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Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk - got it!
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- Start date
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Eric Anondson said:Which few bits? I think I caught a bit in an reference about Iuz returning from some planar business. Any others?
I would have loved to help synchronize Vayne with some of LG developments around him. I know a ton of Greyhawk grognards grouse about not being able to know what has happened during LG's tenure. This could have been a nice way to throw them a bone.
Eric Anondson
Shield Lands Plots
You know, I'd love to see a document come out of RPGA in which each Triad summarizes the adventures, plots, and over-all timelines of how their regions developed over the course of LG. Hell, I'd accept something relatively informal, a simple PDF, ANYTHING so that all of the stuff that came out of LG can be reviewed by those of us Greyhawk grognards who didn't have many opportunities to participate in LG play.
And since they would be summaries or reviews, I would think fair use would apply with respect to anybody's (authors', WotC's, RPGA's) copyrights.
HugeOgre
First Post
I've all but decided that if I have to, Ill summarize the end of the LG campaign with a news story about what the campaign did over the 8 years it ran.
Reporting news is, after all, fair use. lol
(and even if it isnt I dont want to ruin this fine thread with IP discussions)
and Ive already stripped the IP out of the adventures I wrote in preparation of posting them.
Reporting news is, after all, fair use. lol
(and even if it isnt I dont want to ruin this fine thread with IP discussions)
and Ive already stripped the IP out of the adventures I wrote in preparation of posting them.
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HugeOgre
First Post
HugeOgre said:
Having not gotten a quick answer on this I sat down and continued reading, and after looking at the maps in the original Greyhawk Ruins adventure I discovered that they did indeed use parts of the old dungeons. Level 4 Shatterstone is part of W500 and Level 6 The Arena is part of W700. One has some minor map changes, the other has a fairly significant alteration. I didnt get any further than that last night, but Im GUESSING the other towers follow similar suit.
Jason Bulmahn
Adventurer
HugeOgre said:
Actually, they don't.. mostly. If you take a good look through Greyhawk Ruins, you will notice that some of the best maps were in the Tower of War. Those in the Tower of Magic and Tower of Zagig are mostly uninspired, repetative, and boring. So... when designing this book, we tried to use some of the maps that had interesting layouts, and reinvented those that did not.
Hope that helps...
Jason Bulmahn
EttRoG Co-Author
GameMastery Brand Manager
DM_Jeff
Explorer
I picked this up at GenCon, and it has been a great lunchtime read this week at work, and I still have plenty to go. While I am a student of the Forgotten Realms, not Greyhawk, I had hoped the politics and NPCs wouldn't get lost on me, to the contrary, I'm finding the backstory compelling and I do remember enough to make it all a worthwhile trip down memory lane. Easiest the "funnest" of the Expeditions to read. I look forward to running it!
In 3.5, of course, conversions be darned.
In 3.5, of course, conversions be darned.
RichGreen
Adventurer
LOVED it!
Hi,
I've just finished reading this lengthy campaign adventure this morning and it's gone straight to the top of my "must-run" pile. Erik Mona, James Jacobs and Jason Bulmahn have done a great job: the adventure contains action both in the City of Greyhawk and the legendary ruins beneath Castle Greyhawk itself and manages to feature many of the great movers and shakers of the setting, including Mordenkainen, Robilar and Iuz. As well as the main adventure plot, there are numerous side quests which connect NPCs in the city with items and characters in the dungeons. Several notorious areas of the castle ruins that we know appeared in Gygax's original campaign make memorable appearances and there are some very interesting new monster encounters. Really well done and very entertaining to read.
The only tricky thing for me is which group of players/characters to run it for. It's for 8th level PCs and needs to be set on Oerth to get the full benefit of all the Greyhawk lore inside. I think this might need to be a one-off campaign, a bit like Red Hand of Doom. I'll have to have a think...
Cheers
Richard
Hi,
I've just finished reading this lengthy campaign adventure this morning and it's gone straight to the top of my "must-run" pile. Erik Mona, James Jacobs and Jason Bulmahn have done a great job: the adventure contains action both in the City of Greyhawk and the legendary ruins beneath Castle Greyhawk itself and manages to feature many of the great movers and shakers of the setting, including Mordenkainen, Robilar and Iuz. As well as the main adventure plot, there are numerous side quests which connect NPCs in the city with items and characters in the dungeons. Several notorious areas of the castle ruins that we know appeared in Gygax's original campaign make memorable appearances and there are some very interesting new monster encounters. Really well done and very entertaining to read.
The only tricky thing for me is which group of players/characters to run it for. It's for 8th level PCs and needs to be set on Oerth to get the full benefit of all the Greyhawk lore inside. I think this might need to be a one-off campaign, a bit like Red Hand of Doom. I'll have to have a think...
Cheers
Richard
ivocaliban
First Post
Let me preface this by saying that I don't buy many adventures. I've got around fifty WotC books on my shelf and the only adventure I purchased prior to Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk was The Standing Stone from 2001. (Well, alright, I did buy the issue of Dungeon magazine featuring Maure Castle, but that's really it in the last decade.) Generally speaking, I just don't like running other people's adventures.
So, I debated buying Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk for weeks, starting long before it was released. On the surface the choice seemed simple enough: I don't like or buy pre-made adventures, so why should this one be any different? Well, I thought about this for a while and eventually I discovered three reasons:
1) Greyhawk - I picked up the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer (LGG) in early 2001. While I started playing D&D back in the summer of '92, I'd never really explored the established campaign settings. My settings were homebrewed with bits of Mystara (from the maps in the back of the Rules Cyclopedia) and the Hollow World (the only setting material I ever purchased prior to 3.0e) thrown in for good measure. By the time 3.0e was announced I was no longer playing D&D, but I wanted to come back to the game. The new edition seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.
That's when I discovered the LGG. The lovely hardcover Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting had not yet reached the shelves and I was anxious to start playing again, but didn't have the time to create my own world. The LGG seemed to be the pefect balance in that I had a great deal of freedom, but all the basic work was done for me. So, from the spring of 2001 until the summer of 2007 I ran a Greyhawk campaign. Sure, I purchased Forgotten Realms materials after they were released, but I just never felt the need to leave Greyhawk. I enjoyed it, my players enjoyed it...we had no desire to leave.
So here comes Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, the second (third, if you count the slimmed down version of the Gazetteer) 3.0/3.5e book released with "Greyhawk" on the cover. While I would have loved this book about three years ago (when the PC in my campaign was in the 8-13 level range), I felt a sense of...not quite obligation, not quite nostalgia...but certainly a mixture of both, to buy this book in support of a setting that had provided me with so much pleasure for so many years.
Even with the vast majority of the book being an adventure, there's still quite a lot of flavor here for the DM, not to mention the maps of The Free City of Greyhawk and so on. I'm not saying those who dislike adventures will get the most out of the book, but they will certainly find much of it useful in a Greyhawk campaign. What's more, because it is so much a part of Greyhawk I've found dozens of ways I can use the adventures in this book when generally I'm always seraching for ways to shoehorn pre-made adventures into my campaign if I bother to use them at all. This is a first for me. A large, level-spanning pre-written adventure, that doesn't feel forced or out of place in my campaign world.
2) The Writing - While I haven't read any of the other Expedition books, I can certainly say that the writing is what makes Expedition to the Ruins of Castle Greyhawk stand out as one of the best adventures I've ever read. Even if I never get the chance to run it, just having read it was entertainment enough for me to be happy with my purchase. There are few RPG supplements I can say this about, really. Perhaps the early Legend of the Five Rings material comes to mind, but not much else.
You can sense the admiration for Greyhawk in reading this book and it's a fitting tribute to a setting that may soon live only in memory. It isn't treated as a chore or some perfunctory courtesy, but as a project of love and respect. For that, I thank Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, and Erik Mona for finally giving the world of Greyhawk a 3.0/3.5e book worthy of the name.
3) 4th Edition - Oddly enough, it was the announcement of 4th edition that made me finally decide to purchase Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk. It's been repeatedly pointed out that the book's release coincided almost exactly with the death knell of 3.0/3.5e (at least in terms of support from WotC). Some would say that this was in no way a coincidence.
Whatever the truth of the matter, I'm sticking with 3.5e for years to come. Purchasing Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk is my way of saying "thank you" to the authors for making it work so well and even "thank you" to WotC for allowing it happen at all. It's also my way of keeping Greyhawk alive, if only within my own tiny sphere of influence. It (along with next month's Rules Compendium, assuming it turns out to be worthwhile) will be my last WotC purchase for years to come. I'm pleased to no end that it turned out to be such a memorable one.
Long Live Greyhawk!
So, I debated buying Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk for weeks, starting long before it was released. On the surface the choice seemed simple enough: I don't like or buy pre-made adventures, so why should this one be any different? Well, I thought about this for a while and eventually I discovered three reasons:
1) Greyhawk - I picked up the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer (LGG) in early 2001. While I started playing D&D back in the summer of '92, I'd never really explored the established campaign settings. My settings were homebrewed with bits of Mystara (from the maps in the back of the Rules Cyclopedia) and the Hollow World (the only setting material I ever purchased prior to 3.0e) thrown in for good measure. By the time 3.0e was announced I was no longer playing D&D, but I wanted to come back to the game. The new edition seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.
That's when I discovered the LGG. The lovely hardcover Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting had not yet reached the shelves and I was anxious to start playing again, but didn't have the time to create my own world. The LGG seemed to be the pefect balance in that I had a great deal of freedom, but all the basic work was done for me. So, from the spring of 2001 until the summer of 2007 I ran a Greyhawk campaign. Sure, I purchased Forgotten Realms materials after they were released, but I just never felt the need to leave Greyhawk. I enjoyed it, my players enjoyed it...we had no desire to leave.
So here comes Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, the second (third, if you count the slimmed down version of the Gazetteer) 3.0/3.5e book released with "Greyhawk" on the cover. While I would have loved this book about three years ago (when the PC in my campaign was in the 8-13 level range), I felt a sense of...not quite obligation, not quite nostalgia...but certainly a mixture of both, to buy this book in support of a setting that had provided me with so much pleasure for so many years.
Even with the vast majority of the book being an adventure, there's still quite a lot of flavor here for the DM, not to mention the maps of The Free City of Greyhawk and so on. I'm not saying those who dislike adventures will get the most out of the book, but they will certainly find much of it useful in a Greyhawk campaign. What's more, because it is so much a part of Greyhawk I've found dozens of ways I can use the adventures in this book when generally I'm always seraching for ways to shoehorn pre-made adventures into my campaign if I bother to use them at all. This is a first for me. A large, level-spanning pre-written adventure, that doesn't feel forced or out of place in my campaign world.
2) The Writing - While I haven't read any of the other Expedition books, I can certainly say that the writing is what makes Expedition to the Ruins of Castle Greyhawk stand out as one of the best adventures I've ever read. Even if I never get the chance to run it, just having read it was entertainment enough for me to be happy with my purchase. There are few RPG supplements I can say this about, really. Perhaps the early Legend of the Five Rings material comes to mind, but not much else.
You can sense the admiration for Greyhawk in reading this book and it's a fitting tribute to a setting that may soon live only in memory. It isn't treated as a chore or some perfunctory courtesy, but as a project of love and respect. For that, I thank Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, and Erik Mona for finally giving the world of Greyhawk a 3.0/3.5e book worthy of the name.
3) 4th Edition - Oddly enough, it was the announcement of 4th edition that made me finally decide to purchase Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk. It's been repeatedly pointed out that the book's release coincided almost exactly with the death knell of 3.0/3.5e (at least in terms of support from WotC). Some would say that this was in no way a coincidence.
Whatever the truth of the matter, I'm sticking with 3.5e for years to come. Purchasing Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk is my way of saying "thank you" to the authors for making it work so well and even "thank you" to WotC for allowing it happen at all. It's also my way of keeping Greyhawk alive, if only within my own tiny sphere of influence. It (along with next month's Rules Compendium, assuming it turns out to be worthwhile) will be my last WotC purchase for years to come. I'm pleased to no end that it turned out to be such a memorable one.
Long Live Greyhawk!
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JoeGKushner
First Post
I keep finding things to nitpick about over it.
The whole Rolibar thing smacks of "No More Mutants" or Superboy Prime punching time.
Some of the traps actually aren't listed as traps.
It talks about how we don't need stats for Iuz but provides summary information anyway.
We really didn't need to see Mordikean in the adventure. He serves no purpose. Any mage could've done. If this was a FR book and that was Elminster people would be up in arms about "forced plot" and "railroading".
There are a lot of things I like about it. There are some great encounters. I like the whole "side quest" bits. Art and layout are top notch. The writing, when it's not verging into Super Heroism, is great. (And the things I'm thinking of as Super Heroism are probably at home in a standard mid-high levle D&D campaign but just seem silly to me as a reader.)
The whole Rolibar thing smacks of "No More Mutants" or Superboy Prime punching time.
Some of the traps actually aren't listed as traps.
It talks about how we don't need stats for Iuz but provides summary information anyway.
We really didn't need to see Mordikean in the adventure. He serves no purpose. Any mage could've done. If this was a FR book and that was Elminster people would be up in arms about "forced plot" and "railroading".
There are a lot of things I like about it. There are some great encounters. I like the whole "side quest" bits. Art and layout are top notch. The writing, when it's not verging into Super Heroism, is great. (And the things I'm thinking of as Super Heroism are probably at home in a standard mid-high levle D&D campaign but just seem silly to me as a reader.)
