Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CruelSummerLord" data-source="post: 4587578" data-attributes="member: 48692">Heh, thanks.  I actually have a lot more material just like it at <a href="http://www.canonfire.com" target="_blank">www.canonfire.com</a>.  Go there, enter my username into the search engine, and there you go.  Treatises on every major nation in the Flanaess, analyses of the military, profiles of various rulers, takes on history, travel guides, writings on many of the major religions and races are all there for anyone who's interested.    My pleasure.   One of the major conventions that developed for Greyhawk as it was played by its fans was that when major changes occur, they occur in modules, not in novels or other similar game products.  Classic modules like Against the Giants, the Temple of Elemental Evil, the Slave Lords, or the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun all have the potential to majorly influence the development of your campaign, depending on how it plays out.  The thing was, though, that your campaign specifically decided how it was going to play out.  There was no specific timeline advancement.  When the bad guys hatched a major plot, your PCs had a chance to nip it in the bud and prevent the disaster from ever happening.   Another major convention was that the world was a firm shade of grey.  Factions for both good and evil existed, but they held one another in check and failed just as often as they succeeded.  Indeed, many realms and power groups were less concerned with promoting good or evil than they were in promoting their own personal interests or other specific goals-the Harpers wouldn't find much reception if they were established in Greyhawk, and the Circle of Eight was more interested in preventing any one power from gaining dominance over the Flanaess, than in working for abstract notions of good and evil.   FtA flushed both of these notions down the toilet.  All of a sudden, by simple canonical fiat, the world becomes starkly black and white as many nations are destroyed.  Perfectly good adventuring locales like Geoff, Sterich, Tenh, the Bandit Kingdoms, the Wild Coast, the Hold of the Sea Princes, Idee and Onnwal were all ruined, along with any campaigns you or your group might have been running there.  The Scarlet Brotherhood suddenly operated openly and brutally, and I have trouble seeing how anyone not of Suel ancestry could adventure there without immediately being thrown in chains.   Your gaming group had no chance at all to prevent any of this from happening, as it was simply assumed to have occured.  The character of the setting changed radically, as most realms were hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and Iuz, the Scarlet Brotherhood, and Turrosh Mak were all poised to conquer even more territory, while most of the forces of good had all they could handle just trying to keep from collapsing.   From there, subsequent writers like Erik Mona and Gary Holian had to try and make Greyhawk more "grey" again and reverse some of the dramatic changes made by FtA, but even then FtA remained canon and if you wanted to continue to use official canon in your games (and most Greyhawk fans are sticklers for this sort of thing, even if I'm not), you were pretty much stuck with it.  Even then, for all their best efforts and very real commitment to the setting, Holian, Mona and company had to resort to some of the arbitrary declarations by company fiat to restore things to normal.   In short, FtA brought a lot of unnecessary and unwelcome changes that altered the setting for the worse and screwed up many important elements of it.  I don't blame Carl Sargent (FtA's author) for this so much anymore as I do Jeff Grubb and the rest of the TSR crew at the time, who were left wondering what to do with Greyhawk once Gary Gygax had left the company.  In keeping with the boneheaded decision-making that characterized TSR at the time, Grubb suggested that they "blow Greyhawk up".   I've never been impressed with anything Grubb has written aside from his contributions to the Dragonlance saga, and his track record didn't improve with Greyhawk, either.   Carl Sargent was left holding the bag, and as a result Greyhawk's fan base is divided among those who hate FtA and those who love or at least accept it, among many other divisions.  -_- So yeah, I have some reason to be bitter.</blockquote>

Verification