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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CruelSummerLord" data-source="post: 4474741" data-attributes="member: 48692">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.</blockquote>

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