both chasing a thief through the streets of Mitrik and befriending each other.
By this stage, after a couple of years, the campaign was faltering. In the longish gap between a couple of adventures, I used the old book "Cities" (published by Chaosium, but originally Midkemia Press) to work out what was happening to Meliander in the meantime, as he was wintering in the City of Greyhawk. By sheer luck, he made a fortune investing in business, and met the love of his life, Caitlin Raelthayer. Bruce was more than a little surprised when, at our next session, I informed him that Meliander was married.
We managed to play through one more major adventure series before the campaign dissolved: the Slave Lords. At this point, Bruce and I were playing a lot of excellent games together in other systems, along with the new friends we were meeting at University: Amber, Marvel Super Heroes, and especially the West End Games Star Wars RPG.
Transitions (1991)
Meliander returned to the County of Ulek with his wife, and the campaign rested - almost. I was beginning to do more DMing in those days, and with a few friends from Uni and my brother, ran the introduction to the Greyhawk Wars adventures: Five Shall Be One and Howl from the North. This was 1991. They fit my brother perfectly: he was a Frost Barbarian, and they were designed for a group of Frost Barbarians. So, using a bunch of pregenerated characters for the other players, we launched into the adventure.
By the end of it, the Frost Barbarians had released their god, Brunak was king of all the barbarians, and the Greyhawk Wars had started. Unbeknownst to the barbarians, their "god" was actually Iuz, pretending to be Vatun. All of this didn't make much sense in the real Greyhawk campaign world that TSR was putting out, but it all made a lot more sense in our world... because Bruce and I had been running some adventures on our own.
One of those was Vecna Lives!. In fact, I wasn't much involved in that; as I recall, L. may have ran it for Bruce. In any case, the adventure's end didn't go as TSR had designed: Vecna had overpowered Iuz and dispossessed him of his kingdom. So, where there had once been the land of Iuz and the Horned Society, Vecna united them both and started a reign of terror. Bruce's original plan for the campaign was to go through the four major AD&D campaigns: Temple of Elemental Evil, Slavelords, Queen of the Demonweb Spiders, and end it up with the Bloodstone series. So, the new land that Vecna ruled was called "Vaasa". Furyondy and Veluna had been united (with the heir to Veluna marrying the rescued Thrommel) and would take the place of Damara.
A little side adventure I ran after that saw Iuz seeking the Codex of the Infinite Planes, and Scarlett and Meliander teaming up to stop him. The resulting disastrous confrontation saw the Codex "destroyed", and Meliander (and possibly Scarlett) thrown into the planes and away from Greyhawk.
And then the campaign really dissolved, and we didn't do much more for a long time. My brother and I moved to Ballarat (where I remain today), and basically fell out of touch with our old RPG friends in Melbourne.
A brief interlude (1995)
My brother and I did have one short one-on-one D&D game together, where Brunak realized he was being manipulated by Iuz and escaped, taking two henchmen through an maze of icy tunnels - and somehow falling into Dungeonland. I don't remember much about it; but eventually he escaped to Greyhawk, and the campaign rested again.
The Feast of Xan-Yae (1997?)
In the intervening time, I'd been playing a lot of Magic. Some of the friends I'd been making in Ballarat through that pastime also proved to have an interest in D&D, so I started up a new AD&D (2nd edition) campaign - using the Player's Option books to create the characters. We had four main players: Dave, his wife Julia, Shane, my brother - and I was the DM for most of the campaign.
The original campaign had spanned the years of 576-582 CY in the Greyhawk calendar. For this campaign, I set the clock back to 576 and assumed we were in the same world; so events of our original campaign would take place in the background.
The plot of this campaign I'd eventually call "The Feast of Xan-Yae". The idea was this: the adventurers were called together by the Church of Xan-Yae to retrieve a stolen relic from the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk, where the thief had taken it. (In fact, a very similar plot to the first adventure that my brother and I had gone on in the first campaign).
As these things do, the campaign grew: the relic proved to be one of many, and a group of shrines in the dungeons would eventually prove to be the prophesied downfall of Vecna. Things got interesting: characters were captured and needed to be rescued. Shane's character, Starlin - an archer of some ability - proved to be of questionable morality, so that he would work as an assassin and occasionally directly opposing the other PCs (though secretly).
As more of the relics got uncovered, the forces of Iuz were discovered to be main opponents of the PCs. To make things worse, the high priestess of Xan Yae was killed. My brother was playing a lesser priest of Xan-Yae (Yahlos), and was not impressed. He was even less impressed when more priests began turning up dead - including high priests of other lands who were travelling to Greyhawk to see who'd be the new high priest! (Unbeknownst to him, some of them had been killed by Starlin!)
Things rose to a head when my brother's girlfriend (now wife) joined the group: an elf from the Vesve forest - and I made it seem like she was the assassin who had killed the latest priestess! It was an incredible session of roleplaying, with my brother taking centre stage, and it saw the group eventually depart Greyhawk with their reputation in ruins, travelling to Vesve to help against the plans of Iuz there.
The Vesve section of the adventure was fairly straightforward in comparison, with the group fighting against various military forces and finally stopping the forces of Iuz from capturing the forest (and, more importantly, the village of Skytree, from which both Julia's and my brother's PCs hailed).
And then everything fell apart again, as Dave and Julia moved away to the far west of Victoria, and once again there wasn't an active D&D campaign. However, it had been a real highlight for the short time I'd run it. It would also be the last time that my brother and I played D&D together. (Nowadays, we live in different cities, and we'll only play a boardgame together now and then, alas!)
However, Shane and his character Starlin were still around. We still saw a lot of each other as we were playing a lot of Magic and the Star Wars CCG... and soon enough 3E would be released and the next chapter would begin.
3E Greyhawk - The Rainbow Portal (2000)
The first couple of sessions of my new Greyhawk campaign saw three players, Ernie, Shane and Gofa, entering a cave to find it contained a buried tower. D&D 3E wasn't released yet - it was only a couple of weeks away - so we were using AD&D rules (with Player's Option) plus some tidbits of 3E (like AC going up!) that had been released. Gofa's bard died in his first session, so a new character was created...
Then 3E was fully released and it started my longest period of continuous role-playing. Shane continued to play Starlin, his character from the previous campaign, picked up a henchman, and had a great time before work took him away from us. We headed off to the Grand Duchy of Geoff, where a bard (really the Prince of Geoff) joined them. They found the "Rainbow Portal" - my take on the Stargate - which sent them into the depths of the Sea of Dust, off to Hell, and finally back to the City of Greyhawk.
We finally resolved the Xan-Yae plotline, as I actually ran Vecna Lives! as part of the campaign, and revealed Vecna as being one of the major villains behind the attacks on the followers of Xan-Yae. We fought slavers. We met Rexfelis, the Cat Lord (and Gofa mistook a slaver for a slave, "rescued" her, and a year later she betrayed him).
Characters from my previous campaigns (particularly Meliander and Brunak) turned up as cameos. Ernie's cleric started building a castle overlooking Woolly Bay, and discovered an ancient tomb in the area that needed to be cleared out: upon doing so, Gofa's character ended up enslaved by a Lord of Hell and, sadly, the game ended with members of the group dispersing to parts around Australia. Gofa would continue in my next Greyhawk campaign.
The County of Ulek (2001)
During the play of the previous campaign, I started up a second campaign which took place in the homeland of my original AD&D character, Meliander. His wife (Caitlin) was still there, with a baby daughter, and both of them plus Caitlin's pseudodragon familiar, Teri, would make important contributions to the feeling of the campaign.
The game revolved around the royal court of Ulek, of which Caitlin was now Court Wizard; in particular, the young ward and heir of the Count, a young girl called Penny. (Trying to work out a properly Celtic sort of name years later, I coined "Paenaetha" for her full name, but she'll always been Penny to the members of that game).
At this point, I placed the Keep on the Borderlands in the mountains between Ulek and the Wild Coast, and sent the group there. They got their first view of the Priests of Chaos there, and they found in their temple another manifestation of the Rainbow Portal from my previous game. One of the characters smashed the gems that powered it, and in a surge of wild magic, the group found themselves sent to a new plane: that of the Desert of Desolation.
After that quest was over, the group returned to Ulek (much to the delight of Penny, who had been befriended by several of their members), and I tried to pick up some of the Priests of Chaos plotlines, but the campaign didn't last that much longer before player turnover, mostly caused by jobs, required its termination.
Tales of the Great Kingdom (2002)
This was the campaign that replaced the Rainbow Portal campaign, and saw Gofa plus a host of other players now playing new characters in the Great Kingdom, a realm fallen into evil ways. The original idea for this was to eventually end up running Robert J Kuntz's "Maze" series (at the time I'd no idea I'd do the d20 conversion of the final module), but as it turned out, the campaign diverged before then and we never got to the Maze.
Keeping my penchant for using classic modules in new settings, we began with The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, which went well. Danger At Dunwater went less well (the group actually negotiated, thus negating most of the adventure!) and The Final Enemy went terribly, as the group just couldn't enter the sahuagin lair. Gofa actually got his character - a very annoying gnome - killed as he insulted a NPC villager who'd just lost a brother on the doomed assault.
Then the group travelled inland where they met Gofa's new character, Cassie: the illegitimate daughter of a local baron. It was also a LE mind-controlling enchantress, the only time I've allowed such a character, and it'd become one of the best characters I've run. By a hilarious event involving an ettin, every character except Gofa's (who was absent that session) was killed. So, new characters created, and the group headed to a larger city.
There they met a merchant - Darien - who was looking for adventurers to explore a newly discovered Isle: the Isle of Dread. This adventure proved very popular with the group, so much so that they returned to the Isle two more times in the campaign, each time discovering more of the isle. I had intended for Darien to eventually lead them into the Maze series (as he was an agent who opposed the King), but such did not occur.
Instead, Cassie managed to ingratiate herself into the political affairs of a town - Cofston - in the See of Medegia. And, eventually, became its leader, which effectively retired the character. The rest of the group, realising they were no longer welcome in the Great Kingdom, headed off for the City of Greyhawk where they had a few adventures before being hired for a major mission... which ended up being in a different plane altogether. They had to save the country of Khemet from a dark evil: the Set Rahotep. Yes, I was running Gary Gygax's Necropolis, which saw some characters betray the party (and were killed). After that was finished, the campaign ended with characters at about the 15th level of experience. The longest surviving was Greg's character, Lukas, a high level ranger/wizard.
Ruins of Greyhawk (2005)
About this time, we ran into an interesting fellow by the name of Caine Chandler. (There's one or two Dungeon adventures written by this fellow). Anyway, he was a local Ballarat D&D player, and we persuaded him to run us through the Ruins of Greyhawk adventure, updated to 3.5E. We had a lot of fun with the adventure, with my character, Alvares Yulos, a cleric of Pelor, advancing to 15th or 16th level without dying at all in the campaign. This was some achievement: Adam almost managed it, but his halfling thief died in the final encounter. Greg O and Greg M also played, and had much, much higher PC deaths (and number of PCs as often they needed to start anew). A few events in that campaign - the finding of the Greenleaf Tavern, the existence of Alf - would find their way into my later Greyhawk games.
The Age of Worms (2005)
I met Caine at a RPGA event I ran, but the more significant meeting was with Martin, Peggy and Bradford, newly arrived D&D players from Sydney who were now making their homes in Ballarat. We quickly became friends, and we started some D&D games. The most significant of these was the Age of Worms adventure path from Paizo, which we started and completed with the PCs at 21st and 22nd level when it was done. I drew upon my previous Greyhawk campaigns to enrich it (thus Alvares turned up during some of it), and it was one of the most rewarding games I've played, even though I still shudder at the thought of The Spire of Long Shadows, one of the weakest D&D 3E adventures.
Return to Ulek (2005)
Another really important campaign also began this year, with Sarah and Dave - and a few other players - starting up a new campaign that saw us revisiting the setting of the previous Ulek campaign. It was a few years later, Penny was now a young woman, and the Priests of Chaos came roaring back into the frame as the harbingers of the Fhoi Myore (Fomorians), which I adapted from Moorcock's Corum books, although I made them extraplanar possessing spirits that warped the giants they possessed.
Nathaniel rejoined the campaign shortly after it began, with his character from the previous campaign (who had been enslaved by a mysterious figure from a demiplane known as the Grey Lord). We'd previously established how his character didn't like his father, so I threw in tragic bits with his sister possessed by one of the Fhoi Myore (they failed to save her), the Count of Ulek sacrificing himself to break the unnatural winter, and eventually it was revealed that Nathaniel's PC's father was behind a lot of the grief, and had been possessed by the chief of the Fhoi Myore. In the final session, Nathaniel got to kill him, and there was much rejoicing.
It was a massive campaign, and took us up to the release of 4E...
4E: Changes
With 4E being released, for the first time my Sunday afternoon campaign (which had been Ulek) was no longer a Greyhawk game: instead I started running the HPE adventures. They've been a lot of fun, but lie outside the scope of this article. Our Friday game (which had been Age of Worms) switched to Savage Tide for a time, and though it began well, it got further and further away from what we wanted to do. I don't properly hold it as part of my Greyhawk games, despite it returning to the Isle of Dread, which some of my players had enjoyed earlier.
After that stopped, it was time for a new Greyhawk homebrew, and that leads us to...
Castle Zagyg (2008)
I began by taking my players through The Mouths of Madness, part of the East Mark Gazetteer, a preview of Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works, whilst using Yggsburgh to detail the Free City of Greyhawk further than it had been before. Nathaniel chose to play Will Jr, the son of his character in the Ulek campaign, and as a result I included Teresa, daughter of Meliander and Caitlin as a recurring NPC (and Will's girlfriend). As she's now almost 20, one can see the lapse of time between this and my very first steps running Meliander back in the late 80s.
Adam threw an interesting spanner into the works when his first character, Archibald, betrayed the group and soon became a recurring NPC villain. Otherwise, the early exploration of the Castle Zagyg material was abandoned for later threads involving priests of Iuz (and Archibald), and then dark druids and necromancers who were threatening the city. 2010 was a very, very disrupted year (we got only 7 sessions in) due to travel and illness on the part of the players, but so far in 2011, we've just started in on the Paragon levels, and the group is now investigating the Garden of Graves in the Feywild.
I've got enough adventures for this group to take up to the early Epic levels, and ideas for beyond that. Once my other group finishes the Epic Tier, the next campaign for them will be back in Greyhawk. Exactly where I'm not sure yet, but it'll just add more details to a world in which I played a very great deal over the past 20 years and more!
The system we were using was a meld of AD&D 1st edition and 2nd edition, with a few other bits and pieces thrown in. However, the campaign world that it spawned is still sort of alive today, some twenty years later. Of course, the world isn't exactly the same as the one that Bruce used, for it's now very much my world, but it dates from those early seeds.
The First Campaign - Meliander and Brunak (198?)
In the beginning, there were four adventurers: Meliander (my magic-user), Brunak (my brother's fighter/barbarian type), Scarlett (Bruce's NPC) and Bardal (an elven rogue played by L. the fourth member of the group). We began by playing through a couple of minor adventures before we entered the first major classic adventure of the old times: The Temple of Elemental Evil.
By the end of the adventure, we'd rescued Prince Thrommel, and we were about 8th level or thereabouts. I'd picked up a wand of fire in the Temple, and watched Bruce's face fall as I used it with glee, creating walls of fire to protect us from the gargoyles and trolls as Brunak and Scarlett laid around them.
At this time, L left the group, and the game became primarily Bruce, my brother and me. Occasionally, another person would briefly join us, and then L. would pop up from time to time.
In any case, Brunak, Meliander and Scarlett soon found themselves helping save Furyondy and Veluna from a poisoned river (Sabre River) and then, when Scarlett's unusual sister turned up, going to the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth to recover Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn.
Our original ideas for our characters had Brunak a Frost Barbarian from the far north-east. I was playing the son of a cavalry officer from the County of Ulek - in the far south-west of the world. How did we meet up? Brunak had severe wanderlust, and we ended up both chasing a thief through the streets of Mitrik and befriending each other.
By this stage, after a couple of years, the campaign was faltering. In the longish gap between a couple of adventures, I used the old book "Cities" (published by Chaosium, but originally Midkemia Press) to work out what was happening to Meliander in the meantime, as he was wintering in the City of Greyhawk. By sheer luck, he made a fortune investing in business, and met the love of his life, Caitlin Raelthayer. Bruce was more than a little surprised when, at our next session, I informed him that Meliander was married.
We managed to play through one more major adventure series before the campaign dissolved: the Slave Lords. At this point, Bruce and I were playing a lot of excellent games together in other systems, along with the new friends we were meeting at University: Amber, Marvel Super Heroes, and especially the West End Games Star Wars RPG.
Transitions (1991)
Meliander returned to the County of Ulek with his wife, and the campaign rested - almost. I was beginning to do more DMing in those days, and with a few friends from Uni and my brother, ran the introduction to the Greyhawk Wars adventures: Five Shall Be One and Howl from the North. This was 1991. They fit my brother perfectly: he was a Frost Barbarian, and they were designed for a group of Frost Barbarians. So, using a bunch of pregenerated characters for the other players, we launched into the adventure.
By the end of it, the Frost Barbarians had released their god, Brunak was king of all the barbarians, and the Greyhawk Wars had started. Unbeknownst to the barbarians, their "god" was actually Iuz, pretending to be Vatun. All of this didn't make much sense in the real Greyhawk campaign world that TSR was putting out, but it all made a lot more sense in our world... because Bruce and I had been running some adventures on our own.
One of those was Vecna Lives!. In fact, I wasn't much involved in that; as I recall, L. may have ran it for Bruce. In any case, the adventure's end didn't go as TSR had designed: Vecna had overpowered Iuz and dispossessed him of his kingdom. So, where there had once been the land of Iuz and the Horned Society, Vecna united them both and started a reign of terror. Bruce's original plan for the campaign was to go through the four major AD&D campaigns: Temple of Elemental Evil, Slavelords, Queen of the Demonweb Spiders, and end it up with the Bloodstone series. So, the new land that Vecna ruled was called "Vaasa". Furyondy and Veluna had been united (with the heir to Veluna marrying the rescued Thrommel) and would take the place of Damara.
A little side adventure I ran after that saw Iuz seeking the Codex of the Infinite Planes, and Scarlett and Meliander teaming up to stop him. The resulting disastrous confrontation saw the Codex "destroyed", and Meliander (and possibly Scarlett) thrown into the planes and away from Greyhawk.
And then the campaign really dissolved, and we didn't do much more for a long time. My brother and I moved to Ballarat (where I remain today), and basically fell out of touch with our old RPG friends in Melbourne.
A brief interlude (1995)
My brother and I did have one short one-on-one D&D game together, where Brunak realized he was being manipulated by Iuz and escaped, taking two henchmen through an maze of icy tunnels - and somehow falling into Dungeonland. I don't remember much about it; but eventually he escaped to Greyhawk, and the campaign rested again.
The Feast of Xan-Yae (1997?)
In the intervening time, I'd been playing a lot of Magic. Some of the friends I'd been making in Ballarat through that pastime also proved to have an interest in D&D, so I started up a new AD&D (2nd edition) campaign - using the Player's Option books to create the characters. We had four main players: Dave, his wife Julia, Shane, my brother - and I was the DM for most of the campaign.
The original campaign had spanned the years of 576-582 CY in the Greyhawk calendar. For this campaign, I set the clock back to 576 and assumed we were in the same world; so events of our original campaign would take place in the background.
The plot of this campaign I'd eventually call "The Feast of Xan-Yae". The idea was this: the adventurers were called together by the Church of Xan-Yae to retrieve a stolen relic from the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk, where the thief had taken it. (In fact, a very similar plot to the first adventure that my brother and I had gone on in the first campaign).
As these things do, the campaign grew: the relic proved to be one of many, and a group of shrines in the dungeons would eventually prove to be the prophesied downfall of Vecna. Things got interesting: characters were captured and needed to be rescued. Shane's character, Starlin - an archer of some ability - proved to be of questionable morality, so that he would work as an assassin and occasionally directly opposing the other PCs (though secretly).
As more of the relics got uncovered, the forces of Iuz were discovered to be main opponents of the PCs. To make things worse, the high priestess of Xan Yae was killed. My brother was playing a lesser priest of Xan-Yae (Yahlos), and was not impressed. He was even less impressed when more priests began turning up dead - including high priests of other lands who were travelling to Greyhawk to see who'd be the new high priest! (Unbeknownst to him, some of them had been killed by Starlin!)
Things rose to a head when my brother's girlfriend (now wife) joined the group: an elf from the Vesve forest - and I made it seem like she was the assassin who had killed the latest priestess! It was an incredible session of roleplaying, with my brother taking centre stage, and it saw the group eventually depart Greyhawk with their reputation in ruins, travelling to Vesve to help against the plans of Iuz there.
The Vesve section of the adventure was fairly straightforward in comparison, with the group fighting against various military forces and finally stopping the forces of Iuz from capturing the forest (and, more importantly, the village of Skytree, from which both Julia's and my brother's PCs hailed).
And then everything fell apart again, as Dave and Julia moved away to the far west of Victoria, and once again there wasn't an active D&D campaign. However, it had been a real highlight for the short time I'd run it. It would also be the last time that my brother and I played D&D together. (Nowadays, we live in different cities, and we'll only play a boardgame together now and then, alas!)
However, Shane and his character Starlin were still around. We still saw a lot of each other as we were playing a lot of Magic and the Star Wars CCG... and soon enough 3E would be released and the next chapter would begin.
3E Greyhawk - The Rainbow Portal (2000)
The first couple of sessions of my new Greyhawk campaign saw three players, Ernie, Shane and Gofa, entering a cave to find it contained a buried tower. D&D 3E wasn't released yet - it was only a couple of weeks away - so we were using AD&D rules (with Player's Option) plus some tidbits of 3E (like AC going up!) that had been released. Gofa's bard died in his first session, so a new character was created...
Then 3E was fully released and it started my longest period of continuous role-playing. Shane continued to play Starlin, his character from the previous campaign, picked up a henchman, and had a great time before work took him away from us. We headed off to the Grand Duchy of Geoff, where a bard (really the Prince of Geoff) joined them. They found the "Rainbow Portal" - my take on the Stargate - which sent them into the depths of the Sea of Dust, off to Hell, and finally back to the City of Greyhawk.
We finally resolved the Xan-Yae plotline, as I actually ran Vecna Lives! as part of the campaign, and revealed Vecna as being one of the major villains behind the attacks on the followers of Xan-Yae. We fought slavers. We met Rexfelis, the Cat Lord (and Gofa mistook a slaver for a slave, "rescued" her, and a year later she betrayed him).
Characters from my previous campaigns (particularly Meliander and Brunak) turned up as cameos. Ernie's cleric started building a castle overlooking Woolly Bay, and discovered an ancient tomb in the area that needed to be cleared out: upon doing so, Gofa's character ended up enslaved by a Lord of Hell and, sadly, the game ended with members of the group dispersing to parts around Australia. Gofa would continue in my next Greyhawk campaign.
The County of Ulek (2001)
During the play of the previous campaign, I started up a second campaign which took place in the homeland of my original AD&D character, Meliander. His wife (Caitlin) was still there, with a baby daughter, and both of them plus Caitlin's pseudodragon familiar, Teri, would make important contributions to the feeling of the campaign.
The game revolved around the royal court of Ulek, of which Caitlin was now Court Wizard; in particular, the young ward and heir of the Count, a young girl called Penny. (Trying to work out a properly Celtic sort of name years later, I coined "Paenaetha" for her full name, but she'll always been Penny to the members of that game).
At this point, I placed the Keep on the Borderlands in the mountains between Ulek and the Wild Coast, and sent the group there. They got their first view of the Priests of Chaos there, and they found in their temple another manifestation of the Rainbow Portal from my previous game. One of the characters smashed the gems that powered it, and in a surge of wild magic, the group found themselves sent to a new plane: that of the Desert of Desolation.
After that quest was over, the group returned to Ulek (much to the delight of Penny, who had been befriended by several of their members), and I tried to pick up some of the Priests of Chaos plotlines, but the campaign didn't last that much longer before player turnover, mostly caused by jobs, required its termination.
Tales of the Great Kingdom (2002)
This was the campaign that replaced the Rainbow Portal campaign, and saw Gofa plus a host of other players now playing new characters in the Great Kingdom, a realm fallen into evil ways. The original idea for this was to eventually end up running Robert J Kuntz's "Maze" series (at the time I'd no idea I'd do the d20 conversion of the final module), but as it turned out, the campaign diverged before then and we never got to the Maze.
Keeping my penchant for using classic modules in new settings, we began with The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, which went well. Danger At Dunwater went less well (the group actually negotiated, thus negating most of the adventure!) and The Final Enemy went terribly, as the group just couldn't enter the sahuagin lair. Gofa actually got his character - a very annoying gnome - killed as he insulted a NPC villager who'd just lost a brother on the doomed assault.
Then the group travelled inland where they met Gofa's new character, Cassie: the illegitimate daughter of a local baron. It was also a LE mind-controlling enchantress, the only time I've allowed such a character, and it'd become one of the best characters I've run. By a hilarious event involving an ettin, every character except Gofa's (who was absent that session) was killed. So, new characters created, and the group headed to a larger city.
There they met a merchant - Darien - who was looking for adventurers to explore a newly discovered Isle: the Isle of Dread. This adventure proved very popular with the group, so much so that they returned to the Isle two more times in the campaign, each time discovering more of the isle. I had intended for Darien to eventually lead them into the Maze series (as he was an agent who opposed the King), but such did not occur.
Instead, Cassie managed to ingratiate herself into the political affairs of a town - Cofston - in the See of Medegia. And, eventually, became its leader, which effectively retired the character. The rest of the group, realising they were no longer welcome in the Great Kingdom, headed off for the City of Greyhawk where they had a few adventures before being hired for a major mission... which ended up being in a different plane altogether. They had to save the country of Khemet from a dark evil: the Set Rahotep. Yes, I was running Gary Gygax's Necropolis, which saw some characters betray the party (and were killed). After that was finished, the campaign ended with characters at about the 15th level of experience. The longest surviving was Greg's character, Lukas, a high level ranger/wizard.
Ruins of Greyhawk (2005)
About this time, we ran into an interesting fellow by the name of Caine Chandler. (There's one or two Dungeon adventures written by this fellow). Anyway, he was a local Ballarat D&D player, and we persuaded him to run us through the Ruins of Greyhawk adventure, updated to 3.5E. We had a lot of fun with the adventure, with my character, Alvares Yulos, a cleric of Pelor, advancing to 15th or 16th level without dying at all in the campaign. This was some achievement: Adam almost managed it, but his halfling thief died in the final encounter. Greg O and Greg M also played, and had much, much higher PC deaths (and number of PCs as often they needed to start anew). A few events in that campaign - the finding of the Greenleaf Tavern, the existence of Alf - would find their way into my later Greyhawk games.
The Age of Worms (2005)
I met Caine at a RPGA event I ran, but the more significant meeting was with Martin, Peggy and Bradford, newly arrived D&D players from Sydney who were now making their homes in Ballarat. We quickly became friends, and we started some D&D games. The most significant of these was the Age of Worms adventure path from Paizo, which we started and completed with the PCs at 21st and 22nd level when it was done. I drew upon my previous Greyhawk campaigns to enrich it (thus Alvares turned up during some of it), and it was one of the most rewarding games I've played, even though I still shudder at the thought of The Spire of Long Shadows, one of the weakest D&D 3E adventures.
Return to Ulek (2005)
Another really important campaign also began this year, with Sarah and Dave - and a few other players - starting up a new campaign that saw us revisiting the setting of the previous Ulek campaign. It was a few years later, Penny was now a young woman, and the Priests of Chaos came roaring back into the frame as the harbingers of the Fhoi Myore (Fomorians), which I adapted from Moorcock's Corum books, although I made them extraplanar possessing spirits that warped the giants they possessed.
Nathaniel rejoined the campaign shortly after it began, with his character from the previous campaign (who had been enslaved by a mysterious figure from a demiplane known as the Grey Lord). We'd previously established how his character didn't like his father, so I threw in tragic bits with his sister possessed by one of the Fhoi Myore (they failed to save her), the Count of Ulek sacrificing himself to break the unnatural winter, and eventually it was revealed that Nathaniel's PC's father was behind a lot of the grief, and had been possessed by the chief of the Fhoi Myore. In the final session, Nathaniel got to kill him, and there was much rejoicing.
It was a massive campaign, and took us up to the release of 4E...
4E: Changes
With 4E being released, for the first time my Sunday afternoon campaign (which had been Ulek) was no longer a Greyhawk game: instead I started running the HPE adventures. They've been a lot of fun, but lie outside the scope of this article. Our Friday game (which had been Age of Worms) switched to Savage Tide for a time, and though it began well, it got further and further away from what we wanted to do. I don't properly hold it as part of my Greyhawk games, despite it returning to the Isle of Dread, which some of my players had enjoyed earlier.
After that stopped, it was time for a new Greyhawk homebrew, and that leads us to...
Castle Zagyg (2008)
I began by taking my players through The Mouths of Madness, part of the East Mark Gazetteer, a preview of Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works, whilst using Yggsburgh to detail the Free City of Greyhawk further than it had been before. Nathaniel chose to play Will Jr, the son of his character in the Ulek campaign, and as a result I included Teresa, daughter of Meliander and Caitlin as a recurring NPC (and Will's girlfriend). As she's now almost 20, one can see the lapse of time between this and my very first steps running Meliander back in the late 80s.
Adam threw an interesting spanner into the works when his first character, Archibald, betrayed the group and soon became a recurring NPC villain. Otherwise, the early exploration of the Castle Zagyg material was abandoned for later threads involving priests of Iuz (and Archibald), and then dark druids and necromancers who were threatening the city. 2010 was a very, very disrupted year (we got only 7 sessions in) due to travel and illness on the part of the players, but so far in 2011, we've just started in on the Paragon levels, and the group is now investigating the Garden of Graves in the Feywild.
I've got enough adventures for this group to take up to the early Epic levels, and ideas for beyond that. Once my other group finishes the Epic Tier, the next campaign for them will be back in Greyhawk. Exactly where I'm not sure yet, but it'll just add more details to a world in which I played a very great deal over the past 20 years and more!
