- This article is about the adventure module. For the castle of that name, see Castle Greyhawk at the Greyhawk Wiki.
WG7 Castle Greyhawk is a 128-page parody adventure module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition released in 1988.
Official synopsis[]
Deep beneath the keep of Castle Greyhawk, a really nasty device is creating mutated, unpleasant monsters that are running wild throughout the castle and the twelve-level dungeon beneath. The call has gone out for heroic, fearless, and perhaps foolish adventures to out-hack, out-slash, and sometimes even out-think hordes of doughmen, headless mice, manic bee queens, really bad dead things, burgermen, crazed chefs, and movie moguls. If they survive these and much odder obstacles, the characters still have to find the nasty monster creator and put it out of business.
Castle Greyhawkcontains 13 detailed levels for adventuring and exploration. Each is a separate adventure written by different author and each has its own unique brand of baffling weirdness. Some levels involve solving puzzles and some require good old hacking and slashing. The adventure can be played separately or all together as a grand quest to free Castle Greyhawk from the evil, rotten hordes that are plaguing it. The common theme of this dungeon is that no joke is so old, no pun so bad, and no schtick so obvious that it can't be used to confuse and trip up PCs!
13 Adventures for Character Levels 0 to 25.
Content[]
Development and release[]
Development[]
Castle Greyhawk consisted of 12 chapters, each detailing a different level of the dungeon, and each written by a different writer or writers: Chris Mortika (introduction); Steve Gilbert (level 1); Rick Swan (level 2); Guy McLimore, Greg Poehlein, and David Depool (level 3); Paul Jaquays (level 4); John Terra (level 5); Greg Gorden (level 6); Grand Boucher and Kurt Wenz (level 7); John Nephew (level 8); Scott Bennie (level 9); Rick Reid (level 10); Ray Winninger (level 11); Steve Perrin (level 12);
The cover art was provided by Keith Parkinson, with interior art by Jim Holloway and Jeff Easley, and cartography by Stephen Sullivan.
Release[]
Castle Greyhawk was released by TSR in for $9.95 US.[1]
The module code WG7 was originally intended for a module named Shadowlords, or Shadowland.[2][3] Following Gygax's departure from TSR, that project was canceled. The code WG7 was instead used for Castle Greyhawk, which parodied Gygax's adventure setting.
On May 14, 2013, it was re-released in digital format. It is currently available on DriveThruRPG and Dungeon Masters Guild for $9.99.
Reception and influence[]
Critical reception[]
Castle Greyhawk won best Role-Playing Game Accessory at the 1989 Gamer's Choice Awards. It was a three-way tie with REF5 Lords of Darkness (1e) (1988) and Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms (1988).[4]
In Dragon #135 (Jul 1988), p.77, reviewer Ken Rolston praised the light-hearted module as legitimizing the bizarre and incoherent style of adventure of his early games.
As of 2023, Castle Greyhawk reached the rank of Platinum seller on DriveThruRPG.