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

[TheSword]

Besides the lack of ongoing support, one of the reasons that I think Greyhawk suffers in comparison to other campaign settings is the lack of support in other media to expand and add meat to the bones of the basic supplements and modules. Key to this is novels and computer games.

Greyhawk has three dozen novels by a range of authors and a single computer game of dubious quality.

Compare this to over 300 Forgotten Realms novels, and dozens of computer games, many of which were award winning. We don’t spend all our time playing the tabletop game and computer roleplaying games and novels fill the gaps. Dragonlance while no longer supported still had hundreds of novels.

Other settings have similar or fewer volumes of novels but are more niche/unique and therefore more distinctive (most had at least one quality crpg though, some had several). Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright, Ravenloft by their unique nature and longer term published support have a much stronger IP.

This comment may not be very popular on this thread but I think it goes someway to explain why most people are only vaguely aware of Greyhawk in the few Easter eggs and references that have survived in the core rule spells, gods and magic items. Even when they have played the game for 30 years like me.

Im not sure much can be done to fix this either!

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Besides the lack of ongoing support, one of the reasons that I think Greyhawk suffers in comparison to other campaign settings is the lack of support in other media to expand and add meat to the bones of the basic supplements and modules. Key to this is novels and computer games.

Greyhawk has three dozen novels by a range of authors and a single computer game of dubious quality.

Compare this to over 300 Forgotten Realms novels, and dozens of computer games, many of which were award winning. We don’t spend all our time playing the tabletop game and computer roleplaying games and novels fill the gaps. Dragonlance while no longer supported still had hundreds of novels.

Other settings have similar or fewer volumes of novels but are more niche/unique and therefore more distinctive (most had at least one quality crpg though, some had several). Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright, Ravenloft by their unique nature and longer term published support have a much stronger IP.

This comment may not be very popular on this thread but I think it goes someway to explain why most people are only vaguely aware of Greyhawk in the few Easter eggs and references that have survived in the core rule spells, gods and magic items. Even when they have played the game for 30 years like me.

Im not sure much can be done to fix this either!

don’t apologize for being truthful.

it doesn’t change much for me. I still like the deities and political players and tone of Greyhawk much better than the realms. I actively dislike the realms and can’t help it.

but this does not change the facts of what has been supported, expanded and ‘chosen’ by the powers that be.

I actually found the gray boxes set of the realms intriguing. But it was also bare bones and big and mysterious. Of all the irony, that is why my buddy bought it in high school—-because it seemed big and sparse! Open without PCs tripping over heroes who rescue the world!

The fact that there are SO MANY organizations that know so much about everything makes the realms seem small and lacking in mystery. But that matter little.

WOTC went with it and filled it (ad nauseam for me) but it is all most players will ever know.

the beauty of D&D worlds is that they can be changed or created. I say pick up some 1AD&D materials and roll with it.

Use our new classes and monsters where it seems appropriate. Wing it! I think sadly it’s all we are gonna get...

 

[grodog]

Are any of the Greyhawk wikis out there faithful to the Folio or the 1983 Box Set?

Most-current GH wiki is the one on GreyhawkOnline at Greyhawk Wiki

Allan.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Most-current GH wiki is the one on GreyhawkOnline at Greyhawk Wiki

Put this up-

D&D General - What if God was One of Us? Divinity in Early D&D & Greyhawk

Some days, you feel like the Count in Sesame Street. Five! Five Greyhawk-adjacent threads! Muahahahahahahahaha! I was asked very nicely in another thread to post about the mythos of Greyhawk. Which is a fascinating topic that deserves a lot of interest! But in my opinion, the most...

www.enworld.org

May want to critique any parts I missed.

 

[grodog]

OK, I'm done catching up. I was going to do some distilling---"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” (Inigo Montoya)---but I realized over the course of the past 14+ pages of additional discussion that I’m not really qualified to hold a strong opinion here.

I think that you raise excellent points @Chaosmancer . Greyhawk should be able to stand on its own merits. We should be able to craft a solid elevator pitch for it. But perhaps, without an understanding and appreciation for its context*, Greyhawk really can't stand on its own merits any longer. It's worth considering.

That is, I realized that I really don’t know enough about 5e to understand what will make Greyhawk viable in 5e gameplay. I’ve been basing my assumption that “Greyhawk would be great for 5e” on the fact that Greyhawk is cool (of course! ), but whether Greyhawk can be cool for play in 5e is a more-directly relevant reiteration of the Q that Snarf Zagyg initially raised. I haven’t ever played 5e, and I’ve only barely scraped-by helping my 12-yo son Henry create a 5e PC for a game with a teacher and some friends earlier in the year---we eventually gave up doing so by hand using the 5e “basic set” (ha!) and PHB, and resorted to an online generator (a process I loathed, FWIW; but that's a rant for another day).

So, all of my engagement in this thread has been coming from the POV that Greyhawk is great on its own merits, but that’s missing the entire second half of the equation. The 5e half. The perhaps more-important half, for this discussion.

* I'm already up way too late, and will reply with more on why/how that context may (or may not?) still be relevant, along with my version of the elevator pitch, after I catch up on more reading in the thread.

Given all of that preamble, I can’t “sum up” Greyhawk in a 5e-relevant manner. I can talk to what makes Greyhawk great from the POV of its history, it’s characteristics as a setting, etc. ad nauseum, but I can’t do so in a way that will be grounded in 5e mechanics or what 5e has done/not done with other settings, save for the little I’ve gleaned from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes and Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which are the only two 5e books I own.

So, I think I’ll extract myself from the thread for the moment, and perhaps try to fold my half-formed responses into a still-draft blog post, “A Novitiate's Introduction to the World of Greyhawk” and see where that gets me.

Allan.

 

[pemerton]

Greyhawk is much closer to us, 0 level humans. The heroes are not superheroes. Gods do not walk on it's soil.

Iuz and Lolth are both gods who walk (or have walked) on the soil of GH. And Zagyg trapped twelve gods in Castle Greyhawk. And heroes of GH - eg Murlynd, Kelanen, Heward - have become quasi-deities.

The rule of Furyondy is a paladin of double-digit levels; the rluler of Veluna is a comparably powerful cleric.; you can hardly throw a cobblestone in the city of Greyhawke without hitting a thief or assassin of considerable expertise and influence.

 

[pemerton]

The 1983 boxed set has lots of clear-cut Good and Evil.

The "metaphysical" aspects of much of this evil - ie it is not just personal or political venality but corruption that manifests as demon summoning, human sacrifice, etc - and the corresponding religious/providential tone of much of the good - especially the clerics and paladins and their gods - sit at odds with the ostensible S&S tone of GH.

That's not to say that there is no S&S in GH, but it's not a pure or even predominantly S&S setting. Which makes sense, because D&D - with its clerics and paladins and lower and upper planes, and it's Tolkienesque Dwarves and Elves and Orcs - is not purely or even predominantly S&S in its tropes.

S&S doesn't have to be amoral - REH's Conan is a killer but not an amoral one - but it tends to emphasis the protagonists as the source of, and imposer of, value. There is room in S&S for demons and human-sacrificing anti-clerics; but not for paladins or divine providence or the notion of diabolical powers hoping to corrupt humanity. In this sense at least S&S is irreligious. Whereas GH is not irreligious on the whole.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There is room in S&S for demons

And the demons in Conan aren't like demons in Christianity. They're not trying to thwart God's plan. They're more like sentient sharks, I think, in the sense that they're alien and hostile, but not part of a spiritual struggle.

EDIT: I missed the bit where you said "but not... the notion of diabolical powers hoping to corrupt humanity" so I'm afraid I basically just repeated part of what you said back to you!

 

[Aldarc]

Again, Greyhawk feels more like a setting sprung from a medieval miniatures than S&S. Doesn’t even the Greyhawk Box Set begin with “here are the heraldic symbols of the various kingdoms”?

 

[Doug McCrae]

Again, Greyhawk feels more like a setting sprung from a medieval miniatures than S&S. Doesn’t even the Greyhawk Box Set begin with “here are the heraldic symbols of the various kingdoms”?

And the cover says 'Arthurian knights' rather than 'Conan'.