Even leaving aside the terrible editing and production I found Yggsburgh to be very lackluster and bland. There were a ton of plot hooks, sure, but most of them were both completely obvious and not very interesting; very mundane stuff that's not at all what I want to spend my limited rpg-playing time on. To me, Yggsburgh was a whole lot of unneeded detail about a completely uninspiring place (and the fact that they took something that I felt was already overkill of useless mundane info and decided to multiply it twenty-four-fold with the Yggsburgh Expansion Project strikes me as pure, unmitigated folly -- imagine if that level of effort (a team of a dozen+ freelancers working hard under Gary's supervision for a year or more) had gone instead into detailing the actual dungeons what we could've seen instead!).
Definitely. If you removed the filler from Yggsburgh, you would get a 48 page
Village of Hommlet style product. Mind you, I also think Hommlet was Gary's weakest module, and I do not find it interesting outside the upper section of the Moathouse, but of course lots of people like it. Yggsburgh is way too much, and the Expansion project takes that way too much into the stratosphere.
Imagine this:
Yggsburgh: 48 page saddle-stitched city & wilderness supplement, big-ass map by Darlene
Dark Chateau: 32 page "Moathouse" style module
Castle Zagyg: Castle Ruins: 32 page folio on the castle ruins and environs, lotsa maps
Castle Zagyg: Upper Works: 32 page folio, first few dungeon levels.
(etc.)
It is my opinion that Gary worked best when he was constrained by page count; his best products are lean and mean with a lot of content by page. It shows that he had to work hard to squeeze everything he could into a slim volume. Yggsburgh and other later modules do not have this -- of course, neither does the industry (which operates on a shamefully low pay-by-words basis, making bloat almost a certainty), but that is another can of worms.
As for Gygax Games, I have so little hope about getting something I will like that any development to the contrary will be a pleasant surprise. On the other hand - and I know this will be sacrilege - amateur publishers are delivering just the type of content I would have liked to see from EGG and Rob Kuntz, and doing it without the unsatisfactory compromises, delays, heartburns and false starts. Sure, it is not That Legendary Product People Have Been Waiting for Since 1979. But after a while, you have to ask yourself what matters more -- the form of expression or simple product fetishism.
