I didn't really know what this module was when it first came out. I remember seeing it on the shelf at the store but when I got into AD&D the first campaign I played was Dragonlance and the first campaign I DMed was Forgotten Realms, so the Greyhawk campaign world just looked like generic-but-older fantasy from my viewpoint. To this day I don't really get Greyhawk.
It was the first campaign setting, it was Gygax'es world, it was where all of the canonical lore for AD&D's spells and outer planes originated from and I get why all of that is important to most grognards. But in 1989 my teenager brain didn't find it all that interesting. These days I look at Greyhawk and I still see a kind of generic fantasy steeped in American sensibilities. It seems saccharine and simplistic, but I can respect it.
I bought the pdf for Greyhawk Ruins because it's a published megadungeon and it seems to draw out wildly different reactions from people based on their personal investment with the Greyhawk setting. I wanted to read it for myself and it was pretty cheap. I used store credit at drivethruRPG which nice readers like yourself have supplied by clicking my links to DriveThruRPG before purchasing products there.
So, what is this module?
Gary Gygax had a notorious megadungeon that he pulled his original group of D&D gamers through and there are many apocryphal and amusing anecdotes about this dungeon, and commonly when people discuss this megadungeon they refer to it as Castle Greyhawk even though in reality it was likely not actually called this by Gygax or any of the players in his group. Supposedly. Who knows? The original Castle Greyhawk has a lot of weird and wild stories about it. You can read about some of them at Hack & Slash, Zenopus Archives, and Power Score and Power Score again
The Power Score blog in particular has TONS of links to more information!
Castle Greyhawk received a module, though it was mostly humorous nonsense, and many people don't consider it an "official" adventure since it materialized after Gygax was ousted from his own company. I've flipped through it, but I don't own a copy of it so I've never been able to sit down and properly read it.
At the beginning of AD&D's 2nd edition era every campaign setting got tentpole releases and for Greyhawk the flagship release was Greyhawk Ruins, a module that details the dungeons beneath what once was Castle Greyhawk. The castle was composed of three towers and has collapsed or been destroyed in some vaguely handwaved ways that leaves no rubble on the ground and didn't somehow also collapse the tower-like cave structures beneath the castle.
Seriously?
Yes, seriously. One of the towers is said to have had ONE HUNDRED floors, yet when it collapsed it somehow left the first floor free of debris.
Are you going to review this module?
That's what this post is. As a whole I don't like this module very much. It's filled with crappy ideas and poor setups and would not be fun to play through as written. There are a few good ideas hidden away in the thing but ultimately I don't think it's worth the time scouring the thing for them.
I've read through it and I found most of it pretty boring. It's an interesting little post-Gygaxian artifact of Greyhawk but I didn't find it essential to anything about the Greyhawk setting. The complaints I've seen of the adventure online tend to be accurate. However, when people talk about the story I get confused because there doesn't seem to be absolutely any story here.
The adventure is written with the assumption that the PCs are here to loot as much as possible, and are possibly in competition with other people who are here to loot the ruins, but no plotline exists to push PCs into the dungeon. There's a list of rumors to drop into your campaign, but these are given with the phrase "The truth or falsehood of these rumors is left undefined as they often have elements of both."
There are sometimes explanations for why a particular creature lives in a particular room or how this NPC will react if the PCs follow a course of action, but I consider that proper window dressing for a dungeon. There's just enough information to know as the GM what's going on and to relay the proper amount of information to the players. The descriptions for rooms are concise and compact, explaining everything in very brief but often exhaustive details. It's put together efficiently, but it doesn't seem like a very fun place to explore. It reads as a tedious environment.
Here's a cutaway map of the levels and how they connect together.
Okay, why does it suck?
Let's ignore the fact that none of these "towers" have stairwells, or remnants of stairwells, leading upwards. You got that? There is no evidence that were ever stairs going UP! That's pretty important for the first floor of a tower that once had one-hundred floors. But whatever, this was clearly not written for somebody who asks logical questions.
There are also NPCs that are described as potential allies for the PCs, they are clearly meant to be befriended, who often have more treasure than the places the PCs are going into. Why bother dungeon delving for jewels when you could murder-death-kill these hapless helpers for their bags of loot?
This module could be forgiven for being written during that time when TSR was transitioning from 1st edition AD&D into 2nd edition AD&D. There are pages of stat blocks for monsters that seem to be compensating for a lack of an official monster manual.
And that is all you really need to know. You can stop reading now unless you want to know, in exhaustive detail, what is good and usable (very little) and what is bad and unfun (most of it).
What's bad
• On one level, the PCs are going to encounter troglodytes right away, and even though when entering this level the hall splits into three directions the PCs are surely going to follow down the path where the troglodytes are laired. Which leads to a fun house / death maze which is filled with carnival clown faces that curse and kill PCs who look at them. The whole maze is ridiculous, stupid, and pointless.
• The first real encounter at the "tower of power" is a scripted fight between some elves and an ettin. Though the module instructs you to play this like a real battle it also literally tells you "let the ballista automatically hit and score maximum damage"
• There is a locked door that is described "with a lock that can never be picked nor even knocked as it is not a true lock." So this is just here to waste the PCs time, and there are A LOT of things like this throughout the dungeon. I don't want to write them all out, just reading them is exhausting.
• There's a trap that releases poison sleeping gas into a chamber then tries to trick the PCs into staying in the chamber to hide from some soldiers, except the illusion involved uses game terminology and I've never ran a dungeoncrawl where the PCs tried to avoid violence.
What's good
• In one room you find the deed to a tavern, which must be validated by an item (a magical key) on the 9th level (excuse me, P900 - weird numbering system in full effect). This is a promising item by itself because I could think of quite a few adventures around trying to claim the tavern using the deed, but sadly very little detail is put into this. Even the magical key is explained as opening a secret door in the tavern, but nothing else. So, sorta badly written and unnecessarily convoluted but still a good idea.
• There are a couple of secret rooms which read to me like secret sex ritual chambers, or rooms for orgies.
• There's a whole section of rooms with kobolds occupying them that are given about 4 paragraphs total. Very light on details, but enough that you could probably wing it. One of the things this module does that I really like is exemplified by the elven fortress and these camping kobolds. It gives a number for an area of rooms and describes a group of connected characters that are occupying the area, then gives individual rooms letter designations so you can decide for yourself where these characters are and what they might be doing when the PCs arrive. It's quick and dirty, but not very elegant since some room elements are never expanded upon.
• There's an artifact on the first level that is basically a GPS that requires magic to read. It's quaint.
I was going to write out more, but I hate that it's even occupying my brain this much.
Final verdict
Don't buy it. But if you buy it, just get it to read how bad it is.
