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Astral Adventures in Greyhawk

2025-10-16T19:03:19-04:00September 25th, 2022|

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!

Planar Architecture for grodog’s Current Greyhawk Campaigns

2022-12-26T15:57:35-05:00May 28th, 2020|

Part of what I'm working toward, by defining and incorporating the forgotten Folio forest into my current Greyhawk campaigns, is to play a more gates-oriented game. This is one of several campaign concepts on my DMing bucket list, and in this case they appear excerpted here as a cluster of related ideas:Games/campaigns I'd most like to run, in rough order of my desire:gates-driven AD&D campaign starting out at fresh at low level (1st-3rd-ish), where gates are sufficiently common that they drive the entire campaign: economy, weather, culture, travel, etc. (think The Primal Order meets Stargate meets World of Tiers meets Moorcock's multiverse meets Greyhawk)AD&D "Treasure of the Dragon Queen"; I'll have to write it first, of course: http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_tourneys_dragon_queen.html AD&D Greyhawk drowic adaptation of MERP 1e Courts of Ardor campaign (could be played as an evil campaign by drowic PCs or traditional good-ish PCs; could merge with previous gates-driven entry)AD&D Abyssal campaign (PCs are a new generation of demons, vying for power amidst the chaos; could combine with gates or drowic ones above); I've slowly been building the framework for an AD&D game where the PCs run demons and explore the mythic geography of the multiverseIn order to play a gates-oriented game, I need to design elements that specifically introduce gates and related magics into the game. Some of that is easier, some harder. We'll see how it goes as the games continue, but here's the framework that I've been working up for Oerth's immediate multiversal neighborhood. I wrote the bulk of this post in response to some discussion in the Greyhawk sub-reddit, in which the user u/P4TR10T_96 asked A Question About the Planes:Are [the planes] ... read more!

Kellri’s 18 Module Challenge – Day 7: X2 Castle Amber by Tom Moldvay

2022-12-26T15:58:08-05:00October 5th, 2018|

Day 7 - A Module I Wish I Had Written: X2 Castle Amber by Tom MoldvaySeveral somewhat-conflicting interpretations of Kellri's Day 7 module topic immediately came to mind when thinking through the question of which module I wish that I had written:What published adventure is so cool that I wish that I'd written it?What adventure that I've written do I wish had been published by TSR?---the snarky rejoinder is, of course, "NONE" since then I wouldn't own my adventure anymore ;) What unpublished-but-known TSR manuscript/adventure idea do really I wish I had written so that it was, in fact, published?What module do I wish that I had written so that the flaws I see in it would have been fixed (i.e., I think I would have done a better job than the original author)? What module do I wish that I had written that I haven't written yet?For the most part, I assume that folks responding to this topic are answering Question #1. Question #2 is an interesting one worth thinking a bit more about, but I think my snarky answer remains on-target for the most part (although I had planned to submit my old "Valley of Pain" wilderness adventure to the RPGA for consideration as a high-level tournament at some point in the early 1980s...). Question #3, while somewhat convoluted and strange, is the most interesting iteration to me, and I'll return to that concept later after the challenge concludes. Question #4 overlaps with Day 10's topic, so I'll address it there rather than here, and while Question #5 might be somewhat interesting-ish, it seems rather self-serving, as well as lazy, so it's right out!So, ... read more!

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