Expedition to the Ruins of the Greyhawk, is it worth it?

[Jon_Dahl]

My time and energy are both pretty limited these days, so I would be very grateful if you guys could tell me what you think about this adventure module. Yes, I have searched information from Google (but I haven't checked any recent GitP threads!), but I would like to know what YOU think.

[Bronk]

I haven't run it, but I have read through it and raided it for ideas. It seemed pretty extensive, and had a lot of good stuff in there!

[Thurbane]

I've run through it as a player, and it's possibly my favorite 3.5 official adventure, edging out RHoD.

But a lot of that is probably because I love the Greyhawk setting. Same reason I'm hoping to one day run through Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil as a player...

[Âmesang]

I haven't had a chance to run it or play it but I would love to; as another WORLD OF GREYHAWK® fan I find it's filled with all sorts of wonderful fluff for both the City of Greyhawk and Castle Greyhawk itself…

…including the orange Octych, one of the keys to the "Eight-Pointed Star" found in the Great Hall of Maure Castle that'll open a portal to a demiplane wherein rests one of the Apprentices of Slerotin, the Last Mage of Power of the Suel Imperium and custodian to the secrets of "Power (Epic?) Magic."

The other Octychs can be found in LIVING GREYHAWK'S™ Return to the Ghost Tower of Inverness (deep blue), Paizo's Age of Worms Adventure Path (crimson), and Oerth Journal #23's Warlock's Walk (golden-yellow). Of the eight Octychs these four were the only ones described in any official capacity, and while I've heard a fifth might be held in the possession of Mordenkainen (see: Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure?), that still leaves three unaccounted for; also, for some reason, Greyhawk's orange Octych is only the size of a human's thumb, while the other three are described as the size of a halfling's hand or a garden spade's blade—so I'd personally retcon the orange's size to match the others.

I would LOVE to be able to run a super adventure that throws all of this together, but considering that Age of Worms is already a 1st-20th+ level adventure path it would take a lot of planning to pull off.
…which reminds me: one of the NPCs in the adventure is adept at dragonchess (via Profession [gambler]), which came up with regards to a 5th Edition character of mine (though I think they aim more for an Intelligence tool check than Wisdom), but it reminds me that one of these days, when I have the time and resources, I want to put together an actual dragonchess set using Gygax's rules found in DRAGON Magazine #100.

[Allanimal]

I ran it for my group, finishing about a year ago. All around, it's a pretty good book and adventure. There were a couple encounters where the CRs were calculated wrong, and there are a couple places where the author(s) forgot about things like fly and permanencied arcane sight. I think the group liked it, it was challenging and rewarding.
There were enough interesting encounters with new monsters and templates, at least for my group. There were a lot of sub-plots, and the players often had trouble keeping things straight, but that may be because my group rotates between two different campaigns, and real life things happened, so sometimes there was several months between sessions EttRoCG.

In general, I'd say it is good for a DM without a lot of time to prepare. You will probably need to read at least the 1st 1/4 to 1/3 of the book before running it, less if you are already familiar with the city of Greyhawk and it's history and famous people. You will need to do pre-session preparing - as i said, there are a lot of sub plots and not all of them have explicitly defined points that they occur. So you'll need to decide which ones and how to work them in. Some things are left purposely vague, and not all of the castle ruins are mapped out. It does provide guidelines for parts of the castle that are not explicitly included in the adventure, should the PCs get sidetracked.

We had 9 PC deaths in a party of 5, not counting the one TPK that we retconned away. One was due to a save or die fairly early in the adventure, before they really had a way to defend against it. I would have probably changed that encounter a bit, were I running it again. Other than that, they were due to poor player decisions or bad luck, not due to bad encounter design (but don't forget my statement about some incorrect CRs / ELs)

[Thurbane]

From memory, we ran through it as:


Human Dragon Shaman (Copper) [me]
Goblin (former Grey Elf before a Reincarnate) Beguiler
Dwarf Fighter
Deep Dwarf Monk
Halfling Druid

...we had 2 or 3 PC deaths over the adventure.