The Lost City of Gaxmoor is a role playing game supplement published by Troll Lord Games for use with Castles & Crusades. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result. It’s also available in a version for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
The supplement is available as a PDF from DriveThruRPG and also in printed form from sites such as Amazon. The PDF is the version reviewed although it was purchased at a reduced price during a sale and has 131 pages with two being the front and rear covers, two the front matter, three the Table of Contents and one the Open Game License.
Behind the Curtain is the introduction, covering how Gaxmoor and various other supplements by Gary Gygax came to be.
Gaxmoor starts with an introduction for the Castle Keeper (GM). It gives some details on Gaxmoor, how it was taken out of time and its bringing back and invasion. It has some details for how to place Gaxmoor in another setting as well as some specific details and adventure hooks for placing it in Aihrde. Following this is a players’ introduction, which has a fairly long bit of read aloud text. After this are five set encounters prior to reaching the city, and a map of where they are in relation to the city. There is also an encounter table outside the city, including some named NPCs. Finally, there are details on persons and groups of notes within the city, with generally a paragraph on these and sometimes a CK’s note.
The Outer City covers the outer ring and walled portions of the city, which has many groups and factions competing for supremacy. The various locations of note in this section are covered, some small, some larger, some mapped and some not.
The Graveyard covers this specific location, which is naturally home to tombs, crypts, undead and necromancers. Again, the encounters vary in size and mapping.
The Tannery covers a single location, and not in any great level of detail.
The Walled City of Gaxmoor, the Inner City covers a lot of various important locations in this part of the city in varying levels of detail.
Within the Inner Walls: The Citadel covers the locations within the main fortification.
Beneath Gaxmoor: The Labyrinth covers the main, human-accessible, parts of the sewers.
Finding the Staff of Urnus Gregoria looks at this powerful staff and where it is.
Statues and Pools of Gaxmoor looks at various statues around Gaxmoor, many of which have been enchanted by an Eldritch Demigod to have strange powers, some helpful, some harmful, some both.
Appendix A: New Monsters is the bestiary of new creatures.
Appendix B: New Magic Items covers the new items found in Gaxmoor.
Appendix C: Gaxmoor in the World of Aihrde looks at using Gaxmoor in Aihrde, its connection to the Aenochian Empire, some details on that empire and its fall and the current state of Gaxmoor.
Following this are four pages of maps of commonly found building types.
The final page of content is a large map of Gaxmoor.
The Lost City of Gaxmoor in Review
The PDF is bookmarked with major and minor sections linked. The Table of Contents covers most major and minor sections and is hyperlinked. Navigation is good. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be mostly free of errors. There are a variety of black and white illustrations up to full page in size. Presentation is good.
Gaxmoor is a large city and effectively a sandbox location. Though almost everyone in the city is, at least potentially, an enemy, there is a lot of infighting between the different factions who have largely been left to their own devices at the moment, and a unified response to intruders isn’t going to happen. There are still plenty of places where the characters have the potential to be overmatched if they aren’t careful.
The city has a lot of locations to explore, some connected to each other, some standalone, covered in varying degrees of depth; some are essentially mini-adventures or side quests in and of themselves. Many locations are described, bit with this being a city, many more are not; most of these will be fairly unimportant, but there are a lot of potential places where things could be expanded when it comes to exploring various parts of the city. A GM could make anything from tables to flesh out locations loosely to add more fully detailed places, even dropping appropriate locations from other supplements in.
Though Gaxmoor is in theory set in the World of Aihrde, it’s a location that has been separate from it for a long time and, in truth, has a bit of a different feel to the rest of the setting. With this, and it having just been returned, it could be dropped into other settings with a bit of effort, probably mostly changing some of the names to ones more appropriate for another setting. The Lost City of Gaxmoor is a large sandbox location and it can be found by clicking here.
Leave a Reply