What didn't people like about Greyhawk From the Ashes?

[Mortellan]

GH Wars/FtA was a logical result from the hooks that Gygax left in the 82 guide and his articles in Dragon(except the Iuz-Vatun thing, yeash). What is startling is all the reverses done to these events when GH put out products for 591CY. Even Philidor vanished. It was like a half-retcon really. All in all I don't reference FtA much since it's outdated material covered twice over anyways in following Guides.

 

[Ripzerai]

From the Ashes was great on many levels, but it was very much Carl Sargent's vision, not Gary Gygax's, and some people are so consumed with Gygax's role in creating the setting and the game or with the screwed up shenanigans involved with his leaving the company that they're not interested in giving his successors a chance.

The Greyhawk Wars did screw up many things that I liked about the setting, devastating entire (interesting) nations like Geoff and Tenh (and hosing the Flan people in most regions). It was a much darker take on the setting, and not everyone likes that. In some ways it made the setting a more limited one - nearly all the campaigns you're going to build with From the Ashes are going to be about liberating ruined peoples from demonic forces or the like, where Greyhawk as it was originally conceived had the potential to be about so many other things.

NiteScreed's "Grey in the Hawk" essay had it wrong in many ways - Greyhawk was never exclusively about balance or moral ambiguity or any of the things NiteScreed thought it was about. That's certainly a good way to play the campaign, but just as certainly not the only way to play it. The problem with From the Ashes was that it made stark good and evil, while certainly not absent in previous incarnations, take over all the other elements entirely.

That said, I love Carl Sargent's material and the depth, the mysteries, and interesting twists he added to the campaign. In the end, the World of Greyhawk isn't about Gary Gygax, Carl Sargent, or any of the other worthies who've elaborated on the setting; it's about what you, the players and DMs, make of it. Sargent's material added a lot of interesting wrinkles to exploit or not exploit as you choose, and that makes it worthwhile, whether you adopt the whole history of the Greyhawk Wars metaplot and the somewhat awkward and disappointing way Roger E. Moore dug the setting out of it in 1998 or not.

 

[Korgoth]

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=191219&page=1&pp=40



The above thread/quote got me to wondering. I've seen a lot of people who didn't like the Greyhawk Wars and From the Ashes material, and I'm wondering why?

Was it that they changed things? Meaning essentially any material that wasn't an adventure would have been unwelcome?

Was it that you would have been happy with different changes, but not the ones they made? If so, which would you have prefered?

Did you find the products themselves of poor quality, as opposed to having any real issue with the ideas?

From my perspective, I liked the material. It made the setting seem more vivid and an inspiring place to set campaigns. I must say though that I wasn't overly familiar with the background before reading it. I'd played characters in the setting, and had an idea of some of the background, but wasn't steeped in Greyhawk lore, so to speak. Separate from the Greyhawk-ness of the material, I also found the ideas well presented, to the point where it made me think about playing differently in any future campaign/setting or home brew.

For me, the issues are these: First, I don't like the introduction of an over-arching "plotline". To me, that's not what a campaign setting should be about. It should be an evocative setting for my campaign, not the place where I try to squeeze in my campaign around the 'official' one. Second, I don't like all of this "blow up half the world" stuff. Sure, I can take any published setting and say "These guys all fight, here's a list of what nations are now destroyed" etc. Problem is, if you had a campaign set in one of those areas you either have to deviate from the newly-official storyline or have your campaign blown off track by some stupid invasion that, by definition, the PCs have no chance of stopping.

It all amounts to a giant, gratuitous cut-scene that leaves you standing in a crater when it's over.

Maybe this is harder for people to think up, but if you want to come out with new setting material for a published set, how about things like a linked series of adventures, a bunch of plot hooks and side quests, new mysterious locations to weave into your campaign, new magic items, secret societies, legends of artifacts, etc. Stuff to get the creative juices flowing. But what you don't want to do, aside from just writing crazy World War scenarios (as an aside, the Hundred Years War lasted a long time and neither England or France ceased to exist because of it... but in GHW about half of the planet ceases to exist in just a few years... even the Trojan War took 10 years to raze one stupid city) where the world explodes and you get to write paragraph after paragraph saying basically just that, is to succumb to the temptation to fill in every tiny little detail that has previously been left open. Tempted to map out the Mage's Stronghold from the Valley of the Mage? Don't! That, just like the city in the Sea of Dust and other "question marks" of the setting are left for the DM to play with.

Ultimately, you want your contribution to the campaign setting to give all the DMs out there more to play with, not less. You want to create additional potential, rather than closing off existing potential by actualizing it.

 

[S'mon]

I guess the problem is metaplot; Greyhawk isn't a very metaplotty sort of place. Carl Sargent is a talented writer, but I've never had much desire to play in his version of Greyhawk. I'd love to see Sargent do a renaissance era setting based on the Thirty Years War, which would fit his dark tone perfectly. Something more WHFRP than regular D&D. I guess my favourite version of Greyhawk is that hinted at in the 1e DMG and other pre-1983 sources; the 1983 box is great but started taking it away from sword & sorcery towards a more medieval-fantasy approach, I prefer the former. Then 2e initially blandified it, then smashed it with the Greyhawk Wars. Of course EGG also smashes it in his Gord books!

 

[haakon1]

No Respect

It was a blatant attempt to wrench away the WoG from the material that Gyax wrote (remember, the Wars and FtA came about right after his departure from TSR). The original (1980/1983 books) presented a fantasy world in the "old school" tradition. A place for a DM to set adventures; a sketched-out starting-point that the DM could fill in as needed and desired. FtA tore that asunder; all of a sudden, a DM with a years-long Greyhawk campaign was faced with a decision; go with the "canon" history, or the one he had carefully created as the game play proceeded?

It didn't respect the world's creator (as pointed out above), it didn't respect DM's (again as pointed out above), and it didn't respect the players.

The Greyhawk Wars authors didn't know the setting. Their changes either didn't make a lot of sense (Bissel being suddenly crushed after hundreds of years of being a heavily armed "front line" state), disrespected players (Geoff and Sterich being crushed by giant invaders when the whole G123D123Q1 superadventure at the heart of Greyhawk was about PC's preventing that), or disrespected DM's (blew away entire regions: the Wild Coast, the Bandit Kingdoms, and the Great Kingdom are three of the more important areas to get nuked -- if you had a campaign set there, you couldn't use their stuff or you had to change your campaign).

FTA made the bad mistake of taking the results of one playing of a silly Risk-like board game (which didn't take the armies listed in the WOG into account, but used its own rules on the Greyhawk map) as "history".

I asked Gary Gygax his views on setting updates once, on these boards. He said he figured once the designer wrote it, it belonged to the DM and the players, and only they should advance the history.

I agree -- more depth (Ivid the Undying) is OK. More adventures and updates of adventures for new editions are fine. Save the world adventures are fine. But basically, a game world should be left alone by the publishers. As an art teacher on the Simpsons once said: "It belongs to the ages now. Walk away." Advice TSR (and George Lucas!) should have followed.

 

[airwalkrr]

God, this whole thread is total deja vu for me. I recall reading like the exact same thread a year or two ago.

 

[haakon1]

It all amounts to a giant, gratuitous cut-scene that leaves you standing in a crater when it's over.

Well said.

Maybe this is harder for people to think up, but if you want to come out with new setting material for a published set, how about things like a linked series of adventures, a bunch of plot hooks and side quests, new mysterious locations to weave into your campaign, new magic items, secret societies, legends of artifacts, etc. Stuff to get the creative juices flowing. But what you don't want to do, aside from just writing crazy World War scenarios . . . is to succumb to the temptation to fill in every tiny little detail that has previously been left open. Tempted to map out the Mage's Stronghold from the Valley of the Mage? Don't! That, just like the city in the Sea of Dust and other "question marks" of the setting are left for the DM to play with.

I agree, but I would have been happy with them just laying off the juvenile good v. evil world war, and adding whatever new stuff or detail they wanted. Unnecessary filigrees on old stuff is a lot better than vandalizing the setting by ripping stuff up wholesale.

When you look at FTA follow-up products like "Puppets", you gotta wonder what TSR was thinking.

 

[Numion]

Carl Sargent is a talented writer, but I've never had much desire to play in his version of Greyhawk. I'd love to see Sargent do a renaissance era setting based on the Thirty Years War, which would fit his dark tone perfectly. Something more WHFRP than regular D&D.

As it happens, Carl Sargent has written (IMHO, of course) one the best fantasy RP adventures evar, for WFRP. Although Power Behind the Throne wasn't the easiest adventure to run, it was also very rewarding.

 

[Garnfellow]

God, this whole thread is total deja vu for me. I recall reading like the exact same thread a year or two ago.

More like ten or more years ago for me, back on the good old AOL Greyhawk forum. Some really good discussions from back in the day on this very issue. I wonder if any of those threads were saved?

 

[S'mon]

As it happens, Carl Sargent has written (IMHO, of course) one the best fantasy RP adventures evar, for WFRP. Although Power Behind the Throne wasn't the easiest adventure to run, it was also very rewarding.

Yeah, I know - I was thinking of something for d20 though, preferably C&C.
Actually a fantasy version of the 30 years' war, as presented in eg Moorcock's "The War Hound and the World's Pain", could be a fantastic setting.