D&D General Greyhawk setting material

[MockingBird]

Just want to thank everyone who contributed and gave suggestions and tips in this thread. My plan after we tie up Tomb of Annihilation is to run a Greyhawk campaign with GoS and TotYP. I plan on picking up Yawning Portal today. The Greyhawk box set is great and I'm really impressed with all the tables in book 2. Very detailed weather generation haha. Guess I'll save Curse of Strahd for after my Greyhawk campaign. I'm interested to see how my group likes the smaller adventures compared to the level sprawling adventure paths. If anyone is running the 2 books (GoS and TotYP) together I'd be interested in how it's going and how you approached it.

 

[David Howery]

Dragon Magazine Annual #1 featured a map of the rest of western Oerik and a very high-level description of each nation

yes, I remember that... and being not all that impressed with it. All the interesting stuff was scattered hither and yonder all over the world. I had drawn (and redrawn and redrawn) my own world maps of Oerth, and kept things a lot tighter...

 

[grodog]

yes, I remember that... and being not all that impressed with it. All the interesting stuff was scattered hither and yonder all over the world. I had drawn (and redrawn and redrawn) my own world maps of Oerth, and kept things a lot tighter...

Agreed completely, David. This may be a bit more to your liking---Joe Bloch just posted a new expanded continental map for Oerik based on the Greyhawk folio map: Lands Beyond the Flanaess – Greyhawk Grognard

Allan.

 

[Carmen Sbordone]

Was hoping DM's Guild would have the box set in a POD format. May try to find a decent used hard copy. If all else fails I'll buy the PDF

Drivethru publishing should have a print on demand version

 

[Azzy]

Agreed completely, David. This may be a bit more to your liking---Joe Bloch just posted a new expanded continental map for Oerik based on the Greyhawk folio map: Lands Beyond the Flanaess – Greyhawk Grognard

Allan.

I've been meaning to do the same thing, but kept putting it off. I like his approach and will likely adopt it for my Greyhawk campaigns. Thanks for sharing that.

 

[Hussar]

Actually, as a side note, the fact that Greyhawk is never really detailed beyond Greyhawk itself is a plus AFAIC. All these arguments about "Oh, there's no X in Greyhawk" don't really hold a lot of water when 90% of the world is undefined.

Plus, I LOVE the fact that Greyhawk isn't actually all that big. Couple of thousand miles square (as in about 2500 miles north south and about the same east to west). It's a HELL of a lot smaller than Forgotten Realms (Greyhawk fits within the Sword Coast, just about) and most of the countries are not that big.

The compactness of the setting lends itself better, IMO, to roving campaigns. Instead of these massive areas which are largely the same (how many cultures are really in the Sword Coast?) it's more like Europe where you are constantly bumping into completely different cultures all the time, within reasonably short travel distances.

 

[MockingBird]

Actually, as a side note, the fact that Greyhawk is never really detailed beyond Greyhawk itself is a plus AFAIC. All these arguments about "Oh, there's no X in Greyhawk" don't really hold a lot of water when 90% of the world is undefined.

Plus, I LOVE the fact that Greyhawk isn't actually all that big. Couple of thousand miles square (as in about 2500 miles north south and about the same east to west). It's a HELL of a lot smaller than Forgotten Realms (Greyhawk fits within the Sword Coast, just about) and most of the countries are not that big.

The compactness of the setting lends itself better, IMO, to roving campaigns. Instead of these massive areas which are largely the same (how many cultures are really in the Sword Coast?) it's more like Europe where you are constantly bumping into completely different cultures all the time, within reasonably short travel distances.

As far as I know the culture on the sword coast doesn't really differentiate until you get Amn. I could be wrong but that's how I always saw it.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I remmember the fate of the world of GH was the reboot or apocalypse by Gygax because now it wasn't his work.

I guess we could add two canon Oerth, one of the them would be the post-apocalypse version of 2nd Ed, fighting against visitors from the demiplane of the dread (Ravenloft), and some cults of the elemental evil. The second Oerth would be like a reboot/retcon with "new" regions: Zihindia, Prestoria, Celestial Imperium, Minyeo, Wunan or the Pearl Empire. Even we could add "planegates" to travel to Jakandor island or Io's blood islands (Councyl of Wyrms). We could create stories about the conflict between the nostalgia vs innovation, about to sacrifice the novelty to keep the past.

* The RPGs consist in two parts, the crunch ("equipment" for gameplay) and the fluff (lore or background). WotC sells a lot of crunch and a little piece of fluff. Today to get fluff is too easy, only with read wikis about videogames, movie sagas, teleseries or books. We don't need money to get fluff. For the return of GH we would a really good reason to try sell us more crunch with some pieces of fluff.

* Today GH and Dragonlance are too "frozen", while FR is dinamic and with enough space for secondary characters who haven't to save the world. A "frozen" D&D world is nice to be visited, but the PCs can't "touch the furnitures", but in FR the players can "handle" all the stage. But a dynamic world also means the risk of a "jump the shark" effect, a change any players don't like.

* The "twin worlds" of Oerth could be used as spin-off and points of origin of new ideas.

Yarth is perfect for a style of "sword & sorcery", with martial adepts (crusader, sworsage and warblade).

Aerth + Phaere can be perfect to create something like the D&D version of 7th Sea + Mage: the sorcerer crusade. Contrast between low magic level from Aerth and the high fantasy from Phaere, its feywild-like parallel earth. Here the incarnum could be so important as psionic in Dark Sun.

Uerth can be like a softer version of Ravenloft, with some pieces steampunk technology and maybe place for "weird westerns". The D&D version of "League of extraordinary getlenmen". A place to playtest gunpowder as primitive tribes.

* In the last Gygax' novel of Gord the rogue, "Dance of Demons" his version of Oerth was destroyed. I guess this means we have the right to justify our own reboot or retcon of the "Graysphere", the crystal sphere of Grayhawk world.

 

[darjr]

For those that want a Greyhawk version.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I am thinking... if the famous vampire Stran von Zarovich is from Barovia... what if the original Barovia in the material plane is in the planet Uerth? We could create a campaign about a second grand conjuction in the demiplane of dread, and lots of refugees arriving from the demiplane, with some "spoiled apples" among them. And with lots of supernatural factions (vampire clans, werebeast tribes, mage guilds, fey courts)..

* I don't want a "jump the shark" like the 5th age of Dragonlance, but if they are not changes in the metaplot of the D&D worlds, these will become "souvenir snow globes".