From Kuroth's Quill -
grodog's AD&D blog

"From Kuroth’s Quill" is grodog's regular design column covering the elements of adventure design (and more-specifically dungeon design, given my interest in that topic). I will also wander through the design of spells and magic items; monsters, traps, tricks, and treasures; PC and NPC classes; planes and pantheons; and likely other topics as well. In the blog, I hope to provide practical examples that will be useful in campaign play, to show theory in action.

Showing posts with label tenser. Show all posts

30 January 2026

The Rime of Descending Ascent - Why to Plumb the Depths of Castle Greyhawk's Dungeon Levels

In the original version of the Castle Greyhawk dungeons designed by Gary Gygax, he placed a set of runes that provided hidden guidance for the PCs in why they should delve deeper--- the raison d'etre in the call to adventure. Tenser decrypted the runic clue using read magic---perhaps the first spell cast in play in OD&D.

I've been, alas, unable to refind the quotation I thought I had read many moons ago, and found merely summary phrases expressing the essence and meaning of those magic words, rather than their exact phrase:

Gary's Castle Greyhawk essays and stories---where I was sure that this quotation originated!---don't even mention the entrance runes in passing in "Founding Greyhawk" (in Dragon Annual #2: 1997), "To Forge a Fantasy World: Greyhawk's Creation" (in Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Jolly Roger Games, 2000), or "Penny for Your Thoughts" (in his "Up on a Soapbox" column in Dragon Magazine #302: December 2002), much less their actual text....
Scott Casper's and Mike Bridges' brilliant Castle Greyhawk web comic does not allude to the runes, although it paints a wonderful picture of the opening entry into the castle dungeons!:

Castle Greyhawk web comic Chapter 1 Page 21,
by Scott Casper and Mike Bridges
The Castle Zagyg boxed set states that at the beginning of the stairway down to The Storerooms level, "The archway is graven with the words: The Path to Adventure Begins Here, Seekers" (Castle Zagyg 2: The Upper Works, booklet 4 Castle Fortress, page 42). Unfortunately, there is no mention of the runes requiring read magic to be read, nor of descending deeper to find richer rewards, as I recalled....
Querying some other Greyhawk stalwarts yielded confirmation, but no specifics beyond Scott Gregg's memories from his long-ago discussions with Ernie Gygax: "I will have to see if I can find the exact quote. It was a warning about the danger increasing the deeper you went, but the treasures get better. It may have been deleted when I deleted my original boards."

That was more-profitably followed-up later with a quote from Ernie: "Tenser was the first magic user ever in Greyhawk. No books or previous experience existed. The first spell I took was a Read Magic and I used it to read the glyphs above a stairway leading down (level 1 to 2). It told us (Rob, Terry and I) that as you descend into the depths of the Dungeon the encounters will be more difficult but the rewards far grander."

Scott's original interviews with Ernie Gygax are almost definitely what I had been remembering and seeking, which was wonderful corroboration, but still left me without Gary's words.

So, unable to find the original text, I've created my own version of that phrase, as a crazy poem penned by Zagig himself.

Enjoy! :D

The Rime of Descending Ascent

Explore! Delve deeper, discover grander treasures:
jewels and riches abound in droves,
dweomers and artifacts---each allures!

Beware!: As you descend, fiercer monsters guard lairs.
Traps confound and wound, maim and slay.
Subtle tricks delude. Enigmas befuddle!

Tempt fate! Test your mettle! Ill-gotten gains yield gold,
Infinite apotheosis---
or it all ends in an early demise....

--- presumably wrought by Zagig Yragerne and/or Zagyg the Mad Archmage

My text helps to highlight some of the focus of my dungeon level designs---traps and tricks, monsters and mysteries---and also ties back to the current campaign's lore about Zagyg and his testings.

It also lays foundational hints and groundwork for exploration of some of the setting lore lurking behind Zagig's rise to demigodhood, which has always intrigued me. These ideas crept into several abandoned level designs I themed around tests of the nine alignments, which I'm dusting some off to see what may be salvaged. Perhaps some may find play at the table and/or in wend their way into the planar correspondences of alignments too. We'll see....

Allan.

08 October 2018

Kellri's 18 Module Challenge - Day 10: Return of the Eight by Roger E. Moore

Day 10 - A Module I Have Big Problems With: Return of the Eight by Roger E. Moore

Return of the Eight by
Roger E. Moore (TSR, 1998)

Today's topic was another difficult one to wrestle with, since there are so many problems with so many published RPG scenarios! However, I decided to focus on flawed scenarios that I like despite their failures, and then added three more scenarios that have worse flaws (in my mind, anyway) but can be salvaged, and three stinkers that are total garbage, too!

What I Love and Loathe about Return of the Eight

Roger Moore's Return of the Eight launched TSR's re-focus to the World of Greyhawk campaign in 1998, and inaugurated the "Greyhawk 98" era of products, several of which were quite good. Perhaps even more importantly, Greyhawk 98's successes led directly to Greyhawk becoming the "core setting" for D&D Third Edition, and the founding of the Living Greyhawk campaign---the most-successful program run by the RPGA.
I also like several elements within Return of the Eight (this link goes to Adrian Newman's newer site that includes the back cover page scan too), in particular:

Tenser's Fortress of Unknown Depths---an inspired site that's placed into the broader context of key locations in Oerik where artifacts can be created; as Tenser's fortress, it is also a bastion for the forces of good; Moore also alluded to concepts from Gygax's TD#37 article "Greyhawk: the Shape of the World" (May 1980), WG6 Isle of the Ape, and the Gord novels in how Tenser was portrayed, which was a nice touch
The concept of Oerthblood, a magical substance created by Moore as a key ingredient in the manufacture of certain magic items, artifacts, and relics (it also appears in my article on artifacts co-written with Erik Mona in Dragon #294's "Artifacts of Oerth"); I keep thinking oerthblood was mentioned in Return to White Plume Mountain too, but I think that was my own association and never appeared in published canon)
I like that the module breathes some life into old names like Tuerny as new forces/players, rather than leveraging the same old stand-bys like Iuz, Vecna, Acererak, the Slave Lords, etc.---inventing new villains, or at least defining them based on old names, is something Greyawk needs more of!
But speaking of those stand-bys, I do like Rot8's use of Iggwilv as a force machinating behind the scenes, and the fact that the PCs never actively engage against her directly--that she's a shadowy force operating in the background that they may never encounter directly
Iggwilv's moon base is a great idea, and could be built out further; Guy Fullerton has a module that he's been playtesting based on the moon (his sequel to F1 Fane of Poisoned Prophecies), but that's the only lunar-themed adventure that I can think of off the top of my head (other than Gygax's aborted one mentioned in "Fly Me to the Moon" in Dragon #301 (November 2002)

On the downside, Rot8 (as we referred to it back on Greytalk in the day) has a number of serious flaws:

It is built around one of the most railroady plots I've seen outside of the RPGA
It is grounded firmly in the Greyhawk Wars background stories which turned Lord Robilar and Rary against the rest of their friends and allies within the Circle of Eight
The cover art is abysmal; the cartography is, at best, bad; and the layout is worse
Tuerny is basically a throw-away villain---boss for the moment, but gone when when module's back cover is closed; building him out (perhaps in conjunction with his infamous Iron Flask) would have been nice to see

Three Runners Up x2

This time around, I decided to six list runners-up in the format of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly!

The Good...

Like Return of the Eight, these scenarios are rife with really bad ideas, but some decent ones that can be extracted, improved upon, and/or salvaged from amidst their published wreckage. They're basically poor scenarios that I like in spite of their flaws:

Ivid the Undying by Carl Sargent (unpublished in print by TSR but excerpted in Dragon Magazine in 1993-1994, and later published online for free, along with a wonderful map by Kent Matthewson): Sargent's capstone to this 2e-era Greyhawk work was supposed to focus on the Great Kingdom, but he really bungled it through the introduction of the animus undead creations that ran rampant through its noble houses (not unlike GRRM's later novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, come to think of it...). That said, if you ignore that aspect of Ivid (along with some others, like Philidor the Blue Wizard), there's plenty of usable content in Ivid that won't ruin your game, and some quite good ideas that I rather like, too (the Isle of Lost Souls and Causeway of Fiends, in particular).
WGA4 Vecna Lives! by David "Zeb" Cook: nearly as railroady as Return of the Eight, I still like some of the background and concepts Zeb defined for the cult of Vecna, even if the idea of turning Vecna into a god isn't something that I like at all; and while the railroady nature of the introduction isn't something I like (or find terribly credible, as a regular player of high-level characters), I do enjoy the shock value of killing off important PCs/NPCs as a way to put the players on edge!

That these four pariahs number among my most-loathed from a potential cast of hundreds should not make you think that they're rare exceptions to the norm, merely that they're not only NOT worth the effort to salvage, but they're probably only good for recycling!:

...The Bad...

Cloudland by Tony Fiorito (Grenadier Models, 1984): unfortunately despite some promising features (perhaps most prominently its five dungeons levels), this module doesn't live up to the premise in its name---it's not a cloud castle, or otherwise really connected to cloud castles in any way---and the encounters throughout are completely forgettable; this was also a missed opportunity by Grenadier to create a dungeon adventure centered on new monsters from their miniatures lines, which would have been a natural crossover product (they did include some RPG scenarios/scenes in many of the inserts from their Dragon Lords and Fantasy Lords boxed sets, but that was as far as that kind of design work ever went)
The Doomgrinder by Steve Miller (TSR, ): this one never grabbed me despite its use of the derro, a monster I've been fond of since its appearance in S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth: I'm sure the lame execution and wasted potential of Sargent's hook from From the Ashes were contributing factors (it was a toss-up for me to list this module or Sean Reynold's Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad here, but in the end I think Lyzandred is more-salvagable than Doomgrinder...)

...and The Ugly!

The Ruins of Undermountain II: The Deep Levels by Donald Bingle, Jean Rabe, and Norm Ritchie (TSR, 1994): a total crap paint-by-numbers waste-of-poster-paper mega-dungeon almost as bad as Castle Greyhawk below, and equally a let-down based on expectations going into the product; it's probably debatable about whether RoU2 is worse than WG10 Child's Play, but either way they're a waste of good ink
WG7 Castle Greyhawk (TSR, 1988): TSR's disgraceful hack-job on Gary's and Rob's Castle that mislead fans who'd been waiting for its publication for years, so nothing more really needs to be said