Nightfall said:
Nah. You're just in an in closet Orcus worshipper.
I'm prepared to admit that I don't get Orcus. "Undeath" seems like a strange portfolio for a demon prince as opposed to a deity. It seems like an artifact of the weird way Gygax and co. developed the cosmology back in the day, but I honestly don't know enough to know whether or not that's true.
In any case, I wanted to add something:
I think it would be great if the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons took a cue from the three main World of Darkness game lines and included a very basic gazetteer for Greyhawk in the core rules.
Vampire: The Requiem has a chapter on using New Orleans;
Werewolf: The Forsaken has a chapter on using the Rocky Mountains around Denver;
Mage: The Awakening has a chapter on using Boston.
If the
Player's Handbook and
Dungeon Master's Guide each had a short chapter on Greyhawk from the appropriate perspective, deliberately calling it out as an example of a setting showcasing the kind of world the rules describe and which each gaming group can make their own, I think that would be an excellent way to keep Greyhawk alive without committing to the same level of support that the Forgotten Realms receives.
(I make the comparison to support for the Forgotten Realms because Greyhawk doesn't really compete with Eberron for "mindshare" of the player base, it competes with Wizards of the Coast's other pseudo-medieval, Tolkienesque traditional fantasy setting.)
If it proved to be really popular based on player feedback, you could do what the World of Darkness also does and publish a book which goes into a little more detail about the setting, like
City of the Damned: New Orleans,
Hunting Ground: The Rockies, and
Boston Unveiled.
I envision that the
Player's Handbook chapter would talk about the politics and geography of the world, things that PCs should know like "Where do the elves live?" and the like, whereas the
Dungeon Master's Guide chapter would talk about cosmology, villainous forces like the demon princes/devil lords/Iuz/whatever, that sort of thing.
An alternative way of doing it would be via callout setting boxes scattered throughout the rules, imparting specific flavour that the rules themselves don't need. So you describe the basic rules and flavour attributes of elves - they're graceful and long-lived with an aptitude for magical study, they get +2 Dex, +2 Con, have low-light vision,
et cetera - then there's an "Elves in Greyhawk" section, sidebar, or box which discusses the elven nation(s) of the setting, the history of the race, their relationships with other races and cultures of the world, and so on.
Basically, rather than the Greyhawky descriptions of the races that are evident in the current core rules, which are overruled and revamped by the
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the
Eberron Campaign Setting in their own chapters about PC races, you have the universal mechanics and basic flavour that doesn't vary much from world to world and then an example, drawn from Greyhawk, of how elves can be developed beyond those basics. Nothing too extensive - I wouldn't want to add too much to the page count - but something that both showcases Greyhawk as the "example setting" in a little more detail and makes it clear that
those elven attributes are universal but
these only apply to Greyhawk, and other worlds may and will do things differently.
(An example here would be the description of how half-orcs are treated with suspicion or outright prejudice by members of other races, which probably fits very well in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms but which isn't always true in Eberron, which happens to have a region where orcs and humans live together in clans which count half-orcs as regular, respected members, and where one of the mercantile powers of the setting is made up of humans and half-orcs descended from the clans of that region.)
I'm sympathetic to those Greyhawk fans who want more for their setting, but I also see why it would be silly to commit to too much support for a setting which is, in the larger scheme of things, pretty similar to the Forgotten Realms, which has the massive advantage of a wildly successful line of novels drawing interest. I think a happy medium of a little bit of detail as the "example setting" in the Fourth Edition core rules - more use of proper names and history, but strictly as examples of a setting for individual player groups to flesh out with their own ideas - would be a good way of keeping Greyhawk alive for those fans and out of respect for the history of the game.
