Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 9879521" data-attributes="member: 2209">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).</blockquote>

Verification