D&D 5E Greyhawk: Pitching the Reboot

[UngainlyTitan]

The thing that the original post brought to my mind is a great big sprawling wargame like Empires in Arms, or Crusader Kings or maybe something using Britannia mechanics not D&D.
When one thinks of D&D in GW grognards bang on about grimdark, low magic and sword and sorcery. When it comes to swords and sorcery I think that D&D just does not do it. Too much power and magic and too much power escalation over the characters career.
As for D&D grimdark, Dark Sun does it better. Though I am personally fed up to the back teeth with grimdark.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I'll add, Lord of the Rings is pretty low-magic too! The only spellcaster on the side of the good guys in the key battles is Gandalf!

I'd say that Greyhawk is high magic, but narrow magic. There are many high-powered characters around, but they don't tend to get involved much, unlike FR (high magic), and even low-level magic is inaccessible to most people, unlike Eberron (wide magic).

And in the 5e Adventures in Middle-Earth setting, which sold well, Cubicle 7 completely redesigned the classes and stripped them of spell-casting ability (including the lore master). There are no wizards, no sorcerers, no clerics, etc (notwithstanding Istari and rare NPCs/monsters with spell-casting ability). I haven't actually played the system so can't assess the final outcome (i.e., how well it works in practice). And while I'm not suggesting that WotC totally strip magic from Greyhawk player classes, they certainly have design space to create a lower magic alternative to the default game.

The issue is that Greyhawk has been a D&D setting for long enough that the assorted high-level characters in the setting are known to be 20th level wizards etc. Messing with the classes is hard to do in a setting that defined some of them.

Sticking to a lower-level, slower-advancement game might be a better fit, as might limiting the level of spells available for a game (encouraging multiclassed, or fractional casters). - But that is something that you can do fine in other games as well. It works just fine in Eberron for example.

 

[Dioltach]

Perhaps WotC would be better off releasing a generic "here's how to do low-magic D&D" book. Then they could market it as, "Play D&D in settings like Greyhawk, but also GoT, the Witcher, the First Law, the Broken Empire and Grimm's Fairytales."

 

[Coroc]

I gotta say man, I think approximately 0-10 D&D players are interested in a setting like this. Grimdark pre-war? For D&D? Are you even slightly serious?

Grimdark is already like, targeting an old people audience, frankly, grogs and aging edgelords. D&D is absolutely terrible at grimdark. There's no reason to engage with the politics of any of the Greyhawk nations as they're all pretty lame. This is a recipe for selling like hundreds of copies instead of thousands, let alone tens of thousands or millions. It would probably sell worse like this than catering to the ancient fans, even, though I admit not a huge amount worse.

I strongly agree with your general suggestions, but the world you outline doesn't seem one likely to attract players now, in 2021. In 2003 or something? Sure.


In D&D? I don't buy it. I don't buy that that audience really plays TT RPGs, or if they do, wants D&D to be like that. And D&D is extremely bad at that because of the Vancian magic system. The idea that you can have "grounded low-magic" when people are daily summoning magic animals and shooting fireballs and so on at level 5 is pretty silly imho.


But that's not what D&D is about or like, even slightly. D&D is inherently high-magic, and the only way around it would be to literally cut every single full-caster class from a setting, at which point, it's not really D&D.

As for Greyhawk, I think the only way it comes back and actually sells any copies if it's a modernized gonzo dungeon-crawl fantasy setting leading with strong visual design, an appealing suggestion for how campaigns there should basically work, and one that differentiates it from other "generic fantasy" games, and where the strong villains are used to provide adversaries for adventuring, not fodder for politics.

You got some strong points there and i do not disagree with you on that it is difficult to do low magic with D&D especially with 5e and also on your view on economics of such a product. But on one thing i disagree namely in my pov Greyhawk is more vanilla than even FR. FR has some feats not every vanilla setting has hich Greyhawk has not. Maybe it is your definition of a vanilla setting which is different than mine, maybe this is worth an own thread.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Perhaps WotC would be better off releasing a generic "here's how to do low-magic D&D" book. Then they could market it as, "Play D&D in settings like Greyhawk, but also GoT, the Witcher, the First Law, the Broken Empire and Grimm's Fairytales."

The difficulty with doing low magic, grimdark or mostly-humans is in the 5e rules, not the setting. 5e is designed around the idea that the player characters are action movie heroes. If you want to get away from that you need to change the rules. Which is why it's can't be Greyhawk. Greyhawk is a core rules setting. A 5e Greyhawk would be a bunch of mismatched alien superheroes kicking bad-guy ass, because that is what 5e core rules is.

If you want to do a setting like that in 5e, is has to be a non-core rules setting. So not Greyhawk. Not Dark Sun. Something NEW.

 

[Quartz]

I think we've done this before. Anyway, I would take the conceit of Pluffet Smedger and make it real. The year is now 800-odd CY. Lands have consolidated and changed. Iuz has become a full god and left Oerth but his legacy remains. Perhaps his lands are ruled by the lich-queen High Priestess Halga. This would allow for a significant reworking of the setting while retaining everything that was.

Just to continue this, advancing a couple of hundred years allows for the presence of tieflings in the former Lands of Iuz and Aerdy / Ahlissa. You can also have dragonborn who have crossed from the other side of the Sea of Dust or have come up from Zindia.

Something else: in 'present-day' Greyhawk, why is Iuz allied with Zuggtmoy? Well, perhaps it's because of the orcs. You see, orcs are her creation, being fungus creatures (a la WH40K) or human / fungus hybrids.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Just to continue this, advancing a couple of hundred years allows for the presence of tieflings in the former Lands of Iuz and Aerdy / Ahlissa. You can also have dragonborn who have crossed from the other side of the Sea of Dust or have come up from Zindia.

Something else: in 'present-day' Greyhawk, why is Iuz allied with Zuggtmoy? Well, perhaps it's because of the orcs. You see, orcs are her creation, being fungus creatures (a la WH40K) or human / fungus hybrids.

games workshop would sue that idea within 4 four minutes of finding out about it, you would need a different direction for the orcs.

 

[Minigiant]

I'd say that Greyhawk is high magic, but narrow magic. There are many high-powered characters around, but they don't tend to get involved much, unlike FR (high magic), and even low-level magic is inaccessible to most people, unlike Eberron (wide magic).

Back in another thread of Snarf Zagyg, I stated that Greyhawk isn't low magic. Because to me, there are 3 magic aspects to magic level:

Power
Frequency
Versatility

Greyhawk is a high magic power high magic versatility setting. Spellcasters are strong and can do a lot with magic. What they arent is common. Greyhawk is low magic frequency. Proper spellcasters are spread out and far between, clustered in adventurering parties, mentor's homes, or bases of organizations.

That to me is the real draw on Greyhawk's magic. The magic is out there but it takes work to find and it is often unfair or unwise to search for. There are few organizations and societies fostering systems of constant magic user production anymore. That's why most "adventurers" find a single first treasure hoard, stow their single +1 item, and retire. Getting past the first few levels without going the petty politics of a dozen grumbling nations is deadly. Getting magic involves too make eyes or risk. But the magic is out there if you want to take the gamble. Most don't, so you don't see the magic.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

<shrug> If all metrics are bulls**t, we're down to trusting our own gut feelings. I trust mine more than yours, no offense.


I'm not an advocate for the GoT themed politics or "Fantasy WWI" either. (Nothing says sexy like trench warfare and mustard gas.) I just think the argument that rebooting Greyhawk as a pastiche of '10s and '20s darker fantasy isn't commercially viable is a weak one.

I didn't say all metrics are naughty word. On the contrary, they're highly variable to the degree of naughty word. But the metric used there, "Demand", is TOTAL naughty word, as I illustrated with my point that it suggested a TV show that is:

A) Not on in the UK.

and

B) Not even being bought by a network or due to be on later in the UK.

Is the most popular TV show in the UK. That's like maximum possible naughty word. It was the same metric that put AOT as the most popular show in the US for a single week. My comment re: walking away was due to me wanting to work in advertising/marketing/market research when I was young and stupid, doing an internship at then-very-modern company who did that in the UK, and just seeing the naughty word up close. An awful lot of these kind of naughty word metrics have come and gone over the years.

I'm not an advocate for the GoT themed politics or "Fantasy WWI" either. (Nothing says sexy like trench warfare and mustard gas.) I just think the argument that rebooting Greyhawk as a pastiche of '10s and '20s darker fantasy isn't commercially viable is a weak one.

I think we're kind of arguing at cross-purposes (shocking right?).

When I say gonzo, I assume dark, not light. Hunter S. Thompson, not The Dragon Prince or whatever. But it's not grimdark, which tends to be that the whole world is naughty word and there's nothing that can be done and it's nation-level forces and crushing evil and so on, which is what appeared to being proposed.

So dark I can get behind, but I just don't think relentless darkness is a good fit for GH or D&D in general, nor something that sells in 2021 (much as it might have in 1995 or whenever).

The other issue is "low magic". I don't think D&D handles that well at all, and whilst you can go with "the PCs are special", it tends to work against darker fantasy because it can make the PCs seem like superheroes even more than D&D usually does.

 

[teitan]

Pick an area and work from there.
I suspect many might use the Village of Hommlet and work up to the Temple of Elemental Evil.
Are there any other games that stick out as far as Greyhawk are concerned?
Except for Blackmoor perhaps?

Against the Giants, Vault of the Drow, White Plume, Barrier Peaks, Tomb of Horrors spring to mind just off the top. It’s iconic D&D.