What is so special about Greyhawk?

[billd91]

There are a few things that keep drawing me back to Greyhawk, even after spending some time enjoying FR and its supplements in the 2e days.

1) The source materials I rely on, the Folio and to a lesser extent Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, are more sketchbook and framework than detailed. That offers me a lot of leeway while still keeping true to the source. It's also why a lot of GH DMs will refer to MY Greyhawk rather than just Greyhawk.

2) The militant neutrality aspect is fascinating to me. The Circle of Eight, for example, was established not to fight for truth, justice, whatever. But for stability. As such, it'll intervene in any direction.

3) Interesting use of reasonably realistic historical ideas. The Folio lays out some history of migration into the Flanaess (the main locale) after magical disasters. While ultimately of fairly trivial appeal, it still gives you a sense that Gygax was really thinking about how the history should develop on a macro scale. By comparison, FR always seemed a bit too compartmentalized, country by country, supplement by supplement.

 

[timbannock]

If it helps at all, I only recently got into the setting (I've been playing D&D since red box days, though).

What spurred me into it was Yggsburgh and Castle Zagyg: Upper Works. Those books had something in them that I couldn't identify at first, and that I started to discover was in a lot of Gary's works in the original Greyhawk stuff.

I figured it out (at least in part): sense of adventure. To put it very simply (everyone else on this thread has done it well!) and also very personally, I find that the setting is very consistent in terms of backstory, but very open in terms of allowing the players to explore it, change it, have huge impact on it, and so on.

GH is like Shadow of the Colossus, FR is like Final Fantasy. In GH, there's the sense of all this detail, history, character, and info in the setting, so much so that it would take hours and hours of just exploring the nooks and crannies to get a true sense of the bigger picture. But all that crazy information is essentially just window dressing. In FR, there's the feeling of an over-arching plot, there's a cast of tons of NPCs that are just more badass than the PCs...until some cataclysmic event and tons of level-grinding results in the PCs becoming godlike in power and finally being able to take on super NPCs #1 - 30.

GH has more backstory.

FR has more metaplot.

At least in feel.

Gygax kept writing "take what you want, change what you want, make it yours!" I always felt that the FR writers implied "here's what's going on in our world. You can play in it if you want, but it's OURS." Obviously that's not a truism, but it's just the sense I got from it all. YMMV

 

[Hussar]

The idea of a knight facing off against a dragon in Greyhawk is credible. In FR the same image is lah-di-dah; the knight is probably some magically empowered glowing dude, and dragons are just not as credible as opponents in a world full of the wild stuff going on in FR. Magic is a little harder to come by; not unreasonably, but it's clearly magic, and not corner-store enchantments and pseudo-technology. The tropes cleave a little closer to swords-and-sorcery. It replaces the dualism of LOTR or FR or Dragonlance with a moral realism that is embodied in specific people, creatures, and acts, not in monolithic armies. Civilization is very civilized, but also geographically isolated. It's a little easier to believe in peasants carrying out their lives in Greyhawk than in other settings. Aesthetically, it resembles the middle, middle ages more, and an airbrush painting on a van a little less.

I'm going to have to quibble with you on this one. Given that Greyhawk was explored almost exclusively through modules and those modules were absolutely dripping in magic items, and very powerful magic items to boot, the idea that Greyhawk was somehow less wahoo than FR depended an awful lot on whether or not you actually played those modules.

I know the party that I played with that went through the GDQ series eventually wound up with about a MILLION gp each. We were giving away magic items left right and center because what do you really do with twenty-five plus one swords?

To me, Greyhawk, as presented in the modules, IS the airbrushed van sort of fantasy. You had wahoo settings for the adventures, robots, demons and various other things popping up all over the place and you were battling GODS by the end of more than one module (or at least beings powerful enough to be able to see divinity on a clear day).

Probably the most striking thing about it was that it was born out of the tropes of AD&D and then fed back into them, but itself never seemed to be constrained by them. It introduced antipaladins, for instance, and gave us our first taste of the Drow. The elven races paralleled the PHB ones but were not precisely them. Iuz was a half-fiend, something not even statted in AD&D until he came along. It was very much a version of Gary's homebrew.

Very true. And, for all its gory glory, I did love and still do love Greyhawk.

 

[Obryn]

Has nobody mentioned the map?

Seriously, that's my favorite part of Greyhawk. It's the archetypal fantasy world, and its map is a piece of art, IMHO. Yeah, it's kinda awkward, but it has everything and just exudes a sense of wonder. I mean, the Hellfurnaces, the Land of Black Ice, Ket, the Scarlet Brotherhood, the Great Kingdom, the Nyr Dyv, the mountainous barbarian penninsula... Sure, it has some silly names, too, like "Perrenland," but it's a gorgeous map.

-O

 

[billd91]

I'm going to have to quibble with you on this one. Given that Greyhawk was explored almost exclusively through modules and those modules were absolutely dripping in magic items, and very powerful magic items to boot, the idea that Greyhawk was somehow less wahoo than FR depended an awful lot on whether or not you actually played those modules.

But when you do read the non-module sources and compare with sources for FR, like Volo's Guide to Waterdeep for example, you really do realize the substantial difference between magic assumptions in the campaigns.

Adventures are always a little different because they were designed to be the main source of wealth and magic items for adventures, back in the day.

 

[Riley]

...those modules were absolutely dripping in magic items, and very powerful magic items to boot, the idea that Greyhawk was somehow less wahoo than FR depended an awful lot on whether or not you actually played those modules.

I know the party that I played with that went through the GDQ series eventually wound up with about a MILLION gp each.

When we played old TSR modules, we routinely received far less treasure than specified.

I was just reading a used copy of UK5 Eye of the Serpent that I picked up recently, and was amused to see half the magic items in the treasure piles had already been helpfully crossed out by a previous owner.

Crossed out in pencil, thankfully.

 

[amethal]

If WotC freelanced the writing of the Greyhawk setting to Mona, Jacobs and Co., I have no doubt that it would be a product that Greyhawk fans would almost certainly like.

I get the impression those guys are kind of busy at the moment

 

[aboyd]

Here is Paizo's beautiful map:

http://paizo.com/download/dungeon/desktops/Greyhawk_1600x1024.jpg

You can buy issues 118 through 121 to get the full size map (which is huge and very readable):

http://paizo.com/dungeon/products/issues/greyhawkmap

 

[Obryn]

Here is Paizo's beautiful map:

http://paizo.com/download/dungeon/desktops/Greyhawk_1600x1024.jpg

You can buy issues 118 through 121 to get the full size map (which is huge and very readable):

http://paizo.com/dungeon/products/issues/greyhawkmap

It's gorgeous, but it's got 2 main problems:

(1) It's not the Darlene map
(2) It's post-Greyhawk Wars.

-O

 

[Riley]

I was initially quite impressed with the Paizo map, but I eventually found myself reverting to the original Darlene map - simply because her(?) map has so many beautiful hand-drawn details.

This blog illustrates that nicely:
Jeff's Gameblog: a blog about games and stuff: The Pekulish Script

See the whole map here:
http://www.gotbowie.com/arps/old_wogmap/wog-large/Greyhawk Map Left Big.jpg
http://www.gotbowie.com/arps/old_wogmap/wog-large/Greyhawk Map Right Big.jpg