D&D 4E Greyhawk 4e: Back to the Beginning...
- Thread starter Knightfall
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qstor
Adventurer
what I liked it too. I think it was well written and had months of material for a campaign.
Mike
Remathilis
Legend
Well, to be fair my DM a.) doctored the heck out of the plot and b.) didn't use it on Greyhawk, but I recall fondly the guerilla tactics used to wipe the Giants out.
OTOH: Return to Keep on the Borderlands was pure bantha poo-doo.
Klaus
First Post
The Greyhawk Wars were an attempt to turn Greyhawk into another FR: advancing the timeline and introducing changes to the setting that rendered your previous products useless, and advance the setting more and more with each new product.
There was a vast ammount of ground to cover on the Flanaess (let alone the rest of Oerik or even Oerth) that didn't require advancing the timeline.
CruelSummerLord
First Post
To elaborate on what Klaus stated in his post, From the Ashes was a massive, top-down change that radically altered the setting for the worse, and trashed many traits that fans had come to associate with the setting.
For one thing, Greyhawk had never really been "advanced" outside of the official modules published by TSR. The tendency that had developed was that these modules constituted the "metaplot", and that individual DMs and players played these modules out and incorporated the changes into their own individual campaigns as they saw fit. Gaming groups could use or ignore them as they pleased. Players had a chance to prevent certain catastrophic events from happening.
All that changed with From the Ashes, with its massive changes dictated from on high without any possibility of player influence. It all just happened, without any of the sort of player input that had been so popular in the past. This was seen by many fans as a break from the established Greyhawk tradition, and one they didn't like.
Second, many of the changes directly affected the spirit of the setting. Greyhawk was commonly seen as a "shades of grey" place, where good, neutral and evil peoples and powers intermixed, without one ever entirely gaining an advantage over the other. After From the Ashes, Iuz and the Scarlet Brotherhood had made tremendous gains, while many good-aligned countries (Nyrond, Geoff, Furyondy, Sterich, Bissel, the Shield Lands, etc.) either destroyed or gravely weakened. Instead of a rainbow of shades of grey, Greyhawk became much more starkly black and white.
Other, more subtle aspects were wrecked as well. The Twin Cataclysms aside, there was rarely any magic performed in Greyhawk on a massive scale...but now Iuz and the Great Kingdom summoned entire armies of fiends, which in itself required another massive magic ritual to get rid of them. The Scarlet Brotherhood, instead of being a secret Illuminati-like organization that sought to undermine its enemies through lies and deception, was now a brutal, aggressive power that quite openly enslaved any territory it claimed and ruled it in the name of the Scarlet Sign. Many fans of the Brotherhood hated the way it had changed, myself included.
Finally, so many perfectly good adventuring areas were trashed. The Great Kingdom was rife with dynastic intrigue and murderous Byzantine powergames...and now it was trashed. The pirates of the Hold of the Sea Princes were all enslaved by the Scarlet Brotherhood. The Flan lands of Tenh and Geoff were destroyed, and the Bandit Kingdoms all enslaved by Iuz. The evil Horned Society was wiped off the map, as were the frontier areas of the Wild Coast. The good-aligned southern nations of Idee and Onnwal were enslaved by the Brotherhood. If you ran campaigns in any of these countries, your group was pretty much screwed.
All this was done with little input from fans, it seems: Jeff Grubb came up with the idea of "blowing the setting up", from what I've heard.
Talented guys like Erik Mona and Gary Holian came along and salvaged what they could...but since then it just hasn't been the same.
That's what turned so many fans off-so many radical changes done by TSR's fiat, in an attempt to introduce an ongoing metaplot that most Greyhawk fans neither wanted or needed, as they were pretty content with a steady supply of modules that they could incorporate into their own campaigns as they saw fit.
Shroomy
Adventurer
The changes mentioned in the orignal post sound interesting and I'd definitely buy the sourcebooks (hell, with two books and an adventure, I plan on buying all of them), but I wouldn't put much credence in any of the information as of yet. Except that I do believe that the Great Wheel cosmology will go bye-bye in any future iteration, as I think it is well and truly dead.
Sounds like Realms 4E or DragonLance 4th Age.
I don't know. VampDA was, AFAIK, a game line set in the distant past using the same rules and some of the same source material. Marvel's Ultimate line is about scaling back the setting to its basics in order to re-explore it, but updated to modern sensibilities and hopefully avoid making the same mistakes as the last time (at least that's what they've done in Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, and Ultimate Fantastic Four - not so much with the Ultimates, perhaps).
Assuming that the OP has the right of it, the neoGH sounds closer to the Ultimates. A Vampire Dark Ages version would be more like setting it during the war between the Baklunish and the Suloise, or in the period leading up to that.
catsclaw227
First Post
I would be ALL for this Greyhawk. Mmmmm goodness and back to the beginning. 
This is a perfect setting to restart/reboot.
And to all those that cry out in anguish, your Greyhawk will not vaporize on the shelf. You can still play it with your ruleset, as you see fit. There's tons of material that's available.
This is a perfect setting to restart/reboot.
And to all those that cry out in anguish, your Greyhawk will not vaporize on the shelf. You can still play it with your ruleset, as you see fit. There's tons of material that's available.
CruelSummerLord
First Post
I myself am not familiar with the changes to either setting, but based on the complaints I've seen regarding 4E Realms, it sounds like an appropriate comparison.
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