OK, this is Expedition to the Ruins of Castle Greyhawk (2007), a late-in-3.5E campaign book. It is a return of sorts—in 1990, TSR released WGR1: Greyhawk Ruins, which was an earnest attempt at creating a published version that matched the vibe Gygax’s ur-dungeon. That remains a somewhat obscure supplement, but forms the basic foundation of this campaign.

There is a fair amount of material on the city of Greyhawk and some important world lore before getting to the ruins themselves. The upper works are the remains of three towers—Zagig’s, Magic and War—each with voluminous, interconnected subterranean regions. These are vast, and not fully detailed. Rather, the book employs a system of encounter spaces and connections that creates an illusion of endless detail without the slog (or the page count). It feels super usable, with all the information for a given encounter (attributes, maps, tactics) all laid out on one or two pages.

I don’t know how I feel about it, though. It feels very very 3.5, for better and worse. Even allowing for that, this all feels somewhat disappointing, if only because it is trying to reconstruct a thing that never truly existed. The original, likely lost or unpublishable Greyhawk dungeon wasn’t a sensible place to explore, with a cohesive plot or anything like that. It was irrational, built on the fly literally to test new mechanics during the development of the game. It had a bowling alley for giants, and a portal to King Kong’s Skull Island. This book is, weird to say, too cool to be Castle Greyhawk. Or, at least, the Castle Greyhawk I am interested in reading about.

I don’t find the art direction very helpful. Michael Komarck’s cover has baldy Mordenkainen pondering his orb, in which a not-nearly-ruined-enough castle appears. It’s the most distinct piece of art in the book, the rest of which is done by a gang of artists whose names I don’t recognize; it’s all workmanlike and adheres closely to the 3E art direction.

I dunno, this is fine, probably.