A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Pegana Mythos

CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Pegana Mythos is a role playing game supplement written and published by Kent David Kelly. This is a generic supplement but it is most suited for Dungeons & Dragons based games, especially Old School variants.

This is a 248 page PDF that is available from RPGNow for $4.39 but was purchased at the reduced price of $0.99 during a sale. Two pages are the front and rear covers, seven pages are the front matter, five pages are the Contents, one page is the Afterword, two pages are About the Author and five pages are ads for other supplements.

The Description is two pages long and gives a brief overview of the author’s World of Oldskull, and the sources on which the world’s mythos is based.

Chapter I: Revealing Pegana starts with an Introduction on how The Pegana Mythos is the author’s own interpretation of Lord Dunsany‘s first book, The Gods of Pegana (which, as it happens, is still in copyright in the majority of the world; in the U.S. Lord Dunsany’s works that were published prior to 1923 are in the public domain), and how the stories from the book have been modified into a new whole. The Pegana Mythos is the oldest known mythos on the World of Oldskull, although there are more recent ones as well. Much of this first chapter has a history of creation, using the gods that Lord Dunsany created, and extensively quoting him as well.

Curiosities of Pegana is the final part of this chapter and is actually more of an introduction to the next. It covers how to interpret the number of monsters appearing and how Pegana magic items tend to have bad side effects as well. There is also mention of the monster-themed and harvestable magic items that can be found in Chapter II, which are intended to add lore to monsters and increase connectivity between monsters, magic, places, NPCs, deities etc.

Chapter II: The Lifting Veil: Entities Sacred to the Pegana Mythos starts with lists of deities and monsters and the alignment they are associated with.

The primary part of this chapter is the list of ‘Scrolls’; an alphabetical list of monsters, priesthoods, magic items, locales, unique individuals and harvestable magic.

The monsters start with a description of their history and behaviour, as well as how common they are (which can include in different environments), and are generic in nature but they have some approximate game stats. These are lethality level, ranging from 1-10, number appearing, Blood Dice, average hits to kill as a number or number of sword thrusts and alignment. There is also a table as to how many would be encountered by what character levels, with lower levels of characters often starting at Not Recommended or Dangerous. The monsters may have different names, but some are clearly based on recognisable D&D monsters. If magic or valuable items can be harvested from a monster, these tend to be described in the following scroll.

Important individuals give a rough idea as to their power level and their history is described.

Magic items give their history, value, recommended discovery level and a generic description of their power.

Deities give their alignment, that of their worshippers, their symbol, plane of residence, sphere of influence and sacred beast. The race of those who worship a deity are given, along with their permissible weapons, dress, common spells (which references the lists in Dungeon Delver Enhancer)

Chapter III: The Pegana Campaign covers the author’s setting, which also has a strong Lovecraftian influence. This explains why the Oldskull setting is based on Earth, why a Rome equivalent in Italy was chosen as the home base (this city has a large castle with dungeon near it; rather reminiscent of Castle Greyhawk and the City of Greyhawk) – this gives access to many different environments. There are various places listed around the world, some real, some based on myths and legends, and various named places and countries. Finally there is a list of Peganan locales, with their names and a brief description of what and where they are.

CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Pegana Mythos in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and these would have been useful. The Contents is decently thorough, covering the major and minor sections, but navigation could be a lot better. The text maintains a single column format and some minor errors were noticed (and Chapter II was actually called Chapter I in the text). Barring the front and rear covers, and logo in the front matter, there are no illustrations; this is actually an improvement over the sometimes scattershot illustration formatting seen in later supplements. There is quite a lot of blank space, and the font is fairly big, so there is less content than might be expected from the page count, but the actual word count is stated in the promotional material. Presentation is okay.

This is quite an interesting read. The entwining of different locations, creatures, items and legends works quite well although, given that there are no game stats, a GM will need to do quite a bit of work first to be able to use anything in their own game world. Whether a GM wants to try and use the Oldskull world is another matter; despite quite a bit of history and details being given, there isn’t really enough to create a fleshed-out world without a lot of work. Some of the ideas and concepts are worth copying, such as tying magic items to specific monsters. CASTLE OLDSKULL – The Pegana Mythos is an interesting collection of flavour material, some of which could be adapted, and it can be found by clicking here.