D&D General Melf's Guide to Greyhawk Coming From Luke Gygax & WotC

[Plaguescarred]

I wonder what Luke Gygax, Jay Scott & Co. thougth of GREYHAWK version published in the Dungeon Master Guide 2024. Its largely the same as the originally gazeteer aside few minor change like the name of some nation or power group.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Vince Vaughn got the original painting for only $5k? Seems kind of low to me (and easily afforded by an actor, even one as relatively humble as Vaughn).

 

[Mournblade94]

I'm very glad about this.

Luke is well more in touch with what fans expect from a Greyhawk book so this is massively good news. Ayoub is turning out to be a great steward it seems and I wish he was in charge when they made the Forgotten Realms books. He probably would have brought on Ed Greenwood and we could have avoided the Purple Dragons riding "purple Dragons" and Calimshan arbitrarily becoming robot land.

 

[Mournblade94]

Go to your room. No supper for you.

Seriously- this is probably the absolute worst way to do anything Greyhawk related. That module isn't just a useless piece of crap, it's actively insulting to Greyhawk, the Gygaxes, and WoG players.

The chances of Luke Gygax doing this are very low because it was a direct insult to Gary Gygax. I COULD see a REAL version of Castle Greyhawk being released though.

 

[Mmalcontent]

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At GaryCon this week, Luke Gygax and WotC's Dan Ayoub announced that Gygax was working on a book called Melf's Guide to Greyhawk. No other information is known at this time, other than that Gygax is also working on adventures.

Luke is the son of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. The character Melf--of Melf's acid arrow fame--was his player character back in Gygax's home game in the 1970s.

Dan Ayoub: I think probably the thing that I'm excited about many things that we're going to be doing, one of the biggest things I'm most excited about is Luke coming back into the franchise and we're going to be doing some stuff together. You want to talk a little bit about what we're going to be doing?

Luke Gygax: Yeah, absolutely. So, obviously I grew up playing in Greyhawk and so that was something special to me and it has, you know, meaning and if you look at the names, that beautiful map that Darlene did and Darlene was here at Gary Con if you to talk to her. That beautiful map that she created, the names on there are a lot named after not only my family, but a lot of friends and relatives, so it's a place where I did all those adventures as Otis the Ranger and Hommlet and you know Steading the Hill Giant Chief and the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl and sent into the the Underdark, to the depths.

All those places are seminal memories for me and so getting a chance to put my stamp or my input or return to Greyhawk and kind of keep the Gygax of Greyhawk really. I said "Yes let's do this", he said "Is there any chance...?" I was like "Yes, yes, yes, there is there's a big chance let's do this thing!" and so that's going to be great and you know I was working on with some because Greyhawk was not supported for a long time officially, but there's a huge community that loves Greyhawk. And so I was getting together with some of those folks, you know, Anna Meyer, who does all the maps and that sort of stuff, and J Scott and a few others, and I was talking about doing a, you know, unofficial Melf's Guide, and putting it there. And so, we're working on that, and we're looking to put that out officially through Wizards of the Coast, which would be awesome. I love that idea.

And there's a few other things where I'm going to be writing some adventures primarily in Greyhawk because that's my first love was adventuring in Greyhawk and the cast of Greyhawk, whether it was as Otis or Melf....

At present, we know of two upcoming D&D 'seasons': the Season of Horror, which includes Ravenloft: The Horrors Within in June, and the Season of Magic which includes Arcana Unleashed in September. There's a third season after that, the Season of Champions, which will presumably be detailed at Gen Con in August.

At the same panel they announced that WotC will be making future Dungeons & Dragons product and season announcements at Gen Con (which is July 30 – August 2 this year). Ayoub also touched on past disagreements between the Gygax family and WotC, saying "We have to mend whatever rift happened between the family and the franchise". Finally, it was announced that WotC is a sponsor of Free Comic Book Day.

MELF IS NOT BLONDE

 

[Flying Toaster]

Greyhawk is all over the place in vibes.

It is grounded and gritty low level medieval fantasy. It is high level whimsy throw different things in high fantasy. It is default D&D (elves, orcs, demons, the original modules), but also its own distinctive thing (elves are olven, distinctive big bads are Tharizdun, Iuz, Scarlet Brotherhood, Great Kingdom). It is lightly described to fill in and make it your own but also heavy on details like history and ethnography that has shaped the setting. It is Gygax's home setting and creation, but lots of details were not developed until after he left (like what religions the explicitly theocratic religious kingdoms follow). There is both the materials in the book and stories about the actual Gygax campaign. It is a kitchen sink of different fantasy adventure trope stuff (fantasy Vikings, Arabs, Mongols, pirates, Elves, including multiples of most so there is no one viking land, but multiples), yet distinctly its own curated list of them (no East Asian stuff, no specified dwarven kingdoms or halfling homeland). The original 1e setting folio had no gods but did have religious kingdoms (and the PCs swore by Crom and Odin), the later 1e boxed set had multiple pantheons of original gods with really cool fleshing out of some individuals in the boxed set and in Dragon magazine, but still no explicit connections for kingdoms with names like the archclericy or the Caliphate, then those details filled in somewhat controversially in later post-Gygax editions. It has serious development of ethnic migration patterns and wars and civilizational expansions and contractions that are reflected in the setting and map and set up, and silly joke names for some stuff (Bigby, Digby, Rigby, various anagrams, the Grand Duchy of Geoff). It has huge expanses of low population and wilderness, plus Greyhawk city as a D&D Chicago style adaptation of Lankhmar, a Sword and Sorcery novel fantasy adaptation of New York. It has multiple eras of development and plot advancement with different vibes (though 5.5 goes with 1e era timeline and skips the metaplot of 2e Greyhawk Wars, dark fantasy From the Ashes era, and late 2e-3e soft setting reset over time).

As a teenager I had fun reading the setting lore in the gold box set and trying to connect the dots to all of the historical and fictional inspirations. The elvish kingdom of Celene was Lothlorien, the Concatenated Cantons of Perrenland were Switzerland, the Baklunish states were Arabia and Persia from the 1001 Nights. I could never figure out if the Valley of the Mage had a specific counterpart, or why a bunch of grey elves had followed a human mage for so long that they had branched off to become a separate elvish subculture.

Even before it was made canon, I always assumed that Pholtus of the Blinding Light was the chief god of the Theocracy of the Pale. I always had a sort of grudge against Lawful Neutral as the “just following orders” alignment that demanded hierarchy and obedience regardless of fairness or justice.

I got the impression that the Frost, Snow, and Ice Barbarians got increasingly “barbaric” as you traveled farther along the Thillonrian Peninsula. Perhaps this was based on the imperial Chinese distinction between “cooked” barbarians who had been influenced (and compromised) by Chinese culture and diplomacy, versus the more independent “raw” barbarians, but maybe that was just my imagination.

The secret evil societies were reminiscent of those in pulp literature, SPECTRE from the Bond movies, COBRA from G.I. Joe, etc. The Scarlet Brotherhood in particular always gave me a “Boys From Brazil” vibe of ex-Nazis hiding out in the jungle, conducting weird experiments to try to restore their lost racial glory. The Invoked Devastation and the Rain of Colorless Fire were particularly evocative during the Cold War, and the idea of twin magical apocalypses that most people of the Flanaess had never even heard of lent a sinister grandeur to the setting.

Some of the names were indeed silly (apparently Verbobonc was pronounced with a final silent “c” that was meant to sound French...), but some of them were actually clever. The duplicate Urnsts (County & Duchy) and Uleks (County, Duchy, & Principality) were a nod to European feudal domains like Burgundy (County, Duchy, & Kingdom) and Poland (Duchy, Kingdom, Commonwealth, etc). I am usually quite good at catching words written backwards, but I never noticed that the archmage Drawmij and the Dramij Ocean were both “Jim Ward” spelled backwards, more or less. A DM I used to know once insisted that the Pomarj should be pronounced with a final consonant “y” sound (“Pomary”), but he failed to convince me or the rest of the table.

 

[Crit Hit The Giant]

Also, I wish the sound quality was better.

I agree! this was my first year attending and didnt know what to expect so next year i am planning on having a better way to do that.

Sorry about that!

 

[Azzy]

MELF IS NOT BLONDE

It was just a phase he was going through. Damned elves and their long lives.