Where to start with Greyhawk

[replicant2]

I'd go to Ebay and look up the 1983 boxed set. It's perfect. It includes two big, glorious, HEXED maps of Greyhawk, and plenty of material about the world and its populace in two short, sweet books -- a World Guide, which checks in at 80 pages, and a Glossography, which is 48 pages.

You get short but information-dense writeups of all the lands and cities, dieties, royal families, runes, populations, heraldry, encounter tables, and more. You also get a neat listing of classic modules and what map hex they fall into. This to me is the best part of Greyhawk -- all the awesome, classic modules that are based in the world.

Plus it's written by Gary Gygax, so it's fun to read with all the neat Gygaxian turns of phrase all us old-timers are fond of.

 

[Eremite]

I would personally begin a Greyhawk campaign in Istivin which recently received the Dungeon treatment (including a series of three modules). Istivin is nice and close to Geoff and the giants and I've been wanting to run Sean K Reynolds's 2E update to the Giants series since 1998 when it was published. I think that module combined with the three Istivin adventures in Dungeon could make for a very cool campaign.

 

[grodog]

I'm staring a vanilla D&D, greyhawk game here at work. I'm looking for the best product to start a 1st level Greyhawk game, set someplace close enough to the City of Greyhawk that the players could ride there in a few weeks.

Though I'm playing 3.5, I don't care what edition the product is from, I'll hunt it down and buy it.

As a GM, I prefer Birthright style maps that uses hexes and shows me nation boundaries.

Where should I start?

What kind of game do you want to run, Matt? Given the depth of GH materials published in the past 25 years, that'll strongly influence what to recommend.

 

[David Howery]

be aware that there are basically three versions of GH... the Gygax days version, so well presented in the '83 boxed set... the 'we wanted to shake everything up and make it more interesting' From the Ashes boxed set post-Gygax version, which presents GH after a continent-spanning war rearranges a lot of the borders.... and the "The Adventure Begins" post-Cook version, where Roger Moore changed a lot of the "From the Ashes" changes, but not all of them. Personally, I prefer Gygax's original version, but you might have a hard time finding those products....

 

[DarrenGMiller]

I'm staring a vanilla D&D, greyhawk game here at work. I'm looking for the best product to start a 1st level Greyhawk game, set someplace close enough to the City of Greyhawk that the players could ride there in a few weeks.

Though I'm playing 3.5, I don't care what edition the product is from, I'll hunt it down and buy it.


Where should I start?

Ha. Sounds like the game I just started, except I am keeping them away from the City of Greyhawk. Mostly, I am avoiding it just because I ran a campaign a few years ago (2000-2002) in the city. I started that one with the mini-adventures from the Greyhawk Adventures hardcover and used the Falcon series, mysteries of Greyhawk, the Lost Tombs series and Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure (along with a bunch of other stuff). This time I started with ToEE and now steered the party to some Necromancer Games stuff and will bring them back to the moathouse with RttToEE (had the NPC's go to the temple after the PC's cleared the moathouse, but they will have to revisit the moathouse when they are summoned back to town... actually the party has a base of operations near town, so I will keep them away long enought for things to go down there and then when they come back...).

Give us more about your game, please. I am very interested.

DM

 

[francisca]

Well, I just started an old school AD&D Greyhawk game, based on the '83 boxed set.

I've got the party in the Saltmarsh area, and will be using parts of the U series along with stuff of my own creation for a while. At some point, I will establish a link between the smugglers from U1 to the Slavers from the A series and spin them off in that direction. Once that is cleaned up, I'll link the Slavers to the Giants and lead them into the G & D series, then who know where from there.....probably my first adventures dealing with outer planes (but no Q1).

 

[qstor]

Saltmarsh is cool to start as well. You can download the old modules for $5 on svgames and the conversions are in the conversion library on this site. Plus there's a article on keoland on the rpga area on the WOTC site for more stuff.

I'd go with the old '83 set or the Living Greyhawk gazetteer too. Canonfire.com has free resources as well.

Mike