Go get Murder in Baldur's Gate, Legacy of the Crystal Shard, Scourge of the Sword Coast and Dead in Thay.
D&D 5E (2014) I believe the Greyhawk Campaign setting was a missed opportunity for Wizards of the Coast.
- Thread starter Sailor Moon
- Start date
Go get Murder in Baldur's Gate, Legacy of the Crystal Shard, Scourge of the Sword Coast and Dead in Thay.
It's a lot worse than that, as Greyhawk doesn't really have Tiamat or Elemental Evil!
One of the important things to understand about Greyhawk is that, although it's the origin of a lot of D&D material, the link of that material to the setting is often not as strong as you might expect. The Queen of Chaotic Dragons" appeared in Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975), and so might have been part of the early D&D games when Greyhawk was the only setting - most of what appears in "Greyhawk" is considered generic D&D. She is first actually named "Tiamat" in the first Monster Manual (1977). She only gets one passing mention in the Babylonian mythos section of Deities and Demigods - apparently Marduk's battles with Tiamat are legendary - and is listed as a lesser god in the Nonhumans section with no further details forthcoming.
She got raised to the rank of deity by Len Lakofka in Dragon #38 (published about the same time as Deities & Demigods), and at that point she basically disappears from things related to Greyhawk (except for a couple of modules by Frank Menzter which aren't normally considered Greyhawk adventures).
Tiamat's doppleganger, Takhisis, appears in memorable fashion in the Dragonlance Saga, and that's the biggest influence Tiamat has had on the game.
Meanwhile, Tiamat makes her first appearance in a Forgotten Realms product in H4: The Throne of Bloodstone (1988), where the players are told that the Wand of Orcus can only be destroyed by bathing it in her heart's blood. (And yes, the PCs do encounter her). She pops up in other Realms products from time to time, in particular the Draconomicon (1990), which places her very firmly in the Realms.
All of which is a long way of saying that Tiamat is part of "generic" D&D - the core underpinnings of the game which we then put setting material on top of. There's no special connection to Greyhawk at all, and she's certainly never really been part of any important Greyhawk adventure or product.
On the other hand, Elemental Evil...
The Temple of Elemental Evil is a core part of Greyhawk mythology. In fact, its one of the few bits of Greyhawk mythology we have, and one of the few important sites that gets a mention in the "Brief History of Eastern Oerik", which appears in both the 1980 Greyhawk folio and the 1983 boxed set. Of course, it's mention in the Village of Hommlet (1979), but it would be five years - and after Gary left the company - that the actual site itself was detailed (1985), with the manuscript finished by Frank Mentzer.
However, it's not the only Elemental Evil. In 1981, the Fiend Folio came out and amongst its monsters were the five Princes of Elemental Evil, designed by Lewis Pulsipher, one of the significant figures of gaming. Interestingly, it seems that the manuscript of the Folio may have been completed in 1979 - for Games Workshop - before it eventually got published as the first product of TSR (UK) (see the Acaeum).
The Princes of Elemental Evil have hardly been used. Monte Cook decided to put one in his Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, which made sense - sort of - but the original adventure mentions them Not At All.
And here we run into one of the conceptual problems of later developers in Greyhawk. The original story for the Temple probably involved Lolth. Then things got changed around, and the published product has Iuz and Zuggtmoy setting up the temple. Well, mostly Zuggtmoy, the Demon Lady of Fungi. Why Elemental Evil? Because she thinks its more attractive than Fungi to worshippers. She probably had a point. Blasting people with (evil) fire is a lot better than feeding them mushrooms. But there's no real *power* of elemental evil in her worldview. Instead, she's just harnessing the power of the elemental planes to evil ends. This is in sharp distinction to Lewis Pulsipher's Princes of Elemental Evil.
At this point we have the Greyhawk conception of elemental evil against the generic D&D conception of the Princes of Elemental Evil. They're two different things.
And then we get to the complications. Gary Gygax included in his D&D adventures two rather unusual deities. Tharizdun and the Elder Elemental God. They were not intended to be the same thing. Here's Gary on them from Oerth Journal #12:
"The Elder Elemental God I saw as a dark creative deity, one that spun form out of chaos in his portion of one universe, then lost control of his creation--as is the story with so many deities of this sort in the mythology of various peoples of earth, from Babylonian and Egyptian on. Tharizdun is a larger and more pervasive force that is multiversal but not omnipresent. That is what he sought, of course, along with omnipotence. Tharizdun failed on both accounts."
"The EEG was indeed meant by me to have a place in the very nethermost recesses of the ToEE. An anomaly there allowed him to manifest a portion of himself, and by doing the wrong (right from the DM’s point of view) thing the adventurers could release him also! Of course that would counter somewhat the freeing of Zuggtmoy, had she been loosed, so on balance it could serve to redress that error. But, alas, I was too busy with other things at the time when the project was being completed. As it was already quite hefty, I decided to omit any mention of this to Frank Mentzer, and so the ToEE was released with only the Eye of Fire as a clue to what I should have included in the adventure."
The Eye of Fire is the symbol used by the elemental cultists, which is also the symbol of the EEG in the Giant/Drow adventures. (It's misdrawn in the Hommlet adventure...)
Of course, Monte Cook decided that the EEG and Tharizdun were one and the same, and so wrote in RttToEE a story where Iuz and Zuggtmoy were the dupes of Tharizdun, who was using them all to get freed... Thus, the Elder Elemental Eye turns up. And lovers of Gygaxian Greyhawk get very annoyed!
However, note what Gygax uses to describe Tharizdun: "multiversal". It seems fair to have Tharizdun turn up in the Realms when he's described as such... unfortunately, we have to deal with the conflation of him and the EEG.
(In fact, this use of Tharizdun is some way from the original Greyhawk conception of him...)
Cheers!
Don't forget the old Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun module.
As opposed to the second rehash of the Elemental Evil storyline?
In a way yes. The realms have too much lore that we don't have any lore about. Aka stuff that is only given a short paragraph in passing and then never expanded on. And when asked about it, e.g. on Candlekeep, the answer is "Sorry, under NDA" in the majority of cases.
While I understand it's nice to have a lot of aces in your sleeve for picking your next story, it has long since reached the point where we all know that the vast majority of these amazin stories are doomed to never see the light of day, since they have so many of them under NDA and release so few of them per year (plus continuously creating new ones).
Who indeed? Why not use one of their limited release slots to finally give spotlight to one of several dozends FR specific evils, who so far had nothing more than a few lines as an aside?
If they wan't something with a Tharizdhun vibe why not finally use Entropy? So far nothing but hints and teases that alltogether may only fill a single A4 page. Bad enough that Shar and Cyric are hogging all the spotlight and never let the other evils shine, now there's also the Greyhawk baddies overcrowding the limited slots of FR releases.
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Do any of us actually know anything about this storyline other than the term "elemental evil" and the elemental princes? How do we know it's a rehash of the original ToEE or RToEE? Or are we just all guessing?
MonsterEnvy
Legend
Guess what in the later two and Ghost of Dragonspear castle which also involves the Red Wizards. The Elemental Princes are mentioned a lot and the macguffins of the adventure comes from shines to them. They are mentioned by name in the adventures as well.
As mentioned Scoruge, Dead in Thay and Ghosts of Dragonspear had them getting mentioned a lot. The Elemental Princes did nothing in Greyhawk and the creators in the dungeon and dragon magazines towards it end along with the adventures had them saying they wanted to do an adventure with the Elemental Princes.
Morrus's initial announcement of the adventure was (ahem) sort of suggestive:
Morrus said:
That adventure is rather interesting, as it's the first introduction of Tharizdun to Greyhawk. You learn that there's a chained god whose priesthood has deserted him (and plundered his treasure, as well!) and... that's about it.
The next time Tharizdun properly appears in a Greyhawk game product, it's 2001 and Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is released.
In the meantime, Gygax used Tharizdun as the ultimate Big Bad in his Gord the Rogue books. The second book (Artifact of Evil) has Gord and his friends attempting to stop cultists gaining an item that could be use to free T. After that book, Gygax left TSR, but was able to finish the series, which culminates with T. being released and destroying Greyhawk. It'd be fair to say that Gary wasn't particularly happy at this point with what had happened at TSR. (The Gord books have lots of wonderful ideas, but are not particularly well-written).
3E sees the use of Tharizdun once more in a Dungeon magazine adventure "The Cradle of Madness", and that's it for that edition as far as I'm aware.
4E sees Tharizdun gain new prominence in the new cosmology created for the default setting. I find this use really interesting, as we actually get a creation mythology here, which he plays a chief part in. (Tharizdun puts a shard of pure evil in the heart of the Elemental Chaos, creating demons and the Abyss, and is imprisoned for it). In my opinion, the mythology of 4E is its strongest part and it informs a lot of 4E. Although Tharizdun wasn't really linked to Elemental Evil in his original conception, this version of him is explicitly linked to it.
Tharizdun gets a starring role as part of the Abyssal Plague series of novels, which has a cult following him pop up in the Forgotten Realms, and in the D&D Encounters season The Elder Elemental Eye, set in the Realms.
The original idea for Tharizdun seems to be as some sort of Lovecraftian deity. He's not presented that way in the Gord the Rogue books, especially not once he wakes up. Monte Cook linked him to Elemental Evil, a good reason for that was advanced in 4E, and that may well be the base we're starting with in 5E. 4E moved him more into the shared lore of D&D rather than being exclusively Greyhawk, which does fit with Gygax description of him as Multiversal in Oerth Journal #12.
If there are any other significant mentions of Tharizdun, I'd love to know about them!
Cheers!
There were 2 Drizzt novels in 2014 (Night of the Hunter, Rise of the King) and there will also be two in 2015 (Vengeance of the Iron Dwarf and Archmage).
HobbitFan
Explorer
Thanks for the reminders there Merric. I read the Gord the Rogue books and the old modules so long ago that I had forgotten what happened in them.
Relating that to what they did in 4E gives us a pretty good idea at least of what they might be thinking about...that's a good post.
Relating that to what they did in 4E gives us a pretty good idea at least of what they might be thinking about...that's a good post.
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