Do you want Greyhawk updated to 5e?

Much of Greyhawk is run in an unofficial, but well-documented, 5th edition D&D Organized Play program called Greyhawk Reborn (aka GHR), which takes place about 20-25 years post-Living Greyhawk from the days of 3rd edition. I believe GHR has around 50-100 active players and DMs. GHR is primarily consumed by DMs and players in the northeast-US (HQ in Pennsylvania). This is their website: http://greyhawkreborn.net/

I personally have been playing in this campaign for the last 1.5 years, which has been going on since the days of D&D Next, and as someone who doesn't like Adventurer's League because of the lackluster/hit-or-miss DMs, GHR is pretty well run in my opinion because the campaign's adventure writers are all vetted by a single core group of admins that focus on connected storylines. Adventurers are also only ever run by the writers that wrote them, leading to a much more enjoyable experience where the DM is invested in telling a great story and running an entertaining adventure. I believe that at least 200-300 adventurers have been written to date.

As of January 2019, GHR just switched over to a Checkpoint/Treasure Point system for magical gear and it's a step in the right direction and much more forgiving and versatile than the AL treasure system.

I highly recommend trying it out. I believe GHR games are run at Origins and GenCon as well. Most conventions, if not all, where GHR is run have multi-table Interactive events as well. I believe that MEPACON in Scranton PA is the next major event where GHR will be run.

Other, because I don't care.

I have fond memories of GH. But could care less if it gets "updated" to 5E.

lowkey13 said:

What constitutes official support, though?

Greyhawk is supported in 5e enough that I can easily run campaigns there.

Do you mean allowed on DMs Guild?
A hardcover publication of the campaign setting?
Something else?

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Allowed on DMs guild and at least one WotC-published product for the setting. Like we have with Eberron and Ravnica.

The problem I see with all of these campaign settings is simply that their world size is antithetical to a NEW book's usefulness. Because there is just TOO MUCH stuff that you have to pay lip service to, that you can't go into any real substantive detail on any of it. So you end up with like two pages on every barony/duchy/kingdom... and every major location/town/city in each of those places gets at most two paragraphs telling us the baseline about what its big "thing" is.

If you aren't going to update any timelines... then anything that appears in the book is going to be a virtual copy/paste from the previous campaign setting books/boxed sets that have already been made. So what's the point? Just so that we can have a pretty 5E-styled cover and feel good about ourselves that WotC has decided that they love this thing we love just as much as we do? Do our egos really need to be stroked that badly?

Here's the truth about all the Forgotten Realms stuff we've gotten for 5E. We haven't actually gotten JACK about the Forgotten Realms in 5E. What we HAVE gotten is a lot of stuff about the SWORD COAST in 5E. WotC has gone out of its way to detail the Sword Coast in most of their products... the Ghost of Dragonspear Castle adventure, certain chapters of Tyranny of Dragons, the PotA adventure, the SCAG, parts of Storm King's Thunder, the Waterdeep adventures... and heck, throw in the 4E Neverwinter book if you want. All those combined do a pretty good job of giving us a usable Sword Coast to create campaigns in... with quite a bunch of additional detail in all those locations. But we sure as heck haven't gotten anything about any other place in the Realms (except for Chult) that would allow us to set a new campaign elsewhere. If we want a campaign in the Dalelands... we're going to have to go back to the Grey Box of the 3E FRCS book like we would otherwise.

And its the exact same situation with ANYTHING related to Greyhawk. Any book they make that tries to "update" the entire setting to 5E will fall woefully short. Because you just can't detail a usable location to set a campaign that is that fricking large. The BEST thing you could do would be to select a SINGLE barony/duchy/kingdom and then detail the heck out of that one place. Like Geoff, or Furyondy or the County of Sundi or whatever. Because at least then you have a compressed location that you can run characters back and forth across, you can give more detail and plot hooks about the locations *in* that area, and can detail many more useful NPCs to interact with rather than just the one duke or general you'd otherwise mention in a full campaign setting book.

If Ghosts of Saltmarsh is going to detail the town of Saltmarsh... their best/most useful future option for a full Greyhawk "setting book" would be to detail the entire area around it... from the Hool Marshes to the Dreadwood, from the Kingdom of Keoland down into the Hold of the Sea Princes. Give us THAT area in intricate detail... allow us to use Saltmarsh as the home base town for this setting... and then you might have a useful book for people to run effective campaigns in.

If you have the map and know who/what lives where in the world, why do you need a 5e published book?

Don't like the canon history? Ignore it and use your own. Don't know what is in a certain place and need ideas? Use the abundance of published material.

I have fond memories of gaming in Greyhawk, but to my recollection there are not any setting specific races or classes that prevent you from playing there now.

lowkey13 said:

In my mind, Greyhawk is the ur-DIY setting, especially for the swords & sorcery (as opposed to High Fantasy) crowd. What made the setting great at the time is that it didn't provide answers- it provided hooks. Every place described had hints of adventures for the DM to fill in. It was impossible to read more than a paragraph or two about the places without immediately thinking of some way that this place could be the setting for an adventure. Constant wisps of elder civilizations, great magics, vast riches, and unique and hidden lands waiting to be discovered by PCs (and filled in by the DM).

And that's before getting into fact that we only know of but a small part of Oerth.

Now, I genuinely like the work that WoTC has done to date. But I don't need them to update Greyhawk. I don't need an explanation for Tieflings (let me guess- Iuz) and Dragonborn. I don't want new explanations or a change in timeline. I don't want my mysteries filled.

There isn't really any need to update Greyhawk; the countries and forests and mountain ranges are what they are.

And for that reason, I guess I don't understand why some people are complaining when they use Greyhawk "stuff" (like the older modules) in 5e. Just take what you need- and leave out the rest of the fluff, right?

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This! A thousand times this.

I understand the fear about the "jump the shark" effect, but changes are necessary. Yes, when new monsters, races and classes (incarnum meldshaping and martial adepts) are more difficult to add to oldest settings but they shouldn't to be so frozen.

I would like to know more about that third continent from Krynn (Dragonlance) and the oriental continent of Oerth for a Greyhawk version of Kara-Tur.

I want the return of the chronomancers and the time spheres with alternative uchronies of D&D worlds timelines. Why not a time sphere where lord Soth did avoid the cataclysm, or Jakandor being conquered by defilers from Athas?

Would I like to see it updated, sure, but not at the expense of other stuff I can use. If it is just a flavor book with a few classes and such I do not need it. If it takes away from another Saltmarsh module, I do not need it and would rather see a re-hatch like Saltmarsh- even though I would like something original more.

Since 5e came out I have had 3-4 decent campaigns that has not left the greater Phandalin region. I may run one of the published adventures like PotA, but have not run out of ideas for my group. I guess I do not see that it matters much to me and my group. We seem to occupy a small niche in the world and if Phandalin happened to have been published in Greyhawk over FR I would not have noticed or cared. What I do like is solid adventures, but wish they did not cost $50.

I think Greyhawk should be opened up on the DM's Guild and all the original materials republished digitally. Then is should be left to rest in peace. It's not sufficiently different to the FR to make it worth supporting separately when there are settings that actually offer something different still unsupported.

I don't necessarily need WotC to give me in-depth sourcebooks for all their previous settings, but a short player's guide supplement with world-specific backgrounds and perhaps some additional, appropriate archetypes would be nice. I certainly don't need GH updated with a meta-plot (or any of the other settings for that matter).