D&D (2024) WotC Invites You To Explore the World of Greyhawk

This week a new D&D Dungeon Master's Guide preview video was released. This one features the sample setting chapter in the book, which showcases the World of Greyhawk.

One of the earliest campaign settings, and created by D&D co-founder Gary Gygax, Greyhawk dates back to the early 1970s in Gygax's home games, receiving a short official setting book in 1980. Gyeyhawk was selected as the example setting because it is able to hit all the key notes of D&D while being concise and short. The setting has been largely absent from D&D--aside from a few shorter adventures--since 2008. Some key points from the video--

• Greyhawk deliberately leaves a lot for the DM to fill in, with a 30-page chapter.
• Greyhawk created many of the tropes of D&D, and feels very 'straight down the fairway' D&D.
• This is the world where many iconic D&D magic items, NPCs, etc. came from--Mordenkainen, Bigby, Tasha, Otiluke and so on.
• The DMG starts with the City of Greyhawk and its surroundings in some detail, and gets more vague as you get farther away.
• The city is an example of a 'campaign hub'.
• The sample adventures in Chapter 4 of the DMG are set there or nearby.
• The map is an updated version, mainly faithful to the original with some tweaks.
• The map has some added locations key to D&D's history--such as White Plume Mountain, the Tomb of Horrors, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, Ghost Tower of Inverness.
• There's a map of the city, descriptions of places characters might visit--magic item shop, library, 3 taverns, temples, etc.
• The setting takes 'a few liberties while remaining faithful to the spirit of the setting'--it has been contemporized to make it resonate in all D&D campaigns with a balance of NPCs who showcase the diversity of D&D worlds.
• The backgrounds in the Player's Handbook map to locations in the city.
• Most areas in the setting have a name and brief description.
• They focus on three 'iconic' D&D/Greyhawk conflicts such as the Elemental Evil, a classic faceless adversary; Iuz the evil cambion demigod; and dragons.
• There's a list of gods, rulers, and 'big bads'.

 

[Parmandur]

Where?

To be specific, this is an Inn in the Free City from the new DMG:

 

[Zeromaru X]

Yep agree though my impression was that the lore was scattered all over the product line. That said, my main point was that as presented in the 4e DMG... it wasn't a complete setting as some people are claiming.

Well, again, yes and no. As just the Nentir Vale region, it's still a fully sandbox setting. You can play a whole lv. 1-20 campaign without ever leaving the vale.

However, AFAIK, they never considered the Nentir Vale a proper setting, just a place to plug into your pre-established campaign.

The photos were in one of the first post for this thread, including the Inn in Greyhawk.

Interesting. I'm going to watch the video.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

To be specific, this is an Inn in the Free City from the new DMG:

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I wonder how they will root Aasimar, Tieflings, Dragonborn, and Goliaths in Greyhawk, I mean unlike FR, Planescape, Eberron, Exandria, they don't really have a history/lore to them in Greyhawk.

 

[Imaro]

Well, again, yes and no. As just the Nentir Vale region, it's still a fully sandbox setting. You can play a whole lv. 1-20 campaign without ever leaving the vale.

But it's an incomplete campaign setting. As in the setting itself wasn't complete only a region of it was presented.

 

[Parmandur]

I wonder how they will root Aasimar, Tieflings, Dragonborn, and Goliaths in Greyhawk, I mean unlike FR, Planescape, Eberron, Exandria, they don't really have a history/lore to them in Greyhawk.

Greyhawk didn't root much of anything, beyond following the standard D&D. So I expect they will just...be there. Because they are in the PHB.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, again, yes and no. As just the Nentir Vale region, it's still a fully sandbox setting. You can play a whole lv. 1-20 campaign without ever leaving the vale.

The Nentire Vale is a ~18k square mile region that got 3 pages of description in the 4E DMG, plus 8 for the small town of Fallcrest.

The are coverd in 30 pages in this new DMG is ~6.5 million square miles, and covers just about every D&D trope a DM may want to explore.

It really isn't the same.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yes and no. It started as you said, a piece of land to plug into whatever place you wanted in your campaign. However, as 4th edition advanced, the Nentir Vale started to grown into its own setting, with its own lore and stuff (though, it shares a lot of places with Greyhawk and Mystara). The only thing is that this lore was never compiled into a single product.

Yes, and “Nentir Vale” is often used as a shorthand to refer to 4e’s default setting, what with the world axis and the Dawn War and all that. I’ve also heard it referred to as Nerath, or as PoLand (short for Points of Light Land)

 

[Charlaquin]

It is so heartening to see someone new getting into Greyhawk.

I hope that you and your group enjoy making the setting your own and playing there.

I’m most exited about the fact that all these classic dungeons like Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain and the like have defined canonical places on the map. In my experience of D&D, the classic modules have always kind of existed as isolated experiences, collected in adventure anthologies, but separated from any real place. I guess I knew that in theory they were all set in Greyhawk, but they never really felt grounded in the reality of an actual setting to me, they were just something that could be played as standalone dungeons. I remember shortly before it had been announced that Greyhawk was going to be in the 2024 DMG, I had mentioned to my partner “wouldn’t it be kind of cool to run a campaign where the Tomb of Horrors was just… there, on the map, as a place you could go?” as if that wasn’t exactly how it actually worked at one time. Then I saw it pointed out on the DMG version of the Greyhawk map and it kinda actualized the idea for me. These dungeons do all exist as places on the map, and the setting I was idly thinking about trying to run a sandbox campaign in already exists, and is going to be featured in a book, that I had been waiting to come out before starting a new campaign anyway!

 

[Parmandur]

I’m most exited about the fact that all these classic dungeons like Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain and the like have defined canonical places on the map. In my experience of D&D, the classic modules have always kind of existed as isolated experiences, collected in adventure anthologies, but separated from any real place. I guess I knew that in theory they were all set in Greyhawk, but they never really felt grounded in the reality of an actual setting to me, they were just something that could be played as standalone dungeons. I remember shortly before it had been announced that Greyhawk was going to be in the 2024 DMG, I had mentioned to my partner “wouldn’t it be kind of cool to run a campaign where the Tomb of Horrors was just… there, on the map, as a place you could go?” as if that wasn’t exactly how it actually worked at one time. Then I saw it pointed out on the DMG version of the Greyhawk map and it kinda actualized the idea for me. These dungeons all do all exist as places on the map, and the setting I was idly thinking about trying to run a sandbox campaign in already exists, and is going to be featured in a book, that I had been waiting to come out before starting a new campaign anyway!

Someone on Reddit made this a while back:

 

[dave2008]

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Boy really hating all the cutesy / fluffy art in this new edition!

If it is not clear - I AM BEING SARCASTIC!