jollyninja said:
in the core, let the cleric's go without gods, I always liked the option they presented of not having one. just have it written as cleric's get two domains, player choice with the allignment based ones requiring that you be that alignment. no pantheon required, saves a few pages of text space for more feats or better rule descriptions. in the fr, greyhawk, ebberon, Enter random setting book here, it can be written that clerics are more confined, needing a god to fuel their power. It adds flavor in fact. leave flavor out of the core.
That would limit the cleric. If you don't lose a word about pantheons, deities, and clerics as their chief followers, you take away from the archetype. Note that 3e already says that you can have a cleric that doesn't worship a deity, but some ideals. But the option of the deity's champion should always remain there. And for that, a sample pantheon is really useful. Why not just use any pantheon, say, the one they're using now (which is now officially called "D&D Pantheon" - in the core rules, it's just an abbridged version of greyhawks deity roll call, but some of the deities introduced in additional books are new additions, not before seen in any GH book.)
I want more options and fewer presets. In my opinion this is more easily accomplished without a core setting and allows the writers more creative freedom for the generic suppliments. Knight protector of the great kingdom, eye of grummsh and all the other greyhawk specific prc's never get used in my games and have stopped me from wanting to buy any of the "generic" Wotc suppliments for about three years now. it's not generic if it's 35% greyhawk content.
Now come on, those can very easily ported to whatever deity or nation you happen to have in your campaign: Knight Protector of Generia, Fist of Tyranny, Ravager of Slaughterman The God Of Slaughter, whatever.
The Eye of Gruumsh is more racial than GH specific. This one is actually more or less tied to Gruumsh, with the missing eye thing and all, but even then you'd only have to swap out some flavour and you'd have your generic Orc Berserker of the Bleeding Eyeball Tribe.
For greyhawk, come out with
Well, that's the problem: They don't want to come out with Greyhawk anything. They have one traditional fantasy setting, and that's the Forgotten Realms. They won't start competing with their own product (look what it did to TSR in 2e). And GH could never beat the FR in popularity. The tons of novels that are written for the Realms and those that are still to be written make it their favourite franchise for vanilla fantasy needs.
So they will let GreyHawk do its job: Being the default setting that is snuck in to provide some premade flavour that is easily discarded, but useful if you just need something, and perfectly usable piecemeal or wholesale.
The default setting failed as a concept in my opinion but I hope they do not drop Greyhawk entirely.
As I said: Greyhawk's only right to exist seems to be as the default campaign. They won't do books for two vanilla fantasy settings. If they go beyond the current two settings, they'll do something that's different from both of them.
