y adventure with Castle Drachenfels began somewhat unusually. Granted however, everything was a bit unusual in the 90s. Back in those days, when everything was worth its weight in gold (said gold in particular), my then current Game Master collected a staggering amount of about PLN 40 (roughly $10), which he decided to spend on buying another adventure book for WFRP 1ed. These were the times before universal Internet access and therefore also before Amazon and whatnot. You had to go to the store personally to get the books. As you may have guessed, RPG materials were not widely available in grocery store, so the journey to retrieve the book from a hobby store was a quest in itself. So we headed out to the Dragon Store located in Gdynia (Poland) (a big ‘Hi’ to the current staff, which is pretty active on Facebook these days), which was then located at ul. Śląska. Unfortunately, this meant the necessity to inject more cash into our tight little budget to pay the costs of the luxury of traveling by trolleybus (good times).
Obviously, after the purchase we didn’t care too much about the fact that I had a beginner character and we immediately decided to play the adventure. Although ‘playing the adventure’ is a bit of an overstatement. I died about 5 minutes after entering the Castle in the stable you already know from Drach Tales Scene 3 of Act 1. Wilhelm wasn’t there to help me out. Maybe because I hadn’t made him up yet.
Playing Castle Drachenfels for the first time, I had no idea what this place was. I had not read the Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil at that point in time. As a matter of fact, that book was also not my first contact with Drachenfels related novels. That turned out to be the short story No Gold in the Grey Mountains (also by Jack Yeovil), which I found in the anthology Wolf Riders (by the way, the title story Wolf Riders was also my first contact with Gotrek Gurnisson).
I remember the amazing impression that this story made on me. After reading it, I realized that maybe I missed out on something, ending my adventure with the Castle on the unfortunate visit to the stables. I decided to give the Castle a second chance and just look, where we are today.
(The awesome map in the photos is the work of Tomas Mayer, check him out)