Is Greyhawk Relevant?

[haakon1]

LGG simply wasn't intended to be a full blown treatment. It lacked the features: no Greyhawk monsters, no Greyhawk magic items, no special character stuff or prestige classes, no starter adventure, no section focusing on a city; the things that back then came in the box

Yeah. LGG was all killer, no filler.

Pure Greyhawk fluff goodness, very little crunch and very little of the half-baked filler looseleaf and card materials in the City of Greyhawk and From the Ashes box set.

The main difference, though, is the LGG crew knew and loved Greyhawk, and put a multi-year effort into the research and fixing the canon, with respect and even reverance for what had gone before. To me, it's more like WOTC allowed the Greyhawk fandom's own champions to fix the setting, rather than just contracting to publish a book. Erik Mona was a Greyhawk uberfan before he was famous . . .

Whereas CoG and especially FtA didn't understand the setting as well and took a heavy hand in rewriting it, from a professional "what do we think will sell" perspective, rather than a work of art that happened to be commercially sold.

Ars artis gratia versus ars pecuniae gratia.

 

[haakon1]

Greyhawk wasn't ever generic either. It's just so familiar to a certain subset of gamers that they see it as generic, because it's their baseline for fantasy. Not because it truly is.

Nod. My dad was a professor who taught English. A big, recurring joke in their profession?

The student who complains that Shakespeare is overrated, because it's all cliches . . . which the professor has to explain were not cliches when the Bard coined the phrase.

And lest you think that's apocryphal and there never could have been a student so stupid . . . my wife was traveling through O'Hare Airport on Monday night and literally heard a passenger screaming at United desk clerk: "Do you know who I am? My husband is the president of Boeing Airlines! (sic)"

So, yes, Virginia, the morons in off-told jokes sometimes do exist in real life! (AKA, as Homer Simpson once said: "It's funny 'cause it's true.")

 

[Nematode]

Hmm. Isn't that what the core books were for? Okay, that is an oversimplification, but much of what is Greyhwk is core to begin with.

I assume you mean the 3x era core books? No, they were for Dungeons and Dragons.

My participation in this thread has been to try to shed light on an answer to the OP's question, is Greyhawk relevant, and my point of view is, to its owner, it has only been in very particular and limited ways. And, I contend that the events of the last 10 years have left many Greyhawk fans justifiably confused.

And I've tried to illustrate all that with examples. I'm not happy with Greyhawk's lapsed status, in fact it makes me sad, but for better or worse, I'm a realist, so that's where I come from.

For any setting fans who want to see new GH material, I suggest they go upthread and find Theocrat's post(s) and re-read them. The Theocrat is wise.

Here's a final example of my point of view on the relevance thing.

I have no doubt that someone will correct me if I'm wrong, and even if I'm right, but I seem to recall that, apart from the RPGA LG material, the only full-frontal Greyhawk product that has been marketed by WotC (by which I mean the word "Greyhawk" appears somewhere on the cover, and within the book in a meaningful context, and things are called by their Greyhawk names) since about the year 2000 or 2001 was Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk in 2007.

nematode

 

[Philosopher]

That's a pretty rich thing to claim, given your position that a setting that gets less attention year over year, has nothing published for it on a regular and "big" basis, and has continually dwindling popularity is relevent, and you've failed to offer any evidence, despite being specifically asked to do so, to demonstrate this relevence. Heck, I did more to establish its relevence than you did by referring to its legacy in terms of monsters, characters, locations and spells that have become iconic in D&D since Greyhawk's heyday.

OK, that's a nice point, but you still don't do anything to establish any relevence of Greyhawk. All you've done is said that it could be relevent. Especially if D&D campaign settings had any useful points of analogy with medical science.

Which they don't.

I was pretty clear, in the passages you quoted, that my point was not about establishing the relevance of Greyhawk (indeed, as I stated, it's an open question to me). My issue was with your criterion of relevance.

But you seem to insist on misinterpreting what I say. Fine. I'll save you some trouble by pointing out that this post does not even try to establish the relevance of Greyhawk. But still, feel free to point it out again. I won't bother replying again, though.

 

[Philosopher]

I think an answer to the question of Greyhawk's relevance might be found in Gary Gygax's forward to the original D&D rules published in 1974:

Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burrough's Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste.

D&D has grown and changed much since those days, but that was when Greyhawk took shape. So remove "DUNGEONS and DRAGONS" from the above quote and replace it with "Greyhawk". Greyhawk is a fabulous setting if you want to run adventures similar to the Sword & Sorcery tales Gygax mentioned. But if you don't care for them, and instead prefer reading about Raistlin, or Drizzt, or would rather be watching anime or playing WoW than reading a novel, then Greyhawk may not be for you. (Disclaimer: I'm not saying D&D has become like anime or WoW, just pointing out that different people get their inspiration from different sources.)

Just a thought, for your consideration.

 

[Hunter In Darkness]

I disagree with that. I love sword and sorcery and REH stands as one of my hands down favorite authors but I just do not find Greyhawk relevant to what I want to run or play in.


So no just because you have zero interest in Greyhawk does not mean you dislike the works of such folks as REH Camp & Pratt,Fritz Leiber or E.R.Burrough.

Maybe you do not feel GH captures the feel of sword and sorcery. But is uninspiring to you. Maybe it just does not feel like something Burrough or REH would write to you.

So no Greyhawk is not the be all end all of sword and sorcery roleplaying.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The funny thing is, Philosopher, that quote is going in the opposite direction. It's anti-realism. Gary is chiding wargamers who prefer their games to be historically accurate, without wizards and dragons and elves, saying they lack imagination.

Indeed many gamers might feel that Greyhawk is too unreal for their tastes, with all of the crazy stuff - the D&D wandering monster tables with added monsters for example. Sure it's more real if you compare it to Forgotten Realms, World of Warcraft or some anime, but that's not saying much. Like I mentioned upthread, when I played in a Greyhawk game, the main modification the GM made was to cut out a lot of the D&D zoo.

Indeed, partly because of that zoo, Greyhawk doesn't really resemble Hyboria, Lankhmar or even, I think, Barsoom. It's way more of a kitchen sink setting than any of those, mostly because it's default D&D, which is:

a) A crazy zoo of monsters and magic.
b) Its own genre.

The only fictional fantasy world I'm familiar with that gets close to the monster and magic heaviness of Greyhawk is Vance's Dying Earth. And the worlds of Marvel and DC, if you count them as fantasy.

D&D's not medieval. It's the Wild West with swords and plate mail. It pulls in stuff from all over - Caine from Kung Fu, Celtic bards and druids, Vancian wizards, knight hospitallers with Biblical powers, Conan, Cugel the Clever, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, demi-humans from Tolkien. These guys, all together in the same hodgepodge of a world, enter a very big hole in the ground to fight a zoo of monsters from mythology, folklore, sci-fi, Hammer horror movies, HP Lovecraft, kids' toys and Gary's fevered imagination.

And this is all true of Greyhawk. It's a big old mess.

 

[Philosopher]

I disagree with that. I love sword and sorcery and REH stands as one of my hands down favorite authors but I just do not find Greyhawk relevant to what I want to run or play in.


So no just because you have zero interest in Greyhawk does not mean you dislike the works of such folks as REH Camp & Pratt,Fritz Leiber or E.R.Burrough.

Maybe you do not feel GH captures the feel of sword and sorcery. But is uninspiring to you. Maybe it just does not feel like something Burrough or REH would write to you.

So no Greyhawk is not the be all end all of sword and sorcery roleplaying.

You've gotten the conditional statement wrong. The claim is not that if you like S&S, then you'll like GH. That would imply that if you don't like GH, then you don't like S&S. That's the thing that you're saying is wrong, and I agree with you. But it's not the claim being made.

The claim is that if you do not like S&S, then you won't like GH. Perhaps you also take issue with that claim, but it's not the same thing. It in no way implies that GH is all there is to S&S. But it does imply that GH one of many things found in the S&S genre.

The funny thing is, Philosopher, that quote is going in the opposite direction. It's anti-realism. Gary is chiding wargamers who prefer their games to be historically accurate, without wizards and dragons and elves, saying they lack imagination.

Indeed many gamers might feel that Greyhawk is too unreal for their tastes, with all of the crazy stuff - the D&D wandering monster tables with added monsters for example. Sure it's more real if you compare it to Forgotten Realms, World of Warcraft or some anime, but that's not saying much. Like I mentioned upthread, when I played in a Greyhawk game, the main modification the GM made was to cut out a lot of the D&D zoo.

The claim is that GH is in the S&S genre, not that it is "realistic", so I'm not sure what you mean when you say the quote is "going in the opposite direction". Do you mean that Gygax's point is that D&D is about fantasy rather than being specifically about S&S? If so, that's a fair point. But I think the examples he uses are telling.

Indeed, partly because of that zoo, Greyhawk doesn't really resemble Hyboria, Lankhmar or even, I think, Barsoom. It's way more of a kitchen sink setting than any of those, mostly because it's default D&D, which is:

a) A crazy zoo of monsters and magic.
b) Its own genre.

The only fictional fantasy world I'm familiar with that gets close to the monster and magic heaviness of Greyhawk is Vance's Dying Earth. And the worlds of Marvel and DC, if you count them as fantasy.

D&D's not medieval. It's the Wild West with swords and plate mail. It pulls in stuff from all over - Caine from Kung Fu, Celtic bards and druids, Vancian wizards, knight hospitallers with Biblical powers, Conan, Cugel the Clever, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, demi-humans from Tolkien. These guys, all together in the same hodgepodge of a world, enter a very big hole in the ground to fight a zoo of monsters from mythology, folklore, sci-fi, Hammer horror movies, HP Lovecraft, kids' toys and Gary's fevered imagination.

And this is all true of Greyhawk. It's a big old mess.

I guess I had something specific in mind about what S&S is. I'm not sure if I want to get into that issue, as it's a whole other can of worms. All I'll say is that S&S is rather multifarious, and I do think GH is included, whereas FR and DL are not. When you said, "It's the Wild West with swords and plate mail. It pulls in stuff from all over - Caine from Kung Fu, Celtic bards and druids, Vancian wizards, knight hospitallers with Biblical powers, Conan, Cugel the Clever, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, demi-humans from Tolkien," I have to admit that (perhaps with the exception of Tolkien) this sounds like it would fit perfectly into the S&S genre - high action with no single metaplot. Howard's Conan tales, Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales, Moorcock's Elric tales - they've got a bit of that kitchen sink thing going on (although, granted that it's not quite as much as GH).

I would argue that GH was default D&D, but is not anymore, and hasn't been for quite some time (despite WotC's claim about 3e). As I said in my last post, I think D&D has evolved much since those early days. So has GH, but not as much. Calling GH "a big old mess" is fairly apt, but either I don't think it's as much of a mess as you do, or I have more tolerance (fondness?) for messes than you.

 

[Doug McCrae]

All I'll say is that S&S is rather multifarious, and I do think GH is included, whereas FR and DL are not.

Yes, you're right, GH is closer to S&S than FR and DL. The latter are much more influenced by Tolkien and Tolkien knockoffs like Shannara.

My point is that GH simply has far too much stuff in it to resemble the stories of REH, et al. The problem is it's not one S&S author, it's *all* of them. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

Calling GH "a big old mess" is fairly apt, but either I don't think it's as much of a mess as you do, or I have more tolerance (fondness?) for messes than you.

I'm a huge fan of mess. It's just that I don't think the S&S authors, taken individually, are a very close fit for D&D/GH, because of the sheer quantity of stuff in GH. If you mush them up together, then sure, but would any of those authors have written something that was all mushed up together, to the extent that D&D is? They wouldn't because that amount and variety of monsters and magic are unnecessary in a story, liable to bewilder the typical reader. The author has to spend a lot of time explaining all the weirdness and the quantity of it breaks verisimilitude. I guess one exception would be the Desrick on Yandro, which is a great story, though it's a 'weird tale' rather than S&S.

In the Conan stories for example, Conan will typically enter a ruin or other dangerous location and fight one weird monster such as an ape-man or a Cthulhoid horror, not six different varieties of evil humanoid and a dozen other weird monsters. My point is that GH/D&D is not a good match to the typical S&S tale. It's its own genre.

As you say, GH is closer to S&S than FR and DL. But, imo, GH isn't very close to S&S.

 

[Mallus]

My point is that GH simply has far too much stuff in it to resemble the stories of REH, et al. The problem is it's not one S&S author, it's *all* of them. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

Bingo! The only fiction D&D closely resembles is the stuff written after D&D became popular and was explicitly influenced by it. D&S is like the serpent Ouroboros, swallowing it's own tail and pooping into it's mouth. Or like the Human Centipede formed into a ring.

(my brain is doing that thing again where it's unbidden words and images creep me out...).

As you say, GH is closer to S&S than FR and DL. But, imo, GH isn't very close to S&S.

Yeah, Greyhawk is more like the rich profusion of different genre elements (ie, the big mess) typically found in mainstream comic books.