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'.

 

[Zeromaru X]

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

Incomplete is a relative term. The Nentir Vale has a main campaign hub fully described (Fallcrest), and a description of the surrounding terrain with just enough information to know about these locations while leaving room for full creative freedom.

It may be a small setting, but it is still a complete campaign setting. So, yeah, Perkins was wrong in this video. But given their disregard of 4e since they started 5e, it doesn't surprises me anymore.

 

[Azzy]

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.

Well, most of those settings didn't have some or all of these species until they did. Greyhawk should be no different.

 

[Zeromaru X]

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.

Well, Perkins said that Greyhawk is home to "all the monsters of the Monster Manual", and "all the magic items of the Dungeon Master's Guide", but curiously didn't mention anything about all the playable species of the Player's Handbook...

But perhaps I'm just reading too much into this and allowing my experiences with old school DMs of Greyhawk empower my paranoia... Perhaps...

 

[Remathilis]

You dump your bard corpses? I thought they were supposed to be nailed up to discourage the others.

Do you want ghost bards? Because that's how you get ghost bards!

 

[Parmandur]

Incomplete is a relative term. The Nentir Vale has a main campaign hub fully described (Fallcrest), and a description of the surrounding terrain with just enough information to know about these locations while leaving room for full creative freedom.

It may be a small setting, but it is still a complete campaign setting. So, yeah, Perkins was wrong in this video. But given their disregard of 4e since they started 5e, it doesn't surprises me anymore.

It is a complete area...but it is a tiny sliver of what is being presented here, both in scope and detail. It is completely fair to say that this is the first DMG to have the equivalent of a full Campaign Setting product included.

 

[MGibster]

I find it helpful to just wander around, saying things like, "I wish someone would sing some heroic tales," or "I'm really bad at rhyming, if only someone could help me!"

How do you differentiate between a simple musican and a bard?

 

[Azzy]

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!

There's a lot (relatively speaking—not FR kind of a lot, lol) of fan-made goodies for Greyhawk. There's the Canonfire! website and The Great Library of Greyhawk (a GH wiki), as well as several other sites that I can't think of (the Canonfire site should be able to point you in the direction of other resources). There's also Anna Meyer's excellent map (it was well-researched and shows the locations of cites from different products as well as the location of the GH modules).

 

[MGibster]

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.

I'm interested in this as well. While I like canon, I'm not one of those people who needs to have 100% canon adherence at all time, so I'm all for adding additional species to keep up with the times.

As a general rule, I tend to allow almost all species in my D&D game save for those that fly and Thri-Kreen. I'm leaning towards some species being somewhat unique. I don't mind having a PC playing a tiefling, but there's not going to be a lot of other tieflings in the area.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

How do you differentiate between a simple musican and a bard?

When it comes to ridding us of the scourge of bards, it is better to be over inclusive.

If some minstrels, musicians, skalds, and even poets are sacrificed for the greater good, so be it. Nerull can sort 'em out!

 

[MGibster]

When it comes to ridding us of the scourge of bards, it is better to be over inclusive.

If some minstrels, musicians, skalds, and even poets are sacrificed for the greater good, so be it. Nerull can sort 'em out!

I once had an NPC engage the players in a rap battle since guild rules prohibited out and out combat among its members. One of the players wasn't a member of the guild and simply zapped the rapper with a lightning spell.

This Greyhawk setting is the first thing that's gotten me excited about D&D in a long, long time. Okay, since the release of Curse of Strahd in 2016. Has it really been eight years since I've been looking forward to something D&D related?

I think I'm going to run a campaign set in Greyhawk and run some classic adventures I've never actually played. I've never played Expedition to Barrier Peaks and that's going to change.