Greetings from the Dens!
 
We are late back from Gary Con and can now turn our attention to catching up on updates and bringing everyone up to speed.
 
As you know we have Castle Zagyg Act 2 ready to launch in a few short weeks. It has been our plan to have the first three volumes of Castle Zagyg Act 1 at the printer and with luck shipping in April. The April date was important for three reasons: 1) backers of the first CZ campaign could be assured that books were going to be in their hand before the second campaign ended;  2) it allowed us to join the CZ Act 2 campaign with the Megadungeon Month promotion that Backerkit had put together; 3) we avoided our printer’s Year Book season, which begins in April and lasts through the first week of June.

 

Sadly, we are going to miss the April deadline. Though volumes 1 and 2 are completed and in layout, the 3rd volume did not hit its intended goal. The why is important.
 
The original intent was to take Gary’s notes and, following the path he set out for us with Levels 1-4, condense his maps and notes into one large map. That was completed on Level 1-4 with his guidance so we were comfortable with that. We had these maps on hand before the first CZ campaign began. Once we received the original maps and began sorting through them, we realized the scope of the condensing approach. Level 2, with Gary’s guidance, was one solid sized map. As it turned out that was only ONE map of FOUR that he originally marked (back in the 70s) as Level 2. As we got deeper into the notes and maps, and as writing unfolded, this began to present an ever greater problem. What to do with all this extra content we knew was created by Gary.
 
About November of last year, with the problem nagging me continually, Davis and I sat down and discussed it. Both of us decided after a long discussion that we had to include all the mapping and incorporate the notes. Without Gary’s sure hand to guide us with what he wanted (which I suspect was to condense this down to a more manageable level for the CK/DM), it felt too dangerous to try to second guess him.
 
What this required was a rewriting of the completed levels 2 and 3. That included incorporating his original game notes with room occupants from the manifest he sent me in 2003 that detailed what he wanted each level to be like, all the while maintaining his ‘realistic approach’ to the dungeon and its occupants, traps, dangers, etc.
 
What this did was increase the size of the first 4 levels four-fold. Knowing what this entailed, we plunged in. We brought Jeremy Farkas over to help Mike Stewart and Chase actually hammer it out and begin co-writing (I was reluctant to do this, as Jeremy has many troll tasks to do, which are now on hold). By February that proved not to be enough and we brought in Nick Kirkland to assist Jeremy.
 
It still has not proven enough. Simply deciphering Gary’s notes has been a challenge, particularly with Ernie’s passing as he was old enough to remember a great deal. Luke is helping as best he can, but he was very young when Melf was slaying orcs! 
 
So the bad news.

 

All of this is to say that we are not going to have Volume 3 ready for print before April. We are deep into the rewriting of Dungeon Level 3a and wrapping up 3. Four and Five are still lingering. We should have them all down by end of April, but that lands us squarely into Walsworth’s yearbook season, and though we will get them to the printer, they will simply queue them up for rolling out in June/July. 
 
The bad news gets a little worse.
 
We are locked in and cannot pull out of the Backerkit Megadungeon campaign. Not only have contracts been signed, but TLG is a major contributor to that and other publishers would suffer for it. 
 
So, all that long is to say in short, we are going to launch Act 2 on April 7 of this year. IF you do not feel comfortable backing it because of this delay in the fulfillment of our first campaign, please do not. Do not do anything with your hard-earned money to put yourself in a bad way or commit to something you are not sure of. I will only say TLG has conducted 40 crowdfunding campaigns and delivered on 40 of them (well, that’s not true as we have two outstanding!).
 
My apologies for the longwinded update but we wanted to be crystal clear and upfront with everyone. You can be certain sure you will get these books.
 
In the immediate future we are going to send you Volume 2 in PDF (should be this week) and Level 2 of Volume 3 (should be next week). This is to show you our progress.
 
Thank you and I hope to see you in the twisted corridors of that Mad Mage’s dungeons before too long!

 

Have a wonderful day! 
 
Stephen Cheanult 

Troll Lord Games

Greetings from the Troll Dens,

We hope all is well and that you've managed to stay warm this week! We have an Alpha Preview for Volume 1, The Citadel ready! As a thank you for your patience we are sending this out to all backers no matter if your pledge contained the PDF version or not so that you all can see some of the progress and how these books are shaping up.

Grab your copy here:

https://trolllord.com/wp-content/uploads/master-pdfs/Crowdfunding/CZ1/ALPHA-CZ-Vol-1-PREVIEW.pdf

As always, if you notice any errata that you would like to bring to our attention, please email us the page number and description of the error at [email protected] with the word CZ1 ERRATA in the subject line. We are currently only accepting submissions of errata: misspellings, layout errors, grammatical mistakes, etc.

Important Note: Please do not feed The Citadel, or any other preview copies of our Gygax properties, into AI chat bots or other large language models, even to help us locate and correct errata. We appreciate the intent to help us, but the rights to these properties were very carefully negotiated over many months in court and there are rules in place for us concerning how we are allowed to distribute them. Feeding this content directly into AI LLMs may impact our ability to continue to produce these volumes. Our victory in court was hard-fought, and we care far too much about the legacy of these books to jeopardize our future ability to produce them. Please help us out by refraining from feeding these volumes, in part or in their entirety, into AI programs!

In the meantime, if you're excited for your upcoming Castle Zagyg campaign for Castles & Crusades, consider checking out our current crowdfunding campaign for the Adventurers Spellbook Reforged. This spellcasting resource contains all of the updated, rebalanced spells ever published for Castles & Crusades, along with an overwhelming host of new content that will fit right in with the zany hijinks and terrifying depths of Castle Zagyg.

All the best,
The Troll Lords

Greetings from the Dens!

A quick update on Gary Gygax's Castle Zagyg! Svetlana is sending over finalized art for Yggsburgh and for the Village of Garham. I've attached the latter here and her latest rendition of the Area Map of the East Mark. It is shaping up into a beautiful piece of art.

ALSO, the cover for Dungeons, volume 3, or rather the sketch for volume 3 has arrived and been approved and is well underway.

As a quick note, we should have level 2 ready by week's end and level 3 and 4 will be not long after that.

Lastly I'm going to coax a copy of Volume 1 out of peter soon, he is holding off as he wants to incorporate map images from Svetlana into the  book. But very soon you'll see where we are.

Art show begins now:

Gary would be thrilled! Of that I am sure.

If you have not, be sure to sign up for the coming Castle Zagyg Part 2 of this that will launch as part 1 is at the printers! 


Thank you all!
Steve