Making Karameikos Great Again

I started a second game a month or so back with one of my older gaming groups running Shadowdark.  We had all ended up at the same end-of-summer barbeque, started talking about games, and realized several folks in the old guard wanted to give Shadowdark a try.  I had recently become enamored of the rules as well, and so the idea for a new campaign was formed.  This is basically our first game report.

Shadowdark reminds me a lot of Moldvay BX.  Maybe because it's like what a BX version of 5E should have been?  The game embraces simple classes, simple action resolution, and dungeon crawling.  The Shadowdark community claims you can run classic BX style modules with the system mostly as is, only adjusting the treasure down a factor.  I was drawn to the idea of seeing how it handled classic modules from the 1980's that we haven't run before.  Thus germinated the idea of running B5 Horror on the Hill in my favorite setting from that era, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos*.

One other thing we talked about was running a "gauntlet".  Shadowdark borrows some ideas from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), including starting with a pile of 0-level characters, putting them through a horrendous situation, and the survivors get to pick classes as level 1 characters.  In DCC it's called a funnel, in Shadowdark it's a gauntlet, but the concepts are similar.  One difference seems to be in DCC, each player will run all 4 of their zero-level characters at once, so a 5-person table will have 20 peasants trying to survive the funnel.  There aren't a lot of published Shadowdark gauntlets, but the mind-set seems to be each player runs a single character at a time, and the back-up zero level guys are off-camera in reserve (depending on the fiction of the gauntlet).

I decided to use the gauntlet as the lead-in to Horror on the Hill and make it part of the same nexus of events.  In B5 Horror on the Hill, a remote outpost (Guido's Fort) sits on the near side of the River Shrill; across the river sits an ominous fog-shrouded hill with the rising threat of the goblin king in the dungeons below.  I took a gauntlet called Cry of the Stingbat and hacked it up.  In my version, goblins are sneaking across the river at night to kidnap traders and homesteaders and throw them down a huge hole to feed a colony of "stingbats" (stirges) which assail the inhabitants of the fort at night.  The players start as a group of such victims, needing to escape a fairly linear dungeon before dawn when the flocks of stingbats return home and kill them.  They also found and killed a few goblins hiding out near the entrance; the goblins were carrying foul-smelling smudge sticks and stink bombs that immobilize the stingbats and let them manage the horde.

I can see the appeal of running a zero-level gauntlet.  Characters die left and right, which allows for some gallows humor, and story quickly emerges around the exploits of the plucky survivors.  We ran a strict time clock on the gauntlet night, and the added pressure kept things moving briskly.  Finally, there's a useful community generator at shadowdarklings.net that quickly makes a page of zero-level characters fully equipped for game night.  It's all very convenient.  My players had doubts, but now they're believers - I'm sure we'll do a gauntlet every chance we can when starting a Shadowdark campaign.

Ultimately, the zero-level traders, soldiers, and homesteaders returned to Fort Guido after their ordeal in the stingbat hole; they let the fort commander know about the stingbat horde and turned over the stink bombs and smudge sticks so the garrison could take care of the monsters in the daylight.  Having tasted dungeon adventuring, the group promised to reform back at the Fort as level 1 adventurers and take the fight over the river to the goblins - and hopefully get rich and powerful along the way.  Game 2 involved poking around the Fort, collecting rumors from the tavern and talking to the local "old timer", and finally hiring a boatman to ferry them across the river.  They agreed the boatman would return in two-days time at the agreed upon spot for a pick-up, so the players are carrying just enough food and water.  We honestly didn't get too far in their exploration of the hill after game 2.

I have a range of opinions on Shadowdark - I want to give it a few more game sessions (and maybe even try it with the other gamer group) before rendering official judgment.  It's definitely a vibes game that is laser focused on evoking an old school dungeon crawling vibe, while embracing a lot of modern mechanics from 5E and DCC.  I've had great fun; I don't know if it will displace BX (or even needs to).  I also signed up to run a few convention games as Shadowdark in a couple of months to get more drive time with the rules.  More to come on that front.

I still need to build a map for Guido's Fort, it's not provided in B5.  However, I did put together a new map for Karameikos.  This will sound a bit sacrilegious to fellow Mystarans (?), Mystara-philes(?), but the old 8-mile-per-hex style of the Trail Guides was leaving me a bit cold so I made a custom map (above).  Halloween is coming up, and Karameikos is described as a misty, wild land with dark forests, haunted moors, and foreboding mountains, like something out of Eastern Europe.  Maybe I could put the hidden valley of Barovia in the Black Peaks or Cruth Mountains in time for a Halloween one-shot?  It seems like it could work.

* Apologies for the lame title, when your country's politics are as ridiculous as ours, you've got to find a way to laugh about it.

Ode to Karameikos

I'm way behind on listening to podcasts.  The combination of fantasy baseball preparation and working my way through YSDC's Shadows by Gaslight audio recordings, has me way behind on gaming podcasts - so it was just the other day I listened to a Bruce Heard interview over on the Save or Die podcast*:  Bruce Heard on Save or Die Podcast

I've observed that many of the folks visiting here love the BX editions of the game, and probably know that Bruce led the D&D line during the late 80's and 90's, launching the gazetteer line, the Rules Cyclopedia, The Hollow World, and many other excellent products of the time.  If you like that stuff too, the interview is a cheerful peek into how some of those books came to be produced; I particularly liked the discussion of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and how it was retrofitted into Mystara's past, showing up in Glantri, the Broken Lands, the Hollow World, and the DA 1-4 series of time traveling Blackmoor adventures.

One conclusion that emerged a few times in the interview was the importance and relevance of the gazetteers, and how underrated they were by gamers of the period, who were focused mainly on AD&D 2E.  I've been meaning to put together a retrospective on GAZ 1, The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, so this is a fine debarkation point.

Karameikos showed up in both versions of the expert rulebook (the 1981 Cook/Marsh version, and Mentzer's edit).  The 1981 version is extremely minimalist - we're introduced to Specularum, Luln, the Black Eagle Barony, and various humanoid areas stamped right on the map.  Mentzer's version adds a few more places, the towns of Kelven and Threshold.  However, it's the 1987 Gazetteer, The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, that really expands the setting and embellishes the culture and themes of the region.

Karameikos is a frontier of the Thyatian Empire, colonized by a Thyatian Duke that invaded the land 30 years ago after trading his ancestral (Thyatian) lands for the rights to rule the colony.  This sets up a simmering racial tension in Karameikos between the Thyatian Duke, Stefan Karameikos, his loyal nobles from the empire that accepted positions of nobility and power, and the indigenous people, the Traladarans.  It has echoes of the Saxons versus the Normans in 11th century England, with ousted Traladaran nobles, stripped of their titles, competing through mercantile tactics, crime, and banditry, against the interloping Thyatians.  There's a similar conflict between the imperialistic Church of Thyatis and the native Church of Traladara.

Make no mistake; the themes may echo from the Norman conquest, but Karameikos is not England; it's a misty, mountainous land of evergreen forests and things that howl at the night on the moors.  Vampirism and lycanthropy are common, and the setting introduces a new kind of vampire, the Nosferatu.  Some of those sleepy Traladaran villages, nestled in the countryside, are ruled by nobles that only drink… blood, like the Nosferatu wizard of the seaside village of Sulescu.  The Karameikan countryside evokes Romania or Transylvania, and the native people, the Traladarans, have a Hungarian or Roma quality to their names and dress and customs that would work well if one wanted to turn up the volume on the Gothic horror.  (As written, the setting is very much high fantasy).

The Gazetteer is an extremely well-rounded DM's resource for culture and verisimilitude; it covers customs, dress, coins, calendars, holidays, politics, names, religious organizations, thieves guilds, heraldry, even ancient history and mythology.  There's a large section on personalities, providing statistics and practical DM notes on staging Karameikos's powerful figures in games.

Quite a few of the classic modules from the "B" line were fitted into Karameikos, and the later modules in the line were explicitly placed there.  X1, The Isle of Dread, ostensibly departs from Specularum.  Of course, the absolute high water mark for adventures is B10 Night's Dark Terror, which embellishes much of Eastern Karameikos, and exploits the land's mythic past, introducing ancient ruins and a desperate race to find the ruins ahead of a gang of slavers.  It's one of TSR D&D's greatest adventure modules, bar none.  Just don’t try to find it a nice version on E-bay, unless you want to pay (a lot).

Karameikos begins the excellent practice in the Gazetteer line of providing battle ratings for the various military units in War Machine terms, and scenario seeds on introducing wars - and in Karameikos, that means the revolt of the Black Eagle Baron.  The Baron is a roguish Prince John figure rebelling against Richard Coeur de Lion - if not the historical version, at least the Prince John of Robin Hood tales and Errol Flynn movies.

Karameikos is one of my favorite Gazetters to this day, and it’s my go-to setting for pick-up games with the neighborhood kids, because it has such readily identifiable historical tropes and themes.  I should point out, the Gazetteer is not without a bit of controversy; the early versions of Karameikos in the expert sets were far more sparsely populated, and the populations were increased by a factor of 10 to support a more populous and cosmopolitan Medieval kingdom (or should I say, Duchy); one comes across such nitpicks from time to time where those things malinger, like older message boards.  Don't be dissuaded; The Grand Duchy of Karameikos is an excellent book.

Well, let's hope that the suits at WOTC do the right thing and reintroduce their electronic PDF program for vintage games.  The Gazetteers were well produced, professionally written, and deserve to be enjoyed by newer gamers rediscovering classic D&D.


*I don't regularly listen to Save or Die, though I do check out the related one (Roll for Initiative) from time to time, but the interviews are a great way to catch up with various TSR figures from back in the day.

Mystara in the Blog News

Here's a quick bit of Mystara-related news.  Bruce Heard started a blog recently.  Bruce was the product manager at TSR through the period of creation for the Gazetteers of the Known World, the Almanacs, Hollow World, Wrath of the Immortals - the heyday of Mystara.  One of the more interesting series at the time was The Voyage of the Princess Ark in Dragon magazine; each installment covered the voyage of an Alphatian sky ship to previously undiscovered areas of Mystara, and then included maps and game stats for using the areas to expand your campaign.

I've often said here on the blog that while it seemed TSR was focusing corporate oversight on AD&D 2E, the classic D&D line was given freedom to move in other directions, and that creativity can really be seen in these Gazetteers and products of late 80's / early 90's D&D.  You can get some background on the creation of the Glantri Gazetteer at Bruce's place:  Bruce Heard Q&A

If you're not sure what is the fuss about all of these Known World Gazetteers, a good place to start is over at the Age of Ravens blog; Lowell Francis has been putting up excellent reviews of the gazetteers in order:  Age of Ravens Gazetteer Reviews

I haven't done any Mystaran reviews per se, more like paeans and odes to Mystaran goodness.  You can see my own exaltation of Mystara's gonzo excellence in some of these posts:

• The Glantri Game
• Ode to Mystara

Review of Barrowmaze

I had the chance to read Greg Gillespie's* Barrowmaze this week.  Barrowmaze is a large dungeon beneath a barrow-ridden moorland.   It's not explicitly stated, but my sense is that characters would reach 5th level or so by the time they exhausted Barrowmaze's opportunities - that's a lot of adventuring.  The PDF is 87 pages and you can get it at the usual suspects (Barrowmaze at RPGnow); it's a great value for $6.66.  The statistics are officially for Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion.

The atmosphere of the dungeon makes an immediate impression.  Imagine a haunted moor outside of the nearby village, small hillocks shrouded in mist, hiding barrow mounds, or rings of standing stones, on the crests of the hills.  It's hard not to be reminded of the village of Bree and the famous barrow downs from Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, and it made me realize - it's about time we've seen a cool published adventure that placed a large, sprawling dungeon beneath a haunted moor!

Continuing the theme, the dungeons under the moors are creepy, quiet, and strewn with undead.  A dark power has defiled many of the crypts, transforming the interred remains into hungry monsters.  But the treasures and magic belonged to an ancient culture, and the only thing standing between the adventurers, and great wealth, is whether they have the requisite courage.

Barrowmaze breaks the mold of the traditional vertical dungeon, extending horizontally, instead - the further one travels from the entrance, the more difficult it becomes.  It's loosely divided into four different sections of difficulty -the antechambers, the haunted tombs, deserted dormitories, and finally, the death vault.

The author has used some interesting techniques to reinforce the theme of plundering long sealed tombs.  There are frequent calls for excavation, or smashing through bricked up walls, to reach the hidden room beyond; much of the treasure is interred in burial catacombs (niches) carved into the walls, which require careful searching.  Time is always a factor.  There are 30+ new monsters, although 10 or so of them are conversions, bringing monsters to Labyrinth Lord that you may remember from the Fiend Folio or Monster Manual 2, like the Huecuva or Coffer Corpse.

Fun in the Barrowmaze!

The writing in Barrowmaze is informal; the design notes and introduction read like one gamer speaking to another gamer.  This tone, along with the many pieces of art by Stefan Poag, portraying parties of adventurers in various stages of combat or exploration, gives the adventure a strong hobbyist vibe.  Greg claims that Barrowmaze was the backbone of his home campaign, and it feels like a piece that started as a well-cared for home brew that has been elaborated and developed into a published work, ready for market.

I love the atmosphere of the sprawling labyrinth of crypts and ruins beneath a field of haunted barrow mounds, and I think this would be fun for any old school group to experience.  There are enough factions and mysteries beneath the hills to provide drama, and give a party actual enemies to plot against, besides the many undead horrors.  I guess the best praise is this:  I'm already thinking this one will go to the top of the queue when the weather warms up, and I start another weekend kid's game with my son and his neighborhood friends.  Barrowmaze would slot nicely into The Grand Duchy of Karameikos on the haunted moorlands beyond the town of Kelvin.

Hope you enjoyed the review!

*Greg's alter ego is Kiltedyaksman, over at the Discourse and Dragons blog.

Barbarians are Big and Strong (But Don't Call Them Dumb)

I've seen a number of folks discussing the faults of differentiating ability score ranges between male and female characters in role playing games this week.  A much more interesting question to me is whether we should consider creating distinctions between culture groups in a human centric world.  AD&D, for instance, has no problem applying ability score adjustments to the demi human races when compared to humans.

Consider that one of the most common themes in Swords & Sorcery literature is the strong but primitive barbarian juxtaposed against the decadent cultures of the large cities.  The barbarian character is invariably more physically capable and resolute than his civilized antagonists.  You see this motif in the RE Howard stories of Conan, the character of Fafhrd in the Lankhmar stories, and countless other stories featuring rugged, sword-wielding barbarians.

Consider also this historical excerpt from Tacitus's Germania, speaking of the many tribal inhabitants across the Rhine:

Hence the physical type, if one may generalize at all about so vast a population, is everywhere the same wild, blue eyes, reddish hair and huge frames that excel only in violent effort. They have no corresponding power to endure hard work and exertion, and have little capacity to bear thirst and heat; but their climate and soil have taught them to bear cold and hunger.
--Tacitus, Germania

My intent isn't to start a real world furor over Tactitus's text; it's been abused by plenty of folks already (koff, Nazis, koff) in other contexts.  But when you're making a game world that features humans from different cultural groups, does it make sense to have racial or cultural abilities that differentiate those groups mechanically in game terms?

My son is playing a lot of the Skyrim game, and he tells me "Nords", the Skyrim analog of the northern barbarians, are tough and resistant to cold.  That sounds a bit like Tacitus's description of the barbarians in Germania.  Video game designers apparently don't have any problems making humans from different areas different from each other based on culture or race.

Let's look at these big blonde northerners again.  According to Tacitus, they're all pretty much big and strong.  The fantasy stereotype of the barbarian is also strength; what's the argument against giving characters from barbarian lands a +1 to the strength score?

But how about a -1 to the intelligence?  You know, to balance it out.  The way I read the intelligence tables in D&D, intelligence gives you literacy, knowledge of extra languages, and the ability to learn spells - all capabilities that are the result of education and not primarily aptitude.  There shouldn't be a problem declaring that characters living out in the untamed wilderness, as an insular tribal unit, haven't had the same education as the decadent urbanites - but the moment you tack a -1 intelligence onto a cultural group, you step onto a pretty slippery slope my friend.  Even if it is a fantasy culture.  Would Conan put up with a -1 to *his* Intelligence score?  You don't tug on Superman's cape, or call a Cimmerian uneducated or stupid.  The Romans may have looked down on the barbarians, but who had the last laugh?  (Alaric did).

I'm only familiar with one official D&D supplement that tackled human racial and cultural differences - it was the Hollow World boxed set for classic D&D / Mystara.  The Hollow World gave humans from different ethnic groups pseudo skills and proficiencies to differentiate their culture backgrounds.  Antalians (the Viking analog) could climb like thieves; Milenians (ancient Greeks) all had extra bonuses with spears.  Some of them were more extreme; Tanagoro tribes people (analogs for African cultures) could all move at  150' base movement.  Azcans (the Aztec knock offs) were ridiculously tough and got an entire extra hit die at level 1!

What's my point?  In today's day and age, humans are uncomfortable declaring another group diminished in any capacity.  Maybe games have no place classifying differences between groups of people (or the sexes) in this way.  But there's a cynical side of me that sees a really simple way around the problem.  Just flip it around and highlight a positive benefit, and cultural differentiation becomes much less controversial (and judgmental).  "Scythians and Parthians don't get minuses when firing from horseback!", that kind of thing.  Make people feel good about the in-game differences.

Hey, look at what I just did?  I managed to justify giving all those barbarian tribesman a +1 to their strength scores after all.  I feel better already.

Ode to Mystara

I Got Your Gonzo Right Here, Buddy

Hey, I just found a new blog (Stocking the Dungeon) and noticed it's dedicated to campaigning in my old favorite, Mystara.  These days we are strong with the power of AD&D and Greyhawk, running a campaign featuring all the classic AD&D modules, but I spent most of my DM career campaigning in Mystara.  For many years, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos was always the starting place for new campaigns.

Mystara tends to be overlooked by the old school crowd, folks that got their start in the 70's and early 80's; by the time Mystara was hitting its stride, they had checked out of TSR and its 2nd Edition and its death from a thousand settings.  Mystara followed the pattern of the time, releasing book after book after book, describing all the nations of the Known World in Gazetteers, the Hollow World, and something I can only describe as RACE CLASS MADNESS (in other words, those four Creature Crucible books and Orcs of Thar).

But while many of the TSR settings of the 2E period went for different flavors of theme and simulation, like Al Qadim or Kara Tur or Maztica or The Horde, Mystara saw that, raised them, and then went gonzo.  As in, "the moon is ruled by katana-wielding Cat People Samurai Ninjas, who ride giant saber tooth tigers, in space."  That, my friends, is either stupid, or awesome.  Or as Jeff might say, stupidly awesome.

This is what happens when you're the red-headed stepchild of AD&D.  The suits ignore your product line, and you're given freedom to have some fun.  Basic D&D is for kids, right?  Sit tight and see what happens when the inmates run the asylum.

First off, Mystara kept Dave Arneson's Blackmoor firmly in the setting's prehistory (for those that wanted some time travel, there was the opportunity to jaunt back to the Temple of the Frog or visit the Egg of Coot in the DA series of Blackmoor modules for Mystara).  The good ship FSS Beagle crashed on Mystara, and its nuclear reactor exploded, destroying the ancient world of Blackmoor and turning the globe into a prehistoric nuclear wasteland.  All magic on Mystara is fueled by low levels of background radiation, and the existence of magical creatures can be traced back to magical mutation.  The first step to awesoming up your setting is putting a global thermonuclear catastrophe in the ancient past and declaring that magical races (elves!) are actually unwitting radioactive mutants.

In the Glantri book, there are even ways for wizards to learn how to manipulate radiation-magic directly (it's called The Radiance) and a practitioner will either become immortal or get turned into a Lich suffering from radiation sickness.  But don't worry, the 20th level wizards wasting away into radioactive Lichdom fit in with all the vampire wizards and werewolf wizards in Glantri.  It's a party.  Too much manipulation of the Radiance can actually alter the flow of magic on Mystara, causing Potions of Longevity to fail and magical creatures (elves) to slip into lethargy.

Before I forget - a little Clark Ashton Smith makes any setting better, so those whacky Mystaran writers transplanted the whole crew from Averoigne right into Glantri by way of Castle Amber.  I love the fact the Enchantress of Sylaire graces the cover of the Glantri book.

The Mystaran sky is filled with various nations that have mastered air ship technology, like the expansionist Heldannic Knights of the Heldann Freeholds, or the Alphatians, descendants of the Atlanteans of Earth myth.  The Alphatians went on an inter-dimensional odyssey before ending up in Mystara...  every setting should have ties to sunken Atlantis.  We learn that Alphatia is ruled by a council of no less than one thousand 36th level wizards.

If "magic as technology" isn't your thing, you might be annoyed by Mystara.  There are flying carpet courier services, islands set up as theme parks for ordinary folks to experience "the adventurer lifestyle" on holiday, and Glantri City is lit by continual light spells.  An entire kingdom of gnomes floats high above the ground in their orbiting clockwork city of Serraine.

In case the surface doesn't have enough wahoo, consider that Mystara is hollow.  There are huge voids at the north and south pole where an explorer could literally walk around from the outside to the steaming jungles of the inside world, but powerful divine anti-magic prevents flying ships from making the trip.  The hollow world is a night-less place where the immortals of Mystara transplant dying cultures in a kind of world-sized bottle city; it's filled with analogs of the Aztecs (with dinosaurs), the Romans (with dinosaurs), and the Egyptians (with dinosaurs).  One of the hollow world deities is Ka, the patron god of dinosaurs, so the place is crawling with prehistoric monsters and the scantily clad barbarian princesses that ride them.  It's ideal for a savage world, swords & sorcery style game (with dinosaurs).

I mentioned that Mystara featured RACE-CLASS MADNESS.  It's what happens when you can't resist the urge to turn any monster or humanoid race into a  playable class.  I mean "Pegataurs", really?  Mystara took the Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling classes, as laid out in Moldvay BX and Mentzer, out to its logical conclusions.  There are race classes covering every type of lycanthrope, lots of woodlands creatures (centaurs, pixies, sylphs, dryads, satyrs, and more), all manner of aquatic races, and every kind of monstrous humanoid.  One could even run an entire humanoid campaign centered on the monster realms in the Broken Lands - wouldn't it be fun to visit Trollhattan, or Bugburbia? Mystara didn't take Gygax's "humanocentric vision" very seriously, and enjoyed plenty of in-jokes.

In addition to stretching the bounds with gonzo weirdness, the D&D line featured products that took classic D&D out of the dungeon and added new dimensions to game play, like mass combat, domain rulership, and quests for immortality.  I haven't been shy about talking up my support for Adventurer Conqueror King, especially because it's improving the systems first field tested on storied Mystara.

The story line that was begun in X4 Master of the Desert Nomads and X5 Temple of Death reaches fruition in module X10, Red Arrow, Black Shield - a double sized adventure that plunges Mystara's Known World into a continent spanning war against "The Master" and his desert hordes.  It's really two games in one, first a series of player character quests as the players traverse the Known World as envoys enlisting the kingdoms of the world to rise up against the Master.  It's also a continent spanning military campaign using old school hexes and cardboard military counters to track the progress of a war spanning dozens of nations and hundreds of army units.

Domain rules are fully embraced in C1, Test of the Warlords, which opened up the Norwold region of Mystara for colonization, allowing your 15th+ level PC's to carve out wilderness domains, raise armies, and hold off various invasions.  Norwold would go on to be a mainstay in the M-series of modules as well, and thrust the players right into the middle of the conflicts between Thyatis and Alphatia, the world-spanning empires on Mystara.

I'm going to skip discussing Mystara's approach to Immortals and quests for Immortality, seeing as this Ode to Mystara is waxing long.  Wrath of the Immortals was a boxed set that put this element of play front and center, and probably deserves it's own post at some point (it's both ambitious and controversial).  Suffice it to say, Mystara's approach to integrating gods, known as "Immortals", was just was wahoo as the rest of the setting, centering Immortal politics around a location on the moon known as the Vaults of Pandius that's presented a bit like the halls of the Justice League.

Let's hope part of WOTC's appeal to lapsed buyers gamers includes putting those old PDFs back on sale; there's a lot of great stuff in the Mystara catalog that should be experienced by modern gamers and mined for ideas.  The Grand Duchy of Karameikos is still the best campaign starting area ever published...

The Junkyard of Ideas: The Glantri Game

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
-Inception

The Junkyard:  This is the place where I'll post campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

My love for the GAZ3, Principalities of Glantri, is disproportionate to the amount of time it's actually seen use on the game table, but it's a perennial visitor during my bouts of Gamer ADD when I'm casting around for a new campaign setting.  One of these days.

Glantri is a late 80's classic D&D product written by Bruce Heard, part of the Gazetteer series for classic D&D's "Known World".  Glantri is a realm of wizard-princes where magic is king; it's chock full of chaotic, homicidal, high level magic users.  It's about as gonzo a setting I've seen; the source of magic throughout the world is an alien nuclear reactor deep beneath Glantri City, buried there when an ancient star ship crash landed, suffered a melt down, and sank beneath the earth.  The ultimate origin of most magical creatures in the Known World is magical mutation.

Glantri did magic-as-technology long before Eberron; it did the Great School of Magic well before Hogwarts (and had arcaners vs mundaners); it's had vampire, lich and werewolf wizards in various dark brotherhoods well before the Camarilla and WOD; it's got power politics, skullduggery, and even a few cameos from Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne (courtesy of X2 Castle Amber).  Glantri City is riddled with twisting canals and waterways like Venice, and the streets are home to conniving cabals of every sort, including powerful thieves and assassin's guilds.  There's quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, too, so the tone can be adjusted lighter or darker to fit your own vision - it wouldn't be hard to run a Glantri-game like Discworld, for instance.

The Glantri sourcebook has quite a bit of rules-crunch - there are skill bolt-ons to the magic user class to allow things like potion making, elemental mastery, dracology, to necromancy; there are alternate XP rules for magic research, alternate rules for spell and item creation, and a new Path to Immortality by mastering Glantri's unique magical source, the Radiance.  The later editions of Classic D&D - BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia - went from levels 1-36 and had an end-game focused on gaining immortality.

I've often thought if I wanted to run a campaign with byzantine politics, backstabbing, and "Tales of the Dying Earth" style roguery and repartee, I'd place it in Glantri.  A megadungeon would provide a good balance of consistent dungeon adventuring versus treacherous politics, and there would be no shortage of patron-wizards to set objectives in the dungeon.

The biggest reason I haven't built a campaign around Glantri yet is "The Mystara effect".  I have a love-hate relationship with the Known World (Mystara); it's an odd patchwork of faux-historical nations stuck together, and I'm never sure if I want to set a game there or transplant a Gazetteer somewhere else.  When I've done Known World games in the past, they've always been centered around Karameikos and using various classic modules placed in the Grand Duchy.

Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls or Castle of the Mad Archmage, two recent OSR products, would be excellent megadungeon center pieces for a Glantri game.  And the wheels start to turn in Beedo's mind again...