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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thulcondar" data-source="post: 3407529" data-attributes="member: 43770">From my perspective, FtA simply seemed... unnecessary.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? That was bad enough, but in addition the post-FtA Greyhawk started filling in all sorts of details that were similarly previously the demesne of the DM. Products like "Iuz the Evil". It was a reaction to the success of the Forgotten Realms products, where everthing was set up and presented in nauseating detail, 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. There was no room for individual DM creativity any more. Greyhawk was at its best when it was a framework upon which the DM could imprint his or her own creative stamp. A place where you could plunk a "generic" dungeon. The Post-FtA Greyhawk was too much like Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance; everything laid out following an inexorable path, or detailed to the point where the talents of setting design were no longer needed.</blockquote>

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