2026-11-07

Starting the game

The party began play in the catacombs—the first of Castle Gygar’s twelve levels—tasked with a crystal ball “buried some layers below” the decrepit ruins. I settled on this premise mostly out of necessity, picking a powerful magic item from the middle of the module’s detailed item trade-up sequence and conjuring an employer out of thin air.

Greeted by a couple doors and long, echoing (but well lit!) hallways leading north and south, the group heads north. They stop at an intersection, wary of a rusted key sitting out in the open. Tohst throw his shield at the key “to check for traps,” catching a good bit of flak from everyone else before stowing the key and continuing north again.

They encounter a set of doors, one on each side of the hall, and note that the path ends in a ‘T’ intersection some twenty feet ahead. Tohst picks the door on the left at random, poking his head into a darkened room. This turns out to be a demonic altar—pentagram drawn in blood, black candles scattered on the floor, the whole nine yards!3—which piques the party’s interest. The air cracks and spits, throwing sparks and ash as they cross the threshold; three imps materialize at the far end of the room and pull the party into their first combat encounter.

I should note that we played this game over Discord using the Swords & Wizardry system in Foundry; overall, the system made for a clunky experience at times, but mostly because I needed to pause halfway into this fight to shrink everyone’s tokens and add 5-foot subgrids. The token overlap had become unbearable and the players lost track of who was where, resulting in somewhat of a wasted first round.