D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[Mirrorrorrim]

The angels and devils are all psionic creatures.

Psionics is the mind − the soul. Angels are "intellects".

See, I see the mind, the soul, and the body as different things in D&D. Even spirits aren't "souls" in my headcanon.

 

[Belen]

Surely you see how you kid knowing who han and Chewie are but not knowing who Rey and Finn are is more a reflection of how you have or haven't embraced nuStar Wars in your home.

My kids have seen all the new movies and shows and they love Star Wars. They really dislike the sequels though and refuse to watch them.

The local toy shop also refuses to buy any sequel stuff and they dedicate an entire wall to Star Wars.

 

[Reynard]

I disagree. My current campaign is heavily influenced by the collapse of the bronze age civilizations. I take a lot of material from historical civilizations when I create my campaign worlds.

Sure, but you probably also have a good idea of what your audience (players) will tolerate and appreciate. WotC has to deal with a lot more uncertainty in that regard, and as we have seen time and again, them getting it wrong even in one instance out of 100 is still an issue. And, frankly, the real problem with "historial" settings is that by and large, they aren't. They are based on outmoded, ignorant, just plain wrong pulp fantasy interpretations of history. And even when they aren't, they are based on history written by people with biases and agendas stretching back centuries.

That is to say, for WotC in particular but most publishers, trying to incorporate history into their fantasy worlds in just too little risk for too little reward.

 

[Yaarel]

See, I see the mind, the soul, and the body as different things in D&D. Even spirits aren't "souls" in my headcanon.

In my head canon − after looking at the many mentions of the word "soul" in official D&D texts:

There are three levels of the soul
• Ki, the bodily aura of lifeforce pervading and emanating around the body
• Spirit, the stuff that a "ghost" is, and that Bards wield as the spirit of an artist
• Mind, psionics, the thought stuff that Astral Plane is made out of, and the eternal part


There is only one soul, but it functions differently in different parts of the multiverse.

 

[Reynard]

The local toy shop also refuses to buy any sequel stuff and they dedicate an entire wall to Star Wars.

People can do what they want but throwing away potential sales for ideology seems silly.

 

[Shardstone]

My kids have seen all the new movies and shows and they love Star Wars. They really dislike the sequels though and refuse to watch them.

The local toy shop also refuses to buy any sequel stuff and they dedicate an entire wall to Star Wars.

That's because the Sequels were low quality movies. That really has nothing to do with the greater conversation at work, which is the real reason Astro's example was bad. IT doesn't display the larger context at all.

Regardless, and this is to the rest of the thread, Greyhawk is an interesting setting IMO but as someone who doesn't have history in it, I'd be uninterested in seeing it reprinted without something new in it. 5E has its own cosmology, its own races, and I'd want all of those races reflected in Greyhawk; aasimar, tieflings, and yes, dragonborns. If your setting can't be updated to match the base standards of the vanilla game in 2024, then your setting best exists in its older state and has no business being remade into a 2024 book. But if you're willing to accept that your setting has to change a bit, then I think we could all embrace a pleasantly surprising Greyhawk update.

 

[SteveC]

I disagree. My current campaign is heavily influenced by the collapse of the bronze age civilizations. I take a lot of material from historical civilizations when I create my campaign worlds.

Yes, but you are not WotC. I didn't say anything about home games or even smaller publishers.

 

[Belen]

People can do what they want but throwing away potential sales for ideology seems silly.

It is not throwing away anything. There is no ideology in it at all. I brought a huge selection of sealed content to them. They buy a lot of toys to resell and they apologized to me and said they could not take the sequel vintage and black series figures because they can not sell them. They said that they may get a couple of purchases a year of those figures and they have a ton of them sitting in the store unsold.

 

[CleverNickName]

I am sure some amount of updates are needed; however, a main focus of D&D is conflict. You could leave some of the problematic elements alone to provide campaign fodder for adventurers who want to change things.

Or leave it alone and then create adventures around changing the narrative.

Well, updating legacy content isn't the same thing as removing/reducing conflict.

As for leaving the problematic elements alone, I think I'd prefer the opposite: make the changes they want to make, modernize the setting and bring it up to date...and then point the folks who don't like the changes back to the originals. Put a little sidebar in there that reads, "This is the updated Greyhawk campaign setting. For a look at the original, visit www.drivethrurpg.com/whatever/url or something like that.

 

[CleverNickName]

Sure, but if nostalgia is the deciding factor, I certainly think mine is most important.

Oh I agree completely! Mystara is my favorite D&D setting. Threshold is still the starting town in my homebrew campaign, some 35 years after it was written. (The patriarch has changed, and the Black Eagle Barony is something different, and...heh, don't get me started. I'll burn my keyboard up typing about it.)

But that's a pretty big "IF," there. We don't know for sure that nostalgia was the deciding factor. It's probably one of several.