Two Gary Gygax Castle Crowdfunders Collide in Mega Dungeon Month

The old-school D&D crowd is getting a rare split-screen view of Gary Gygax history. Inside BackerKit’s Mega Dungeon Month, two separate campaigns built from lost castle material are running side by side, forcing collectors, OSR referees and lore obsessives to compare not just content, but provenance.

On one side is Troll Lord Games’ Castle Zagyg Act 2, which launched on April 7, 2026 as the second of two crowdfunding campaigns. BackerKit describes it as the project that adds the dungeon levels, maps and encounters needed to finish the Mad Mage’s labyrinthine castle, and Troll Lord Games says the larger Castle Zagyg line is being issued as five boxed sets for Castles & Crusades. The first wave was a monster by any crowdfunding standard: more than $600,000 from 2,669 backers, with coverage of the 2025 campaign putting the total at $601,490 on a $25,000 goal. For readers who track Gygax-era cartography as closely as most fans track hardcover release schedules, the draw is obvious. This is not just a tribute package. It is a sprawling reconstruction that includes Yggsburgh, the castle precincts, East Mark, Mouths of Madness and all 17 handcrafted dungeon levels and sublevels.

The other castle is stranger, and in some ways more combustible. Castle Wolfmoon, from Pulse Publishing, is being positioned as a long-delayed system-agnostic project born from a late-1990s collaboration between Chris Clark and Gary Gygax, after TSR had been sold to Wizards of the Coast. Industry coverage says the final installment was shelved and then effectively forgotten, which gives the campaign the air of something recovered from a lost archive rather than simply dusted off for modern crowdfunding. BackerKit’s landing page already showed about 610 people signed up for updates before launch, a solid signal that there is a real audience waiting for a piece of dormant Gygaxiana to reappear.

Castle Wolfmoon also carries a personal and legal shadow that Castle Zagyg does not. EN World documented a 2025 dispute involving Chris Clark and Luke Gygax, and the project’s contributor list, which includes Luke Gygax, Frank Mentzer, Heidi Gygax, Erik Garland and actor Todd Stashwick, gives it extra weight among fans who treat lineage and authorship as part of the appeal.

Taken together, the two campaigns show what still moves this corner of the hobby: not branding, but unfinished material with a name attached. One campaign serves referees who want usable dungeon content for the table. The other serves historians and memorabilia hunters who want a slice of the Gygax mythos that was never fully published in the first place.