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

[00Machado]

The thing is, you're NOT doing all the work. You've already got a decent framework as your starting point. But you are given a lot of room to connect the dots as you need to do them. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite published campaign. I don't have time to generate stuff from scratch, but I do have time to fill in the gaps.
Plus, every Greyhawk campaign is a little different. Keeps experiences with the setting fresh with every campaign you play it where it's in use.

What dots were present to connect besides names and some sparse exposition? Maybe I didn't see it. I'm wondering what you'd use an an example for demonstration purposes.

 

[Faraer]

By the way, for any of you who like Gary's work but haven't read Living Fantasy, I recommend it strongly. It's Gary's exposition of D&Dlike quasi-medieval/Renaissance society, drawn from historical models and his own quirky imagination, and spells out a lot of the assumptions that Greyhawk and D&D are based on but which he perhaps unwisely thought everyone would either take for granted or not be interested in.

For me, Living Fantasy is one of the pillars of AD&D-Greyhawk alongside the rulebooks, the 1980 and 1983 sets, and the modules.

 

[Breakdaddy]

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.

There is a town called DOTHELAUNDRY??

 

[kenobi65]

There is a town called DOTHELAUNDRY??

I think he was referring to Slapundtickle, Norway.

 

[dcas]

I think he was referring to Slapundtickle, Norway.

INTERCOURSE and BIRD-IN-HAND, Pennsylvania.

 

[Twowolves]

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.

I'm not sure if it was the old 83 boxed set, or the later "The Adventure Begins" book, or some of the older adventures or what, but I was more impressed with the different human sub-races and cultures in Greyhawk than anywhere else. Forgotten Realms just took RL cultures and dropped them in wholesale with little more than name changes. Yeah, it was easy to instantly get a feel for them, but it was almost cheating, in a way. Greyhawk's races and cultures mostly didn't have clear-cut RW analogies, other than Northmen=Vikings and Rhenee=gypsies. Well, I guess Flan=Amerindians, maybe, but the Suel and the Baklunish, and the ancient Oeridians (who were the ones the ancient Suel fought with again?) were pretty unique, or so I thought. At worst, they were "kinda like X, but really different".

Both 1st ed Greyhawk and 1st ed Forgotten Realms were the way I feel that campaign setting ought to be done. Namely, they provide maps and the names of distant lands with sketchy details on culture and denizens, with lots of open space to be filled in by the DM. The original FR boxed set had a cyclopedia of names of places and rumors and legends, and that was it. Later on they filled in ALL of the blanks, and screwed up the rumors/legends with horrible adventures (I'm looking at YOU, Hellgate Keep) and worse books (*cough cough* War-in-Tethyr *cough cough*). But in the beginning, I choose it to base my campaign in because there were vast, open areas that I could make my own, and just use the names of the other places to fill in the background detail.

Of course, having said that, I did think "Volo's Guide to Waterdeep" (and some of it's sequels) were so good, they would be my second choice for how to set up a campaign setting. Interesting places to see, with hundreds of built in plot hooks, complete with a tavern menu!

 

[Umbran]

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 don't think any GM needs to start a campaign with every place in the entire gaming world already named, or even mapped. And it isn't as if the original Greyhawk maps were particularly detailed. One could sketch out the basic information on them in minutes. That's not what I'd call painstaking.

Some settings are terribly restrictive in their detail, yes. But Greyhawk was too far on the other end of the scale - there is actually little benefit to using a setting if you can do absolutely whatever you want. The best reasons for using a setting is that it gives you material so you don't need to make it up - but the only material Greyhawk provided was the stuff I found easy and quick to do myself.

YMMV, of course. And to each their own.

 

[Ranger REG]

...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!

So basically, you wouldn't be surprised if Gygax use Erypt for Egypt clone, Zindia for India clone, Celestial Imperium (China), Nippon Dominion (Japan), etc.

 

[grodog]

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

[off topic]
I've always been a fan of the regional source book, and was disappointed when Destan's Valus book with Different Worlds didn't sell as well as it "should" have, given that it's a nice compromise in scope as you describe (a 600 mile island/sub-continent). Sigh....
[/off topic]

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.

The folio had those, page 7, bottom map. Not sure why they were dropped from the box set (which does in fact display the page 7 top map I mentioned above, it's just in the Glassography by the weather info...).

 

[grodog]

What dots were present to connect besides names and some sparse exposition? Maybe I didn't see it. I'm wondering what you'd use an an example for demonstration purposes.

This is part of what I was attempting to get at in the comment below:

I think one of things that appealed to many of the early GH adopters was that Greyhawk rewarded careful reading and attention to detail, [snip] within the main rulebooks (linking Tenser's Floating Disk to the Rogues Gallery entry, or the DMG artifacts to their GH details), [snip]

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.

The DM connects the dots however he wants them connected; using some DMG artifacts as a quick example:

• the Plains of Pesh could be anywhere on the map of GH, or elsewhere in Greyhawk's planar cosmology
• which demi-human raiders stole the Cup and Talisman of Al'Akbar and how did it end up in the Bandit Kingdoms?
• how long ago did the Isles of Woe sink? was Tzunk Flan, Bakluni, Suel, or something else?
• how was the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords was lost in the Invoked Devestation---to the Suel? by the Suel? were dwarves fighting on one side or the other in the Suel-Bakluni wars?
• etc.

Working through these details from the DMG---in conjunction with the folio or 1983 box set---would yield lots of DM inspiration and creativity: filling in the gaps in history by detailing the other rulers of the Isles of Woe, or the staunch dwarven allies of the Bakluni, and then extrapolating from there to the present (Bakluni and dwarves are friendly, while the Suel despise dwarves, etc.).