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

[mhensley]

My best D&D campaign to date was a 2nd edition game set in Greyhawk FtA. Most people's issues with it stem from it not being written by Gygax.

 

[diaglo]

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?

i'm sure grodog's got them somewhere.

i'll just say i think Carl Sargent should have stayed away from Greyhawk.

the Greyhack Wars and the lead up to them and following didn't make me very happy with T$R.

 

[Arnwyn]

It was a reaction to the success of the Forgotten Realms products, where everthing was set up and presented in nauseating awesome detail,

FIFY.

for the benefit of lazy DMs who either couldn't work up those details on their own or couldn't think them up on the fly as needed.

Or those DMs who had, you know, lives and jobs. Of course.

(No comment on the quality of how FtA did it, though. I agree that metaplots suck.)

 

[qstor]

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?

Check Canonfire.com there's some .pdfs of the material on that site.

People forget that EGG laid the framework for the Greyhawk Wars in Dragon magazine articles like the one in Dragon #55. I think Sargent continued along that framework.

I love some of what he did like Ivid the Undying and the Marklands. He fleshed parts of the different areas out. I also like some "higher" magic things he did like the Fading Lands. I think these are all great for Greyhawk.

Mike

 

[Garnfellow]

Check Canonfire.com there's some .pdfs of the material on that site.

Nice. Lots of names there I haven't seen in many years.

Man, that AOL group was an excellent community.

 

[Krolik]

The problem with Greyhawkers is that they do not want their timeline advanced. Most of them have been gaming in Greyhawk for over 20 years and they have advanced the timeline in their own way over the years. Then when you get new published material that changes something they have had in continuity for decades they start jumping up and down and swearing it's not Greyhawk. It's great if you bought Greyhawk back in '81 and have been using it ever since but that does nothing for newbies looking for a new world to game in. 25 year olds have different game expectations then the 45 year olds currently playing Greyhawk. It's called the generation gap.

For each person who's pissed that Greyhawk got more detail there's a dozen who do not find it detailed enough. I think Gary's Greyhawk was left vague because Gary was the type of DM who would have had no problem redrawing the landscape every spring/summer due to world and civil wars. Old-timers dislike change but I think Greyhawk, more then any other campaign world, was designed to be constantly in flux. Some of that flux could be prevented by the players' actions but the rest of it was supposed to keep fluxing.

Greyhawk is a miniature-battles world put into a role-playing environment. I think old-timers forget that.

 

[Set]

Loved 'old school' Greyhawk, loved From the Ashes and the Greyhawk Wars. It really revitalized the setting for me, while addressing one of my problems with quite a few fantasy settings, too many 'good guys' and not enough 'bad guys.' Evil kingdoms are absolutely a requirement, and the Greyhawk Wars revitalized Iuz, Aerdie and the Scarlet Brotherhood, which gave the DM an assortment of 'bad-guy' options.

Hated the whole Vecna Lives thing, just as I hated the Avatar trilogy / Time of Troubles over in FR. Meta-plots that involve the gods are on my list of least-favorite things ever.

 

[Mycanid]

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.

This post just about sums up my feelings and thoughts on the matter perfectly.

I think it is unfair to simply assume that most of those who did not like From the Ashes were "simply" Gygax fans. I did not like it at all. I would not say I am a particular "Gygax fan" or not one. But there WAS a change in the setting's tone to one that was more dark. I did not like that change. I preferred the "open wide" character of it before the whole supplement.

 

[Mycanid]

The problem with Greyhawkers is that they do not want their timeline advanced. Most of them have been gaming in Greyhawk for over 20 years and they have advanced the timeline in their own way over the years. Then when you get new published material that changes something they have had in continuity for decades they start jumping up and down and swearing it's not Greyhawk. It's great if you bought Greyhawk back in '81 and have been using it ever since but that does nothing for newbies looking for a new world to game in. 25 year olds have different game expectations then the 45 year olds currently playing Greyhawk. It's called the generation gap.

For each person who's pissed that Greyhawk got more detail there's a dozen who do not find it detailed enough. I think Gary's Greyhawk was left vague because Gary was the type of DM who would have had no problem redrawing the landscape every spring/summer due to world and civil wars. Old-timers dislike change but I think Greyhawk, more then any other campaign world, was designed to be constantly in flux. Some of that flux could be prevented by the players' actions but the rest of it was supposed to keep fluxing.

Greyhawk is a miniature-battles world put into a role-playing environment. I think old-timers forget that.

Krolik ... I think this characterization of "not liking change" is a little unfair and maybe a little too sweeping.

Regarding the subject of the thread at hand, it's not that just that "old Greyhawkers don't like change". It's that they don't like the particular change that was done in this supplement. Also, that the change was disliked by many of them just shows that several people exposed to common things had a common reaction taste wise. Something that may or may not have to do with the issue of "not liking change" in the general sense you seem to present it as. :\

Besides, as you can see in the thread there are "old Greyhawkers" that did not mind the change.

 

[Krolik]

Krolik ... I think this characterization of "not liking change" is a little unfair and maybe a little too sweeping.

As someone who spend a couple of years at the weekly chat and several years on the Greyhawk lists I think I heard from a great-many Greyhawkers. I didn't find my statement too sweeping.

Regarding the subject of the thread at hand, it's not that just that "old Greyhawkers don't like change". It's that they don't like the particular change that was done in this supplement. Also, that the change was disliked by many of them just shows that several people exposed to common things had a common reaction taste wise. Something that may or may not have to do with the issue of "not liking change" in the general sense you seem to present it as. :\

What change do you think they would have liked better: an updated timeline with every country exactly the same as it was 20 years earlier: Or one that actually lived up to the idea which Gary put in place that Greyhawk was a violent world of warfare and strife?

While GW and FtA might not have been as well written as they could have been I do believe they lived up to the theme of Greyhawk and made it something that was not stagnant and unchanging.