D&D General Greyhawk: Snarf's Guide to Ready-Made Campaign Themes!

[Paul Farquhar]

Huh, I really like that description as RenFaire. So accurate once you read through. That same tone seemed common through some other early 2e-era Greyhawk like Castle Hart.

Greyhawk was always RenFare. In that it was always Hollywood fake medieval, rather than remotely realistic or grounded.

 

[Zeromaru X]

How so?

Allan.

Oh, I don't want to derail the topic again with something about the clash between new and old school D&D. Just suffice to say I find some choice of words quite telling. But, again, my opinion about this is highly colored by bad experiences, so I may be imagining things.

 

[MGibster]

There's an awful lot of information about the weather in the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set. Greyhawk's weather is fairly moderate on the whole. Not sure I need all these random tables to figure out whether it's sunny today or not.

 

[Azzy]

There's an awful lot of information about the weather in the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set. Greyhawk's weather is fairly moderate on the whole. Not sure I need all these random tables to figure out whether it's sunny today or not.

It's a convoluted mess, to be sure. I've never used it (but have used online weather generators before).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There's an awful lot of information about the weather in the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set. Greyhawk's weather is fairly moderate on the whole. Not sure I need all these random tables to figure out whether it's sunny today or not.

The kind of information someone feels is important is a highly individual thing, and at the time it was a completely new thing, so the author was just feeling his way. I expect the weather was largely what was familiar to him, when in doubt write what you know.

If you compare other early campaign settings, such as City State of the Invincible Overlord, the Runequest setting (I forget the name) or the Traveller 3rd Imperium, they each focus on very different things.

 

[Voadam]

There's an awful lot of information about the weather in the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set. Greyhawk's weather is fairly moderate on the whole. Not sure I need all these random tables to figure out whether it's sunny today or not.

Yeah, I always ignored that in actually running Greyhawk, though I think there are some interesting flavor entries about gods and such causing specific weird weather results.

Page 22 of the Glossography:

3. There is a 10% chance that any Special Weather Phenomenon has been caused by one of the following:
01-30 Elemental(s) or Giant(s)
31-60 Elemental(s) under NPC control
61-90 NPC or monster
91-98 Demons, devils, or creatures from the appropriate Elemental Plane
99 A deity or his/her servants
00 Two or more battling deities

There was a long Dragon article on Weather in Greyhawk written by David Axler in Dragon #68 (December '82) and Gygax mostly ran with it in expanding the folio to the boxed set.

 

[Turgenev]

I've used this website to determine weather for a month at a time. I don't always use the weather generated but it does come in handy now and then.

Scroll of Weather Forecasting: Weather Forecaster for Greyhawk World

Cheers,
Tim

 

[grodog]

Oh, I don't want to derail the topic again with something about the clash between new and old school D&D. Just suffice to say I find some choice of words quite telling. But, again, my opinion about this is highly colored by bad experiences, so I may be imagining things.

No worries! If you’d like to share any thoughts via email or PM, I am curious!

If there’s feedback that I can pass to the team to help on the language front, I’d be happy to do so—their intention is to be welcoming to players new to Greyhawk who are basically seeing it for the first time from the 5.5 DMG.

Allan.

 

[grodog]

There was a long Dragon article on Weather in Greyhawk written by David Axler in Dragon #68 (December '82) and Gygax mostly ran with it in expanding the folio to the boxed set.

Dave’s article was truncated when it appeared in the boxed set. Dragon 68 also included a cardstock 3-panel screen for using the weather tables/rules from the article.

I’ve not compared the screen to the 1983 box to see if the edits made the screen only useful with the original article’s full text or not. Hmmm…..

Allan.

 

[Voadam]

Dave’s article was truncated when it appeared in the boxed set. Dragon 68 also included a cardstock 3-panel screen for using the weather tables/rules from the article.

I’ve not compared the screen to the 1973 box to see if the edits made the screen only useful with the original article’s full text or not. Hmmm…..

Allan.

I pulled up the issue from my Dragon archive pdfs and it is a huge long article.

Way more in depth than I ever had an interest in. The multiple pages in the boxed set are more than I ever wanted to use in a game as well.

An impressive academic achievement though from the looks of it though.