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

[kenobi65]

I used to complain at the names in Greyhawk -- Geoff, Perrenland, the Gnarley Forest, Fax -- until I started looking at real-world maps, at places like Pis Pis river, Wet Beaver Creek, and the Grand Teton mountains, and realized that Gary's place names were SANER than some of ours in real life!

I think the Verboboncs and Gnarley Forests don't bother me as much as the names that are clearly reversals (sometimes with a little modification) of actual players' names -- Zagyg, Drawmij, Tenser, etc.

 

[krunchyfrogg]

The thing about Greyhawk, as a setting, is that aside from the names there is nothing there that tells you you're playing in Greyhawk, instead of somewhere else. It is too generic to be inspiring to me.

Ya see, I actually dig the generia of it all. A DM can do whatever he wants with the world, without having to go through the painstaking effort of creating maps and names of every place in the entire gaming world.

 

[dcas]

I think the Verboboncs and Gnarley Forests don't bother me as much as the names that are clearly reversals (sometimes with a little modification) of actual players' names -- Zagyg, Drawmij, Tenser, etc.

How about Yrag? and Serten?

Don't forget the "-igby" names: Bigby, Riggby, Zigby, Digby, and Sigby Grigbyson!

 

[kenobi65]

How about Yrag? and Serten?

Them, too. "Ten-ser"..."Ser-ten"...

I'm convinced that 25% of the proper names in Greyhawk are variations/anagrams of "Ernest", "Gary", and "Gygax."

 

[Henry]

How about Yrag? and Serten?

Don't forget the "-igby" names: Bigby, Riggby, Zigby, Digby, and Sigby Grigbyson!

...and King Ethelred the Unready was called that on a pun for "Wise Counsel the Uncounseled"; The Holy Roman Empire Had Bald Charlie and Fat Louie. We're as bad in real life, and I keep wondering if Gary and his bunch were drawing their inspiration from that (well, that, and the usual propensity of D&D players to inject silly stuff in their games...)

P.S. I've always loved Gary's explanation for the -igby's: You think some players have railroading DM's? Gary once said that Rob Kuntz wouldn't let him name his own characters, and named them for him!

 

[00Machado]

It's tough for me to identify what is intentional vs just the way things were done back then (like level of detail, etc.).

I will say that one thing I didn't like was the quality of the writing, as separate from any of the ideas contained therein.

I would have rather had more info on the setting, plot hooks, etc, than on types of trees as well

 

[T. Foster]

P.S. I've always loved Gary's explanation for the -igby's: You think some players have railroading DM's? Gary once said that Rob Kuntz wouldn't let him name his own characters, and named them for him!

I think that applied only to followers, henchmen, and retainers (which is what all of the -igby's, even Bigby, started as) -- I'm pretty sure Gary named Yrag and Mordenkainen himself.

FWIW I like all the anagrams and silly place and character names in Greyhawk (and in Glorantha too, for that matter).

 

[00Machado]

Ya see, I actually dig the generia of it all. A DM can do whatever he wants with the world, without having to go through the painstaking effort of creating maps and names of every place in the entire gaming world.

I'm a fan of gm customizeability, but I have to agree with Umbran that at some point you draw the line and say that what you have is more a set of names and a straw man than something that is an evocative and imaginary place in the minds eye.

 

[Faraer]

The howling emptiness of the 30 miles hex. If they had even one regional type modules that showed how things looked like on the regional level.

T1 The Village of Hommlet showed us that (and S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, Artifact of Evil, and more recently Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh).

The thing about Greyhawk, as a setting, is that aside from the names there is nothing there that tells you you're playing in Greyhawk, instead of somewhere else. It is too generic to be inspiring to me.

Much of what's distinctive about the World of Greyhawk isn't the brute geographic and historical details, but the literary and game sensibility that underlies it and is better seen in Gary's modules than the gazetteer. Its feel, assumptions, combination of influences aren't just unusual compared to the early-21st-century online D&D culture, they're practically alien. (As we see in the bemusement here at Gary's naming tastes.) The other half of 'generic', of course, is because it's the prototype for later derivatives.

 

[00Machado]

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.

I concur. Without buying adventures as separate products (because they had the ideas), there wasn't much interspersed throughout the text that would result in adventure ideas just springing to mind throughout reading the books.

The setting didn't come to life for me. And it's true that there was less focus on what would and wouldn't allow for suspension of disbelief back then. These days I certainly don't like random ruins and whatnot. Back then I had fewer expectations though. I've grown. Entertainment has gorwn. Presentation has grown up. But I guess the ball could have been started rolling sooner had the initial creation done more in that area.