So? What is the difference between Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms in the feel of the game?
I have to say something very controversial, but I do say it as an old-timer with much love for both Faerun and Oerth:
Greyhawk really isn't that different from FR.
Difference in level of detail? That's really not a big difference. Liches with armies? Both have 'em. Mad reclusive wizards? Check. Secret racial supremacist organizations? Check. Big waterfront town that dominates the setting and the region's trade? Check.
Much as I love Oerth's history, and its Leiber- and Howard-esque origins, I don't think you could draw a hard line between the two and show a huge self-evident difference.
Dragonlance would be in a different boat, though a slightly similar boat. At least we had the Cataclysm and the divine isolation, and the magic moons, and the LotR-esque elements, but still somewhat classic fantasy.
Dark Sun is an example of self-evidently different. The minute you're fighting with a bone sword back-to-back with your six-armed insect-man ally, against a tribe of cannibal halflings, while your party wizard is sucking the life out of the ground and giving you body aches in the process just to cast magic missile, you KNOW you ain't in Faerun anymore.
Eberron is another - golem-men detectives interacting on lightning trains with good-aligned blood-priests while solving a whodunnit before going home to his two-mile-tall Mega-City while his friend with the inherited magic tattoo cuts a trade deal with a medusa diplomat from the next-door monster nation, that also screams a different brand of fantasy.
Much as I'd like to see Greyhawk goodness, and find out if Iuz still has his nation, or see a mega-adventure dealing with the mystery of the Invoked Devastation and Rain of Colorless Fire, it doesn't scream "drastically different fantasy" from Forgotten Realms to me.
As someone new to D&D with this addition, I don’t get the appeal of updating old settings. (I admit this is most likely due to the fact that I am new to this addition.) The one thing that I believe 3PP has done better than anything is settings. You have Primeval Thule, you have the Midgard kickstarter, you have the Talislanta kickstarter, and many more 3PP settings, do you really need WOTC to provide older settings.
Then he will ruin it.He says that he doesn't want to get into a situation where anyone has to ask, "what's the difference between the Realms and Greyhawk?" Instead, it's self-evident. He says that he sees it as an interesting design challenge: to take the things that makes a setting distinct and putting them front and center, but without having people who love the setting feeling like its been changed too much.
Yeah, but it's not as if Greyhawk doesn't have its share of that, such as the potential return of Tharizdun in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.Compare that to the AP's we've gotten for Forgotten Realms. The Tiamat modules are about summoning a GOD to the Realms who's going to lay waste to vast swaths of the Realms if successful. Out of the Abyss summons Demon Princes into the Realms, destroys vast swaths of the Underdark, and, if the PC's fail, this carries huge consequences for the setting as a whole.
I concur with your sentiment here. The differences between the two settings are much subtler which makes for a more challenging sell. It doesn't help matters any when a number of "classic Greyhawk adventures" have been ported over to 5e in the most recent adventures collection. Furthermore, selling the generic distinction between Forgotten Realms as "Epic High Fantasy" and Greyhawk as "Sword & Sorcery" only puts Greyhawk into an additional pickle: it's not alone in that niche. Dark Sun, for example, is unquestionably Sword & Sorcery, albeit of the post-apocalyptic fantasy flavoring. It has evil sorcerer-kings, hostile cities surrounded by deadly environments, corruption, moral ambiguity, selfish heroes, and almost all the hallmarks of the S&S genre. Then we also already have Primeval Thule. It is not D&D official, but it is a prominent 3pp setting adapted to 5e that also occupies the Sword & Sorcery niche, and one that evokes the more familiar Conan-esque Sword & Sorcery niche. It may be unfortunate, but since people are not really reading Leiber (and much of that era's S&S), it will likely be more difficult to appeal to Leiber as a clear aesthetic.I have to say something very controversial, but I do say it as an old-timer with much love for both Faerun and Oerth:
Greyhawk really isn't that different from FR.
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Much as I'd like to see Greyhawk goodness, and find out if Iuz still has his nation, or see a mega-adventure dealing with the mystery of the Invoked Devastation and Rain of Colorless Fire, it doesn't scream "drastically different fantasy" from Forgotten Realms to me.
Eberron has this too, though. A cleric gets its power from its faith. The gods might no even be real, and their servants don't have to be of the same alignment and so on.A good example of how you can make a change towards S&S fiction in D&D is from Primeval Thule. In Thule, clerics gain access to their magic by training through the clergy, but, after they gain the ability to cast spells, the gods have nothing to do with them. They're essentially just another kind of wizard with better PR and generally more organization. That, right there, helps with moral ambiguity. That cleric of Pelor might very well be a chaotic evil cultist who's using his position to sacrifice souls to Demogorgon all the while still having access to everything a Pelorite cleric can do. :evil grin:
aldarc said:Yeah, but it's not as if Greyhawk doesn't have its share of that, such as the potential return of Tharizdun in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.
Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?540556-Mike-Mearls-on-Settings/page3#ixzz4eDqcfu2F
So? What is the difference between Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms in the feel of the game?