Is Greyhawk Relevant?

[UngainlyTitan]

Long time player that never got into Greyhawk, reading the thread has been interesting from a game history point of view but nothing in the thread would entice me to buying a new Greyhawk setting.
The parts of Greyhawk have become iconic features of D&D but in my opinion some of the naming conventions are weak, like mentioned up thread with the sea princes and the sea barons.
It seems to me that looking at the existing settings,
Ebberon is where you can do steampunk, film noir mysteries or cold war spy stuff as well as the usual kitchen sink D&D
Dark Sun, is pretty grim struggle to survive, freedom fighters or Mad Max - post apocalyptic
FR - high magic kitchen sink D&D
Dragonlance - epic adventure arcs tying in closely to the fate of the known universe

What is the one line pitch for Greyhawk? and the low magic version of the Forgotten Realms is not going to cut it.

 

[Desdichado]

10-15 years ago the same thing could be said about Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories: They had been out of print for a generation. So, clearly, Robert Jordon's Conan novels were relevant and Howard's stories weren't when it came to Conan, right?

Well, more like 40 years ago, but yeah. At that time, they were pretty irrelevant. Nobody even knew what they were.

In short, hinging "relevancy" to the decision of a copyright holder to publish or not publish material is a questionable measure in any case.

It becomes downright silly, however, to define "not relevant" as "out of print" in a thread where the OP is asking whether or not Greyhawk is relevant enough to re-publish it. Your argument boils down to, "It's not currently in print, so it shouldn't be in print." Tautological nonsense.

I didn't hinge my definition on that. Maybe you should read what I posted if you're going to reply to it. That was just one bit of evidence to suggest that it wasn't relevent, and not even the most important one.

 

[Desdichado]

I was challenging your definition of relevance as requiring people to be paying attention to it. To describe what I was doing as special pleading is to beg the question on your understanding of relevance.

That's a pretty rich thing to claim, given your position that a setting that gets less attention year over year, has nothing published for it on a regular and "big" basis, and has continually dwindling popularity is relevent, and you've failed to offer any evidence, despite being specifically asked to do so, to demonstrate this relevence. Heck, I did more to establish its relevence than you did by referring to its legacy in terms of monsters, characters, locations and spells that have become iconic in D&D since Greyhawk's heyday.

A society could pay no attention to medical science; that does not mean that medical research has nothing to offer them. Before anyone jumps on me for the analogy, I am not claiming that Greyhawk is as valuable as medical science - I'm just saying that relevance need not be recognized. If Greyhawk does have something to offer current and future gamers (and I'm open to the possibility that this is not the case), it may still need to be marketed to them as such.

OK, that's a nice point, but you still don't do anything to establish any relevence of Greyhawk. All you've done is said that it could be relevent. Especially if D&D campaign settings had any useful points of analogy with medical science.

Which they don't.

 

[amerigoV]

What is the one line pitch for Greyhawk? and the low magic version of the Forgotten Realms is not going to cut it.

Greyhawk - no wimps allowed! (Tomb of Horrors, Temple of Elemental Evil, etc)

This thread and looking over Expedition to Castle Greyhawk has me itching to run some old school stuff. I might have to get the Gazetter and take a look at some options.

FR is alright, but they keep screwing it up on the even editions of the release of D&D. While it has the kitchen sink, many DMs feel restricted by its voluminous canon (I just do not allow FR fanboys in the group - it solves that problem). I have always been luke warm on the setting, but I thought they did a fantastic job on the 3.0 FRCS. I love Eberron, but it does have a Theme to it, so not everything fits as nicely (an you always have adjust for Dragonmark family perspectives, etc).

I'll admit it is a hard sell, especially with Pathfinder's world kinda in the same niche (fantasy, areas with themes but not a driving theme like Darksun/Eberron).

 

[Jhaelen]

The whole "pick one" philosophy is one of 4e's terminal flaws, IMO. "We have a water race, we don't need more?" So long, locathah and sea elves. "We have a pretty evil outsider, we don't need two", "We have a pretty nymph-like creature, no need for another", etc etc... In the end you end up with a vacuous Monster Manual that reads more like a jumble of playing cards. Leave my kitchen sink alone, dernnit! One man's trash is another man's treasure. Let me decide what my own "good stuff" is, thank you.

That's, imho, a flawed comparison. What you don't need in a Monster Manual are two aquatic races that are mechanically completely identical. This doesn't mean they have to have identical cultures. D&D has always had a tendency to equate race and culture, e.g. elves are like this, dwarves are like this, etc. Heck, in BECMI D&D race even equals class!

The traditional 'D&D' way was to introduce a new race or racial subtype to portray a different culture. That's completely unnecessary, though. It's something I disliked a lot in 1e and 2e. Did we really need 'Valley Elves'?

I first noticed this being changed with the Eberron setting. Valenar elves and Aerenal elves are very different culturally but completely identical mechanically.

And since starting with 3e you could easily customize aspects of monsters by adding class levels, templates or simply changing skills & feats, you can even create mechanical variants of the same basic race/monster.

In 4e some races/monsters show up in every monster manual. There's no longer even any need for a common baseline creature. A DM doesn't have to use the same stat block twice, even when portraying identical monsters.
On the flip-side you can use the same stat block for superficially very different creatures.

Take the 4e Dark Sun setting: Half-Giants are simply reskinned Goliath. It's something that makes a lot of sense if you're consequently separating mechanics from culture.

'Plane Below' includes several sample encounters using reskinned monsters, often with modified abilities. It makes sense and saves space.

Other rpgs are even more advanced in this respect. E.g. in DSA/TDE there's a kind of 'meta-template' for 'chimerical creatures'. This covers every creature that resembles a hybrid between two other creature types. Or Ars Magica which uses a toolkit approach to create stats for every kind of animal.

There's still bestiaries for both DSA/TDE and Ars Magica, but they have a completely different focus than D&D Monster Manuals: They provide background information for the setting (flora/fauna) and story hooks. But that's also available in D&D supplements, it's just not in the Monster Manuals.

 

[Beginning of the End]

10-15 years ago the same thing could be said about Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories: They had been out of print for a generation. So, clearly, Robert Jordon's Conan novels were relevant and Howard's stories weren't when it came to Conan, right?

Well, more like 40 years ago, but yeah. At that time, they were pretty irrelevant. Nobody even knew what they were.

What?

40 years ago = 1970. The year that Marvel started publishing the Conan comic book. The Lancer series of Conan reprints had just been published in 1968 and would continue in print for a decade. And Jordon wouldn't publish his first Conan novel until 1982.

So, no. I wasn't talking about 1970. And nothing in my description matches the state of affairs as it existed in 1970.

I was talking about 1995-2000 for a reason. That's the time period when Howard's stories had been out of print for 15-20 years (depending on how you count) while Robert Jordon's novels were still in print.

So, basically, you couldn't be more wrong.

I didn't hinge my definition on that. Maybe you should read what I posted if you're going to reply to it. That was just one bit of evidence to suggest that it wasn't relevent, and not even the most important one.

So you didn't write: " I see it as an out of print setting that hasn't seen any significant new treatment in years, and is played by a steadily shrinking, small subset of gamers. That's iconic irrelevant, right there."

Interesting.

And immediately after claiming that you never said that, you didn't post: "That's a pretty rich thing to claim, given your position that a setting that gets less attention year over year, has nothing published for it on a regular and "big" basis..."

Fascinating.

Well, you should probably figure out who hacked your account.

 

[Argyle King]

If you actually loved 3rd Edition, it might behoove you to actually read the guidelines for encounter design.
.

loved - past tense; I haven't played 3rd Edition for several years, so -as I admitted- I am more than a little rusty on the rules. I still have a hefty 3rd Edition library, but I mostly use it as source material for creatures and ideas to convert into the systems I currently play. To be perfectly honest, if I were to try playing 3rd Edition right now, it would be like relearning the system all over again.

Even so, I still stand by the statement I made: when comparing 4th Edition to 3rd Edition, 4th is more built around the idea of having a lot of entities involved in an encounter than 3rd is. While I'm not a huge fan of 4th Edition, I do feel 4th Edition got some things right, and the ideals behind encounter design (even if I don't like the implementation or execution of those ideals) is one of the things I feel they got right.

 

[Voadam]

Ahem if you must but you know as well as I Merric that LGG simply wasn't intended to be a full blown treatment. It lacked the features: no Greyhawk monsters, no Greyhawk magic items, no special character stuff or prestige classes, no starter adventure, no section focusing on a city; the things that back then came in the box, and I'm assuming (simply for the sake of comparison) are representative of the sorts of things that appeared in the 3e era FR books - I don't know, I don't own em - and presumably still appear in the hardbacks of setting treatments.

It did have some material necessary for play like favored weapons and clerical domains. And later we got some nice stuff in the Living Greyhawk Journals. But otherwise LGG was boxed in by Greyhawk being the implied, rather than supported setting.

I love my copy of the LGG, too.

nematode

This inspired me to pull out my From the Ashes. It does indeed have a couple of monsters, most notably for Greyhawk flavor the Great Kingdom animus undead which are big deals for the Ashes campaign and derro (which originated in 1e but have a neat greyhawk tie in), as well as quickly forgotten things like the abyssal bats, a dark treant, babboon things, and the thessalos. About 8 pages or so of monsters.

I don't remember the 1980s 1e boxed set having any monsters though. Or magic items. Its been a while though.

LGG didn't have prestige classes, but it did detail world power groups and such. FTA had short adventures in it on those cards, but the 1e boxed set had only some paragraph adventure ideas (a werewolf pack leader, who is also a vampire!).

I think the LGG was a great campaign setting book and would be fantastic to run a campaign out of with no other sourcebook, but I also enjoyed the 32 page OE/1e Greyhawk folio one and could go with that as well.

 

[btmcrae]

I'm sure that many of us have played at some point or another in the world of Greyhawk. This was Gygax's world, home to some of the greatest classic dungeons in D&D. It is for that nostalgia factor that we hold it in such high regards.

Yet as time has gone on and the hobby has evolved, I have to wonder if it still holds up all these years later.

While the nostalgia factor has died down due to fewer older folks playing, and newer folks simply not having heard of Greyhawk much due to it being allowed to lie fallow, Greyhawk still has a following among fans, and a presence in WotC products to attract older players' cash(and because they do not want to waste the time creating something new, or can't think of something new with as much "cool" factor presumably).

One of the questions I ask is why WotC would ever want to re-release Greyhawk. They might get some sales based on nostalgia, but what really sets it apart enough to draw in a new crowd?

Why? So that they could actually write some material for a campaign setting that hasn't been super-detailed, ergo sell a metric crap-ton of supplements with information in them on a world which has but the merest, tiniest portion of it somewhat detailed in a half-arsed fashion? Oh, and they don't have to put int too much lead time in creating the setting whole cloth either- they already have the springboard.

My fear on this is that, as a generic setting, it will be outshone by other generic settings, most notably the Realms. It doesn't offer the wide range of cultures that other settings do. There's nothing geographically or culturally that really sets it apart.

That is rather unfounded, as it is kind of hard for a campaign setting which was barley detailed to not offer the cultures that other settings do. Those cultures are there, but they were never allowed to be developed before Greyhawk was crated up and put in that old warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

But what of the classic dungeons? My guess is that they'd rather release those in books like Tomb of Horrors. Rather than put out a setting about dungeons, put out books on dungeons.

Well, they might do that, but that would be a mistake. Does a book about dungeons fire you imagination, or does a book about *a world with places of adventure* in it, and *adventures set in that world* fire you imagination. The Dungeoneer's Survival Guide didn't do a whole hell of a lot for my interest in dungeons let me tell you, but information on campaign settings and *much more importantly*, adventures *set in those worlds* did. Classic D&D is a generic term, for a generic game system, just as is the term "cards". Do you want to play "cards", or "Poker!, and do you want to play "D&D" or "Greyhawk!". "Cards" and "D&D" do not make me think "AWESOME!!!", but "Poker!" and "Greyhawk!" do.

Does GH need reinvention? I would say yes. It needs to be set apart somehow.

No, it doesn't need reinvention at all- it merely needs to be fleshed out so as to do it some semblance of justice, and to show people all of the things that are there, but that the IP holders have up until now only allowed allusions to be made to. Turn the writers loose, *explore the entire world* rather than just one tiny corner of it, and *take the players(i.e customers) on the journey from the established bits(the Flanaess) into entire new realms of adventure across the whole of Oerth*. *That* is a recipe for success.

I don't know what Greyhawk needs, or how to make it more relevant to the modern-day gamer. I wish I did. I would hate to just see it fade away, yet that seems to be what's happening. Should it be another continent on the same planet as the Realms? Does it need a makeover?

Thoughts?

Greyhawk should *NOT* be stuffed into the Realms. That would pretty much kill it. You might as well ask people, "Shouldn't Terry Brooks just sell off Shanara to the Tolkien IP holders so that it can be stuffed into Middle Earth? After all, they are very similar..." Kinda sounds like a bad idea, huh? Greyhawk doesn't need a drastic makeover either, just some actual attention.

 

[Orius]

Ahem if you must but you know as well as I Merric that LGG simply wasn't intended to be a full blown treatment. It lacked the features: no Greyhawk monsters, no Greyhawk magic items,

Hmm. Isn't that what the core books were for? Okay, that is an oversimplification, but much of what is Greyhwk is core to begin with.

Honestly, I can also see why near-identical monsters would be cut from the current edition because of publishing needs. The most important things to include in basic monster manual are the popular monsters, as well as a variety of monster types, and a variety of different abilities and combat roles. It's easy enough to cut something that looks like something else and maybe doesn't get a lot of use in general.