A wonderful mega dungeon with all sorts of creepy, weird, and exciting surprises to uncover!

The formatting and writing are both top-notch. As other reviewers have noted, the formatting maximizes ease of use at-the-table. Room descriptions are concisely written with bolded and bulleted text. The rooms are interesting and interactive. The castle's layout is well-designed. I also love the virtual tabletop acommodations provided with the PDF dungeon.

Two things I missed are a high-level overview of "what's going on" for the referee (like a backstory of the castle) and more description of what the NPCs want & think of one another. The foreward basically says that "there is no backstory," and the description of the NPCs generally includes only what they are currently doing, not their goals or plans.

So overall I would say this is a very good funhouse megadungeon, with an emphasis on the "funhouse." It makes little sense, and really isn't meant to. This might be fine for some players (including you). For myself, it got old after a while because it amounted to little more than "open the next door to see what other wacky/zany/deadly thing awaits you there!" There was little to "figure out" or "discover" due to the lack of depth provided in the text, unless the referee is willing to put in a lot of work to make sense of the non-sense.

If that sort of funhouse-style play appeals to you, or you just want an example of how adventures should be formatted, then I highly recommend this adventure.

I wrote a longer review here, if you are interested!

A very good example of an old-school style "haunted house of traps and terrors" type of adventure. There's a lot of content here, and the writing is consistently interesting (and sometimes slyly funny). The setting is memorable -- it's not just a generic backdrop for the action.

One thing that Gamemasters hoping to drop Castle Xyntillian into their campaign worlds as a "starter dungeon" for levels 1 through 6 may need to know is that the default cultural setting for Castle Xyntillian has a "medieval-fantasy France" feel to it, as opposed to the typical "vaguely medieval-British" feel of many classic fantasy adventures.

The place names and character names, as printed, all have a French flavor to them. These can be changed, of course, if a GM decides she needs something different, but potential buyers should be aware of the adventure's default context.

Recommended.

Very good dungeon for your players to explore. A LOT of stuff to do, the encounters and the dungeon design are top notch and you will never be bored or bore your players with it. It is not "mega" per se, but it has all the qualities that the best megadungeons have. Like multiple entrances, a home town with all you need to run it, a 1d100 encounter table for the enemies. It also have companion quirks, table for man to hire, great advice on how to run a dungeon in the oldschool style, a lot of randomness in the encounters outside of the base table as well, even for what you will find inside the town each time you visit the taverns! And it has the best layout ever!!! It's worth every penny. Go get it, now!

An excellent castle dungeon crawl, well mapped and described with good plot connections between the various location. A bit like the Black Monastry redone with a more renaissance tone.