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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9883918" data-attributes="member: 7052563">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.</blockquote>

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