how to describe "Greyhawk" to a new player?

[WizarDru]

... plus ridiculous names.

I mean really, "Verbobonc"? I can't even think it without mentally adding "banana-fana-fo-fonk".

Don't forget, that Verbobonc is home to the Gnarley Forest, dude. Mind you, it was called that before surfers co-opted that particular term. In a lot of cases, EGG's names come from real world sources, in-game jokes or friend's names (usually scrambled). I mean Verbobonc sound French, to me, for example. It certainly doesn't sound any odder to me than Faerun. There's a lot of similar names throughout Greyhawk. Though there are some pretty goofy names in Greyhawk, names like the Bone Marches makes up for it, IMHO.

My favorite complaint, though, was when one guy said that the name "Great Kingdom" was stupid and that no real country would call itself something like that. Then someone pointed out "Great Britain" and he bowed out of the conversation. =)

 

[Nifft]

Ergo, Greyhawk is MORE plausible than a setting with no wacky place names.

I'd argue it's more REALISTIC while at the same time being LESS plausible.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Set]

Greyhawk either benefits from or suffers from, depending on what you want in a setting, a lack of development over the last decade, and, IMO, has managed to remain less of a 'kitchen-sink' setting as a result. It ends up feeling more coherent, and yet also being more easily adapted to be 'your' setting. (I'm playing the Freeport Trilogy right now, with Freeport set in the South Olman isles, and much of the city set up around Sueloise influence, with Wee Jas, Lydia, Kord, Norebo, Osprem and Xerbo as the nameless gods of that series. I mention this on Greyhawk lists and I hear, 'cool!' On the WotC boards, suggesting making a tiny tweak to another popular settings leads to flames, nasty private messages, and the moderators being spammed with complaints that *you* have been causing problems!)

If you want samurai in your game, the Realms has absorbed the entire Kara-Tur setting, along with several other settings, such as Zakhara/Al-Qadim, and Maztica (which was actually designed as part of the Realms, so it wasn't 'absorbed' really). Almost anything you could want to play, you can find somewhere in the Realms.

With Greyhawk, it's a more coherent setting, with less stuff 'absorbed' over the years, and you might find yourself thinking less of 'how can I play a Samurai' and more 'how cool do those albino wolf-women from the Frost Barbarian reaches sound?' I find that drawing inside of lines channels creativity in ways that just playing whatever the heck I want, and expecting the setting to make room for me (as Spelljammer and Ravenloft where designed to do), does not. Dark Sun, even more than Greyhawk, is an example of a setting that very sharply constricts player choice to setting-specific race/class choices, and yet only promoted creativity (again, IMO) by making the players 'draw' their characters within the setting-specific 'lines.'

Still, not everyone wants any lines on the paper, and Greyhawk will not be the setting for them.


Number one point;
Greyhawk is the only D&D setting with a diety of *beer.* (Wenta, the Alewife)

 

[haakon1]

Good points so far, points of light, etc.

I'd say:
-- Greyhawk is open to DM interpretation. The DM is meant to take charge and make it his own.
-- Greyhawk is player character centric. Not in the sense that PC's are necessarily important personages or that the world hinges on them or even cares about them, but that there are no bosses and no gods to save you or order you around, just you and your friends on your own.
-- Greyhawk is adventure centric. It's all killer, no filler, as they say about good rock albums. That is, the fluff is limited, and mostly derived from/related to actual adventures.
-- Greyhawk is lived in. It's Gary's original setting. The "big" NPC's are really other people's retired PC's. To me, that's very cool -- a world shared with the game's creator and his friends. Long live Gary!

 

[billd91]

Number one point;
Greyhawk is the only D&D setting with a diety of *beer.* (Wenta, the Alewife)

'Nuff said!

 

[kenobi65]

Greyhawk is the only D&D setting with a diety of *beer.* (Wenta, the Alewife)

One of my regrets, with the impending end of Living Greyhawk, is that I never got around to playing a cleric of Wenta. (Blessed ale substituting for holy water? How excellent is *that*?)

 

[pawsplay]

Greyhawk is a classic swords-and-sorcery setting more than a modern fantasy one. It cleaves more closely to chivalric romance, Conan stories, and adventure stories such as the Prydain Chronicles and the Hobbit. It is less cosmopolitan, less urban, less egalitarian, less populated, and less prosperous (especially in terms of magic) than say the Forgotten Realms. It has more science-fictional, horror, and pseudohistorical elements than Mystara (the old Basic set implied setting). Bad things are always happening in Greyhawk, but you don't have the gods playing billiards with local constellations all the time and such, like you do in Dragonlance. It's similar to Eberron in being action-oriented and assuming somewhat morally flexible PCs, but dissimilar in that it maintains traditional swords-and-sorcery aesthetics, such as dank inns, armored knights, dirty peasants, dragons in mountain caves, etc.

If the Forgotten Realms is a novel from the 1990s, Greyhawk is more like a movie from the early 1980s.

 

[Desdichado]

I really have a hard time with the names, too.

I mean, I know that reality has a lot of dumb and/or boring names too (the Duchy of Geoff could actually exist, I suppose. Sadly.)

However, this is fantasy. It's not supposed to be realistic, it's supposed to be fantastic. Or at least interesting and cool.

Greyhawk's names really, really don't work for me.

 

[grodog]

More often than the place names being griped about in GH (which I've certainly heard a fair share of grumbling about!), most folks instead single out the Gygax pregen PCs and NPC names from the G and D series modules as the hallmarks of Gygaxian nomenclature madness, without knowing that in many cases those names have real-world Middle English meanings (see a DF thread on this topic @ http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6870&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15).

I don't mind the somewhat wacky (or very generic) names of different areas: just change 'em, or, give them local variants/alternates, or tweak the pronunciation so that they don't sound like real-world equivalents (I've always pronounced the Grand Duchy of Geoff as gee-uff, for example, ignoring the "Jeff" pronunciation).

 

[Voadam]

I don't mind the somewhat wacky (or very generic) names of different areas: just change 'em, or, give them local variants/alternates, or tweak the pronunciation so that they don't sound like real-world equivalents (I've always pronounced the Grand Duchy of Geoff as gee-uff, for example, ignoring the "Jeff" pronunciation).

I originally thought it was pronounced "Jee off" and didn't realize that "Jeff" was even a possibility until years later. "Jeff" does cause dissonance for me so I still mentally do Jee off in my head.