Astral Adventures in Greyhawk
The players in my Castle Greyhawk campaign have spent most of the past 11 months (since 23 October 2021) romping about in the Astral Plane, and, at long last, they're likely to return home to Oerth soon, I think. Our next session (last night, on 24 September 2022) will tell! We have been playing through my (somewhat modified) version of Anthony Huso's excellent scenario, Zjelwyin Fall (also available in PDF if you prefer): Zjelwyin Fall cover art by Daniele Valeriani As part of my work to deploy Anthony's adventure into my Greyhawk campaign, I also used this as an opportunity to define some more of the planar architecture for the setting. Some of that design work went into adjusting the framework and background for the scenario to suit my current campaign situation, and some of it was general work expanding upon the options for how the Astral Planet works in my games. I'll delve into the campaign context after we wrap up the adventure in our next session, so for now, I'll share some of the rules and design work that I used to augment Anthony's scenario. The Astral Plane in AD&D The rules governing astral travel, astral encounters, and astral monsters are (perhaps unsurprisingly) scattered across a variety of sources in 1st edition AD&D. They appear in chronological order in: Monster Manual (1977) - mostly in passing, not a lot of real planar substance Players Handbook (1978) - Astral Spell, Great Wheel planar appendix, etc. Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) - various notes, Appendix C p. 180 for one page of Astral and Ethereal wandering encounters, which notably include both the Ether Cyclone (ethereal) and ... read more!
