What didn't people like about Gygax's Greyhawk?

[Waldorf]

It bugs me that Gary signed away the rights to continue producing material for Greyhawk.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

The fact that despite them being the central features of the setting we never got a detailed treatment of either Greyhawk City or Greyhawk Castle.

Yeah, that was something stuck in my craw, too, almost as much as the oft-delayed continuation of the T series. I've never understood why these never appeared, written by Gary himself. The later treatments of both, while not all that bad (I'm not talking about the Castle Greyhawk joke module), appeared after Gary left TSR.

That we later learned this wasn't actually Gygax's home campaign-world at all, but rather something he made up more or less from whole cloth at the time of publication.

Gary has maintained, and continues to maintain, that since he still runs campaigns in the "real" Greyhawk world, he didn't want his players seeing "behind the curtain" with a published version. Much as I esteem the dear old boy, I can't say such reasoning holds much water. Publish the original, and add to it or change it for the home campaign. As Spock says, the needs of the many - D&D fandom at large - outweigh the needs of the few - one's home campaign gaming group.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I think the shoddily thrown together modules were the part I could have done the most without. The Forest Oracle comes to mind immediately.

I don't remember The Forest Oracle being a Greyhawk module. Are you sure about that?

Actually, most of the classic (and good/fun, IMO) early modules were set in Greyhawk: T1, S1, the A series, the G series, the D series, etc. The WG series had some good ones, too: The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, etc.

 

[evildmguy]

GH with some FR

At the time, I really didn't like Greyhawk. And, I have really only come to understand why in recent years.

I was around 8 years old when I started playing DND and 12 years when I started DMing. Reading through Greyhawk, at the time, was very tough to read. I didn't understand it. The only things that were of any use to me were the graphs of what countries were good or evil and the gazeteer, which still seemed quite lacking to me.

I don't have it in front of me, and I could be wrong, but I remember getting no ideas of adventures or what to do from the books. The few ideas I did have didn't go over well with my players, so I looked for other sources of inspiration, which wasn't Greyhawk. I don't remember any ruins that weren't in the middle of an uninhabited desert, with no real reason to go there. Why would anyone go to the Barbarian areas, when all they do is attack any outsiders? And there didn't seem to be any reason to go there.

So, for me at the time, it was a very difficult world to understand. I couldn't find adventures easily and the descriptions were so boring to a 12 year old. (And someone who liked and read history books)

Then, around 1987, FR came out. Here was a setting I could grok as a 15 year old. It had novel concepts like "current events" and "adventure hooks" right in the descriptions of areas, which GH didn't have. The maps had ruins just off of major roads. There were hooks for adventures everywhere, it seemed. (I personally didn't get the sense of Elminster being "munchkin" or too powerful until several years later.) The setting seemed to evoke adventure to me, on a scale that GH didn't. Now, it was still a 15 year olds version of it, and I would shudder to play in one now, but it worked for me then.

A few years later, FtA came out and for me, I could finally understand the setting. There were obvious adventure hooks and things just wrote themselves. The descriptions were more clear about what certain countries were, what they had been and what had happened. I understood them better. Alas, it was too late, as I was firmly enjoying FR and wasn't about to go back to GH.

Now, 18 years later, I do understand what the point of GH was. And, had I been introduced to it now, I would probably like it. I would find it easy to make adventures in it and would appreciate it more. Having said that, I prefer metaplot over nothing. True, I think ALL designers have taken it too far and too many things have happened in too short of a time, but I still prefer the feeling of things moving forward. I have no problem, as the GM, of saying "I am using the timeline until year X and nothing beyond it is canon for me." Further, I also have no problem running several campaigns against canon but continuing what my groups have created and running with it. I have also reset things back to canon and gone forward, using those ideas as new ways of looking at the campaign world for myself and my players.

YMMV

Have a good one. Take care.

edg

 

[Twowolves]

I think the shoddily thrown together modules were the part I could have done the most without. The Forest Oracle comes to mind immediately. I'd prefer quality over quantity maself. I also did not really like the whole Dragonlance setting.

Of course, Gygax didn't have anything to do with either The Forest Oracle nor the Dragonlance setting.

 

[SWBaxter]

But were there things that you did not like along the way (up until his resignation from TSR), be it product material or related articles?

Hmm. The main thing I disliked in the original folio was the population figures. They're generally too low for the land area given by a factor of at least 10. Some of the cultures were a little odd, too (why did the various nomads remain nomads, when they're hemmed in by city-building civilizations on almost every side?), but that's kinda par for the course.

Later on, I also disliked the updates in From the Sorceror's Scroll, which marked my first ever brush with metaplot, as players who kept up with Dragon would try and tell me I'd done something wrong if I contradicted something Gygax (or various others) wrote. Never been much of a fan of that sort of thing.

 

[grodog]

I wish that the many products "in the pipeline" had appeared in a timely manner when they were first announced, because then I wouldn't be have missed the following materials:

• Gygax and Williams' Shadowland module about the demi-plane of shadow
• various other planar materials and modules that Gygax and Marsh were writing
• City, Castle, and Wilderness of Greyhawk
• T2 (was published after 8 years, though in substantially altered form, due to similarities to Q1)

That's more of a "I wish it was this way instead of how it is" response though. To the original question, there aren't a lot of things that I don't like about Gygax's GH:

• 1983 box set should have included the additional Oerik map from the 1980 folio, page 7
• 1983 box set should have included the Dragon articles: illustrations from the original Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk and the full texts of the gods, the later Gods of the Suel pantheon articles, as well as the regional updates and additions from Greyhawk's World (some of which were not published until after 1983, but hey, it is something I dislike)

That's all, off the top of my head. I may think of other issues, with some more noodling on it.

 

[Pielorinho]

I should state at the outset that I ran my first real campaign in Greyhawk--at least until I warped the PCs through an interdimensional rift into a homebrew world. So I used Greyhawk a lot, and I have a strong appreciation for it.

That said, what I didn't like about it was a lack of unity, I think. It felt to me like a hodgepodge, and nothing in it leapt out at me with a strong tasty flavor, to engage in some horrifying synesthesia. I prefer worlds (even much smaller worlds) with a distinct flavor.

That's not to say that no Greyhawk supplements had flavor--I remember a hardback called, I think, Greyhawk Adventures, and I loved the flavor in that. But the main boxed set just didn't do it for me, flavorwise.

Daniel

 

[Laman Stahros]

The thing that always bugged me about Greyhawk was the one thing that I always hear the most praise about it for - the fact that it was basically just a map with an overview of the various nations. I never understood (and still don't) why people liked that. If I wanted to do all the work myself, I wouldn't need a boxed set like the orginal Greyhawk Campaign setting was in. I was so disappointed by that fact that I have never been able to really look it over with an open mind.

 

[grodog]

The thing that always bugged me about Greyhawk was the one thing that I always hear the most praise about it for - the fact that it was basically just a map with an overview of the various nations. I never understood (and still don't) why people liked that.

I think one of things that appealed to many of the early GH adopters was that Greyhawk rewarded careful reading and attention to detail, both within its own modules (Lolth connections in T1 leveraged in Gord novels, and T2 and D3 share some VERY interesting similarities, for example), within the main rulebooks (linking Tenser's Floating Disk to the Rogues Gallery entry, or the DMG artifacts to their GH details), and within and across the folio and box set themselves (Zagig/Zagyg, drow mentions in the Sulhauts and Hellfurnaces tie to G3/D1-3, etc.). That level of encouraged-scrutiny built creator fans, who connected the dots between setting elements, who built within, around, over, and under such details, which is why so many folks have complained about how the metaplots from 2e didn't gel with the detailed games that they had established: the players were paying more attention to the history and development of the Flanaess than TSR was at the time.

At least that's my take