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

[Henry]

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!

 

[Sir Elton]

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!

There is a place called Hell in the U.S. There is also places that are references to body parts in the U.S. Around the world, there are towns with legitimate names, but sound like references to what you do with your wife on a saturday night.

 

[erc1971]

Well...that's absolutely what I liked about it. I could create my own storylines and plots without worrying about some later supplement contradicting anything I had done. Greyhawk gave DM's a sense of freedom that other settings didn't. (I'm looking at you Forgotten Realms)

I feel the same way.

Greyhawk gives me a basic framework to start with while not overwhelming me with every last detail (and thus tons of books that take up space and cost $$$$$).

While I love the fact that Greyhawk does have sovereign nations and a very feudal European feel, I find that there isn't a large variety of cultures. To give things more flavor, I tend to base various area's off of real world cutures, just to give it more variety. For instance, I made the barbarians in the NE corner of the map Vikings, including adding the Norse Mythology to the world. I tend to give the Suel people English and Germanic names. Oeridian's become Spanish or Italian. Real world cutlures have mroe flavor than any person could put to paper, so I borrow thier influences to make things more colorful.

That is really my only complaint as far as Greyhawk goes. It is by far my favorite campaign setting, and meshes well with how I GM.

ERic

 

[RFisher]

The scale. I really wanted something in between WoG & B2.

The lack of borders. Not included because they change. That's not a reason for giving me absolutely zero guidance on where they might fall. Give me something to start with. I'm OK with the fact that they'd just be a starting point.

These days, I would love to see a First Fantasy Campaign equivalent of Greyhawk. I think that'd given me more insight into how the designer ran the game &--ironically--helped more in developing my own style even where might differ from his than any of the stuff "cleaned up for public consumption" has. In fact, I think a lot of the "cleaned up for public consumption" stuff set me on wrong tracks.

I do love both the folio & boxed set, though.

 

[SWBaxter]

You may be kidding yourself here. Look up some figures on world population over the centuries.

I'm not, and I have. Various medieval records show that European feudal kingdoms operated with a population density of about 30 to 120 people per square mile; the former would be something like the Scottish highlands, the latter was found in the richest farmlands of France. Medieval Britain had an overall density of about 40 people per square mile (higher in the south, lower in the north). A 30 mile hex is 780 square miles, at 40 people per square mile that's just over 30000 people. At that ratio, there's many geographically large Greyhawk nations that only have enough people to settle one to four hexes of their territory. Either that or they have population densities of 10 people per square mile or less, which is below the threshold of those few hunter-gatherer cultures we have reasonably good data on. Of course, much of medieval Europe was higher than 40 people per square mile - France was around 100, what is now Germany about 90. They'd fit more than 70000 people per hex; at those sorts of densities, a large nation like Keoland with a listed population of a bit under 2 million has enough people for a little under 30 hexes; the listed borders cover something like 6 times that many.

Now, you could run Greyhawk with those tiny nations, by ignoring most of the fluff about overland trade and travel, border disputes, etc. But the material doesn't really paint a picture of the vast unsettled (and no doubt monster-dominated) wilderness that must make up most of the setting, instead implying that only certain areas are completely unsettled. So the easiest way to get something more reasonable is to multiply most of the populations by 10 or so.

Of course, I have no doubt that many people don't care about this sort of thing, which is fine. I'm just saying what bugs me personally about Greyhawk.

 

[gizmo33]

You may be kidding yourself here. Look up some figures on world population over the centuries. It's pretty surprising to know how long the world moved along with only a hundred million or so on the face of the globe.

IIRC the population figures are too low by medieval standards as well (even a fairly sparsely populated medieval England). Then again I could be "kidding myself" too - if I knew what that meant. The relevant thing to do once you looked up world population figures would be to compare them to the population density of Greyhawk.

 

[TerraDave]

Can we say we disliked nothing...

I liked E.G.G.s greyhawk articles in Dragon (and Grodog is right that it was a shame, and actually kind of silly, that more of that didn't appear in the later box set).

I enjoyed the implicit Greyhawk stuff in the DMG (i.e. in the artifact descriptions).

I have greatly enjoyed the many Gygax Greyhawk modules I have read and the few I have DMed.

I have never used Oerth as a setting and never would. But I don't need that. And as far as I can tell I never needed nor wanted any of the "2nd ed" non-Gygax Greyhaw.

 

[Mycanid]

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

Very correct sir ... very correct. In retrospect and in reading both your and Philotomy's posts I realize that I was "category lumping", if you will, "Gygax's Greyhawk" with all the stuff that came out before 2e, and that is, of course, simply not fair nor really what the thread is about!

As regards to the stuff I remember that was very specifically Gary's I can honestly say that there was very little I did not like. Hmm....

Perhaps if one of you more adept scholars could LIST the products that might fall into this category it might make things easier?

 

[Umbran]

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.

And I find the source material so thin that there is no appreciable difference between "filling in the gaps" and making the whole thing up myself.

 

[Laman Stahros]

Well...that's absolutely what I liked about it. I could create my own storylines and plots without worrying about some later supplement contradicting anything I had done. Greyhawk gave DM's a sense of freedom that other settings didn't. (I'm looking at you Forgotten Realms)

I wasn't talking about later books, only about the initial boxed set's utter lack of:

1> borders on the map for the countries.
2> anything more than a few paragraphs (at best) about each country.
3> the utter blandness of the setting in general.

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.

And I find the source material so thin that there is no appreciable difference between "filling in the gaps" and making the whole thing up myself.

And that was what I was trying to say. So true, so true.