Forked: (from BuddhaFrog's Setting Thread) - Is Greyhawk really that different?

Didn't want to threadjack Buddhafrog's thread so I thought I'd bring this over here.

Cerebral Paladin said:

Most of the core D&D settings are substantially higher magic than traditional LotR style fantasy, let alone grittier and less magic traditional fantasy. In my experience, both Forgotten Realms and Eberron are pretty gonzo high magic. Dark Sun has less of the obvious high magic societal transformation stuff; although powerful magic is a part of the setting, it's a grimmer setting where the powerful magic is mostly in the hands of not entirely human sorcerer kings (although obviously the PCs have magic and can become very powerful). But it is very much a contrasting setting--a world that is more nifty for how it can change perspectives than for people who haven't played much D&D before.

Out of the traditional TSR/WotC published settings, Greyhawk and Mystara are probably your best bets based on what you've said you're looking for. Unfortunately, they're both out of print to the best of my knowledge, with Mystara (the old D&D Known World) long out of print. I've never been a huge fan of Greyhawk personally, but many people like it, and it has less of an uber high fantasy feel than Forgotten Realms or Eberron.

The implied setting of 4e (Nentir Vale, etc.) also seems pretty close to what you're looking for. The points of light nature serves a gritty game well. There are a couple of supplements out describing it, and more on the way, but no comprehensive "start with this book" yet.

Good luck!

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The bolded part is what I wanted to talk about. This is an opinion that I see brought up fairly often. The point basically boils down to "Greyhawk is a less magic heavy setting than Forgotten Realms".

I really wonder where this comes from. I know that I'm not a huge Greyhawk lore guru, but, I've read a fair bit, and, it looks to me, that Greyhawk is every bit as high magic as FR. I mean, in Greyhawk, you have wizards becoming gods by imprisoning demon lords, ultra-powerful wizards running the largest city in the land, countries run by undead, a country run by a god and so on.

Never minding the truly funky Greyhawk stuff like nations being wiped out by the magical version of nuclear MAD, or crashed spaceships, or various other pretty wahoo elements.

Is it possibly just because there is so much more FR material out there? People can see so many examples of high magic in Forgotten Realms simply because there's thousands and thousands of pages of material, while Greyhawk is much less covered?

Why is there this perception that FR is uber-high magic and Greyhawk is low magic?

I can give a few reasons FR is usually considered higher magic than Greyhawk.

In FR regional supplements, you can find high level wizards out in the middle of nowhere pretty easily. They appear in quite a few of the publications. Partly, I think this is to make sure there are interesting NPCs to encounter for PCs of all levels. But it does make it pretty clear there's a lot of high level wizardry sprinkled about. By contrast, there were fewer highly detailed regional supplements for Greyhawk. Had the general methodology behind the FR supplements been turned Greyhawk's way, we might have seen a lot more high level casters in GH as well. But, we didn't see that so there's one difference.

Volo's Guides, particularly the guide to Waterdeep, have some pretty gonzo, out-there magic in them. Really, you have to check out Volo's Guide to Waterdeep. Once you've read that, ain't nothin' going to convince you FR isn't a high magic setting.

FR publications (supplements and adventures) have had a lot of focus on high level magic wielders as NPCs or mission-givers. Elminster, the Simbul, people hanging around Silverymoon like the Seven Sisters, and so on. There's the Circle of Eight in Greyhawk, so there's some parallel, but they don't seem to show up quite as often. Powerful wizards are more often referred to in the past or no longer directly involved. They don't seem as ubiquitously involved in affairs - and if they are involved, they're a lot more subtle (as Mordenkainen prefers).

So, yes, there's a difference and, to my eye, a significant one.

EDIT: Note: It's not that GH is low magic, just lower magic. I'd say about moderate.

For me, it's basically rooted in my experiences playing in each setting. I played moderate (but not high) amounts of Living City, Living Greyhawk, and Living Forgotten Realms, along with some play in both settings in normal campaigns--again, not a lot, but some. In my experience, the Realms was filled with wahoo magic weirdness. Not always, but often, and encountered at surprisingly low levels. Greyhawk certainly has lots of magic, and it's share of archmages, but they don't seem to be as present in the experience of average PCs.

I think that a lot of it is focus and perception, but I feel like that mostly defines what the magic level of a setting is--in most cases, it's not whether there are high level spells, it's to what extent you see high powered magic all the time.

I should also note that different parts of different campaign worlds have different feels in terms of magic. I listed Mystara as a relatively low magic campaign (not low in absolute terms, just relative)... because I was thinking about Karameikos and similar areas. Think about Glantri or Alphatia, and Mystara is the highest of high magic settings. The same is likely true of the Realms--if you look in the right places, it's probably not a super-high magic campaign. But in terms of how it feels and plays most of the time in my experience, it is.

FR's NPCs are higher level. If you compare the 83 World of Greyhawk to gray box FR, the top Greyhawk NPCs are level 10-20 while those in the FR are 20-30. There's even, iirc, a level 32 NPC in the gray box, a lich.

Also, as is often the case in rpg worlds, a lot of the weird stuff in Greyhawk such as the crashed spaceship, is hidden away, encountered by the PCs but not by the general populace. Actually this is often true of fictional worlds too. Middle-Earth is a low magic place but the protagonists in LotR encounter pretty much every powerful supernatural being (except Sauron) and magic item around at the time - The One Ring, the palantirs, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, the balrog, Shelob, the Nazgul, Saruman, Tom Bombadil, etc.