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

[Chaosmancer]

On the recommendations, while I appreciate the effort. I just started a near million word web novel, I have books languishing that I have had downloaded on my kindle months ago, an entire website that I am both writing on and reading, while following at least three evolving stories, and there are at least 30 I mean to check out. And I've got two fantasy series I plan on rereading in full once I get the new novels that are finally coming out.

I have enough books to read to last me until I die.

I don't want to add more. Especially not right now while I'm trying to get my life balanced out again. That is part of why the "anger" at me trying to have this conversation without having read the "proper" books got under my skin so much. I'm not in a place to add yet more books to my list, but that doesn't feel like that should exclude me from the conversation.

My father read a lot of fantasy, mostly from this Sword & Sorcery era. He was quite the nerd. Incidentally, I don't think that my father read any of the stuff that your father read. (Kinda thankful that he avoided Piers Anthony.)

Really? Why?

It has been years and years since I read the stuff (Mostly before high school) so I might have missed something, but I always kind of liked it.

Total honesty here, you have lost me here. Like, I get that DBZ had this ludicrous trope about constantly training and enemies being stronger and over 9000 and so on, but I don't really understand much of the rest. Or who "Deku" is (looks like maybe the main character from My Hero Academica?). I feel like the "huh" reaction that even a nerd who is relatively familiar with some of the sources here is kind of illustrating my point.

Fair enough. I kind of just went with it.

At it's most basic. The Big Three tried to copy Dragonball, especially with bigger and bigger enemies (over 9000) and transforming to get new powers just to fight them.

In my Hero, the main character instead trains to understand the power he has, so the enemies don't need to escalate as much, because he is never actually getting "stronger" just more skillful.


But, yeah, I never wanted to say it was easy to explain stuff without context. Just possible.

 

[TwoSix]

On the recommendations, while I appreciate the effort. I just started a near million word web novel,

Which one, out of curiosity?

 

[Azzy]

Really then, the only race you have to account for in the PHB is dragonborn, and you can make them immigrants from another place "beyond the map". No nations or major settlements, but you find small clans living in isolated areas or mixed into metropolitan areas like the Free City.

There are just so many different ways to include Dragonborn that, to me, it's a complete non-issue. Unlike what some people think, you don't need to plop down a new empire of Dragonborn (but you can if you like the idea). You can make them immigrants, like you said, or have them from fairly remote areas within the Flanaess (like the Crystalmist or Hellfurnace mountains, the Vast Swamp, Land of Black Ice, the Dry Steppes, etc.), or have them just be previously misidentified as lizardfolk by the largely ignorant masses, have them as interlopers from an alternate prime material plane, revert to the 3e blessed by Bahamut (like Moonsong suggested), etc.

I just incorporated the 5e PHB into Greyhawk and nothing broke. Imagine that.

Really? I DM and played in three campaign in GH using 5e as-is and, like you, nothing broke. Weird, huh?

 

[Azzy]

Again, what's the hook? What is unique about Greyhawk? Eberron is a noir and pulp fantasy campaign setting in which magic has been harnessed to fuel an industrial revolution. Theros is a campaign setting inspired by Greek Mythology where larger than life heroes dedicate their exploits to a pantheon of meddling Gods. In one sentence, what is Greyhawk?

It’s a nice attempt, but this sounds an awful lot like standard Dungeons & Dragons, right? Is there anything more? Anything unique?

That's the thing, though. 1e AD&D was so interspersed with Greyhawk (even before the folio's publication) from spell names, to magic items and artifacts, modules, and basic assumptions. Also, when Greyhawk was published, it assumed the use of the AD&D rules as standard. So, in effect Greyhawk is standard D&D and standard D&D is Greyhawk. I think that's why it's hard to express what is decidedly "unique" about GH when the setting assumed the "default" D&D playstyle and new (A)D&D releases were always assumed to have a place in GH (unless expressed otherwise—like those expressly for a different setting). Yes, there are definitely tonal differences (much of which was expressed in Godog's post that included the "What Puts the Grey into the Hawk?" article), but otherwise Greyhawk is just D&D.

 

[Azzy]

WG8 Fate of Istus was the 1e to 2e Realm Shaking Event that killed off Assassins, Illusionists, and Monks. It introduced a plot by the Goddess of Fate involving the Red Death plague and hero involvement to reshape the world to 2e and kill off 1e classes not supported as classes in 2e. Not quite the FR Time of Troubles, but at least it did not introduce Ao.

Fortunately, I never encountered WG8 until well after the fact. The Time of Troubles put me off to the Forgotten Realms for being so hamfisted about justifying and reflecting the 1e to 2e mechanical changes with setting lore. Fate of Istus would likely have done the same to me for Greyhawk. I have cribbed the module for its information on Rauxes, though.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Which one, out of curiosity?

The Wandering Inn by Pirateaba. I'm techinically re-reading it. I prefer to read entire arcs and I stopped after Arc 5 and let it linger for a bit. But I was checking the site, saw they had gotten a comic published and remembered how much I frickin love the world and the characters.

The Wandering Inn

A tale of a girl, an inn, and a world full of levels.

wanderinginn.com

Some of the earlier chapters are a bit... hmm, it is clear the writer was still figuring some things out, while other things are solidly in there from the beginning. But, it literally just gets better and more epic the more it goes, has some fascinating lore and characters, and has almost inspired me to make new DnD races just because they are fantasy races that are so unique and fascinating, like the Stitch People and the Selphid.

I recommend it as highly as anything written and published in the main stream by Butcher and Sanderson.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'd disagree but counter with the idea that a thesis is at the start of every great scientific advancement.

If you give me enough money and scientists I am confident I can prove that elevator pitches are responsible for like 60-70% of why Hollywood movies suck. The rest mostly being tax avoidance schemes, merchandising, and the Oscars.

I don't want to add more. Especially not right now while I'm trying to get my life balanced out again. That is part of why the "anger" at me trying to have this conversation without having read the "proper" books got under my skin so much. I'm not in a place to add yet more books to my list, but that doesn't feel like that should exclude me from the conversation.

Life is full of choices. You've chosen to read certain things, including re-reading books you've already read. You've chosen not to read other things, even though you could read easily enough S&S to gain a solid understanding of the genre in a tiny fraction of the time it would take you to read the "million-word web novel".

This is on you. You chose to exclude yourself from the conversation. It's actually quite a bad problem that you think you can legitimately involve yourself in the conversation without making even the very slightest effort to gain context. You see this a lot - an ignorant person enters a complex conversation, whether it's about Swords and Sorcery, or Trans rights, or thermodynamics, or whatever, and instead of spending the amount of time it would take to get some sort of grounding in that, which is typically a not-huge amount of time, they just want to butt into the conversation and start making ill-informed proclaimations, and when they're told they're ill-informed, they get all upset, and demand that everyone else spoonfeed them the information, and start making ridiculous comments like the one you did earlier, when you claimed that unless you could explain something in very simple terms, it obviously had nothing going for it (yeah alright Jeffrey Katzenberg...).

In short, you have no right to complain because you, by your own choices, have decided to read a bunch of stuff, and not this stuff.

If don't watch One Piece, I don't expect to be capable of having a conversation about something that's basically derivative from One Piece. But you expect to be able to talk about a genre you've systematically avoided having the slightest inkling about, which does not seem reasonable.

I recommend it as highly as anything written and published in the main stream by Butcher and Sanderson.

Talk about damning with faint praise! Two narrow-range authors, neither of whom can write a convincing character between them. Sanderson's only really great talent is making systems of magic/superpowers that are extremely internally consistent. Also I'm not sure which is worse, Butcher's weird combination of sleaze and moralizing (which somehow never seems as "hard-boiled" as I think he thinks it is), or Sanderson's puritanism (in a metaphorical sense) combined with continually walking to the edge of having a character do something risky, and then having them not do it (with that one beautiful exception in Stormlight 2, but even that he backpedaled on frantically in the next novel).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I recall you mentioning some of the better Robert E. Howard Conan stories. Maybe 1-3 of the best ones worth reading? Plus any other essential Sword and Sorcery books?

I’m not the biggest Conan fan- most of my knowledge of him comes from a few short stories, the movies, and the comics. There’s a couple of short stories where Conan drifts into Mythos territory as well, kind of like in Conan the Destroyer.

But Doug McCrae nailed it with Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories. Even though they’re higher magic than Howard’s Conan stuff, they’re still pretty gritty.

A goodly number of the short stories in the Thieves’ World series are solid sword & sorcery tales as well.

Most of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle of short stories and novels are in the genre as well. Most people know the main Elric stuff, but Corum and Hawkmoon qualify as well.

L. Sprague deCamp’s Pusadian stories are kind of like the Conan stories in feel, but set in a world a LOT more like our real-world past...and with fewer of the issues that look awkward to modern eyes.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Is Cugel Sword and Sorcery? Or way too high magic?

Vance’s stuff is a big influence on D&D, without a doubt. I mean some of the game’s iconic items are lifted from it by name,

The Dying Earth series a bit fusiony for S&S purists, I’d imagine, but it feels right to me.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Another: Terry Brooks’ Shannara stories obviously share a lot of feel and pacing with JRRT’s LotR. But the prequel series to Shannara are the Word & the Void novels-

Spoiler: Major setting plot point

set in present day Illinois

- are very much written in a Sword & sorcery style.