Castle Amber Postmortem

Don't Overcomplicate Old Modules | The Grim Accord That Could've Been

From a year and a half until New Years 23', I ran a biweekly campaign of D&D 5th Edition using Castle Amber. Tragically the campaign has fizzled out, six months after we tried moving online and a general disinterest settled in When I got together with one of my friends for an impromptu-board game night for my birthday, and we both realized this should've been a "Castle Amber Day" I realized the campaign was dead. My birthday planning had distracted me, sure, but this was a sign.

Man, I loved Castle Amber.

I ran Goodman Games’ reincarnation of Castle Amber because I picked up a copy at my FLGS, and it was love at first sight. I love Clark Ashton Smith’s short stories, and I liberally ripped off his stories of haunted woods and crumbling castles when I populated my very own hexcrawl for use at home. The Colossus at Ylourgne, the troubled Abbot Theophile worrying about comets in the heavens, werewolves and vampires, oh my! Would you believe me that I’d ripped off those ideas for my own use for almost an entire calendar year before I realized that 1981’s Castle Amber literally takes you through a portal into Averoigne? Forget “inspiration”, Tom Moldvay and co went whole hog and just dropped players in a literary sandbox.

So I got a new group of players together, set the Chateau D’Amberville in my campaign setting, added a few elements for flair and got rolling. At first we had a blast! The players loved the wacky castle, and I played up that the Ambers weren’t so much as Evil but “just insane” from an eternity in stasis. After the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic that idea held a lot more value for me, eccentricity and neurosis onset by isolation. They got to experience a lot of the 80s classics, like almost dying in the infamous “Slime Room”, fighting The Wild Hunt in the atrium, and pulling cards from a mini deck-of-many-things called The Tarot D’Averoigne.

And yet the game burnt out. Let me tell you why:

• I failed to execute foreshadowing

• Disconnect between the funhouse dungeon & the starting setting

• Adding Time Travel to Averoigne

Failing to Foreshadow

My invention of a hook for Castle Amber was a one-shot run for my friends before we committed to a full adventure. It was a scenario involving saving a remote mountain ranch from bandits, and later it was revealed a wounded dragon was in the basement and the “bandits” were a hunting party led by an evil princess intent on finishing the hunt her brother started.

Save the beautiful dragon from the ravening princess! The princess got away and they saved the dragon, and so now they promised to help save the dragon’s mate, a gold dragon named The Lady in Gold, who had been hunted and abducted into a place called Castle Amber.

This made narrative sense at the time, but I think this was my first mistake. I built off of a oneshot with vague connections to CA, and then went whole hog and connected the two narratives. They went into Castle Amber with a mission: finding the princess’ older brother (Andrew-David Amber) and the gold dragon imprisoned within. This gave them a great deal of purpose amidst all the madness and craze: Find the hunter, save the dragon. It made the crawl much more grounded, gave them another goal on top of it.

Then, they found the dragon! They fought Andrew-David and killed him, explored the Hunting Lodge (a delicious addition of Goodman Games’ reprinting of the adventure) and I described how they were keeping the dragon down there in chains.

Disconnect From Setting

Objective completed! Dragon saved, adventure over. Except, no, that’s not the end. You still have half a dungeon and a sandbox to complete to unlock the final dungeon, and the dragon is too wounded to help dungeon crawl. This is why I think this addition was a mistake, it took the wind out of the sails when they got there, they had finished the adventure while there was still all this content intended for the future.

What I should have done is given the dragon the ability to banish the temporal mist outside of Castle Amber, either allowing it to leave or giving a choice to the players: stay inside and plunder even more wealth, or exit with their lives and the wider world. That’s one conceit of funhouse dungeons like CA, they’re too disconnected from the outside world. You can’t throw up your hands and spend all this gold on drinks and gambling, or catch up with backstory contacts, the entire adventure is done in one sitting, no room for going to town and coming back. I should have used this dragon NPC to solve that, to keep things grounded.

Another failure of foreshadowing on my part, The Grim Accord.

I’m a huge fan of MCDM’s content, especially their online-only magazine

ARCADIA! They have beautiful covers and they’re a treasure trove of gameable content.

Here’s the cover of Issue #6, which had SlyFlourish create an evil adventuring party!

ADCAIDA #6 cover by Nephelomancer @nephelomancer

I thought it would be so cool if in this funhouse dungeon, there’s a separate group of adventurers trying to find all the magical mcguffins and messing with the party. So I did! I decided that the princess had signed a contract to find the keys and “save her family” before the players had defeated her, and now The Grim Accord are bound to fulfill this contract. I added new minions to the wandering tables (bandits and barbarians, mostly) and made it so that random encounters sometimes were the Grim Accord’s officers sending minions to slow down the party. They’re too cool for real names, they’re Fire, Shadow, Blood and Bone!

The failure came in from my refusal to properly deploy them. I hyped them up for a year and a half and I never actually had them fight, even if it just meant the evil party retreating and leaving the heroes bleeding out. That was a huge mistake. I talked about them and around them for so long, seeing is believing.

This leads me to a new belief about GM prep: if you put something in your notes, use it! For god’s sake use it or lose it! Don’t just reference things and tell the players they’re cool, SHOW them. If the Grim Accord are truly these evil bastards, shake them down for their lunch money and strike the fear of God in them. ‘

Cause if they fail and the heroes beat them…that’s also great! That’s also a valid use of the mental energy of preparing a squad of villains, and could have given my heroes some much needed confidence.

Grim Accord by Zuzanna Wuzyk

The Grim Accord are awesome and I’ll use them again some day. Except this time, I’ll actually use them to wreak havoc, instead of being a shadow on the wall. I think this crew of despicable dastards works best in open, more exploratory games that aren’t locked to a dungeon. They also work better with a villainous lair like The Storm Tower provided in Issue #6.

If I were to do this again, I would have them hold several NPCs in the Chateau D’Amberville hostage. They’d put the lives of the player’s favorite characters on the line to extract the Silver Keys hidden throughout, culminating in a final battle to reduce the effects of their cruelty and put an end to them once and for all.

Before I move on to my final note on this campaign postmortem, a minor aside: in the original Castle Amber module it makes a conceit that the ghost of the previous prince of the chateau (Stephen Amber) sees the party in his ancestral home and helps them from beyond the grave. This is something that happens, but is never explained.

This help manifests as something like a Leomund’s Tiny Hut of a golden color appearing to keep them safe while resting. I like the idea of this, but the execution felt lazy to me. So instead I ripped off Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki and added Coco Jumbo: an extra-dimensional space to rest safely, inside a living turtle.

What’s the story? Stephen Amber’s ghost sees the party in his family’s home and wants to help them break his curse: so he sends his last ally, his familiar. The Ambers are all wizards, but the books don’t mention familiars at all! This is a turtle named Coco Geant with a key in it: and inside is a 10x10 with nice couches, an ice box and a fireplace. I placed a nice painting of Stephen Amber in there who could communicate from beyond the grave to give important story details, communicating the adventure’s information directly instead of hoping they pick up on certain details.

This I feel really proud of. It’s weird even for high fantasy, but I highly recommend it as a narrative device. In my notes I’d made plans that if they ever got lost in the ancient times of Averoigne they could unlock a hidden crawlspace behind that painting in the turtle and “Crawl” their way back to the future through some kind of brief dangerous out of the PCs backstories. Haha!

Anyways, my last error in hindsight:

Adding Time Travel

Of course this seems ridiculous in hindsight but I swear I had great intentions. I read Lauren Rossen's blog post on Problems with Castle Amber about the second half of Castle Amber (where it goes from dungeon crawl to literary sandbox) and how it’s strange that all these legends and stories of the haunted vale are presented simultaneously. I agreed, and adopted its premise that Clark Ashton Smith’s stories presented time travel as working only in reverse which I thought was fun.

At this point in time my friends had all moved away on opposite ends of the city we live in, and we moved online to try and keep playing. I adopted the concession of Moriamis giving the party time travel potions at each step of the journey, a sort of Rivers from Doctor Who scenario where their first meeting was her final parting, and she grows younger as they go along on the adventure.

I thought this would streamline things: instead of presenting a large sandbox, you have objective A → go to this town and retrieve this item, drink your potion to time B; objective B → go to this town and retrieve this item, etc. I think my group found this boring, dry and much less interesting than the strictly high fantasy stuff we’d been doing previously.

In the land of Averoigne on the planet Urth they just weren’t as invested, and the mcGuffins provided felt so very disconnceted from Castle Amber even if this was the final quest to unlock Stephen’s tomb.

We got through The Enchanted Sword of Sylaire (where they absolutely jumped the werewolf to a hilarious degree) and The Ring of Eibon before we fizzled. A fight with The Grim Accord was near on the horizon, and I was changing up the next chapter to include a choice to either defend Vyones from the colossus or ride on its back to blaspheme Jesus Christ as harshly as possible. You could get the enchanted mirror either as a reward from the grateful city or plucked from the dashed stones under the colossus’ foot.

And the game fizzled. Skip after skip, and that’s a wrap. That’s life.

Learn from my mistakes. I should have had them fight The Grim Accord and wrap up that story way earlier, before they ever went to Averoigne. I should have kept the sandbox and the concession that all these literary stories happen at once, it makes more sense as players making their own choices instead of being hoisted on an adventure they didn’t want.

Big dungeons are fun (in my reckoning) when there are phases of spelunking and looking for greater goals, interspersed with returning to the surface and spending all that money on new equipment, on story goals and social reputation, and then going back down. Castle Amber - for all I love it - precludes that possibility and has its roller coaster start and never end.

Use your content. If you prepare stuff, ignore the urge to delay something cool and have it happen later in “an even cooler way”, just deploy it. Don’t over-complicate plot with things like time travel just because their literary inspiration makes use of it. You take all the parts of the inspiration that are useful and leave the rest, otherwise you’re just conscripting yourself to unnecessary patterns and forms that will clutter your story.

I never finished Castle Amber, but it’s got a firm place in my heart. It’s my classic module of choice, and its weirdness is a charm not a drag. Let me know what you thought of my plans or execution, and I’d love to hear your stories on my twitter (@WalrusAbove) about your own escapades into the Chateau D’Amberville.