What is Greyhawk?

[Paul Farquhar]

Feywild was called something else. The old Faerie Queen Titiannia iirc.

I don't remember that from the 1980s.

 

[Coroc]

I don't remember that from the 1980s.

Seelie and unseelie court, Oberon Titania ?Pan? It is all stuff faerie sprites brownie satyrs pixies etc- I cannot recall right now it, is detailed in 2e monster mythology which is one of the best d&d products ever made.

 

[Zardnaar]

Seelie court may be 2E and 3E, I thought I read something about them in 1E MM type books.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Seelie and unseelie court, Oberon Titania ?Pan? It is all stuff faerie sprites brownie satyrs pixies etc- I cannot recall right now it, is detailed in 2e monster mythology which is one of the best d&d products ever made.

Sure. But I don't think any of that was in 1st edition, which is what I mean by Original Greyhawk.

Edit: brownies, satyrs and pixies did appear in the 1st edition Monster Manual.

 

[S'mon]

Does that really go back to original Greyhawk though? I have noticed a general trend in recent years away from Tolkien elves towards more Shakespearian elves and fey. The Feywild didn't used to be a thing.

Celene and its queen in the 1983 WoG box set are definitely more Shakespeare than Tolkien. Titania not Galadriel. Same in the Gord stories.

Or take a look at the depictions of elves in the 1e PHB DMG & MM.

 

[Warpiglet]

For me, a key difference is In order for the DM to run a really effective campaign in FR, they need to be up to speed in FR lore, history, regions, cities, etc, while those aren't needed in Greyhawk, as the DM can easily just insert their own creations into the world and no one would miss a beat.

I think this is spot on. As teens, our DM bought the AD&D Realms boxed set. 1989? We liked it. The world seemed big and open and fairly uncharted.

Oh how this changed! Later we find a crowded place with scores of active superheroes. The novels piled on new editions piled on products led to this.

Looking at my old grehawk boxes set I see regions and generalities (much more to my liking!).

For me Greyhawk felt more organic in a sense...you could predict what might happen in a region or make a good story up. In the realms it feels (to me) more restrictive. God, can we say this here? The people here don't like x and the magistrate y does z...scrap that story...or wait for a superhero to intervene.

Clearly I prefer one setting over the other but ironically have little play time in it!

 

[Hussar]

It's low powered in terms of monsters. Level 13 to 14 is effectively epic levels and Lolth has 66 hitpoints.

That's an artifact of the system, not the setting. 1e monsters really were pretty weak compared to high level PC's.

But, that also might account for the notion that you have all these high level individuals in Forgotten Realms but not GH. In GH, name level (1e AD&D) characters were a couple short steps away from godhood. A name level group in AD&D could, by and large, depopulate a moderate sized country if they chose to. Forgotten Realms, in comparison, was generally created using 2e rules where the monsters got a pretty big bump in power, meaning that being "name level" (ie, around 9th or 10th) meant that you were a big deal locally, but, there were still lots of things out there that could stomp you into the curb.

3e changed the power dynamic again, which muddies the water even further.

 

[Zardnaar]

The level 1 to 20 thing didn't happen to 2E.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Celene and its queen in the 1983 WoG box set are definitely more Shakespeare than Tolkien. Titania not Galadriel. Same in the Gord stories.

Or take a look at the depictions of elves in the 1e PHB DMG & MM.

Maybe, I had the earlier folder WoG, not the box.

The elves depicted in the 1st edition books where short, slight and humanlike, with modest pointed ears. Which was certainly not identical to Tolkien, whose elves where taller than average humans with "leaf shaped" ears. But I think that was the influence of the adjective "elfin" which was popular in the 1960s.

It was 3rd edition that retconned Greyhawk elves into the much more alien looking creatures with huge pointed ears.

 

[S'mon]

That's an artifact of the system, not the setting. 1e monsters really were pretty weak compared to high level PC's.

But, that also might account for the notion that you have all these high level individuals in Forgotten Realms but not GH. In GH, name level (1e AD&D) characters were a couple short steps away from godhood. A name level group in AD&D could, by and large, depopulate a moderate sized country if they chose to. Forgotten Realms, in comparison, was generally created using 2e rules where the monsters got a pretty big bump in power, meaning that being "name level" (ie, around 9th or 10th) meant that you were a big deal locally, but, there were still lots of things out there that could stomp you into the curb.

3e changed the power dynamic again, which muddies the water even further.

It was more that Ed Greenwood inserted a lot of level 20+ NPCs and had them interact with PCs. Where Gygax statted realm rulers at 10-18 in the 1983 WoG box, Ed tended to stat them 20-28 in the FRCS.

Ed didn't see it as an issue because he takes a storytelling approach to GMing where Gygax is gamist - eg Gygax assumes NPCs are there to be fought/killed, where Ed sees them as part of a narrative. IMO. Ed doesn't want PCs killing the King of Cormyr and would frown on attempts to do so. Gygax is happy to let PCs try to bump off Belvor of Furyondy.