Reject Comment Bin Find

[geneweigel]

I was just thinking about comments and posts in general. I had just lost a comment on my blog because I closed the window by mistake. How many times did this happen? It must be thousands for me. Most I don't give a crap about but years ago I did a massive series of quotes and gone. So now I notepad as I write so I have a safety net.

Some comments I saved but it was because they were unpostable either they would have been deleted.

Anyway, I have, within a bin of reject comments, a file called "Gary's Game Comments July 2001":

Most of the group was having a bit of cool refreshment--soda, beer, and a few of those lemon ice drinks with vodka. Four beers or whatever over as many hours is pretty well a wash...room trip or two
I tried to move things along as much as possible while keeping with requisite roleplay and wandering encounters. The party was traveling west from Veluna City to discover "The City on the Edge" in far-distant Zeif. They had acquired a map, thd the 12th level paladin in the group determined to find this lost city, purge it of its evil. A tall order, as I explained it was there when the Bakluni came to Oerik, and it was quickly shunned way back then!
The upshot is that they made Lopolla as noted, traveling with a band of dervishes randomly encountered, most fortititously for them and me as DM. With the assistance of the Rhenne thet made Thronward by river, then treked over the Penwilds (the hills below the Bramblewood Forest--those further west and south at the foot of the Barrier Peaks being the Pennor Hills/Pennors.
The barrow with the super-specter was in the Bramblewood. Thherafter the party made it to the river hamlet the dervishes knew of, purchased dugout canoes, and went down the Tuflik to Lopolla.
Sadly, it was then near 11 PM and we had to quit--about half-way to the place where the shunned City of the Edge lies on the shore of the Dramidje.
Gary

Does this look familiar? If its from a Gygax game session I certainly wasn't there.

[GRWelsh]

It doesn't look familiar but wow! I'd like to know more about this adventure. It looks like EGG was referring to himself DMing an AD&D game session set in the World of Greyhawk! In 2001 I don't think he was doing much of that... AFAIK at that time EGG was running Lejendary Adventure and sometimes OD&D in the original Greyhawk Dungeons. Was he perhaps reminiscing about an adventure he DMed from the 80's? It is an tantalizing glimpse into his DMing style of overland travel including random encounter checks through the cultures and regions of Oerth. I'd like to know more about this "City on the Edge." Interesting reference about the "Bakluni coming to Oerik" which implies they originated from a different continent... Which one?

[Scott]

Luke might be a good resource to check with. I think he did more adventuring in the larger published setting than Rob or Ernie did, and because of how things unfolded at TSR Gary didn't spend much time detailing it.

[geneweigel]

It might be from the Lejendary Adventure forum because I did not keep much track of that unless Gary was in there since it was so hostile.

[GRWelsh]

Good idea to ask Luke. That quote Gene posted is reminiscent of passages from SEA OF DEATH (pp. 70-71), which makes me wonder if EGG drew upon DMing an adventure in that region previously:

He was surprised that the dwarven company remained with him when they all finally left the mountains, four days after beginning their descent toward less rugged ground. They had come to the rough foothills on the north side of the Barring Mountains, an area called the Pen-Wilds, where few folk lived and game abounded. Gord hunted with success and greatly enjoyed the wild lonesomeness of the place. Noticing this, the dwarves warmed to him a little.

...

The next day they came to a place where the hills became more gentle and trees dotted valleys and hilltops alike. In the distance the mass of a forest could be seen, blanketing the last, low ridges and mounds of the Pen-Wilds. Here the company of dwarves told Gord that they would go no farther.

"You are now at the edge of Briartangle Woodland, Gord," the gnarled captain of the demi-human band said to him. "That little brook there is the headwater of the river the Baklunish humans call the Toosmik. If you keep it on your left hand, it will guide you through the forest to Hlupallu."

NOTES:

Barring Mountains = Barrier Peaks
Briartangle Woodland = Bramblewood Forest
Pen-Wilds = Unnamed on the Darlene map (hills north of the Barrier Peaks and south of the Bramblewood forest)
Pennor Hills/Pennors = Unnamed on the Darlene map (hills north of the Barrier Peaks to the west of the Bramblewood)
Toosmik River = Tuflik River
Hlupallu = Lopolla

I was hoping to find a reference to the "City on the Edge" in far distant Zeif in one of the Gord books... But so far, I haven't found anything. Very intriguing!

[geneweigel]

I posted it on Gary Con that way it would get the most coverage.

[grodog]

My first thought in reading it was that the City on the Edge might be the original version of Gaxmoor, perhaps?

Allan.

[GRWelsh]

Possibly an inspiration, but not the same thing. Gaxmoor was originally located in the Oeridian Empire which was between the Ancient Baklunish and Suloise Empires according to the background, and EGG's description of the "City on the Edge" has it predating the Baklunish arriving on Oerik and located along the shores of the Drawmidj Ocean.

But it could be there is inspiration related to the way Gaxmoor was moved by the gods and had its own planar weirdness... What was the "City on the Edge" on the edge of? Another plane? Another universe?

EGG was always good at adding in "new depths" to what had already been established. This reminds me how the Lost City of the Suloise in the Suss Forest was revealed in ARTIFACT OF EVIL to not be Suloise but from some other earlier civilization -- a mystery!

[Zenopus]

Very mysterious! Thanks for posting that, Gene. The sentence that begins "The barrow with the super-specter..." sounds like a reference to something he had mentioned earlier in the conversation.

"City on the Edge" of course brings to mind that Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever".

I don't recall hearing about Gygax running World of Greyhawk campaigns at such a late date (2001) before, other than the pseudo-Greyhawk playtest for Yggsburgh. He tended to say stuff like this quote from 2005 on EnWorld: "No, seldom if ever do i run O/AD&D game sessions on the WoG. Once the setting passed from my hands I lost interest in it."

Regarding Gaxmoor, when asked on EnWorld about a WoG location for it, suggested that "I think it fits best in the Great Kingdom's eastern verge, there being a good deal of "ancient history" surrounding that place". If it was recognizably derived from this creation, I would think he would have suggested something more like Zeif for it.

[Scott]

Gaxmoor was Ernie’s creation and the WoG location was in the pass between Bissel and Veluna.
My guess is this was an early 80s game, probably the same one Dorgha Torgu came from (“This is material I recently found in my old Greyhawk files. I was preparing for play in the west” - EGG). I mentioned Luke because I know he was playing Melf around then and most of the original players had dropped out.

[geneweigel]

I have a vague recollection that it was local Lake Geneva people playing Original D&D and one of them shared pics, one was a photo of Gary smoking while DMing at a round table on a porch, and the person taking the pics was a big gentleman that I was wondering if I knew the guy from the forums. This is why I'm thinking that it was the LEJENDARY forums there was never a follow up on it.

[Zenopus]

The Lejendary.com forums were definitely active then, and Gygax was posting at least by May of 2001. The site was taken down long ago but glimpses can be seen via the Internet Archive; here you can see that Gygax made some posts in May and June of 2001, you just can't read most of the actual posts.

I checked my archive of the posts from the gygax-games yahoo mailing list (which go back to 2000, although it existed before then), but didn't see any mention by him of gaming in July 2001. Of course it sounds like he might have been commenting on a game from an earlier date?

[Scott]

Yeah, it was definitely from an earlier date. There was a pretty small window where he was running games in the published WoG, 80 - 85 maybe. Later on he did start running OD&D adventuures in his original Greyhawk Dungeons, but nothing like what was described in that quote.

[Scott]

Luke had nothing to add. I tried looping Paul Stormberg into the conversation. He’s had access to Gary’s files so maybe he saw something in there.

[Zenopus]

The 12th level paladin suggests a long running campaign, or a character created at a higher level. Anyone known to have played a paladin in his games?

[Zenopus]

By searching "Col_Pladoh" and "Zeif", I found a promising lead over on EnWorld, in a post from August 2002:

A couple of years back a group from Tennessee visited, and i designed an adventure for them that would indeed take them from Greyhawk all the way west of Zeif, looking for a haunted city there. After eight hours they's not made it much further that Rel mord, so that was the end of the adventure. Pity...

Gene's quote certainly fits the description of this adventure as it also involves Zeif and a mysterious city. The part that doesn't fit is the mention of Rel Mord, which is in the wrong direction.
Either this was a different group (or earlier session?) on the same adventure but starting out heading east for some reason, or he mixed up the city names (Rel Mord for Lopolla?).

Either way, it's neat to see him revisiting Greyhawk at this late date.

[Scott]

Yeah, that definitely looks like it. And Gary mixing up names in off the cuff message board posts was a regular occurrence.
It also explains why he was DMing in Greyhawk at that time.

[Zenopus]

I overlooked that the next post has a little bit more on this adventure and the group. The wights are likely the super-spectre mentioned above?

It was indeed a shame thy chaps didn't return as that promisted when they left. They brought their own PCs of around 8th level, but one lost a couple of levels to some wights, so they stopped in Rel Mord to have the clerics there restore them.

BTW, I suspect that they didn't come back because their van caught fire and was totally destroyed on the way home. They did save their dice.

I wonder how this group convinced him to run Greyhawk again despite his lack of enthusiasm with it in later years?

[Scott]

In case anybody’s not following the Gary Con thread, Paul responded: I did indeed run across the materials for this campaign with maps for Lopolla, the Plains of the Paynims, and details on the City on the Edge and its strange ruler and inhabitants.

[GRWelsh]

Good job on the internet sleuthing, guys. I'm also amazed if EGG was persuaded to DM a World of Greyhawk adventure in the late 90's or circa 2000. The paladin implies it was either AD&D or OD&D with the Greyhawk Supplement. I'm looking forward to talking to Paul about this!