World of Greyhawk Folio - 30 years on

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Nice thread necromancy!

(reminds me I should likely go edit my old post with a link to my Deviant Art page with the hosted imagery of my old unfinished map project, can I edit a 10 year old post? Yep! I just did!)

 

[Voadam]

Even though physically having the maps at a table is preferable, it is good that the PDF is an available option.

 

[Ace]

It has ARISEN hungry for POSTSSSS...

The way I see it The Folio was pretty quality in materials, maps with the right level of realism for the type of setting it is with and enough material to help kick start your game.

The thing to understand about Greyhawk is while there were really powerful and iconic PC's around, at its guts its far more gritty Fritz Leiber or Robert Howard after a magic apocalypse than Tolkien (who Gygax slightly disliked as a writer) or what we'd call high magic fantasy today.

And yes I know the icononic spells in the PHB went to 9th in places but even the iconics as listed in the Rogues gallery weren't shown as that powerful. Bigby was 11th level, Tesner 14th Modenkeinan among the strongest was 16th . It seems to me this was meant to inform us that Greyhawk wasn't super high fantasy with arbitrary high level NPC's but created around the ideal of actual long term play.

I think it was assumed you knew this and you were meant to play your game your way and maybe and emulate that model.

Complaints of its quality should take into account that the hobby was less than five years old and it was made those forty years ago to a high standard especially for a very niche product in 1980.

Could it be better at the time? Probably not. Better now? Of course but we have computers and 4 decades of lessons.

 

[pemerton]

Greyhawk has plenty of JRRT-influence: the Kingdom of Celene, for instance.

For fantasy RPGing, GH is my default setting.

My favourite part of the GH map is the middle bit, because it has everything needed for FRPGing - elves, dwarves, orcs, Lankhmar-like and Zamora-like cities (Greyhawk itself, Hardby, Dyvers), pirates, desert with nomads, etc.