Well, Yggsburgh and Dark Chateau arrived in the mail yesterday. Yggsburgh is not what I was expecting.

A little history: Gary Gygax invented D&D, and his campaign was all around Castle Greyhawk and the Free City of Greyhawk. Unfortunately, he was kicked out of TSR in 1985 or thereabouts, and much of his Greyhawk designs never saw print. Eventually, due to the d20 System and Troll Lord Games, we got Castles and Crusades, a version of AD&D that could legally see print, and Gary began to release some of material from his original campaign.

However, Yggsburgh isn’t Greyhawk. It’s a different city, although I’m sure that plenty of Gary’s Greyhawk has made its way into the book, like the Green Dragon Inn. (Castle Zagyg is Castle Greyhawk, though. I think).

I was expecting a book with lots of information about the city, especially NPCs, intrigues and the like.

That’s not exactly what I have.

Castle Zagyg Vol 1. Yggsburgh is a nicely presented 256 page hardcover book (B&W) with a fold-out double-sided colour poster map. The map shows the wilderness around Yggsburgh (including Castle Zagyg), the other side depicts Yggsburgh.

The book is made up of (basically) four parts:

Part 1 is Yggsburg: the Setting, History and Culture. This takes up 29 pages.
Part 2 lists Places of Import in Yggsburgh. This takes up 70 pages.
Part 3 lists Environs of Yggsburgh, as in the Wilderness, which includes a lot of good adventure hooks. This uses 88 pages.
Part 4 (the appendices) are 64 pages or so, of which 21 are devoted to encounters, mostly urban.

If one examines this, you find that barely half the book is actually devoted to the city. In addition, from my brief perusing of the book, it doesn’t seem that all that much space is devoted to actual urban adventuring. The wilderness material is of good quality, and there are bunches of quests and adventures that are suggested by or can be derived from the material.

In addition, NPC descriptions are pretty sketchy. There are some, such as the Striped Mage (one whose origin is told in one of Gary’s “On a Soapbox” articles in Dragon magazine) that are well-detailed and will prove very entertaining for the DM to use. Others, such as the council members, have no personalities described at all! Family members and where they live, yes… but more than that is up to the DM to provide.

It should be said that I’m not actually unhappy with the book – there’s a lot of really great stuff there which I’ll incorporate into my City of Greyhawk game. The Striped Mage in particular, but other material as well.

However, it does seem odd that the NPCs are so sketchy.