I thought that I should mention to folks here that Gary Gygax's final adventure, Castle Zagyg: Upper Works (http://www.trolllord.com/zagyg/8051.html), will be available for only 2 more weeks.  I own it, and think that it is excellent.  (In fact, I ordered a second copy -- one for play, and one to keep as a collector's item.)  It is the most attractive and well edited product that I've ever seen from TLG.  Gary and Ghul (J. Talanian) did a superb job with this product.

For people who do not play C&C, it includes advice on running the adventure with older systems, i.e., 1e or 0e.  EGG himself used 0e to playtest the castle and dungeon.  It should be relatively easy to adapt to other systems (3e, 4e, or other systems).

Here is a very detailed and balanced review from grodog (Allan Grohe):
http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_grodog_castle_zagyg_review_final.pdf
(Note that this link goes directly to a pdf.)

Cheers.  

Well that sucks.  I was interested in picking it up, but not till February at the earliest.  The fact it was built to run with C&C woulda been sweet too.

Oh well, plenty of other fun things to waste my money on, and its not like the Godfather would be seeing any of the cash..

Does anyone know if there are plans to publish the actual dungeon with another company (Gygax Games, Mongoose)?

I really, really, REALLY hope Theresa got this for me for Christmas.

Quote from: Pierce Inverarity;274087Does anyone know if there are plans to publish the actual dungeon with another company (Gygax Games, Mongoose)?

The first level of the 'actual dungeon' is part of CZ:UW.  As for the lower levels, there has been no news to my knowledge.  I'm not optimistic, since Jeff Talanian has left the project.

Quote from: Akrasia;274098The first level of the 'actual dungeon' is part of CZ:UW.  As for the lower levels, there has been no news to my knowledge.  I'm not optimistic, since Jeff Talanian has left the project.

If you read the writeups on the other planned CZ levels, it will make you weep.

I hope we will still get to see them, somehow.

Oh man, what a loss.

I don't get why Gygax Games withdrew the license in the middle of a project like this--a very profitable one. What's the point? Publish CG for Lejendary Adventures? That would be financially insane.

I got mine.

Mine shipped today!

I'll throw in with the recommendations.  I've had the box for several weeks now, and while I haven't had the time to read everything in the box yet, just about everything I've read has been aces.

Grodog's review sums up the good and the (very minimal) bad very well.

Guys, I'm on the verge of ordering.

Will you swear to me that this isn't an endless, monotonous goblin/kobold hackfest?

Coz that's what I seemed to be reading between the lines of grodog's review.

It's got a lot of goblin/kobold hacking but it's got a lot of other flavorful and cool stuff too -- at 250pp you can throw out a good 100pp of material that doesn't suit your tastes and still have something very substantial to work with

I've got some grumbles about the art and production (saying it's TLG's best work ever, while technically true, is still damning with faint praise -- IMO the art, maps, and layout are all barely adequate and feel distinctly amateurish in comparison to rpg industry standard of 25 years ago (e.g. Chaosium boxed sets -- Borderlands, Trollpak, Pavis & Big Rubble, Masks of Nyarlathotep, etc.)) and would've liked to have seen more "history" (such as scans of the old maps, a la what Rob Kuntz did with Bottle City) but I'm nonetheless very glad I decided to pick this up after all, and think it makes a fine final bookend to Gygax's rpg-writing career.

TF, not to nag, but I'm wondering whether CZ brings the awesome pretty much out of the box, which is what Caverns of Thracia does do. And throwing out a third of the content would mean it doesn't...

Well, I only got my copy last weekend and haven't really read much of it yet -- I've just skimmed through it and read bits and pieces. It's larger than Caverns of Thracia, more open-ended (even without all the stairways down to undetailed lower levels), and more modular -- my impression at least is that you don't need to really consider what effect the party's actions in part 1 will have on the occupants of part 5 (though it is a "living dungeon" and within each section at least the party's actions can definitely have later repercussions). There are a lot of mundane-seeming encounters with bandits and assorted humanoids (the whole first section, the "Mouths of Madness," feels like an overdone retread of the Caves of Chaos and like it would be a grind to play through), but also a lot of interesting and unique ones, and the "Gygax flavor" is in evidence in a lot of it (even though most of the text was written by Gary's co-writer, Gary was clearly the source of most of the ideas, and even those that weren't his were done in conscious imitation of his style). My thought is this set probably works better as a source of ideas and encounters to strip-mine rather than something to actually play through as-written.

I don't want to try too hard to sell you on something you might not like, but I'm glad to have it even though I'll likely never run it as-is, and since it's pretty much "now or never" for buying it, I'd say as long as you can afford it it's worth grabbing even if you're only sort of interested or think you might like it. At worst, if you decide to sell it later, I suspect there will be a good secondary market, especially outside of the US.

Quote from: Pierce Inverarity;274553TF, not to nag, but I'm wondering whether CZ brings the awesome pretty much out of the box, which is what Caverns of Thracia does do. And throwing out a third of the content would mean it doesn't...

One good thing about the box set is that it would be relatively easy to remove a part that you found uninteresting.  Say you didn't like the 'Mouths of Madness'.  You could simply remove it without really affecting the rest of the module.  The product is still a good value, IMO, even if one removed one or two such sections.

Personally, I like the overall product more than T. Foster, although it certainly is not perfect.

I would recommend reading grodog's review (link provided in my original post) for a very detailed and balanced assessment of CZ:UW -- including a comparison to the Caverns of Thracia.