D&D 5E Iggwilv/Tasha To Join Volo, Xanathar, and Mordenkainen? [UPDATED!]

Is WotC teasing a new announcement? There have been a few D&D books named after famous personalities from the game's extensive lore - Vole's Guide to Monsters, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. It looks possible that the next such personality might be Tasha of Tasha's Hideous Laughter fame -- which was an adventuring alias of the Greyhawk villain Iggwilv.

UPDATE -- A page has appeared on Amazon entitled Dungeons & Dragons November Title (Announced August 24). It's a hardcover, $49.95, November 17th release date.

On their Discord channel, WotC posted a short audio clip; it features some female-sounding voices laughing, and it is titled "Feather and Tart". It also has a metadata info which says August 24th, 2020, which is Monday. But in addition to that, a WoTC staff member on Reddit's avatar was changed to an image of Iggwilv.

Iggwilv was an evil magic-user, a villain created by Gary Gygax. When adventuring with the Company of Seven, she used the alias Tasha. The lore has it that the witch Baba Yaga adopted her as a child and named her Natasha, and she soon became Natasha the Dark (Baba Yaga also adopted Elena the Fair).

Iggwilv has two forms, one old and one young. You can read more about the character on Wikipedia.


What does seem clear is that WotC is teasing an impending announcement! I assume that the announcement they are teasing will be the announcement of an upcoming announcement, or I'll be disappointed.

 

[DnD Warlord]

You know, they COULD just support the original Greyhawk. It's not like there are hordes of fans who like everything which came after that (including books which literally intentionally made fun of it) but there are hordes of fans which liked the original. Maybe just give people what they want instead of insisting on supporting the stuff people tend to not like?

They did support it. And you didn’t like the support

 

[Mistwell]

They did support it. And you didn’t like the support

Not true. And weird that you'd make that claim without even asking me if I like whatever support you have in mind. As surely this thread, which is pure speculation by the way, cannot be the "support" you are referring to.

What I want is a 5e Greyhawk campaign setting with a focus on more gritty rules for 5e, and roughly the original Greyhawk canon. It's the same thing Mike Mearls says he'd like to see by the way, though he admits his view may well not be the majority view internally on that topic.

 

[DnD Warlord]

Not true. And weird that you'd make that claim without even asking me if I like whatever support you have in mind. As surely this thread, which is pure speculation by the way, cannot be the "support" you are referring to.

What I want is a 5e Greyhawk campaign setting with a focus on more gritty rules for 5e, and roughly the original Greyhawk canon. It's the same thing Mike Mearls says he'd like to see by the way, though he admits his view may well not be the majority view internally on that topic.

You already discounted an entire edition and a module for the setting as “non cannon” because you didn’t like the fact that Tasha was retconed (maybe people keep telling me there were hints)

 

[UnknownDyson]

You realize that, by constantly posting dismissive comments when replying to me, that makes me prone to be dismissive of your comments too?

I get it, you hold contempt for my views on this topic. Message received. I am not interested however in a discussion with a guy who holds my views in contempt however.

If you consider the truth to be dismissive, isn't that a personal problem? I like a lot of the Greyhawk characters, but he is right it hasn't been relevant in 30 years.

 

[Parmandur]

Should I drop a [Citation Needed] here or would it be more context appropriate to say "I roll to disbelieve"?

I started playing right around the turn of the AD&D 2e era. I know more about bloody Mystara than I do about Greyhawk, and that's a low low bar. Greyhawk hasn't been relevant for over 30 years. Sure, maybe it has more fans than Birthright or Ghostwalk, but those are also very low bars.

I've never seen anyone profess interest in Greyhawk outside of the groggiest of Internet grognards. Which yes, is just as much a personal anecdote as your claim. But mine seems to line up with the business decisions WotC is making based on all those Product Surveys they do.

I started with 3E in my Teens, and everything was semi-Greyhahwk that we ran. It was weird support, but Millennial gamers are going to have weird bits of Greyhawk nostalgia, too.

 

[Wishbone]

Should I drop a [Citation Needed] here or would it be more context appropriate to say "I roll to disbelieve"?

I started playing right around the turn of the AD&D 2e era. I know more about bloody Mystara than I do about Greyhawk, and that's a low low bar. Greyhawk hasn't been relevant for over 30 years. Sure, maybe it has more fans than Birthright or Ghostwalk, but those are also very low bars.

I've never seen anyone profess interest in Greyhawk outside of the groggiest of Internet grognards. Which yes, is just as much a personal anecdote as your claim. But mine seems to line up with the business decisions WotC is making based on all those Product Surveys they do.

Ah Ghostwalk, a setting so unsupported I can't even find a Let's Read thread anywhere on it.

 

[Kurotowa]

I started with 3E in my Teena, and everything was semi-Greyhawk that we ran. It was weird support, but Millennial gamers are going to have weird bits of Greyhawk nostalgia, too.

There's scattered bits of D&D lore that have their roots in Greyhawk but have remained more high profile. Some of the big name NPCs like Mordenkainen and Iggwilv, though there's an emphasis on the plane hoppers. The pantheon of gods presented in the 3e PHB, or at least the ones people found memorable like Kord and Vecna. (I'd name Wee Jas too, but the Raven Queen stole her stuff and wears it better.) Some of the old standbys in the Artifacts section of the DMG.

The thing is, I'd argue those are the bits that have transcended Greyhawk to become more universal D&D elements. You rarely see people bring up the nations or history of Greyhawk. Things like the humanocentric setting and emphasis on Law vs Chaos are cited as historical elements and influences in the evolution of D&D, not something most people want to emulate. Sure, a few do, especially in OSR circles. But everything has a few fans for it out there. There's a big jump from that to the "hordes of fans" that would justify a major new Greyhawk setting book.

 

[Kurotowa]

Hint - constantly calling me the "groggiest of Internet grognards" isn't polite.

If you think me calling someone a grognard is a dire insult in the same post where I namecheck Ghostwalk of all things, then you're very much misreading the tone of my posts.

 

[Chaosmancer]

A little girl named Tasha way early on wrote a letter to Gygax asking for a Spell to make people laugh, so he put it in AD& D and named it after her.

That is a fun little story.

Don't see how figuring out how to make it fit in the canon of the world changes anything about that. Heck, little girl might have been super-stoked to have her name associated with a bad-ass mage lady who plays demon politics like a fiddle.

There's scattered bits of D&D lore that have their roots in Greyhawk but have remained more high profile. Some of the big name NPCs like Mordenkainen and Iggwilv, though there's an emphasis on the plane hoppers. The pantheon of gods presented in the 3e PHB, or at least the ones people found memorable like Kord and Vecna. (I'd name Wee Jas too, but the Raven Queen stole her stuff and wears it better.) Some of the old standbys in the Artifacts section of the DMG.

The thing is, I'd argue those are the bits that have transcended Greyhawk to become more universal D&D elements. You rarely see people bring up the nations or history of Greyhawk. Things like the humanocentric setting and emphasis on Law vs Chaos are cited as historical elements and influences in the evolution of D&D, not something most people want to emulate. Sure, a few do, especially in OSR circles. But everything has a few fans for it out there. There's a big jump from that to the "hordes of fans" that would justify a major new Greyhawk setting book.

Yeah, like I think Pelor has more name recognition to me than Lathander, but I actually know Lathander's lore. Vecna is awesome, but no one really cares which country he came from originally. The Rod of Seven Parts exists, but no one really needs to connect it to a setting.

Heck, half the time I forget Greyhawk was the name of a city within the setting. And I know nothing about it other than there was a Castle, and it was called "The Free City of Greyhawk".

It just... doesn't really hold any interest for me to learn about it, even though I have an atlas for it, it just doesn't have the spark I am looking for a lot of the time. Not to say there aren't interesting bits, I remember there was a mysterious attack by giant-kin that routed a noble, and there was some good political intrigue in dealing with that issue, but that was buried and I only found that because I pointed to the map and said "what is near this spot" for running a one-shot.

 

[Guest 6801328]

This thread was interesting before it turned into a pissing match of who knows more about D&D canon.