D&D 4E Greyhawk 4e: Back to the Beginning...

[JeffB]

To elaborate on what Klaus stated in his post, From the Ashes was a massive, top-down change that radically altered the setting for the worse, and trashed many traits that fans had come to associate with the setting.

For one thing, Greyhawk had never really been "advanced" outside of the official modules published by TSR. The tendency that had developed was that these modules constituted the "metaplot", and that individual DMs and players played these modules out and incorporated the changes into their own individual campaigns as they saw fit. Gaming groups could use or ignore them as they pleased. Players had a chance to prevent certain catastrophic events from happening.

All that changed with From the Ashes, with its massive changes dictated from on high without any possibility of player influence. It all just happened, without any of the sort of player input that had been so popular in the past. This was seen by many fans as a break from the established Greyhawk tradition, and one they didn't like.

Second, many of the changes directly affected the spirit of the setting. Greyhawk was commonly seen as a "shades of grey" place, where good, neutral and evil peoples and powers intermixed, without one ever entirely gaining an advantage over the other. After From the Ashes, Iuz and the Scarlet Brotherhood had made tremendous gains, while many good-aligned countries (Nyrond, Geoff, Furyondy, Sterich, Bissel, the Shield Lands, etc.) either destroyed or gravely weakened. Instead of a rainbow of shades of grey, Greyhawk became much more starkly black and white.

Other, more subtle aspects were wrecked as well. The Twin Cataclysms aside, there was rarely any magic performed in Greyhawk on a massive scale...but now Iuz and the Great Kingdom summoned entire armies of fiends, which in itself required another massive magic ritual to get rid of them. The Scarlet Brotherhood, instead of being a secret Illuminati-like organization that sought to undermine its enemies through lies and deception, was now a brutal, aggressive power that quite openly enslaved any territory it claimed and ruled it in the name of the Scarlet Sign. Many fans of the Brotherhood hated the way it had changed, myself included.

Finally, so many perfectly good adventuring areas were trashed. The Great Kingdom was rife with dynastic intrigue and murderous Byzantine powergames...and now it was trashed. The pirates of the Hold of the Sea Princes were all enslaved by the Scarlet Brotherhood. The Flan lands of Tenh and Geoff were destroyed, and the Bandit Kingdoms all enslaved by Iuz. The evil Horned Society was wiped off the map, as were the frontier areas of the Wild Coast. The good-aligned southern nations of Idee and Onnwal were enslaved by the Brotherhood. If you ran campaigns in any of these countries, your group was pretty much screwed.

All this was done with little input from fans, it seems: Jeff Grubb came up with the idea of "blowing the setting up", from what I've heard.

Talented guys like Erik Mona and Gary Holian came along and salvaged what they could...but since then it just hasn't been the same.

That's what turned so many fans off-so many radical changes done by TSR's fiat, in an attempt to introduce an ongoing metaplot that most Greyhawk fans neither wanted or needed, as they were pretty content with a steady supply of modules that they could incorporate into their own campaigns as they saw fit.

:golfclap:

Excellent post!

 

[Spatula]

I don't see why there has to be a reboot to draw in new gamers. A re-release, with polished up and new material, taking what worked best in the past and adding/emphasizing things that might appeal to a new demographic, I can see.

Yeah. The trick is that you want to provide some incentive for older fans to buy the repackaging. Like including new stuff, as you say - think a greatest hits alblum. You don't have to make a completely different version.

 

[Miyaa]

Here the $64,000 question: Will Wizards of the Coast's target audience, the 12-24 year old WoW online user consider buying Greyhawk with the suggestions you've put int?

Mind you, think about some of your complaints: Tieflings and Dragonborn. They were put in precisely because Warcrafters tend to play those and the elven races more than anything else.

I'm of the opinion that Wizards won't do anything beyond Forgotten Realms, Eberron, one of their losing finalists works, and maybe a Dragonlance flier. I really doubt there is much in their budget beyond that, and they may decide to allow, within GSL reason, other groups to take over a past setting, such as Greyhawk.

If the comic book world is any indication, retcons or rebooting doesn't bring in new audience members or even keep them interested for very long. The younger group tends to be more savvy than in the past and with wikipedia and such, I'm sure they could be figure out the past history of the editions anyway.

I wasn't impressed with Greyhawk other than the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, so I have my doubts they could make it more interesting than the 3.0 version.

 

[CruelSummerLord]

After reading your post this is what I took away from it: Just another jaded gamer.

Why in the world would some 16 year old just starting D&D in 1992 want anything to do with a setting that had 16 years of poorly documented history? Did you expect them to go buy every adventure and piece together the campaign? They “blew up” the world for the same reason they just blew up FR, to make it more approachable to new players. The players that will carry this game for the NEXT 40 years, not the ones keeping it stuck in the past. As best as I can tell no one ever made you change your campaign just because a new book came out.

To the OP and the thread, WotC has publicly said that they are not sure what to do with Greyhawk. Mostly because if they release a setting it won’t mesh with any old timers champions, so they won’t buy the heretical book, and no one under 30 has really played in a fully supported GH world, so they will have no reason to buy it.

So they have to come up with a shtick to sell it to their old and new consumers, because we are well past the time when WotC or TSR can release a vanity product. A good reboot might just do the trick, and might be the ONLY thing they would. And to be honest it would not surprise me one bit if this was ‘leaked’ to get some marketing feedback.

I for one would love it if they rebooted Oerth and release books just as they are for FR. That campaign guild is everything I want it to be. It gives you the basics of the world/region/country and lets the DM build his/her own world. Just like my World of Greyhawk box set let me do.

You clearly did not read my first contribution to this thread, or else you would have realized that I absolutely LOVE the idea of rebooting Oerth. I have no problem at all with rebooting either comic book characters or campaign settings-sometimes, the bad canon and continuity just gets to be too much, and it's better off to start all over again.

Just so we're clear, I'm 26 years old, and the number of actual D&D game sessions I've played can be counted on one hand. I am not a jaded old gamer-the work of Erik Mona, Gary Holian, and Frederick Weining notwithstanding, I loathe most of the post-From the Ashes canon, and I am glad to see it gone. Indeed, one of the things that aggravates me most about my fellow Greyhawk fans is their seeming need to make sure everything in their campaigns is perfectly lined up with existing canon, instead of just making up whatever suits their campaigns.

I agree with many of your points-a lot of the old canon is increasingly hard to track down, and more of a pain than anything else, especially considering how contradictory some of it is. A stripped-down, rebooted Greyhawk, with the best additional details added to flesh out the setting, might just be the ticket to getting Greyhawk some new fans.

The reason I hate FtA is not because it messed up my non-existent campaigns, but because it took a setting I found to be a tremendous source of inspiration, and turned it upside down. It wrecked so many good things about the setting. To see it wiped away can only be a good thing, in my estimation. If they were to reboot Greyhawk, they could have done it in a much more effective way that didn't upset so much of its already existing fanbase.

 

[Spatula]

Here the $64,000 question: Will Wizards of the Coast's target audience, the 12-24 year old WoW online user consider buying Greyhawk with the suggestions you've put int?

Mind you, think about some of your complaints: Tieflings and Dragonborn. They were put in precisely because Warcrafters tend to play those and the elven races more than anything else.

Err.... wut? There are no devil-people or lizard-people playable races in WoW. If there were, most WoW players would not choose them, because most WoW players choose their characters based on how "pretty" they look.

 

[Klaus]

Err.... wut? There are no devil-people or lizard-people playable races in WoW. If there were, most WoW players would not choose them, because most WoW players choose their characters based on how "pretty" they look.

Tell that to Horde players...

 

[Spatula]

Tell that to Horde players...

Horde players are not "most" players, as evidenced by the massive population imbalance on your average realm. I don't know what it is now that the horde has their own pretty elf race, but back in the day the ratio of alliance to horde on pve realms was typically 4:1.

 

[Staffan]

Err.... wut? There are no devil-people or lizard-people playable races in WoW.

Um... draenei? Fangs, tails, cloven hooves, and horns (at least on females, males have some other form of cranial plating).

OK, no lizard-people, but they do have cow-people.

 

[grodog]

A reboot of GH thoughtfully leveraging the 4e rules might be the only thing that would get me to buy 4e. I'm otherwise happy with earlier editions.

I think GVD's vision is interesting, but my hunch is that WotC's level of commitment and interest in GH isn't that great, and since Erik Mona's departure, there are few folks who still know and use the setting regularly and would be capable of pulling off such a project (Mike Mearls obviously excepted).

If it comes to be, I'll definitely check it out, at the least.

 

[FJammet]

I will definitively buy the Greyhawk 4E books, and the sooner the better.

But I'm not so pleased by this reboot idea : my goal is to shift (perhaps) my current 3.5 campaign to 4E, and it takes place at the moment in 3.5 Greyhawk, that means after the Wars, and I don't intend to change that ! So this setting supplement would not be as helpful as it may have been.

Why not pick up things where there are now, and just make the 4E conversion : regional feats, Greyhawk deities powers, Greyhawk classes and so on ?