I'm relatively new to running a campaign in the Greyhawk setting. Although i spend hours sometimes googling obscure oerthling names, trying to get a feel for what Suel architecture looks like, or scouring messgae boards for the statistics of the owner of the most frequented tavern in gryrax, it seems it is all to no avail. For those of you who run Greyhawk campaigns, how would you describe the tone of the setting? How do you feed this tone to your players? Are there stereotypical plot devices you use? What have you found works? Any advice on running my own campaign so i can make it successful, and have my characters feel that they have played a unique campaign in a unique world? if i run a campaign later on in, say, Toril, is it gonna seem like a blur of alien place names with no real seperation of identity?
That Greyhawk Feeling
- Thread starter innis
- Start date
Aaron L
Hero
Try Cannonfire, they specialize in Greyhawk. http://www.canonfire.com/
francisca
I got dice older than you.
There is no Greyhawk feeling, despite what the "THAT'S NOT CANON!!" screechers say.
Gygax tossed a barebones setting out there for us to take and mold to our table. I've run two Greyhawk campaigns out of the '83 boxed set, both have a distictly different feel.
Greyhawk feel is what you make of it.
Gygax tossed a barebones setting out there for us to take and mold to our table. I've run two Greyhawk campaigns out of the '83 boxed set, both have a distictly different feel.
Greyhawk feel is what you make of it.
HeapThaumaturgist
First Post
"You've lost that Greyhawk feelin' .... wooaaaoaaa that Greyhawk feelin' ... lost that Greyhawk feelin' and now it's gone, gone, gone."
I like Greyhawk in that it's just ... D&D.
That's pretty much it. Everything else is window-dressing. Greyhawk makes very little sense, otherwise. Add what you know, what you can find out, and what you can make up. Like most great fiction, it's supposed to SOUND good. Make everybody think YOU know what's going on: A knowledgable statement about Baklunish architecture here, etc. Everybody will go along with you.
The game is supposed to be about the PCs, anyway, so really everything else is there to add flavor. Give it your own.
--fje
I like Greyhawk in that it's just ... D&D.
That's pretty much it. Everything else is window-dressing. Greyhawk makes very little sense, otherwise. Add what you know, what you can find out, and what you can make up. Like most great fiction, it's supposed to SOUND good. Make everybody think YOU know what's going on: A knowledgable statement about Baklunish architecture here, etc. Everybody will go along with you.
The game is supposed to be about the PCs, anyway, so really everything else is there to add flavor. Give it your own.
--fje
WayneLigon
Adventurer
To me, the Greyhawk Feeling is one where Good is often trumped by Expediancy and Gold. It has a gritty and kinda dirty lived-in feel that's kinda of like Discworld if you drained every bit of humor out of it. Most of your higher-up NPC's are neutral or amoral. Evil has a place in the world, and people just accept that and deal with it.
Advice: don't worry about such details as the type of architecture unless it becomes important to the plot.
Advice: don't worry about such details as the type of architecture unless it becomes important to the plot.
Romnipotent
First Post
I lost the greyhawk feeling when 3.5 came out and my LG character got stripped of all its flavour.
greyhawkrr
First Post
I think HeapThaumaturgist has the right idea. For the longest time, Greyhawk WAS D&D. It was a world that originally served to accomodate the concept of adventuring heroes in a fantasy setting. The best thing about Greyhawk is that it is unadulterated adventure. It wasn't intended to be something great, it wasn't really intended to be anything more than a background from which to justify the killing of monsters, the gaining of experience points, and the looting of treasure. It was not contrived (though it borrows heavily from history, myth, and folklore) to be a unified world like some of the later settings, it just came together as the result of the creative insight of a group of friends who liked pretending to be wizards. That's what I love about it. Greyhawk is the home of D&D. I may visit other campaign settings, but I always come back to those roots where it all began.
sad_genius
First Post
I like to see it like this:
In the first Realms novel I read, the cleric with a photographic memory instantly learned how to do esoteric kung fu from his hawt monk girlfriend just by watching, and then made a clockwork remote controlled chainsaw chackram thing from memory because he saw some gnome with one once.
In the first Greyhawk novel I read, the main character hid two silver pieces in his ass because he'd never, ever seen that kind of money before.
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But seriously, read Saga of the old City or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and you'll get it.
In the first Realms novel I read, the cleric with a photographic memory instantly learned how to do esoteric kung fu from his hawt monk girlfriend just by watching, and then made a clockwork remote controlled chainsaw chackram thing from memory because he saw some gnome with one once.
In the first Greyhawk novel I read, the main character hid two silver pieces in his ass because he'd never, ever seen that kind of money before.
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But seriously, read Saga of the old City or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and you'll get it.
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