D&D General For the Love of Greyhawk: Why People Still Fight to Preserve Greyhawk

[Helldritch]

Actually . . .

WG8 Fate of Istus was the 1e to 2e Realm Shaking Event that killed off Assassins, Illusionists, and Monks. It introduced a plot by the Goddess of Fate involving the Red Death plague and hero involvement to reshape the world to 2e and kill off 1e classes not supported as classes in 2e. Not quite the FR Time of Troubles, but at least it did not introduce Ao.

Later you had the Greyhawk Wars which did not get rid of any race, class, or monster but did shake the realms of Greyhawk significantly and remake the world into the Dark Fantasy version of Greyhawk that was From the Ashes until the later WotC era soft reboot to the earlier baseline with rebuilding the broken Circle of Eight in Return of the Eight and the recovered Crook of Rao artifact banishing Iuz's FTA demon hordes as seen in the setting books Greyhawk Players Guide and The Adventure Begins.

2e to 3e had Die Vecna Die which started in Greyhawk with Iuz then involved Vecna failing to reshape the multiverse from Sigil to make him an overgod and only reshaping things for Greyhawk to be the default 3e setting with Vecna going from WotC 2e era demigod to full on core pantheon god. 3e barely touched Greyhawk directly (especially compared to the Forgotten Realms) but it did give a 32 page Gazetteer I would assume is similar to the original folio (I did not get the 3e one) and a pretty in-depth 200 page Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.

Snarf missed a lot of fun stuff in rage quitting after WG7 Castle Greyhawk.

(He did manage to avoid things like WG9 Gargoyle, WG10 Child's Play, and WG11 Puppets so there is a bright side)

I have all of those and then some more. I really liked Returm to the tomb of horror and the planar forteress of Acererak. Vecna lives was one of the most shocking adventure my players did at the time. Yessss! we get to play the circle! The disbelief on their face... I should've filmed this. It was well worth all the dice I got thrown at me....

The Patriots of Ulek was a good adventure but needed a bit of work to be great. Though I did run the other adventures, my players were not in the moods and I quickly changed a lot of things in the adventures to suit them more. So, yeah, they were not that great.

The box set of the City of Greyhawk was great. The cardboard mini adventures were very fun and the one evening approach was a novelty at the time (introduced in Ruins of Under Mountain, if I remember correctly.) and this is an approach I srill use today when players are between two adventure but need a bit more experience to raise in levels for the next adventure. They bring a nice change of pace.

I wish 4ed had produced some good Greyhawk books....

 

[Urriak Uruk]

What I find amusing about this post, is that this is exactly how I would describe Eberron.

The War was paused, not ended. Political, religious and racial tensions are still high. A single spark could ignite everything.

Most of the magic in the setting is low-level. There is a chance you've seen battle magic, but the dead being returned to life is something spoken about, not something you would expect to happen. Powerful NPCs include a figure head child priestess, a Tree, and a court of spirits bound to their isle. No one can go and do anything about the majority of events in the setting.

There are differences. Eberron feels more connected, the organizations feel more powerful and organized, but everything you said here, can apply there.




I was just wondering about that.

Like, I'm 9 pages in the thread and the best we have is "more political and the PCs work for money, not the good of the world" along with some "grittier and less magic" being tossed around.

But, none of that sounds like something I can't do in another setting.

Since I've been deep diving Eberron, let me just reference it again. Q'Barra or the Demon Wastes are a great place for a gritty, desperate struggle against threats like disease, injury, and "low level" monsters on the frontiers. Poltical? Eberron is defined by the politics of the Houses, the Five Nations, the various religions and even mercenary bands which tend to have political ties.

And in a setting with Mega-corp proxies, working for profit and glory is more common than being a good person.


Not that I don't think Eberron is very very different from Greyhawk but... Greyhawk doesn't seem to lend itself to these sort of elements any more than any other setting. Sure, FR has the NPC problem if you run it "canonically" but you don't have to ever introduce those characters. So, it circles back to me. What about Greyhawk as a setting is the hook?

I could have a player come up to me and say "I want to play a game that focuses on the Psychic Oppression of the Riedran people and how it might be possible to fight an enemy that controls the minds of an Empire." or "I want to play a game that focuses on the Reconstruction of Neverwinter, after it was destroyed by yet another cataclysm, and how the forces of the Thayans are trying to infiltrate while the city is weakened"

But, I don't know anything about Greyhawk. They have an evil empire run by a half demon... that is interesting, but I don't know anything more about that land than that. Is he just sitting in his castle waiting for us?

There is a council of powerful wizards? Okay, get in line behind every setting ever.

What is actually a hook for the setting? What am I exploring? Why should I care about [insert name here]?




A very interesting post, but I find myself... not quite seeing the difference in most of these.

Like, 1, 2 and 3 are just running a player focused campaign that cares about the Lore. I mean "Greyhawk has a history that informs the setting" is about as generic a statement as I think you can make.

4, 5 and 6 really kind of confuse me. There is a vast variety of evil in Greyhawk, but nowhere else? Villains have no backstory in other settings? That doesn't seem to be the case as far as I can ever tell. Again, I've been deep diving Eberron recently, but the Dreaming Dark, The Lords of Dust, The Daelkyr, Lady Illmarrow, The Daughters of Sora Kell? All of them have deep backstories tied into the history of the setting, and are threats that have arisen and been beaten back time and time again, shaping the history of the world.

7... Seven is the weirdest claim that I often see. Especially since (and I know this wasn't your post, but an old repost of someone else) but they talk about militant neutrality, and how they prevent good or evil from winning.... and then list all the times they stopped evil.

I never hear about the time Mordenkainen destroyed the church of Pelor. Or some other time when these "keep the balance" people attacked the forces of Good. And often, when I see the argument that "good" can't be allowed to win, it is because good becomes tyrannical and evil when it wins... which means it was never good.

Now, I will agree that FR is certainly a world where good is more prevalent than neutral or evil. The Good Guys are definetly winning in FR, but is "the fight between good and evil is more evenly matched" really have enough appeal to make a full setting stand up on?

And 8.. is a good point, but I think that doesn't really apply to the setting unless there are rules for customizing your own spells. Which would immediately be taken up by every setting because that is a thing everyone would want to do. Greyhawk just had the luck to be the first setting, so it got to name some of the iconic spells.


So, in all, I think that was a very good post, but I think my confusion is clear on why it leaves me scratching my head. None of that is really unique. Unless the history is so compelling to be able to stand on its own.





Honestly... I wonder if part of it is that people just assume that everyone knows the plot points of Greyhawk.

Like, people keep saying "The Scarlet Brotherhood" like they are a big deal, but I literally have no idea who that is. The history of Greyhawk is supposedly incredibly important to running it... but I have no idea what that history is.

I can name nearly a dozen cities and countries for FR, but for Greyhawk I only know that there is the Free City of Greyhawk... and I have no idea why it is called the Free City. Is it in the middle of that Evil Empire of Iuz? What makes the city of Greyhawk special enough that I'd want to go there?

I totally agree that when you aren't aware of much of Greyhawk's history, it is a hard setting to nail down what it's theme actually is.

I think when you imagine each campaign setting, it's always a good idea to reference a different, more popular fantasy property (whether or not it is released after or before) as a reference point. Dragonlance is an epic fantasy tale of a major war (or series of wars), much like Lord of the Rings or the Wheel of Time. Forgotten Realms is a cosmopolitan fantasy world with some clearly differentiated forces of good and evil (MMO World of Warcraft, or Ivalice Final Fantasy). Dark Sun is a post apocalyptic fantasy wasteland, where city-states compete for resources across a desert (John Carter of Mars).

Greyhawk most reminds me of two properties, at least in style: Moorcock's novels, and Conan the Barbarian. I'm going to use Conan as the reference as I have a better memory of that property and can better explain the similarities.

Conan of Cimmeria is an odd hero... in that he's barely a hero. He travels from adventure to adventure, fighting monsters and evil wizards, but his motivations are less than noble. Usually, he is fighting simply for survival, to take control of a kingdom, or just treasure. He behaves much like the PCs that Gygax and his original players made, who weren't particularly good-aligned, and instead were delving in dungeons for treasure, not to save a princess.
Our hero is the hero not because he's good, but because his enemies are worse. Much like Greyhawk, this is a world that requires an uncompromising and hard hero who is willing to stand up to the slavers of the Sea Princes, or the Hordes of Iuz.
The world of Hyperborea also matches Greyhawk in that it is a world in decline. Atlantis has fallen under the sea, and this is a new age with less of the previous splendor.
The common peasant will see little if any magic in their life, and treats it as a sign of demons. A smart move, since most practitioners of magic are indeed evil.

Of course, Conan is far more of a Bronze Age story than Greyhawk, which is more European medieval inspired. But tonally, I find Conan matches extremely well.

That's my explanation at least, I'm curious if people feel if I'm completely off my rocks.

 

[MoonSong]

Ok, after reading through all of this, I want to add my take on it. However I need to sleep first, so let me add one thing I want to say:
To all people who want to remove Dragonborn from Greyhawk, let me tell you that they in fact originated in Greyhawk (in third edition). Unlike 4th edition+ Dragonborn, The original dragonborn are in fact called Dragonborn of Bahamut. They don't breed true, instead they are people who Bahamut favors and transformed into his image. They already have a place in Greyhawk, unlike the ones in FR that started popping out because dimensional shenanigans.

 

[MNblockhead]

Wow, I just read 11 pages of this discussion. Personally, I think I would be happiest with Goodman Games giving it the "1e reincarnated" treatment. Publish the folio and boxed set ('83) in their original forms, a 5e update, and some historical essays and artwork in a large hard cover.

 

[Coroc]

Actually . . .

WG8 Fate of Istus was the 1e to 2e Realm Shaking Event that killed off Assassins, Illusionists, and Monks. It introduced a plot by the Goddess of Fate involving the Red Death plague and hero involvement to reshape the world to 2e and kill off 1e classes not supported as classes in 2e. Not quite the FR Time of Troubles, but at least it did not introduce Ao.

...

Wow I did not know that one, can you please elaborate a bit more on that ? Especially, did the plague target Assassins, Illusionists, and Monks specifically? Was the sundering / spellplague /times of trouble like stuff already a thing back then when they wentfrom 1e to 2e?
It is so odd that I never heard about this.

And since in 2e there were the wizard schools one of them being the illusionist school (only school allowed for gnomes) how did they reconstruct that one into the pseudo uberplot?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I totally agree that when you aren't aware of much of Greyhawk's history, it is a hard setting to nail down what it's theme actually is.

I think when you imagine each campaign setting, it's always a good idea to reference a different, more popular fantasy property (whether or not it is released after or before) as a reference point. Dragonlance is an epic fantasy tale of a major war (or series of wars), much like Lord of the Rings or the Wheel of Time. Forgotten Realms is a cosmopolitan fantasy world with some clearly differentiated forces of good and evil (MMO World of Warcraft, or Ivalice Final Fantasy). Dark Sun is a post apocalyptic fantasy wasteland, where city-states compete for resources across a desert (John Carter of Mars).

Greyhawk most reminds me of two properties, at least in style: Moorcock's novels, and Conan the Barbarian. I'm going to use Conan as the reference as I have a better memory of that property and can better explain the similarities.

Thank you for the time and effort, and I will be looking to your explanation, but I have an immediate problem.

I have never read Moorcock or Conan either. So, you are comparing a thing I don't know except through references to a thing I don't know except through references.

Which might explain the problem, to a degree (I have also never read Song of Fire and Ice, or watched Game of Thrones, so going to that explanation would also not help make it any more clear.)

Conan of Cimmeria is an odd hero... in that he's barely a hero. He travels from adventure to adventure, fighting monsters and evil wizards, but his motivations are less than noble. Usually, he is fighting simply for survival, to take control of a kingdom, or just treasure. He behaves much like the PCs that Gygax and his original players made, who weren't particularly good-aligned, and instead were delving in dungeons for treasure, not to save a princess.

Our hero is the hero not because he's good, but because his enemies are worse. Much like Greyhawk, this is a world that requires an uncompromising and hard hero who is willing to stand up to the slavers of the Sea Princes, or the Hordes of Iuz.

The world of Hyperborea also matches Greyhawk in that it is a world in decline. Atlantis has fallen under the sea, and this is a new age with less of the previous splendor.

The common peasant will see little if any magic in their life, and treats it as a sign of demons. A smart move, since most practitioners of magic are indeed evil.

Of course, Conan is far more of a Bronze Age story than Greyhawk, which is more European medieval inspired. But tonally, I find Conan matches extremely well.

That's my explanation at least, I'm curious if people feel if I'm completely off my rocks.

And this gets me to the second problem I seem to have. Much like @Helldritch talking about making the setting gritty and other such things, what you have described is a style of play.

FR is a setting in decline too. The greatest ages of magic are behind them. Gritty anti-heroes adventuring for profit and not for the good of the world? In all the FR games that I have been in (because I have a DM or two who use the realms since the APs are set there and the maps are easy to find) that's exactly what people did (I am too much of a goody-twoshoes, but I tried)

You could trivially set an adventure in (pulls up map, picks random point) The Border Kingdoms near the Shaar Desolation, and have a gritty survival game where you are the hard, uncompromising hero who is a better alternative than the evils he fights.


So... what gives? What makes Greyhawk as a setting something I'd want to run six different styles of campaign in, if the only hooks are "well you can run this one style of campaign really good, because it matches the history of the world"?


And to state again, I find FR boring as crap. It has a few interesting ideas, but nothing in FR really strikes me as highly compelling either. Though I think that is in part because it is so frickin big, and every game I've ever been in focused on one of two cities (Neverwinter or Waterdeep) and we never went more than a week's travel into generic dungeon beyond that. But, all people seem to be able to say to advocate Greyhawk above FR is that you can run a gritty game where people aren't heroes.... and I can do that in FR, or Eberron, or Wildemount, or Ravinca. So the hook really reads to me as "You can run the game you can run in any setting, but this one is Greyhawk"


And, I suspect that people are going to say you can't really run a gritty game in a setting like Eberron or Ravinca, because there is too much magic. But, in my experience, there are always plenty of sections on the edges of the maps that are harsher than the centers. Sure, House Jorasco has Healing Houses that can cast cure wounds.... but like all hospitals, they exist where the customers are, and maybe out in the border between Breland and Droaam, there is no profit and Jorasco healing is only available if you make a week long trip to a major city.

And, the advantage of a setting like that, is that you can run both games in the same setting. Shifting from a border town in the middle of nowhere to a major metropolis with vast resources lets you play both styles of game, without having to switch settings. Something you can't do if the resources simply never existed in the world. And sure, we could talk about how "X high level spell means you can trivially travel to take advantage of those resources" but you can't really have a properly gritty game when people can just teleport wherever they want anyways, and a lack of magical resources means that your PCs are suddenly scarier than anything else in the world, because nothing else has access to the capabilities the party does.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

E. Ain't Nothin' Gonna Break-a my Stride, Nobody Gonna Slow me Down

So what is to be done with Greyhawk? I think there are two simple, easy-to-understand, wrong solutions to the problem:
1. Ignore the haters and publish whatever you want; they are just going to whine and die off anyway.
2. Don't bother with Greyhawk; it's not worth it.

The reason neither of these is really suitable is because ignoring the people that are truly passionate about a product is probably not a good way to succeed (after all, even old people can evangelize) while ignoring the ur-setting of D&D in 5e (motto- "We will bring all ur nostalgia to u while also cultivating the twitch peoples") seems like a poor choice.

Your whole piece was fascinating and illuminating, and made complete sense. But then it feels like you totally fall down here. Why is it a "poor choice"? You seem to think ignoring it is self-evidently bad, but is it?

Re: nostalgia, I mean, for who? How many people are actually nostalgic for GH? To judge by the internet, not many. And when a setting peaked 37 years ago, we're talking about people who, if they aren't 50+, will be very soon.

Pretty sure the Twitch crowd and the vast majority of people under 45 (which is to say, virtually all D&D players, according to WotC's own surveys) don't give a hoot about GH, and certainly don't feel nostalgia for something they never experienced and that as you've illustrated, they don't even understand.

The answer, as always, is this- find someone who loves "Old Greyhawk" (WOG) and is also a good designer. And let them make a great product. There is a lot of innate hostility towards new Greyhawk products because, to be honest, there is a long history of them sucking (from the perspective of the Old Guard), with an added dash of the most ill-conceived, worst-ever product (WG7) in the TSR era rubbishing Greyhawk.

Who would this please though? A tiny number of ultra-grogs? Your well-presented and convincing argument suggests that even a large section of that community would object to this, because it would inevitably imperfectly align with the 128-page 1983 boxed set. Because that contained largely vague, malleable information, and more GH material will inevitably pin it down.

It seems like the winning move here is not to play, given the thing people love is beloved partly because it's so vague and undetailed.

But, speaking for myself, I would love to see an "updated Greyhawk" that accentuates the differences in the setting (as compared to other settings) and really emphasizes the swords & sorcery, adventurers for money (not heroic quests) aspects of Greyhawk.

I'd love to see that, and I think from a financial perspective, that would be bound to be vastly more successful than any "let's please the ultra-grogs" take on GH. You don't really need to update DS or PS (SJ you do a bit), in fact DS is arguably more relevant now than when released (and PS fits in well with the modern aesthetics and approaches, once more - it didn't in, say, 2004). But anything that's going to be successful is going to enrage the ultra-grogs you've written so eloquently and convincingly about. I now understand the defensiveness re: GH, but really the only move that can ever truly satisfy the people who love the 1983 version (short of some kind of necromancy involving ol' Gary) is to leave it at that. But the only move that would be a financial success would be to update and modernize GH.

 

[Orius]

I've been saying it for years: Greyhawk fans are their own worst enemies.

Here's one of the primary central problems with Greyhawk. The vocal fans complain that the setting isn't supported, but when stuff gets published, they don't like it. They don't want setting development, but if something gets published which has nothing new, there's always the group that'll complain that they already have all that stuff. It's bad business for WotC and it's self-defeating for the fanbase.

Grodog said it fairly well earlier:

Tone in Greyhawk is, I think, something that does vary quite a bit from group to group based on what adventure is currently being played, and perhaps also from edition to edition. But when I hear folks comment that Greyhawk is low magic or that spell casters are rare, that does not align at all with my vision for Greyhawk. To me, Greyhawk is a setting where gods and demons walk the earth, where artifacts and relics are at play on the fields of battle, where the landscape of the plane was shattered by human-made magical catastrophes multiple times over, and where high-level casters are available to resurrect and restore fallen PCs.

My Greyhawk perhaps draws more heavily on Michael Moorcock and Philip Jose Farmer for inspiration that other folks' view of the setting, but I still also love "medieval" feel of Thieves World-meets-Lankhmar sense of the setting too. But I'll never give up that "world on the brink of catastrophe" potential that the high-magic backdrop of history in Greyhawk provides.

The fans like their individual versions of Greyhawk, but they're all different. Even in this thread, the biggest Greyhawk fans have different ideas of what makes the setting so good. How can WotC please all of them at once while appealing to new fans?

I don't blame the fans completely, there was a lot of permanent damage to the brand that was done in the late 1e and early 2e days that it may never really recover from. I don't believe there was a concerted effort to destroy Greyhawk after Gary's departure, but the setting was poorly handled. Even then, some of the setting's problems have been there from the start. This is how the whole situation looks to me from everything I've read over the last maybe 20 years:

First problem is that Gary didn't realize the demand for a commercial game setting. I don't blame him though, he was coming in from his wargaming background and there were alot of DIY approaches there. He assumed referees would just construct their own settings. But even early on, D&D attracted a lot of sci-fi/fantasy fans, much more than Gary had anticipated, and they did things he didn't expect.

After JG proved that a commercial setting was indeed viable, Gary put out the original Greyhawk folio, and it later got updated to the box. But things were changing at TSR. Gary had his power struggles with the Blumes, while narrative RPG elements were starting to come into vogue. From what I've read, there were more than one group of creative teams at TSR at the time, one group was headed by Gary or at least shared his gaming approaches, while another started getting into the story driven elements which would soon produce Dragonlance. Gary I think may have developed more of Greyhawk, but he found himself forced out of the company, and after he left, the people who worked with him and were familiar with Greyhawk left with him. So TSR didn't have designers who had a good feel for the setting. And because a lot of the early modules were nominally set in Greyhawk, I think TSR saw it as a dumping ground for anything generic, regardless of quality, and a lot of poor quality junk got dumped there.

The nadir here was the infamous WG7. I'm inclined to agree with Shannon Applecline's background on the module on the DMs Guild. Not necessarily an attack on Gary, but definitely a combination of several bad ideas. First, Gary had published a few modules that started as demiplanes connected to Castle Greyhawk and inspired by Alice in Wonderland and King Kong. So one of the usual "geniuses" in TSR management might have thought it would be a good idea to set the whole dungeon up with silly pop culture references. Then at the time TSR was on an adventure anthology kick, so they made WG7 another anthology instead of being a cohesive whole. Then to top things off, they outsourced a good deal of it to freelancers, and I suspect at least some of them hadn't done much if any gaming with Gary, and of course didn't know how the actual dungeon was supposed to feel. That probably didn't make any difference anyway, since they were probably told to come up with some kind of silly/humorous dungeon level when they got the freelance assignment. It's not surprising the end product was a mess. Possibly there were people in TSR's management who wanted to harm Gary's reputation, but TSR at the time seemed to be focused on milking IP cash cows, and the management had a consistent pattern of stupidity.

Then we get to the Greyhawk Wars, probably an attempt to spark fresh interest in the setting. Unfortunately, the Wars themselves had a canon outcome, and was probably an attempt to bring some metaplot to the setting. And the canon result might not have worked well at all for Greyhawk campaigns that had been running for years so that only further angered the fanbase. So after all these problems, there was a portion of the fanbase that was completely alienated, but other fans were willing to accept later material like From the Ashes or WotC's attempt to revive the setting.

Then of course, some of the guys who want to reset Greyhawk to 1983 also want to reset the game to 1e which is just completely unrealistic. It might be more realistic to reset to 1983 while using 5e, but there might be some tonal problems in using a setting designed for 1e with 5e given the rule changes over the intervening years. And that has the problem of annoying players who liked the post Greyhawk Wars setting. Perhaps WotC could take an approach that shows what the world was like before the Wars occured, then present the post Wars would as one possible outcome while suggesting other possible outcomes. From what I've read, the Wars were something of a logical outcome for the world as originally presented, but the canon outcome wasn't necessarily the likely one.

So for me the bottom line is that Gary didn't develop the setting very strongly, letting DMs do what they want with it, and when he left TSR, all the creative direction left as well. And TSR damaged the setting through very poor handling. The Realms I think ended up being the default setting because Ed had put much more detail into it, and TSR had more to really build on.

As for the whole Greyhawk vs Realms arguments, I think they're silly. Both settings are pretty standard D&D, and have a lot of surface similarities. It's easy to borrow things from one setting and use them in the other. Now I can usually tell the differences between the two myself, but for a newer player, those differences aren't all that obvious. I agree with the views here that Greyhawk needs something to give it a hook to make it distinct from the Realms. I think the setting lends itself better to PCs building armies and establishing domains to rule, but that might be a gameplay style that's become passe or unpopular.

 

[Voadam]

Wow I did not know that one, can you please elaborate a bit more on that ? Especially, did the plague target Assassins, Illusionists, and Monks specifically? Was the sundering / spellplague /times of trouble like stuff already a thing back then when they wentfrom 1e to 2e?
It is so odd that I never heard about this.

And since in 2e there were the wizard schools one of them being the illusionist school (only school allowed for gnomes) how did they reconstruct that one into the pseudo uberplot?

The Drivethru entry for WG8 has a pretty good description and commentary.

It was an adventure anthology going from 1st level to high level, each one being a secret test by Istus for one of the 1e classes loosely tied together by the plague across the world. Each one set in a different area with some in-depth description of the area such as Rookroost in the Bandit Kingdoms and Rauxes in the Great Kingdom. I remember running the low level fighter test one where the party is kidnapped by Hextorites for an underground gladiator bloodsport fight club and thinking at the time it played out decently and was fun, I can't remember if I modified it though. Xaene the crazy two-headed lich former advisor of Overking Ivid was a pretty cool bad guy to read about for the high level Rauxes one also.

Overall the test part and time of troubles aspect was not that great, it was a better adventure anthology and serial sourcebook IMO. Istus hides her part in it too well to be impactful for the players (multiple fake ID patrons) and the big reveal at the end seems like it would not be that great and feel like more of a retcon just to say she had been there all along. The Red Death I vaguely remember would have something to do with classes where the test was failed, but it has been decades and I did not run through the whole thing, also it is almost never mentioned in later products. I do not remember how gnome illusionists were handled. I had forgotten about the banishing monks to Kara Tur angle they worked out until re-reading the linked description, but thinking back I vaguely remember not liking it at the time. I felt FR with the death of the gods of murder and illusions and the change of magic goddesses was a better conceptual transfer for the 1e to 2e transition.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Having read this thread, I am now convinced that, though there are ways to shape Greyhawk into a distinctive campaign setting for 5e, one that would bring something unique to the table, in doing so, the product would probably not get the support of Greyhawk fans. While some people here have tried to find a niche for Greyhawk, a hook, something that would immediately make it distinct from all the other settings and would make gaming groups want to play in there, others have resisted any effort to pigeonhole GH or to reshape it into something that younger players and DMs could like. That sounds pretty pointless, and it seems to me that there is simply no way to bring back the setting successfully.

From my perspective, as the OP and a major contributor to this thread, that is not accurate.

First, there is no such thing as a monolithic "Greyhawk fans" group. I have tried very hard to make sure that I keep writing that I do not speak for all, or most, Greyhawk fans, but I simply offer my perspective. There have been others that have chimed in here, that I am familiar with from other places, that are amazing repositories of knowledge of all that is Greyhawk (such as @grodog and @Mortellan ). I don't think that we would all necessarily agree on every single thing, and that's okay! Moreover, there are people that are real fans of Greyhawk that came about solely because of some of the late-2e work (the From the Ashes timeline) or the 3e Mona work. Those are all fans of Greyhawk, and they have varying (and valuable) opinions.

Just like it would be clear error to say that "All Forgotten Realms fans" or "All players of B/X" would say something, or like something, or approve of something, it's the same here. Quite frankly, I am tired of this criticism, because of course people that are passionate about something offer opinions! Whenever the topic of a possible lore book for Forgotten Realms comes up, or any book, really, there are people that say that they want it certain things. And yet, I don't see people come into the Forgotten Realms lore threads, or Dark Sun threads, and make comments like, "Well, all you FR fans are the same, and you don't agree on the exact nature of the product, so it shouldn't be made."

And that brings me to the second point. There is a lot of really good and interesting discussion that is always fun. And yet, there are two particular strains of comments that seems to recur-

A. "The Dragonborn." I'm using this as a synecdoche for the larger issue, but for whatever reason, whenever Greyhawk comes up, there is a contingent of people that demands that it be a generic setting. I'm not sure why this is; but given that every new campaign setting release by WoTC has included at least some new mechanics and restrictions (of varying amounts, some little, some more), it is odd that some people who do not seem overly invested in having a Greyhawk released, nevertheless find the time to demand that a hypothetical product be nothing more than "generic D&D." Personally, I am indifferent to what new mechanics (backgrounds, races, classes, rules) are added, or what restrictions are put in, but I don't want or need a "generic" Greyhawk. The places, names, maps, etc. are already available.

B. "Thank you for explaining what you want. Now, let me tell you why you are wrong." One of the many frustrating things about an internet forum is that it rarely operates like a conversation; instead, it is almost always a debate. In other words- thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Except without the synthesis. And a side-effect of that is what is referred to as sea-lioning. So when you have fans of different settings (such as Eberron, or Forgotten Realms) continually demand that you keep explaining why you like a setting, and then tell you why that isn't sufficient, and then demand you explain it again, etc.- well, eventually you just ignore them. Because there are plenty of resources (here, elsewhere) to learn about Greyhawk if that's what they really want; if they just want to keep asserting that they don't see the need for the product, then time is better spent not engaging with them. On this matter, or any other.

In the end, an updated Greyhawk cannot and would not be about running it "old school" again with level caps, and an incredibly limited palette of races and classes, and dwarves and elves constantly bickering. If you want to do that, as I keep saying, get a retroclone, download the 1983 Folio, and use the excellent resources available on the web, including:

Greyhawkery

A gaming blog about the World of Greyhawk fantasy setting for all editions of Dungeons & Dragons formerly owned by TSR now by Wizards of the Coast.

greyhawkery.blogspot.com

Canonfire!

www.canonfire.com

But a new and vibrant campaign setting, that incorporated aspects of the old while paving the way for the new in a way that introduced new fans to the setting? That's something I would love. As I write, the thing that matters most is the quality of the end product. Take the best, and leave the rest.