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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ripzerai" data-source="post: 3407649" data-attributes="member: 38324">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.</blockquote>

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