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

[Mecheon]

Well if you are going to change everything why use any pre-existing settings at all? Just make up a new one and abandon all previous works. And remember as soon as 7e comes up abandon that just created world as well, because you know, strict rules.

I mean, are we changing everything? Greyhawk isn't a load bearing "Only these races have to be playable or everything collapses" setting. Its a bare-bones basic setting based on a homebrew setting that is absolutely based on rule of cool. We are talking about the setting with the god who is a cowboy from Boot Hill and a crashed alien ship. This is a setting that is completely fine with these things existing. There's a whole Martian encounter table in the early books that's just flat out lifted from John Carter

Why is it so hard to just keep the "flavor and integrity" of a world's vision while in good faith judiciously tweaking things as needed? We do it all the time, and others have been with 5e and GH for years. It works, it's being done right now. This seems like arguing just to argue.

I mean, the flavour will be kept, but you and I got very different views of its integrity. Things are being tweaked because, hey, turns out you want the options advertised in the game to be playable in the setting advertising the game.

Plus like. It takes ten seconds to justify any of the new races. Classes aren't codified in Greyhawk and there's no Weave so, different ways to do magic and not just study, which is the art of wizards. Blam, every single class sorted immediately. Tieflings and Aasimar are easy ones due to the bloodlines, Tieflings with the Iuz connection and just pull an Atlantis with the "Unknown ancient civilisation that were involved with angels" with Aasimar, let people figure it out themselves. Goliaths? Live in the mountains. Orcs? Some orcs and humans fight, but in some places (don't even need to be named) they join together against the wilderness/outside threats. Dragonborn? There literately is something called the Dragon Empire in Greyhawk lore that is never explored (unless you're. Subscribing to the opinion it relates to a French comic which is basically the same as saying "I never want it ever touched ever again")

If those small little adjustments, barely a sentence each, is so much change that its breaking the integrity of Greyhawk to its core, then I have significant questions

 

[AstroCat]

Because creating something new whole-cloth is more work than taking a starting point and modifying it.

And “strict rules?” What does that mean?

If the settings doesn't match your current vision of the game, maybe it's the wrong setting. Seems also like a ton more work to haphazardly shoehorn in your game into a settings that doesn't match than just making a new one, or using a an existing one. The strict rules are you must have all new things in a setting supersede the previous ones not matter what. That is what I'm being told, not what I believe.

 

[AstroCat]

I mean, are we changing everything? Greyhawk isn't a load bearing "Only these races have to be playable or everything collapses" setting. Its a bare-bones basic setting based on a homebrew setting that is absolutely based on rule of cool. We are talking about the setting with the god who is a cowboy from Boot Hill and a crashed alien ship. This is a setting that is completely fine with these things existing. There's a whole Martian encounter table in the early books that's just flat out lifted from John Carter


I mean, the flavour will be kept, but you and I got very different views of its integrity. Things are being tweaked because, hey, turns out you want the options advertised in the game to be playable in the setting advertising the game.

Plus like. It takes ten seconds to justify any of the new races. Classes aren't codified in Greyhawk and there's no Weave so, different ways to do magic and not just study, which is the art of wizards. Blam, every single class sorted immediately. Tieflings and Aasimar are easy ones due to the bloodlines, Tieflings with the Iuz connection and just pull an Atlantis with the "Unknown ancient civilisation that were involved with angels" with Aasimar, let people figure it out themselves. Goliaths? Live in the mountains. Orcs? Some orcs and humans fight, but in some places (don't even need to be named) they join together against the wilderness/outside threats. Dragonborn? There literately is something called the Dragon Empire in Greyhawk lore that is never explored (unless you're. Subscribing to the opinion it relates to a French comic which is basically the same as saying "I never want it ever touched ever again")

If those small little adjustments, barely a sentence each, is so much change that its breaking the integrity of Greyhawk to its core, then I have significant questions

You are proving my point, you can add "new" stuff without destroying the setting's flavor and what makes it fun and unique to other settings. You don't have to turn GH into FR, if that's the case just use FR and be done, why bother? For the record, we actually ran a 5e GH campaign with a DB PC, it was fun and we totally made it work without "breaking" the setting. We even included our version of White Plume, which some of the players had never done before... super fun!

 

[TiQuinn]

If the settings doesn't match your current vision of the game, maybe it's the wrong setting. Seems also like a ton more work to haphazardly shoehorn in your game into a settings that doesn't match than just making a new one, or using a an existing one.

Maybe it’s the wrong setting but in those cases I just don’t use the setting at all. I haven’t mentioned Dark Sun, or Birthright, or Spelljammer because, nothing against those settings, but they don’t do anything for me. When I use Greyhawk or FR, I’m using what works for me and it’s largely an 80/20 split. 80% of what’s there is a solid base. Trimming or altering what doesn’t work is easy then.

The strict rules are you must have all new things in a setting supersede the previous ones not matter what. That is what I'm being told, not what I believe.

You’re gonna have to give a quote on that because I haven’t seen anyone suggest that here.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Plus like. It takes ten seconds to justify any of the new races.

If you're really hard core about Greyhawk and only take the 1983 material as canon (aka, Greyhawk your way), then it's trivial to justify anything for three reasons.

1. Greyhawk was envisioned to be a barebones setting with "hooks" that DMs could use to make their own settings. Every table's Greyhawk was different. (And the published GH was not the same as Gygax's Greyhawk, fwiw, because he intentionally changed it).

2. There is no official source for anything beyond the Flanaess (one part of one contient), so "Greyhawk" isn't the entire world of Oerth. Fill it in with whatever you want.

3. The borders between the different planes is notoriously porous in Greyhawk, with portals to other material planes and pocket planes seemingly everywhere. If it isn't in GH to begin with, it can be justified that way as well.

 

[Swanosaurus]

Yeah it's not going to change with the new 6e GH, agreed. There would be a setting "cool" way to introduce more rare and "funky" races previously not seen in the setting. And, there would be the lame out version of, now we say they were always there, you know just because.

Find a cool way to let DB come around and others, make them rare or visitors from another unknown continent, etc... you could do a zillion cools ways better than, hey they were always there because we say so.

TBH, that kind of "cool" sounds like the most artificial way to go about it. Just do what's most organic, which would probably be "they were always there" and interweave it a bit with what was known before. Way less intrusive than suddenly having visitors from an unknown contint never heard of before, while at the same time, another ancestry fell from the sky in seed-pods and yet another was caused by a sudden mutation of a population of dwarfs ...
It's like the Klingon forehead thing. It was fine as long it was "well, Klingons always had ridges, we just kind of didn't notice." Doing Yadda-Yadda-Star-Trek-genetics so in this era they had foreheads, and then not, and then foreheads again, didn't really help consistency or credibility.

 

[AstroCat]

Maybe it’s the wrong setting but in those cases I just don’t use the setting at all. I haven’t mentioned Dark Sun, or Birthright, or Spelljammer because, nothing against those settings, but they don’t do anything for me. When I use Greyhawk or FR, I’m using what works for me and it’s largely an 80/20 split. 80% of what’s there is a solid base. Trimming or altering what doesn’t work is easy then.

You’re gonna have to give a quote on that because I haven’t seen anyone suggest that here.

We also modify as needed, no different. My issue would be making sweeping changes that fundamentally alter the "vibe/favor, whatever you want to call it", in some haphazard way that would kill it for me.

You were making a point that all the rules must be kept, or it all breaks. You were being sarcastic and so was I.

 

[AstroCat]

TBH, that kind of "cool" sounds like the most artificial way to go about it. Just do what's most organic, which would probably be "they were always there" and interweave it a bit with what was known before. Way less intrusive than suddenly having visitors from an unknown contint never heard of before, while at the same time, another ancestry fell from the sky in seed-pods and yet another was caused by a sudden mutation of a population of dwarfs ...
It's like the Klingon forehead thing. It was fine as long it was "well, Klingons always had ridges, we just kind of didn't notice." Doing Yadda-Yadda-Star-Trek-genetics so in this era they had foreheads, and then not, and then foreheads again, didn't really help consistency or credibility.

I guess I disagree, all of sudden having Tieflings and Dragonborn and Bunny/Cat people walking around everywhere with no rhyme or reason and no connection or interplay with the world breaks it for me on many levels. It makes it not that world but a different one, so why not just use the different one you already got, like FR. Just use that if that is what you really want?

 

[Micah Sweet]

TBH, that kind of "cool" sounds like the most artificial way to go about it. Just do what's most organic, which would probably be "they were always there" and interweave it a bit with what was known before. Way less intrusive than suddenly having visitors from an unknown contint never heard of before, while at the same time, another ancestry fell from the sky in seed-pods and yet another was caused by a sudden mutation of a population of dwarfs ...
It's like the Klingon forehead thing. It was fine as long it was "well, Klingons always had ridges, we just kind of didn't notice." Doing Yadda-Yadda-Star-Trek-genetics so in this era they had foreheads, and then not, and then foreheads again, didn't really help consistency or credibility.

I'd still rather have answers than not, pretty much every time.

 

[Swanosaurus]

I guess I disagree, all of sudden having Tieflings and Dragonborn and Bunny/Cat people walking around everywhere with no rhyme or reason and no connection or interplay with the world breaks it for me on many levels. It makes it not that world but a different one, so why not just use the different one you already got, like FR. Just use that if that is what you really want?

Nope ... neither "walking around everywhere" nor "suddenly", that's just the point. A whole new ancestry coming from another continent? That's "suddenly", and I can see that disrupting a setting. Learning that in the mountains, there are reclusive giant people called goliaths and maybe seing one of them or even travelling with them after 20 years of adventuring for the first time? Looks fine to me, and a LOT easier to ignore if you don't like it.

In the real world, you might not have heard of the nation of Tajikistan - what's more organic, learning that it existed all along, or that it just recently popped up on the map due to some fluke of international politics, and funnily just around the same time as three other nations and two ethnicities suddenly came into existence through unlikely events?