Dungeons & Dragons May Not Come Back to Greyhawk After 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide

Wizards of the Coast does not appear to have future plans for the Greyhawk setting past the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Speaking at a press event earlier this month, Dungeons & Dragons game architect Chris Perkins explained that the inclusion of Greyhawk campaign setting material in the upcoming rulebook was meant to stand on its own. "Basically, we're saying 'Hey DMs, we're giving you Greyhawk as a foundation on which you can build your own setting stuff,'" Perkins said when asked about future Greyhawk setting material. "Whether we get back to Greyhawk or not in some capacity I cannot say, but that's our intention for now. This is the sandbox, it's Greyhawk. Go off and run Greyhawk or Greyhawk-like campaigns with this if you wish. We may not come to this version of Greyhawk for a while because we DMs to own it and play with it. This is not a campaign setting where I think we need to go in and start defining large sections of the world and adding more weight of content that DMs have to sit through in order to feel like they're running a proper Greyhawk campaign."

The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide includes a campaign setting gazetteer focused on the Greyhawk setting, one of D&D's earliest campaign settings. The use of Greyhawk is intended to be an example for DMs on how to build a full-fledged campaign setting, with an overview of major conflicts and places to explore within the world. New maps of both Oerth and the city of Greyhawk are also included in the rulebook.

However, while it seems like Wizards isn't committing to future Greyhawk campaign setting material, Perkins admitted that the fans still have a say in the matter. "We're not so immutable with our plans that if the fans rose up and said 'Give us something Greyhawk,' that we would say 'No, never,'" Perkins said. "That won't happen."

Perkins also teased the appearance of more campaign settings in the future. "We absolutely will be exploring new D&D worlds and that door is always open," Perkins said.

 

[Parmandur]

If WotC doesn't want the money from making Greyhawk products, the DM's Guild will certainly step it and take it.

WotC gets money from all DMsGuild sales.

 

[nyvinter]

Not to mention that the Greyhawk community fraction more and more for every additional Greyhawk publication after the original folio because it does not match up to their now 45-year old homebrew, I really don't see how they can do any anything else than what they're doing here.

Doing an introduction like this and opening up the DMsGuild for it is the win win scenario.

 

[Stormonu]

WotC gets money from all DMsGuild sales.

Ha! I'd forgotten that, honestly.

Maybe a decent influx would change their mind then

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Good for Greyhawk, stops them from monkeying with it too much and stuffing it up (5e has a bad track record)

 

[Charlaquin]

This is as it should be. From everything I’ve heard from Greyhawk fans, it sounds like the setting’s biggest strength is that it’s wide open for DMs to personalize to their liking. Setting a bunch of hardcover adventure paths there would only fill in the blanks and weaken that selling point. Give the basic overview in the DMG, open it up for content creators on the DMs Guild, maybe include sidebars in adventure anthology books about “here’s where you could put this adventure in Greyhawk” and otherwise leave it alone. I approve.

 

[Imaro]

And then it's promptly getting ignored again. In favor of the Realms. Again, as a new DM, eight year-old me would have wanted something more. And there's no way I would have just jumped into DMsGuild. I guess I would probably pick up the Realms book and wonder why I had read about Greyhawk at all.

If I had started the game older, I think I'd have a similar reaction and maybe get something more from DMsGuild but I'd wonder why the world used as an example in the DMG didn't become the default world.

Now me as, well, me, I have old Greyhawk materials from when they were new. I still wonder why we're going right back to the Realms. I guess it doesn't really matter because the next game I would run is set in the Realms anyway. It seems like some wasted pages.

I guess I'm thinking there must be a target for this, but I don't think it's going to effectively be new DMs or more experienced ones who aren't going to homebrew. I've no idea what percentages that's going to end up resonating with, but I suspect it won't be as much as if there was a clear path of support.

The funny thing is if they had put a mini-gazetteer in the DMG for the Forgotten Realms we'd be hearing outcries of how scummy WotC were for using the DMG camapign setting as an advertisement to get customers to buy the upcoming full campaign book. Eight year old me was pretty poor back in the day so I would have appreciated getting a camapign setting in the corebooks that I didn't have to buy anything more for. Heck, adult me thought it was one of the better done parts of the 4ed era with the Nentir Vale... though I wzasn't a fan of some of the chzanges to general D&D lore and cosmology they made.

 

[SteveC]

The funny thing is if they had put a mini-gazetteer in the DMG for the Forgotten Realms we'd be hearing outcries of how scummy WotC were for using the DMG camapign setting as an advertisement to get customers to buy the upcoming full campaign book. Eight year old me was pretty poor back in the day so I would have appreciated getting a camapign setting in the corebooks that I didn't have to buy anything more for.

Oh I think people are going to complain no matter what. I believe there's some law of the Internet that says that. I think WotC is wise to not create their own competing brands, but if you're going to create interest in Greyhawk, why not give fans something to chew on?

And I know with the new Realms book, I'm unlikely to get it as I have a ton of Realms materials already.

I have to laugh with you about being poor at 8, too. The only exception my parents made was for books, which I somehow convinced them that D&D books were. But yeah, college aged Steve would have appreciated a one-and-done approach.

 

[Hussar]

Isn’t this what pretty much every Greyhawk fan begged for?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Isn’t this what pretty much every Greyhawk fan begged for?

If you get three Greyhawk fans together, they will come up with four mutually contradictory sets of demands.

 

[mikeburke]

"We absolutely will be exploring new D&D worlds and that door is always open," Perkins said.

Hollow World confirmed.