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

[grodog]

i'm sure grodog's got them somewhere.

Actually, while I was online then, I wasn't on AOL. They are on Canonfire!, though, and thanks for the vote of confidence diaglo (BTW, are you attending GenCon or LGGC this year?).

 

[T. Foster]

FWIW, here's part of an essay I wrote a couple years back describing what I see as the difference between "The World of Greyhawk" as default AD&D campaign-world (exemplified by the 1980 folio and various WoG-set but not Gygax-penned modules of the early 80s) and "Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk" (exemplified by the 1983 boxed set, Gygax's modules, and the Gord novels):

The second Greyhawk is the implicit default setting of the AD&D game, consisting primarily of the material in the AD&D rulebooks (character classes and races, spell lists and names, monster distribution, magic items, etc.) and the 1980 World of Greyhawk folio. At the time this was billed as the world of the original Greyhawk Campaign, but we know now that this wasn't true and the connection between the two was only tangential -- that Gygax essentially invented the published World of Greyhawk from scratch at the time of publication with an eye towards creating a setting that was both broad and eclectic enough that pretty much any AD&D DM could find a place within it to stick his campaign. This is the "everybody is free to do with it as they like" conception of Greyhawk, that is able to fit Quag Keep, Len Lakofka's Lendore Isle and Suel deities material, Frank Mentzer's Aquaria, the Slaver series modules, B1, C1-2, I1, N1, S1-3, U1-3, UK1-3, and each individual DM's own material all under the same umbrella. This World of Greyhawk is in some sense just a synonym for "D&D world" -- the place where all the assumptions as described in the AD&D rulebooks are in effect and thus has no "canon" -- no specific list of what is "in" and what is "out" -- as long as your material is true to the spirit and assumptions of the AD&D game and isn't specifically set elsewhere it will fit somewhere within this World of Greyhawk. This Greyhawk is of obvious continuing interest because of both its tie to the AD&D system and its wide-open nature. This is "your" Greyhawk, loosely defined by the rules and folio and open as a toolbox for each DM to develop and do with as he wishes.

The third Greyhawk tends to get confused with both the first and the second (Erik Mona's breakdown failed to really differentiate them) but is distinct in my mind, and I think the failure to recognize that distinction is what has lead to a lot of the strife and confusion we see in Greyhawk fandom -- the third Greyhawk, is, simply put, Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz's own elaboration and development of Greyhawk #2, the codification and expansion of the Greyhawk #1 material within the Greyhawk #2 setting/milieu. This, and only this, is the Greyhawk that has a specific canon -- the 1983 boxed set, the G, D and EX series modules and WG1-6 (counting T1-2 as WG1-2 and S4 as WG3, as was originally intended), various Greyhawk-related articles by Gygax and Kuntz in Dragon magazine, the Gord novels, and occasional bits of Greyhawk and crypto-Greyhawk from the pens of those authors post-1986. This is the Greyhawk of Iggwilv and Graz'zt, Tharizdun and the Elder Elemental God, the Rhennee and the Circle of Eight, uskfruit and bronzewood trees, iron drabs, copper commons, and platinum plates, elves as olve and gnomes as noniz, Xaene and the Lost City of Elders, Hextor and Incabulos, Celestian and Fhlarlanghn, Heward and Keoghtom. In other words, no longer either the "anything goes" primarily dungeon-oriented game-world of the 70s-era material or the wide-open and deliberately vague "DM's toolbox" of the 1980 folio, but rather the specific, detailed, and self-consistent creative vision of a single author (well, two single authors, but even RJK's role in this Greyhawk is distinctly secondary to Gygax's). This Greyhawk is of continuing interest the same way any other detailed fantasy world -- be it Tekumel or Middle Earth, the Young Kingdoms or Glorantha -- is, because it's imaginative and flavorful and is the expression of its author's creative vision. But while people study, play in, and perhaps even add their own personalized bits and pieces to Tekumel and Middle Earth, they'd never claim to "own" those worlds, which are inextricably tied to profs. Barker and Tolkein, and the same goes for this Greyhawk and Gygax/Kuntz -- it's their world, and any attempts by other authors to "use" it will come off at best as tribute/pastiche, and at worst as a complete bastardization (I'll leave which later works come off as which as an exercise for the reader ).

(note: "Greyhawk #1" in this essay is the original Greyhawk Campaign of the 70s, which isn't germane to this particular discussion)

IMO a lot of the miscommunication and rancor among various factions of Greyhawk fans stems from a failure to sufficiently differentiate between these two conceptions. People who see Greyhawk #2 either don't see what the big deal is with other authors continuing to detail the world or think even Gygax himself betrayed the original world by overdetailing (and eventually destroying) it in the 1983 set and Gord novels. Fans of Greyhawk #3, OTOH, take offense at the very notion of anyone other than Gygax (and perhaps Kuntz) continuing to develop the world, and the idea is so offensive that the actual quality of the development is almost immaterial.

 

[grodog]

That's the best of the first 6 folders. It looks like they -still- haven't put up the next 6 BoGs.

Hmmmm. Not having been there, I'll take your word for it, Nell. Have you pinged Gary about or Issak about the missing files? IIRC, Issak's in charge of CF! downloads (or at least hosting).

For those who weren't there...the original AOL folders closed after (500?) posts and were "auto-archived" in AOL's download library (they're no longer there; don't bother looking). There were 30 folder logs in all, then AOL switched to an unlimited post message board which was not auto-archived. There were a few desultory attempts to manually log the posts after that, but I don't think any suceeded or survived.

Of the original 30 folders, #27(26?) and #30 are corrupted. To the best of my knowledge, no intact log of these folders exists. I have all but the earliest logs (#9 or so, I think). I'm not sure who, if anyone, also have copies. Grodog might, or Blusponge - also Erik Mona & PSmedger. I haven't come across them archived anywhere online (I haven't looked recently either, though).

I definitely have some archived AOL logs that I snagged bitd while they were still available, though I don't know that I have the corrupted logs. I'll have to go dig into floppy archives, though, to look, I think, if no one else is able to bring them to light.

The Best of Greyhawk files are excerpts from the folders, with posts compiled into articles. ("Someone who's name escapes me") did 1-5; I did 6-12 or so before stopping.

Ah, so the Best of AOL are just that---not everything. Hmmm. Maybe I just have those???

 

[grodog]

If you can track them down, there were a number of articles (by Carl Sargent as well, I believe) in Dragon Magazine that followed up on events introduced in FtA and provided a lot of interesting information and hooks. Don't know if those articles have been collected anywhere, but they should have been.

Actually, Sargent's Dragon articles were excerpted from Ivid the Undying after it was killed as a published product---chunks of it were salvaged as articles in Dragons 204, 206, and 208.

I haven't ever compared the text of the Dragon Ivid articles to the content from the Ivid downloads---has anyone else done so, to determine if there were any differences between the two?

 

[Nellisir]

Ah, so the Best of AOL are just that---not everything. Hmmm. Maybe I just have those???

Those are what most people have. So far as I know, the folder logs were only ever available via the AOL library. No one ever bothered hosting them elsewhere. I tried getting them to Smedger & others a few times, but I think there were file size issues or something on both ends. I'll take another look when I get a chance.

The original folder logs are plain text files.

...OK, I just checked. I have logs #13-28 &#30. #27 is a partial, #29 was the corrupted log. Folders 1-12 were collected in the Best of Greyhawk files.
...I just uploaded a zipped file containing the above folder logs here. Let me know if there are problems downloading it.

 

[Mechanurge]

I didn't like the Greyhawk Wars and FtA because they polarized a world that had heretofore been a greyscale, finely-balanced and very interesting equilibrium. Suddenly it became black-and-white with Iuz's Empire overrunning everything interesting in the North, the Great Kingdom disintegrating and practically every kingdom ruined by war and famine. All that was hidden and interesting - the machinations of the Scarlet Brotherhood, the rot at the heart of the GK, the secret wars in the occupied Shield Lands, the power-politics between tiny statelets - became overt, obvious...and hence boring.

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

No, a series of good sourcebooks for say, the Horned Society, would have been very welcome. Please don't assume that all GH fans "hate change" as that is both denigrating and untrue. A lot of them just don't like this particular change.

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

It wasn't the execution, it was the ideas. I don't want a destroyed world with the forces of good and evil all nicely lined up for megabattles (especially since this was partly done to support a crappy new product line).

 

[zoroaster100]

I liked From the Ashes a lot. I liked having the static original campaign setting and a detailed outline of a campaign-shaking series of transformative wars. It created the possibility of using the wars as the background for a campaign where the world was dynamic, with much work done for me, or a campaign involving the wars, or an example of how to plot out a different world-shaking event of similar scale.

 

[haakon1]

The problem with Greyhawkers is that they do not want their timeline advanced. . . . I think old-timers forget that.

The problem with (some) non-Greyhawkers is they get mad at Greyhawkers for wanting Greyhawk to be Greyhawk. Is that so wrong? :\

 

[haakon1]

diaglo "i was on the lists too" Ooi

Word, homes.

 

[haakon1]

Neitther, of course. They/we would have wanted more detail on 576 CY, like how Wilderlands and Harn do it. No timeline advancing - that's fine for comics and novels, IMHO it's consistently terrible for RPG settings. We GMs want a world we can bend to _our_ will, not have our campaigns bent to someone else's will!

As many others have said, yup.