3520 Paper Cut
on June 20, 2022
Characters: Bernard, Cadugan, Captain Lilianne Carruthers, Lucas Greyfort, Sibling Reeeaaaawwwwen "Re'en"
Location: Abbey of St. Aldwin the Skilled
Pick up your copies of YAFGC Volumes 1 - 5 at our online store. Multi-book bundles and sketch editions available.
Ah, memories of Bigby-style hands Hack and Slash being used to create forms for paperwork in one of the levels. Or needing to make change to buy the stairway to heaven.
Castle Greyhawk was exactly the module I needed when it came out. It was jokey and showed that D&D didn’t have to be serious, and we had great fun playing it.
I won’t say it was good, and maybe they shouldn’t have put it in a canonical place in Greyhawk, but it was fun.
It gets worse, though. Abbot Heigh has the revised edition: Fifty Shades of Greyhawk. They say it used to belong to a Rannite priestess. Didn’t you ever wonder how they were able to break so many minds so thoroughly?
Oh good lord…that is even worse
Now I imagine the book in a seperate room, bound with heavy chains to a podest and the the abbot destroyed the key.
AHA !! That’s it !!!
The book Taurenil was constantly writing in was her copying the module one page at a time from memory.
She had to do it in code so nobody would know but someone saw her in the room where it’s kept and figured out what she was doing, so she had to go…
Blasphemy of that magnitude can’t be forgiven, only removed 😉
I am afraid I am either too old or too young to understand this joke.. (mind you I am in my early 40s)
too young 😉
Argentlupus
The creator of D&D, Gary Gygax had his own original Castle Greyhawk campaign he developed as he was designing the game.
Much of his campaign’s world, characters and lore became the core of original D&D and the Advanced version of the game, but the original, complete Castle Greyhawk dungeon was never published, only hinted at or referenced in books and articles–and partially published in a few adventures.
It was always hoped it would eventually see the light of day. But it never did.
Then in the late 80’s after Gygax had left/been forced out, TSR published a Castle Greyhawk module–a comedy/satire adventure using the name.
Most fans had been hoping/expecting the Gygax original–which would have been more balanced between humour and challenging/deadly– so they were bitterly disappointed, and it tarnished the legacy as a result.
Thank you for answering, MDF! And Argentlupus, thanks for asking.
"Drider-Man, Drider-Man, does whatever a drider can…"
As for why the Abbey of St. Aldwin the Skilled has the only copy, well, the stories are not clear. Something about a "natural twenty" and not realizing what sort of gamer St. Aldwin was.
As for why they keep it, well, it makes a perfect forfeit challenge. "If I win, I get your teddy bear. And if I lose, um, I’ll read an entire chapter from Castle Greyhawk!"
Castle Greyhawk, putting the pain in campaigns since 1975.
I did not know about Castle Greyhawk until now. I did a little reading and now I desperately want a copy of that module. It looks like it was tailor made just for me.
Even as a callow youth in high school when I got it, I knew it was not really meant to be played. Oh, parts were playable, but other parts were just "how to make your players never let you DM again" level stuff that was fun to read but that’s about it.
If you go to the Wizards of the Coast section on Drive Thru RPG, they may have a PDF of it for sale. Fair warning, some of the scans WOTC have done are not great.
*behind the curtain stuff*
When we wrote this, one of us hadn’t heard about Castle Greyhawk, and the only other knew it as a book of jokes. We learned about its notoriety afterward! We were wondering how many readers would know what it was, worried the reference would stiff. Grateful it didn’t!
t!