Erik Mona Member # 1030
posted 22 December 2001 08:36 PM
Gene's list of Greyhawk incarnations is good in a broad sense, but if you're really looking to dig deeper, I've broken it down into a few more.
1) Original Greyhawk Campaign. This is the stuff Gary put together for his home campaign. Later, Rob kuntz became co-DM. The Greyhawk of the original campaign featured some norse gods, trips to Mars and China, and other things that might seem odd to fans of the published setting. As I understand it, most of this campaign took place in Castle Greyhawk, but rarely in the city and elsewhere around the world. Occasionally, snippets of what this world was like can be gleaned from such sources as Andre Norton's Quag Keep (produced with assistance from Gygax), Gary's Dragon columns new and old, and the introductions to various adventures and sourcebooks. This setting has effectively never been published, though Gygax himself claims that the Aerth "Dangerous Journeys" campaign setting bears a strong resemblance.
2) Gygax Greyhawk. This is the Greyhawk of the early 80s. The setting of most of the beloved Gary Gygax adventure modules and the folio and '83 boxed set. It is also the setting of the first two Gord the Rogue novels (the latter are set in a divergant setting I'll list below). This is the published "baseline" that makes the setting what it is. When a gamer over the age of 20 fondly talks about Greyhawk, chances are pretty strong that this is what he's talking about.
2a) Gordhawk. Controversy enters the publishing history of the World of Greyhawk. Gygax, cut from TSR, continues to detail the plight of Gord the Rogue in a handful of novels set on the World of Greyhawk but published by New Infinities Productions, Inc. Though it bears many similarities to (2), a lot of the place names have been changed, probably for legal reasons (one theory I have heard is that Gary was free to use names and places that appeared in the first two books, but had to invent new names for places that were not first mentioned in Artifact of Evil or Saga of Old City--I have no idea if this is true, and would be interested to hear from Gary on the matter). In any case, Gygax completely destroyed this universe at the end of the final novel, "Dance of Demons."
Gord and a couple of friends survived and were transferred to Yarth, which was later to become Aerth, the setting of the "Dangerous Journies: Mythus" roleplaying game.
2b) Sagard the Barbarian. It's difficult to classify where in the extended publishing canon of the World of Greyhawk one should place the four "adventure gamebooks" that detail the life of one Sagard the Barbarian. The first book claims to be set on the world of Yarth, but Sagard is from Ratik, lives on a sub-continent called the Flanaess, and encounters servants of Oeridian gods and haughty nobles of North Province. As the series goes on, however, the world diverges considerably. The people of Tenh seem to worship snakes, for instance.
Sagard eventually leaves the Flanaess for a completely alien land filled with off-beat kingdoms like Momboodo and Hitaxia. It's possible that this wandering from the Oerth baseline is the result of influences by Flint Dille, Gary's co-author on the short series (and the brother of the legendary Lorraine Williams). In any event, the series was not published by New Infinities or TSR, and is in fact quite difficult to track down. It remains, some 20 years later, a curiosity.
3) Confusion Reigns. After Gary leaves TSR, the company continues to publish both game materials and novels under the Greyhawk line. The novels, written by Endless Quest superstar Rose Estes, are uniformly rubbish. The products are an extremely mixed bag. Jim Ward's ecclectic "Greyhawk Adventures" hardback comes out at this time, seemingly taking great pains to avoid meaningful setting development.
The best of the era is probably "Fate of Istus," an adventure that leads Greayhawk campaigns into second edition with a multi-authored quest through various cities of the Flanaess. Former Greyhawk Campaign co-DMRobert J. Kuntz contributed two cities to the effort.
The worst of the era is undoubtedly the allegedly humorous "Castle Greyhawk," a mockery of the kind of dungeon crawls that made Gygax famous and that put TSR on the map. Reading through those pages, it's difficult not to see the enormous hubris of mutineers who have deposed their captain and are drunkenly painting up his respected wife to look like an over-used *****.
Greyhawk fans everywhere started to realize that TSR cares a lot less about their favorite setting than they do. Elsewhere, the Forgotten Realms entered print for the first time.
4) The City of Greyhawk (the second edition years). Led in part by editor Anne Brown and a decent boxed set detailing the City of Greyhawk, Greyhawk enters the "new era" of the Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons game. The novel line is pretty much dead by this time, with the sole example being "Nightwatch," by Robin Wayne Bailey. Using the material published in the City of Greyhawk boxed set, Bailey weaves a story set in the near future of Greyhawk--many who have read it claim that this is the best Greyhawk novel available. TSR, apparently, did not agree. The word "Greyhawk" appears nowhere on the book's cover, and the novel was released as part of the normal TSR book line.
Products from this era, again, are an extremely mixed bag. Anne Brown spearheaded the "Falcon" trilogy of adventures, all of which were set in the City of Greyhawk, and all of which came with cardboard cut-out buildings to enhance play with miniatures. "Treasures of Greyhawk" leads players on a romp of extremely loosely connected mini-adventures with locales ranging from the Amedio Jungle to the archmage Bigby's home in Mitrik.
Clearly, however, Greyhawk was not a business priority for TSR. Three much-reviled adventures, "Puppets," "Childsplay," and "Gargoyles" were adapted from existing RPGA convention tournaments, with predictable results. Greyhawk fandom generally looks down on these three adventures not because they are bad, but simply because they clearly have nothing to do with Greyhawk, and seemed to have been released only to fill spots on a release schedule. "Childsplay," for instance, is set in a "fictional" kingdom of Oerth.
The most impactful release of this era was probably "Vecna Lives!", a high-level "lead-by-the-nose" adventure that began by wiping out the Circle of Eight (largely made up of old player characters belonging to Gary Gygax and his family). The adventure hints that important things were on the horizon, and indeed they were. . .
5) Greyhawk Wars/From the Ashes. By the mid-90s, it was pretty clear that something was wrong with Greyhawk. According to a post by Roger Moore to AOL's old Greyhawk message boards, it was Jeff Grubb who suggested that in order to save the setting, they would have to "blow it up."
And blow it up they did.
2nd edition architect David "Zeb" Cook (author of "Vecna Lives!") designed a massive Risk-like board game called "Greyhawk Wars" that allowed players to play through a massive war that touched every corner of the Flanaess. An appendix booklet relayed how the wars "really happened" as far as the continuity of the campaign setting was concerned. Two adventures, "Howl from the North" and "Five Shall be One," led into the boxed set. The adventures "Border Watch" and "Patriots of Ulek" ostensibly take place during this period.
Making sense of the massive changes of the Greyhawk Wars fell to British freelancer Carl Sargent, who had done notable work with the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay property for Games Workshop. The boxed set "From the Ashes" was very much a "nine years later" update of the Flanaess presented in the '83 boxed set. With a sourcebook on Furyondy, Highfolk, and Nyrond and another on the realm of Iuz the Evil, Sargent covered Greyhawk in a greater detail than anyone before or since. Some fans love his work, others dislike it as too dissimilar to the Gygaxian original. Sargent's Greyhawk is a world beset by dark forces, shifting Greyhawk from a sort of "generic fantasy" wonderland to a very specific "dark fantasy" world.
Whether because his material turned off too many fans or because it was simply too little too late, the die had been cast. Greyhawk was no longer selling enough to justify keeping it in print. Sargent's third sourcebook, a treatise on the Great Kingdom called "Ivid the Undying," was shelved, though TSR later made it available online.
6) Greyhawk 98. Perhaps in part due to an overwhelmingly strong show of fan support for the setting when TSR opened its AOL forum, the powers that be at TSR decided to give Greyhawk another shot. The setting's timeline was advanced to 591 CY, enough time to get past the dark fantasy of the From the Ashes era. Greyhawk was to take players "back to the dungeon," with ads for the revised setting openly mocking current settings ("What the Hell is a Baatezu?") and hearkening back to an age of breaking down doors and stealing treasure.
Plans were announced, work was begun. Then, something terrible happened. TSR was bleeding money fast, and stopped putting out products altogether. The future of Greyhawk, and indeed of D&D, was very much in question.
By 1998, however, Dungeons & Dragons had been bought by Wizards of the Coast. Now under the guidance of creative director Lisa Stevens, Greyhawk roared back into print. The first adventure, "Return of the Eight," by Roger Moore, involved the return of the slain wizard Tenser to the land of the living. A trilogy of "Lost Tombs" adventures, written by Sean K. Reynolds, presented dungeons with a mix of old-school location-based adventures and new-school backgrounds and roleplaying encounters. The flow of Greyhawk products was not fast and furious, but it was constant for the first time in years. Two products, Roger Moore's "Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins" and Moore's and Anne Brown's "Player's Guide to Greyhawk" set the baseline for this era.
7) Third Edition/Defaulting on Greyhawk/Living Greyhawk. With the announcement of the Third Edition of the venerable D&D game, Greyhawk was dead again. Or was it? Fans soon learned that Greyhawk would be the "default" campaign setting for all "core" D&D products. If an adventure was not given a specific location, it was assumed to take place in Greyhawk. All rules and classes were designed to fit within a very basic Greyhawk framework, allowing players to either run with that or substitute their own campaign specifics.
The strategy hearkened back to the first incarnation of the World of Greyhawk, perhaps even before the '83 boxed set (when, it should be noted, most of the people designing and making business decisions regarding the game first got their start with D&D). Greyhawk was a background detail--a map with a few familiar names and very sketchy detail on politics, rulers, and individual nations.
But Wizards of the Coast knew that many fans desired more detailed Greyhawk—a Greyhawk that built upon the continuity of every official incarnation that had come before it. To satisfy such fans, WotC initiated Living Greyhawk, a massive multi-player shared-world tabletop campaign run under the auspices of the RPGA. A huge sourcebook, the "Living Greyhawk Gazetteer," set the baseline for the international campaign, building upon the "Greyhawk 98" material by providing a Flanaess-wide sourcebook that the previous incarnation of the setting had never had.
A shorter product, the "D&D Gazetteer," was adapted from the "Living Greyhawk Gazetteer" manuscript to provide players who wanted a very light background for their campaig--enough information to get their creative motors running.
This is the current incarnation of Greyhawk. No official sourcebooks are forthcoming. For the "core," Greyhawk is a map--a bunch of familiar placenames used with some regularity, but never developed significantly (with the idea that developing the setting is the job of the DM). Living Greyhawk produces scads of tournament scenarios that progress the campaign through play, but you've got to go looking for the stuff to find it.
The Living Greyhawk Journal, which I edit, is a magazine that supports the Living Greyhawk campaign. Originally a stand-alone magazine, its content has now been shifted to a regular feature that appears every month in Dragon Magazine.
The World of Greyhawk has "enjoyed" at least seven seperate incarnations. Though the current set-up seems to be working fairly well, it's my personal belief that there are a lot more incarnations to come.
--Erik Mona
Current Keeper of the Flame
