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

[Flying Toaster]

My introduction to Greyhawk was close to the start of my D&D experience (1979) with the publication of T1 The Village of Hommlet (1979) and the World of Greyhawk Folio (1980) a year later. I remember devouring articles by Gary Gygax in Dragon Magazine that expanded upon bare outline we were given. Beyond that there was no one to tell me how to run that world and I made it my own.

I have since gone back to my roots and my Greyhawk is my Greyhawk, and yours is yours. I do not bother with people telling me what is and is not Greyhawk. They are just a dying, tiny group of reactionaries that amplify their voices via the internet.

I was born right around the same time that the original white box went on sale to the general public, so obviously I never played 0E back in the day. In fact I did not even really know that it existed until I bought the Best of Dragon magazine compilations in the late 80s, and reading the first volume was quite a surprise. Even then it felt like a fascinating glimpse at a lost world, shrouded by the mists of time.

From what I can gather, the early Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns had a fairly serious tactical side inherited from the Chainmail war game, but this was combined with a wacky “anything goes” gonzo sensibility. Right from the beginning there were funhouse dungeons, crashed spaceships, vampire hunting, rules for gaining XP by carousing, and lots of crossovers with existing entertainment properties, including all of the Middle Earth content that got grandfathered in somehow.

So it has always seemed strange to me that some grognards are so adamant that an authentic Greyhawk can only feature a very particular version of the Tolkien races and nothing else. We also see this attitude among some of the OSR crowd, particularly those who explicitly reject new elements from the WotC era like dragonborn or tieflings. This singular devotion to D&D’s version of Tolkien, with the serial numbers filed off in some cases but not in others, seems particularly odd to me because Gary Gygax famously preferred gritty pulp subgenres like sword & planet or sword & sorcery to the high fantasy of LOTR. Perhaps Tolkien’s goblins and orcs became essential to old school D&D because they served as stand-ins for the bloodthirsty, barbaric villain races of so much Appendix N pulp, who existed mainly to get slaughtered by the mighty-thewed hero.

There have already been more than half a dozen major published versions of Greyhawk, and most people probably prefer whichever one they encountered first, just as most people prefer the music of their own youth to whatever the kids these days are into. My Greyhawk was the 1983 gold box set, but no doubt others prefer the 1980 folio, the 1988 hardcover, etc. I suspect that none of the published products closely resembles the original 1970s home game that Luke Gygax remembers, but that is OK. D&D settings should be whatever DMs and players want to make of them.

 

[VashVet]

There have already been more than half a dozen major published versions of Greyhawk, and most people probably prefer whichever one they encountered first, just as most people prefer the music of their own youth to whatever the kids these days are into. My Greyhawk was the 1983 gold box set, but no doubt others prefer the 1980 folio, the 1988 hardcover, etc. I suspect that none of the published products closely resembles the original 1970s home game that Luke Gygax remembers, but that is OK. D&D settings should be whatever DMs and players want to make of them.

Wouldn’t it be kind of cool if some of the lore or maybe some of the new rules come directly from what Luke remembers from the old campaign? I know he was really young at the time but still, maybe there’s a little something that has never really seen the light of day that left an impression on him as a kid, and now he gets to make that part of an official Greyhawk product.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Wouldn’t it be kind of cool if some of the lore or maybe some of the new rules come directly from what Luke remembers from the old campaign? I know he was really young at the time but still, maybe there’s a little something that has never really seen the light of day that left an impression on him as a kid, and now he gets to make that part of an official Greyhawk product.

I suspect that's his goal. Given the stuff he's published in recent years, it will probably at least be tonally in line with the games he grew up with.

 

[kronovan]

Why should D&D limit itself to Tolkien's ideas and European folklore?

Why should "good" elves be white, and "evil" elves be dark-skinned? Do you not see the problem with that classic trope?...

Well actually - neither Tolkien's Dark Elves (Moriquendi), nor the original Svartalfr of European-Norse mythology were inherrently evil. Tolkien's Moriquendi were just those elves that hadn't answered the summons to Valinor to behold the light of the Two Trees. From my readings of Tolkien's writings, the only Moriquendi who was cast as evil was Eol in the Silmarillion, but it's clear that he's an outlier. There are the Orks, which the Silmarillion tells us were Elves that were originally captured, tortured and ultimately corrupted by Melkor. But that's another story.

The Svartalfr in the Norse sagas (as written down by Sturluson in the 12th cen.) are quite nebulous re. good & eveil. Unlike the Light Elves (Ljosalfr) who lived in Ljosaflheim on the World Tree above Midgard, the Svartalafr dwelled in Svartalfheim which was below. The Ljosalfr are equally powerful and just as dangerious and other than where they reside in the Yggdrasil/World Tree geogrpahy, there isn't much different between them. It's only in later folklore that writers began to equate the the Svartalfr/dark elves with evil, but that mostly occurs in the 20th century. Note, I'm not using the correct vowels for the Tolkien and Norse names, only because my Sindarin and Norse spelling is fading with age.

An interesting note re. Tolkien elves - the Woodland Elves in Rankin & Bass' The Hobbit, were dark skinned. That cartoon was made just 3 years after JRR Tolkien's death when his son Christopher was newly in charge of the Tolkien estate. Licensing was a tricky thing then and much of the content had to be vetted by Christopher. So it appears that as far as Christopher was concerned, skin tone of Elves wasn't really an issue.

My bigger issue with the art in recent WotC publications, is that a good majority of the subjects are attractive, if not down right beautiful. It's as if only the beautiful persons of their cultures could possibly be heroic - yes I'm aware there're some exceptions. Considering the pyschological and social concerns around negative body image and how some social media is amplifying it these days, to me that's of equal concern. Personally, I'd like to see some art that portrays heroes that are less attractive, but I'm betting I'm very much alone in that. The Queen Yolande in the LGG that I posted earlier, is a less attractive, yet noble & charismaic depiction of an Elf that I prefer to the majority of those I've viewed in recent publications.

 

[Saracenus]

There is a vast difference between the Greyhawk (and Blackmoor for that mater) that Gary ran at his table that was a play test for OD&D and what he later published with TSR. Yes, Gary's home campaign was a genre blending of many different IPs as well as maps and ideas from the fantasy minitures campaign he was a part of in Lake Geneva. It was also like so many home games, mostly notes and keyed maps that are not fit to publish as is. When it came time to publish there were IPs they had to remove because TSR didn't have the rights to those works. Also, in the proccess of expanding on bare notes things are expanded and changed.

The book The Making of ORIGINAL DUNGEONS & DRANGONS is a dry but fasinating look at that very process. There is a picture of the original Hommlet used in Gary's Temple of Elemental Evil campaign that looks familiar but didn't have a church of St. Cuthbert or the Tower of Rufus and Burne. Those were added later to the publication of T1 The Village of Hommlet and were based around player characters that various family members and friends played at his table.

A later example of this in the AD&D days was the publication of the super module Temple of Elemental Evil where Gary handed Frank Mentzer his notes so that the long awaited follow up to T1 could finally published. There were no maps in that pile of notes because Gary was testing out dungeon geomorphs and the origional temple layout was random, those maps are Frank's.

All the layers of officially published Greyhawk material after the exit of Gray Gygax from TSR in 1985 for good or ill has taken that campaign world farther and farther away from Gary's home game. In fact it has taken it farther and farther away from my version of Greyhawk that I have run off and on since 1980.

I am glad they went back to the box set era of 576 CY in the 5.5e DMG while updating it for a modern audience as it is not hard to intergrate into my already existing campaign material.

I see the Melf's Guide to Greyhawk as just another look at how Greyhawk could be run. I also hope that Luke is going for the feeling he felt at his father's table while bringing it forward to what D&D is today. If I want books that scream this is not my Greyhawk (and I do not want these books) there are plenty of options on DMs Guild already.

 

[Dire Bare]

Well actually - neither Tolkien's Dark Elves (Moriquendi), nor the original Svartalfr of European-Norse mythology were inherrently evil. Tolkien's Moriquendi were just those elves that hadn't answered the summons to Valinor to behold the light of the Two Trees. From my readings of Tolkien's writings, the only Moriquendi who was cast as evil was Eol in the Silmarillion, but it's clear that he's an outlier. There are the Orks, which the Silmarillion tells us were Elves that were originally captured, tortured and ultimately corrupted by Melkor. But that's another story.

The Svartalfr in the Norse sagas (as written down by Sturluson in the 12th cen.) are quite nebulous re. good & eveil. Unlike the Light Elves (Ljosalfr) who lived in Ljosaflheim on the World Tree above Midgard, the Svartalafr dwelled in Svartalfheim which was below. The Ljosalfr are equally powerful and just as dangerious and other than where they reside in the Yggdrasil/World Tree geogrpahy, there isn't much different between them. It's only in later folklore that writers began to equate the the Svartalfr/dark elves with evil, but that mostly occurs in the 20th century. Note, I'm not using the correct vowels for the Tolkien and Norse names, only because my Sindarin and Norse spelling is fading with age.

An interesting note re. Tolkien elves - the Woodland Elves in Rankin & Bass' The Hobbit, were dark skinned. That cartoon was made just 3 years after JRR Tolkien's death when his son Christopher was newly in charge of the Tolkien estate. Licensing was a tricky thing then and much of the content had to be vetted by Christopher. So it appears that as far as Christopher was concerned, skin tone of Elves wasn't really an issue.

My bigger issue with the art in recent WotC publications, is that a good majority of the subjects are attractive, if not down right beautiful. It's as if only the beautiful persons of their cultures could possibly be heroic - yes I'm aware there're some exceptions. Considering the pyschological and social concerns around negative body image and how some social media is amplifying it these days, to me that's of equal concern. Personally, I'd like to see some art that portrays heroes that are less attractive, but I'm betting I'm very much alone in that. The Queen Yolande in the LGG that I posted earlier, is a less attractive, yet noble & charismaic depiction of an Elf that I prefer to the majority of those I've viewed in recent publications.

Okay.

Doesn't really change my point at all.

 

[wizard71]

I like the fact that Dan apologized to Luke for WOTC’s treatment of Gary. I took some flack from forum posters for defending Gygax here a little while ago and so I feel vindicated! Woot! Woot!

 

[Dire Bare]

I like the fact that Dan apologized to Luke for WOTC’s treatment of Gary. I took some flack from forum posters for defending Gygax here a little while ago and so I feel vindicated! Woot! Woot!

Did he though?

I haven't watched the video, but I got the impression that Ayoub was apologizing that there has been a long rift between the GAME and the Gygax family (including Gary, of course). Beginning with TSR, and continuing with WotC.

Has WotC treated Gygax poorly? In what way? Initially Adkinson brought Gary on as a consultant on 3E, but that didn't last too long. Luke has also been a consultant more recently, but it's still been a while until "Melf's Guide".

 

[nyvinter]

Has WotC treated Gygax poorly? In what way? Initially Adkinson brought Gary on as a consultant on 3E, but that didn't last too long. Luke has also been a consultant more recently, but it's still been a while until "Melf's Guide".

I assume it's about the Making of OD&D book that got Rob Kuntz all angry and defensive because it called out some of Gygax opinions for what they were. Which is weird because Gary was dead at the time so he wasn't treated in any way at all.

 

[Clint_L]

My bigger issue with the art in recent WotC publications, is that a good majority of the subjects are attractive, if not down right beautiful. It's as if only the beautiful persons of their cultures could possibly be heroic - yes I'm aware there're some exceptions. Considering the pyschological and social concerns around negative body image and how some social media is amplifying it these days, to me that's of equal concern. Personally, I'd like to see some art that portrays heroes that are less attractive, but I'm betting I'm very much alone in that. The Queen Yolande in the LGG that I posted earlier, is a less attractive, yet noble & charismaic depiction of an Elf that I prefer to the majority of those I've viewed in recent publications.

I think that recent WotC publications are making an effort to represent different looks and body shapes, but they have a long way to go. This is a general problem across media, to be fair.

For example, while I noted that I try to paint my miniatures to look as diverse as possible...if you want one who isn't conventionally attractive and built like a model, then you're probably out of luck. I have thousands of miniatures and less than a dozen, tops, of playable character miniatures that have any significant bodily or facial diversity, aside from hairstyle. There are a few characters in wheelchairs available, but only a few, and only recently. And I've been begging Reaper and D&L to do at least one pregnant adventurer for years.

So it's still baby steps. But I'll take what I can get, including with this Greyhawk art.