Bacon Bits
Hero
I like Greyhawk for a few reasons.
1. It's lower fantasy than Forgotten Realms. There's just less weird stuff there. Sure, you've got elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and humans (and the half-humans), but that's it. No dragonborn. No tieflings. No devas. No genasi. No thri-kreen or aarakocra. No drow as a playable race. You're playing the least fantastic and least exotic of the races, so things that are aberrant or bizarre feel more fantastic just because they're bizarre! It's, "Oh, it's a troll? Well, between the bird man monk, the dragon man that breathes acid, and the demon thing with wings and a tail you've been travelling with for several weeks, that doesn't seem so strange," versus, "It's a troll! You've never seen such a vile and repulsive creature!"
2. The mortals are mortals and the gods are gods. I don't know if it's just me, but it sure seems like the gods in FR die far more often than the mortal protagonists ever do. I want the gods to be both powerful, but also significantly more distant than the gods in FR. The well-known NPCs are basically just the magic-users from Gygax's campaigns, and they're either your friends, completely unavailable, deities, or also dead. There's no Elminster wandering around, no Drizzt and company, etc. In Greyhawk, the high level NPCs are so rare that you may never meet one. The gods are busy or don't care or can't help. Mordenkainen, whatever he's doing, certainly isn't available to help the PCs. If the party gets into trouble in Greyhawk, there's nobody to seek out and ask for help except for the rulers who might be able to levy an army of peasants. By and large, you're on your own and if you lose then everybody within a few thousand miles is gonna die.
3. Lower populations, less civilization, vast unclaimed wilderness. The population of FR, Eberron, and even DragonLance is fairly high relative to Greyhawk. In Greyhawk, if you travel from the city of Greyhawk to Verbobonc, two of the largest cities in the campaign world, you're going to spend a significant amount of time in essentially untamed wilderness between the two cities. Most nations only have limited contact with each other, and pretty much everything feels like they're slightly larger than a city-state. You go outside the sparse region of cities, and you're in essentially vast unclaimed wilderness for months at a time. You can't really get lost in the wilderness of FR because if you pick a direction, chances are there's a city that way a few days away. In Greyhawk, if you get turned around, you're just gone. Being an adventurer in Greyhawk is dangerous business. The wilderness is full of dangers, known and unknown, and even if you've got a map you've no real idea what's out there. It's like striking out west from St Louis in the 1850s. You better be prepared because you're on your own. Being an adventurer in FR feels like going to Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s. No cell phones, but still pretty safe.
4. Division between the "good" races and kingdoms. In FR, there's established diplomatic lines everywhere and the regions are mostly at peace with each other. Not in Greyhawk. In Greyhawk, you're lucky if there's not a war every five years over the border between human kingdoms. Elves are remote and aloof and nearly xenophobic and hide in their forests. Dwarves are greedy and uninterested in the surface world. Gnomes also don't really associate with anyone, except the dwarves that they often have defense agreements with and humans to trade with. Halflings live near humans, but they're halflings. FR is a prosperous campaign world dominated by large, powerful, and often good-aligned nations with a few sparse and holdout regions of evil. Greyhawk is a world recovering from devastation, multiple cultural migrations and displacements, filled with fallen empires, lost kingdoms, forgotten thrones, abandoned cities, and vacant temples. Greyhawk isn't grim-and-gritty (before From the Ashes, at least). Greyhawk is in the middle of it's own Dark Ages.
5. Player ignorance means it really is a blank slate. So many players have read FR books or played FR games. They know Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, Icewind Dale, etc. They know the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards of Thay. They know about the Sundering, the Spellplague, and every other major event in the past 100 years of game time. Nobody knows Greyhawk, however. They'll know the City of Greyhawk. They'll know the famous magic-users just from the spell names. They might know Iuz. Nobody knows about the Twin Cataclysms. Nobody knows about the Invoked Devastation and the Rain of Colorless Fire. Nobody knows about the Sueloise, Bakluni, Oeridians, and Flannae.
