As promised, here is the session report that took me a long time to write. I hope it will make the old American veterans here happy to see young French teenagers taking on the Barrier Peaks on their own initiative. ☺️
Syd Lonreiro
Salut les gars, Syd ici. Aujourd’hui j’ai fait jouer Expedition to the Barrier Peaks avec deux amis comme joueurs, pour un total de 15 personnages. Chaque joueur contrôlait deux personnages chacun, c’était brutal. Transpiration nerveuse, énormément d’exploration et de cartographie, combat non-stop. J’ai adoré voir mes joueurs réagir aux descriptions et aux images tout en élaborant des théories.
Les combats étaient ultra tactiques et mortels. J’ai adoré ça. Ils ont fui et combattu des végepygmées et leurs chiens, lancé des sorts puissants comme Cone of Cold et Disintegrate contre des robots.
Ah oui, putain, les robots. Ils sont entrés dans le commissariat et ont affronté des robots qui lançaient des grenades explosives tout en essayant de sauver un perso clerc PJ enfermé dans une cellule.
Des personnages sont morts.
En gros, c’était notre première session de haut niveau en AD&D 1E, et on a vite compris que trouver un tube d’ascenseur fonctionnel était leur seule chance de survivre. J’ai hâte que de nouveaux joueurs rejoignent la partie.
J’ai utilisé les personnages pré-tirés OD&D originaux fournis dans le module, et j’ai sélectionné les sorts du PHB et de UA.
Hey guys, Syd here from France. Today I ran Expedition to the Barrier Peaks with two friends as players and a total of 15 characters. Each player controlled two characters each, it was brutal. Nervous sweating, tons of exploration and mapping, nonstop combat. I absolutely loved watching my players react to the descriptions and images while coming up with theories.
The fights were ultra tactical and deadly. I loved it. They fled from and fought Vegepygmies and their dogs, threw around powerful spells like Cone of Cold and Disintegrate against robots.
Oh yeah, fuck, the robots. They entered the police HQ and fought robots throwing explosive grenades while trying to rescue a cleric PC locked in a cell.
Some characters died.
I’m going to write a full session report and publish it on my Substack. I’ll bring a link here later.
Basically, this was our first high-level AD&D 1E session, and we quickly understood that finding a working elevator tube was their only way to survive. I can’t wait for new players to join in.
I used the original OD&D pregenerated characters provided in the module and selected spells from the PHB and UA.
Il y a quelques jours j'ai vu un post sur ce sub d'une personne expliquant que la misandrie c'est mal car les hommes peuvent penser qu'ils sont des monstres et se suicider. Ce post m'a touché car je suis moi même un homme et je pense que la misandrie est totalement normale. Je la voie comme un mécanisme de protection légitime des femmes, les femmes dans nos sociétés humaines subissent la discrimination, les viols, la brutalité et toutes ces choses et atrocités. La misogynie est le vrai problème. Quand une femme dit qu'elle hait les homme et qu'elle veut les tuer. Il ne faut pas la blâmer, il faut accepter que ce qu'elle dit est un mécanisme de protection légitime et l'écouter.
Je pense personnellement que le problème n'est pas le système mais tous les hommes en tant qu'êtres humains ? Pourquoi ? Car ils ont été élevés dès la naissance pour perpétuer la violence masculine de leurs biologie et écraser les femmes.
Je pense que nous devons au contraire bâtir un monde où les femmes dominent les hommes. Ce n'est pas une simple inversion des rôles. Ce serait un monde plus juste, plus humain, et centré sur la bienveillance et l'écoute avec moins de guerres. La société utopique des amazones dans wonder woman en est un bon exemple et le féministe qui à inventé cette fiction était plutôt en avance sur son temps. Maintenant je ne dis pas que c'est bien de haïr les hommes. Je dit que c'est complètement OK pour une femme qui est brisée par le patriarcat.
Cette réflexion ne vise pas les hommes. Elle ne cherche pas à appeler à la haine. Simplement à défendre les femmes qui s'affirment misandres.
J'espère que c'est bien compris.
> This level is filled with supplies intended for use on the colony planet. It contains vast stacks of raw materials, refined metals, plastics, glass, emergency food rations, etc. Ramps and catwalks connect the storage areas. Robots are typically used to transport the required supplies. A large reinforced hatch allows unloading directly onto the planet.
> Access is via the main elevators and four inclined or spiral ramps leading to level 2. Access is restricted to command or security badges.
It’s a key popular science article for deepening understanding of issues of personal identity in relation to current patients.
Earlier today I was at the bus stop with my copy of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks in my hand. I was coming back from a day during the second and final week of my internship at a shop in my town that sells board games, RPGs, and war gaming stuff, mostly Warhammer. The manager is a big fan of war games and RPGs, I think since the 1980s. He didn’t recognize the module, but he really liked my presentation and the idea of an alien spaceship.
It was only on my way back from the shop, on the bus ride home, that I started looking properly at the module I had in my hands and thinking, “Damn.” Let me give some context. I’m 16, and I started getting into OSR when I was 14. The way I got into it says a lot about what I was thinking when I said that.
At 14, I only had my 5th edition materials, including the Monster Manual of the Multiverse, a few official WotC campaigns, and I also had a starter box for Call of Cthulhu and some Ryutama stuff. Basically mostly new-school material. I had been playing D&D since I was 12 and started DMing at 13. I went through all my 5e material thoroughly because it was my only reference point for D&D.
Then, I don’t remember exactly how, I ended up finding pirated PDFs of old edition rulebooks, OD&D, B/X, BECMI. I read them, then I read Wikipedia summaries of BECMI and AD&D modules, including Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and some scanned PDFs of modules. I didn’t even really know what online piracy was; I didn’t have those concepts yet, and I didn’t realize what I was doing was wrong. So I just read and downloaded a lot of stuff.
And I thought, “Damn, the 1980s were actually the golden age of D&D.” Why are WotC’s products so bad? Why can’t WotC write rules and adventures as good as those amazing things from the 1980s? I was honestly outraged.
To me, those rulebooks and modules felt like lost treasures, collector’s items worth a small fortune, things you just can’t stumble upon in our time. I learned about retroclones like OSE. I told myself: “Good job, past Syd, you’ve discovered OSR,” but meanwhile I spent years thinking this material would be forever inaccessible to me.
And now I’m 16, and I’m holding Expedition to the Barrier Peaks S3 in my hands, a somewhat worn module that I’m going to run and use, maybe next year, though not before some adjustments to gradually get my group used to higher-level adventures in AD&D.
It all happened so fast. The 14-year-old Syd I’m still connected to through a few atoms not yet replaced by my metabolism, and especially through a continuous chain of conscious experience, would be proud. And honestly, that 14-year-old has gradually become a different 16-year-old Syd who is still amazed, and who has since rethought the original books he acquired and can now use for years to come.
The conclusion is that everything I once admired as inaccessible treasures lost to grognards is now accessible to me. The Gygaxian game is accessible to me, and I’m going to keep the flame alive. It might sound strange in a world of adults where you can just spend five minutes on eBay to find whatever you want at the right price, but for me it still feels unreal and strange.
It’s like achieving your dreams, but the dream is only half fulfilled as long as you haven’t run the module many times. In fact, it never fully completes, but that’s not unpleasant. It’s a perpetual dream you keep fulfilling over and over again.
Syd Lonreiro
Thank you, EGG, for writing this masterpiece. A gem of science fiction designed to work with the AD&D 1st Edition system.
Je mène une campagne old school AD&D 1E pour d'autres adolescents. Elle est centrée sur l'exploration de mon méga donjon le castle Zonreiryd. Voici plusieurs cartes des étages du château et des villes, villages, contrées sauvages en hexcrawl. Certaines cartes sont tellement grandes que je suis obligé de les plier en 2 derrière mon écran du MJ pour empêcher mes joueurs de les voir.
Il n'y à pas tout là mais j'ai rassemblé le principal. J'ai même remarqué après la photo que j'ai oublié de ranger un de mes 2 monster manual, celui de 1978 que ma mère à commandé sur eBay pour moi.
(Je ne savais pas quel flair mettre j'ai hésité à mettre fan made, ou scénario mais collection semblait plus adapté car c'est une collection de cartes manuscrites que j'ai accumulé au fil de leurs créations).
Hi, I'm 16 years old and I'm from France.
I discovered Dungeons & Dragons when I was 12 through my stepfather, Rémy. One day he went to a D&D game night with some coworkers, and when he came back he explained the game and its setting to me. I was immediately hooked. I started researching it online and decided it was going to be my new hobby.
That Christmas, I received the three core rulebooks and both starter sets. We played constantly, and at 13 I became a Dungeon Master for a group of friends at middle school. We played dungeon crawls and hexcrawls using my own house rules. I took them through a half-submerged imaginary city, and at the time we played in the school's library.
I prepared very little. Apart from maps of dungeons and wilderness regions, a few notes, and some random tables, I improvised most of my adventures.
Eventually I started moving away from 5th Edition because I was looking for a game that could better emulate deadly exploration in a massive megadungeon inspired by Castle Greyhawk and Castle El Raja Key, with increasingly bizarre and imaginative levels.
We switched to B/X D&D, which was good, but the rules felt a little too light for my taste. Then we moved on to what became my holy grail: AD&D 1st Edition.
My mother played AD&D 2nd Edition as a teenager in the 1990s, and I still have her Player's Handbook. I also got the OSRIC retroclone and began collecting original AD&D 1st Edition material to play with. There I found exactly what I was looking for. My favorite part of the game is its combat system, which I find rich, dynamic, and enjoyable to run and play.
For my 17th birthday, I chose to get some adventure modules by Robert Kuntz. I also plan to buy his digital archive of El Raja Key, which contains over a thousand scanned maps, notes, and documents from the games he played with Gary Gygax before the publication of Original D&D.
At the same time, I am designing my own megadungeon. Just yesterday I created a machine level filled with conveyor belts, robots, and strange machinery.
Our games focus mainly on exploration and tactical combat. Most of our sessions revolve around exploring my megadungeon, Castle Zonreiryd. One or more players draw maps based on my descriptions in order to navigate the dungeon successfully. We also enjoy wilderness hexcrawling, and I am considering preparing urban adventures in the future as well.
These maps of the Foolsgrave mega dungeon are clearly in my top 5 favorite dungeon maps, along with the Recessive Gallery level map by Grodog, with its inverted triangular corridors designed to complicate humanoid traffic, and the catacombs and sewers of Greyhawk by Robert Kuntz, in which Erol Otus was involved.
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The Foolsgrave dungeon is a true work of art, and I hope it will one day be key’d in a usable way, with teleporters, slides, and magical fountains!
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This is my version of the Machine Level for Castle Zonreiryd. At least, it is the first version; I plan to have it playtested by some of the other teenagers in my group soon.
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The Machine Level was originally a dungeon level designed by Robert Kuntz, numbered East 8, for his Castle El Raja Key II. It later became part of the collaborative Castle Greyhawk II project developed by Gary Gygax and Robert Kuntz.
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Here is the map of my version: a vast pulp science-fiction warehouse filled with machinery straight out of the 1950s. The passages marked in different colors are conveyor belts moving at various speeds. There are several checkpoints where the "products" pass beneath different machine portals. Some slice them apart; others transform them into bizarre steampunk cyborgs.
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There are six teleporters on the level. Be careful not to take the one that leads to the Cleaning Machine Room. This hard-to-reach sector contains a gigantic machine that sweeps the entire area clean, along with pillars more than twenty feet across.
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Wait... those aren't pillars. They're rooms!
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In fact, they are your only chance of survival. Sweating and terrified, you must move from room to room searching for the exit while hoping that AD&D's door-opening mechanics are on your side, giving you a slim chance of escaping before being sucked into the Cleaning Machine's extendable vacuum trunk.
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One crushing roller leads to an acid pool after first sealing you airtight inside a plastic bag. If you fall into the acid already wrapped in plastic, you might have the faintest chance of breaking free and reaching the tunnel beneath the acid. That tunnel connects to a conveyor belt that can drag you out of this nightmare, provided you can hold your breath long enough.
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There is also a room filled with slot machines whose effects are... let's say, unpredictable.
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Various machines are marked with colored symbols drawn in marker. Depending on the color, they perform different functions, including the infamous Titanic Furnace Machine!
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Finally, there is the control room, home to the machine that decides your fate. It may seize you and dump you into the oubliettes, or send you to the holding area, where you will find yourself imprisoned in cellophane inside a transparent capsule.
The mad mage Zonreiryd / Syd Lonreiro has designed a new floor today. It is inspired by Level 3 of the canonical Backrooms (Wikidot): a deadly labyrinth of red brick walls with wires and electrical conduits everywhere. There are multiple human factions, as well as very dangerous monsters from the Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, and Monster Manual II, scattered everywhere in large numbers!
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On top of that, it creates a real challenge in terms of spatial description for me as the referee, and for my players when it comes to mapping!
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So, bring out your 10-foot poles, assemble a small squad of 10 henchmen, and don’t forget your sacks of flour!
Inspired by Grodog’s inventory created for his Castle Greyhawk, I have compiled my own inventory of the levels included in my Castle Zonreiryd, listing each level’s name and creator. Most of the levels were designed by me, while others are incorporated modules or dungeon levels created by notable designers, such as the Machine Level from Castle Greyhawk II, which I will need to reconstruct from descriptions and from the map in the El Raja Key Archives. I will also need to key several of Grodog’s levels.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Greyhawk/s/Quq4c02mEZ
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- The ruins (Syd Lonreiro)
- The halls (Syd Lonreiro)
- The catacombs and sewers (Robert Kuntz)
- Castle Greyhawk L1 (Gary Gygax)
- El Raja Key level 3 (Robert Kuntz)
- Heretical Temple of Wee Jas (Allan Grohe)
- Kloupsi 50 (Syd Lonreiro)
- Central Stair Wall (Alan Grohe)
- The crypt (Syd Lonreiro)
- I don’t have the time darling (Syd Lonreiro)
- WG6 Isle of Apes (Gary Gygax)
- Illusion trap labyrinth (Syd Lonreiro)
- Living Room / plus the two following areas (Robert Kuntz)
- The original bottle city (Robert Kuntz)
- The egg chambers (Allan Grohe)
- The Black Reservoir version Grodog (Allan Grohe)
- The Worked caverns (Allan Grohe)
- The Machine Level (Robert Kuntz)
- SCP (Syd Lonreiro)
- Backrooms level 3 (Syd Lonreiro)
- Backrooms level 2 (Syd Lonreiro)
- Poolrooms (Syd Lonreiro)
- EX1 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror (Gary Gygax)
- The work offices (Syd Lonreiro)
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Hi everyone, my name is Syd Lonreiro, and I'm French. I'm 16 years old now, soon to be 17.
When I was 13, I watched a documentary about the Cuban Missile Crisis and started designing a nuclear warfare wargame for my friends at school. It was extremely rudimentary: there were no dice rolls, no statistics system, and we would simply cross out destroyed targets directly on the maps. Before each game, I prepared a small chart to calculate casualties in the millions using a calculator, and we had an absolute blast. It kept us occupied through every recess, especially as an alternative to going to the library, where I had previously run my first D&D campaign for friends whenever it was open.
For a long time, I put wargames aside and focused instead on old-school TTRPGs, which have been, and probably always will be, my main hobby since I was 12.
Meanwhile, my younger brother became interested in Warhammer, especially Warhammer 40,000. For his birthdays and Christmas, he asked for his first Warhammer boxes when he was around 10 or 11 years old, around the same time he began shifting away from competitive chess in favor of wargames with richer tactical depth.
Recently, I rediscovered some of the old notes, maps, and rule systems from the early version of the wargame I used to run for my friends. I decided to give it a second life, this time with a more structured, clear, and rigorous ruleset. I'm introducing polyhedral dice, statistical systems, and a measuring tape to determine distances and timing.
The game now includes features such as automatic retaliatory "dead hand" systems similar to those used by Russia, diplomacy mechanics, first-strike procedures, tactical nuclear weapons, protective measures for heads of state, and much more.
Expedition to Castle Greyhawk
A Short Story by Syd Lonreiro
This is Part 1 of a fantasy story detailing the expedition of a group of adventurers into Castle Greyhawk.
For the sake of historical accuracy, the original map created by Gary Gygax and photographed in his binder in 2007, along with the pre-prepared numbered encounters, have been respected. These were reconstructed in 2018 through the work of Grodog and Zenopus Archives, using a blurry photograph of the notes, reports from EN World, and various other sources.
For more information about Castle Greyhawk, I recommend consulting Grodog's Greyhawk Online page.
I should note that I have deliberately added sensory details throughout the narrative. Such descriptions are generally improvised during actual play from only minimal preparation, but I felt they would help bring the story to life in written form.
I am a 16-year-old French teenager, and my English is still a work in progress. Please be kind in your feedback. That said, I am very eager to hear your thoughts, as this is the first piece of fiction I have ever published.
Kind regards,
Syd
These fascinating dungeon maps are the first three levels of Castle El Raja Key, developed by Robert Kuntz to have Gary Gygax play as a player during the Lake Geneva campaign. Kuntz was only 17 years old at the time, just one year older than I am today when he created these maps. They may seem strange because they are completely exotic compared to the modern dungeon. Here, the dungeon is designed as a tactical labyrinth to be explored. There are many empty rooms whose contents are not defined. That is normal in an abandoned underground place that has since been populated, there is a lot of “dead space” to explore.
When Kuntz created this map, he didn’t need to define what was in every room. His words and sharp descriptions were enough to terrify players and lead them astray. At that time, planned encounters were numbered and written in a single line on a sheet, which allowed for very minimal preparation and for adventures focused on exploration, horror, and survival in a fantastical place.
The early sessions of Castle Greyhawk and Castle El Raja Key, as well as Castle Blackmoor, were tense and brutal exploration, where players frantically searched for traps with their 10-foot poles and sometimes crossed several empty rooms while mapping to avoid getting lost, under the terrifying descriptions of sounds, cobwebs, and light given by Kuntz, before fighting monsters, collecting loot, and leaving.
There were also some “WTF” elements, such as slot machines, nixie pools, crocodile-filled basins, and all sorts of strange things like that. This particular style of play is something I cherished as a teenager, and it gave me some of my best gaming experiences recently with my high school friends. My Castle Zonreiryd is designed, prepared, and played in exactly the same way.
This is an article that explains how player mapping was handled in the early OD&D games run by Gary Gygax and Robert Kuntz during their Lake Geneva campaigns. It may be important if you are trying to reproduce that particular style of play.
Take care,
Syd
This is my favorite piece of art from all D&D materials across the ages. A magnificent illustration by David Shutterland depicting a group of adventurers in the majestic City of Brass on the Elemental Plane of Fire. The group is confronted by a giant efreet who is holding the party’s daughter captive in one hand, with a scimitar in the other. The green background and the buildings, along with this red river, which I believe is magma, and the small ship on it, make the scene feel surreal and truly breathtaking.
In the second photo, I placed one of my three DMGs on my desk under the lamp to reveal what a Dungeon Master sees when looking for inspiration on the cover. It’s so evocative, and the TSR text fits perfectly.