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

[MGibster]

Sorry, it's not elitist to point out that GH is not great literature. It's a hodgepodge setting for FRPGing.

I once got into some hot water with a friend for referring to the Dresden Files series as "light" reading. It was a series I enjoyed reading at the time and honesty didn't think referring to it as light reading was insulting or dismissive.

Since their introduction in 3e, Warforged are the go to example for entitled players ruining DM's carefully curated settings and a sign of everything wrong with D&D.

I've restricted species in exactly one campaign in the last ten years and it was Ravenloft. It wasn't a decision made from some need to preserve a delicate balance, it was simply a preference I had. I probably wouldn't have fought too hard if one of my players really, really wanted to bring something that wasn't in the PHB.

 

[Yaarel]

Here are two maps of planet Oerth. One is official form the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer 2000, the other quasi-official in Dragon Magazine 1996 by Skip Williams and others. It compiles various earlier references to other locations on planet Oerth.

Most of the continents on the planet are actually subcontinents of a pangaean supercontinent. The name of the pangaea is Oerik. The north pole continent, Hyperboria, is an ice cap but has some island landmasses within its ice.

The map is fantasy versions of reallife ethnicities, such as Erypt representing lands relating to Egypt and Arabia. The Empire of Lynn is the Holy Roman Empire of France and Germany. And so on.

The pangaea is like the reallife world map but where the tectonic planes collided Alaska and Siberia together, and what is left of the Pacific Ocean is now the Pearl Sea. Because of this, the northeast of the pangaea, namely Flannaess is North America, here highlighted in the square.

On the other side of the supercontinent, the northwest of the pangea is Europe.

Note Dragons Island in the Celestial Sea is a suitable location for a Dragonborn species. Legends have it a "dragon prince" rules the island.


The sizes of the landmasses are vast. The purpose is, each homebrew campaign can pick one small part of the map, with enough space for many lands to flesh out.



Here I label a map by Anna B Meyer 2020, to identify the four continents and four oceans of planet Oerth.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You realize you added the word "purity" to their opinion yourself, right? How is that not just going to be inflammatory?

What else am I supposed to get from the use of the word "integrity" in this context? It's very clearly an argument that these damn newfangled ideas are sullying the venerable traditions.

 

[TiQuinn]

I feel there is a huge difference between FR and GH, the whole vibe is so different for me.

Explain it, please.

Forgotten Realms is the kitchen sink of D&D covering nearly every fantasy or mythological culture imaginable from Arthurian fantasy in Cormyr to Arabian Nights in Zakhara to Lankhmar-like urban fantasy in Baldur’s Gate.

Ravenloft is the setting of Hammer and Universal picture inspired Gothic horror where adventurers are pitted against intricately detailed horror villains.

Planescape is where adventurers can travel to the outer planes and find Sigil, a city with portals to virtually anywhere defined by factions with different cosmic philosophies where they can readily encounter angels and demons, sometimes in the same tavern.

What is Greyhawk?

 

[AstroCat]

Explain it, please.

Forgotten Realms is the kitchen sink of D&D covering nearly every fantasy or mythological culture imaginable from Arthurian fantasy in Cormyr to Arabian Nights in Zakhara to Lankhmar-like urban fantasy in Baldur’s Gate.

Ravenloft is the setting of Hammer and Universal picture inspired Gothic horror where adventurers are pitted against intricately detailed horror villains.

Planescape is where adventurers can travel to the outer planes and find Sigil, a city with portals to virtually anywhere defined by factions with different cosmic philosophies where they can readily encounter angels and demons, sometimes in the same tavern.

What is Greyhawk?

Gritty and funky sword and sorcery.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't know. WotC had no issue changing high elf to eladrin in the 4e era. And there wasn't even a good reason for that. As long as you keep the same distinctive look, and make sure to mention warforged in the species description, I think branding is safe. After all, we are specifically not talking about Eberron here.

The good reason, quite simply, was to stop overloading the term "elf" so much. "Elf" meant one specific sociocultural grouping (cousins to eladrin who had settled in, and naturalized to, the World as opposed to the Feywild). Hence Eladrin, Drow, and Shadar-kai; clear and distinct names.

 

[Remathilis]

I feel there is a huge difference between FR and GH, the whole vibe is so different for me. I don’t really like the over the top HF of FR, but really enjoy the more old school gritty S&S vibe of GH. For me the difference is big. I’ll play FR but when I run it I tone it down.

And that's fine. To borrow a different metaphor, Greyhawk is points of light in a dark world while Forgotten Realms is pockets of darkness in a bright world. Greyhawk is a little more cynical, a little more worldly while Forgotten Realms is a little more hopeful and optimistic.

 

[Remathilis]

The good reason, quite simply, was to stop overloading the term "elf" so much. "Elf" meant one specific sociocultural grouping (cousins to eladrin who had settled in, and naturalized to, the World as opposed to the Feywild). Hence Eladrin, Drow, and Shadar-kai; clear and distinct names.

Actually, I liked the idea of making eladrin, elf, and drow all distinct races which were related rather than using the same elf race and using subrace/lineage/whatever to make them different. It reminds me the altmer/bosmer/dunmer split in Elder Scrolls.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I feel there is a huge difference between FR and GH, the whole vibe is so different for me. I don’t really like the over the top HF of FR, but really enjoy the more old school gritty S&S vibe of GH. For me the difference is big. I’ll play FR but when I run it I tone it down. Also never realized there was such GH “hate” floating around, glad I’ve avoided for so long.

If I may:

What, exactly, makes (say) a very restrictive list of playable species more "sword and sorcery" than an expansive one? What makes a warlock pact hostile to S&S thematics or experiences, while a cleric's faith is not hostile to that? (To be clear, pacts and faith are NOT the same, I am vehemently opposed to the notion some have that you can substitute either one for the other.)

I have seen very little hate for Greyhawk in this thread. I have seen quite a bit of reluctance to view an old way as inherently good and needing perfect preservation. That doesn't mean a gleeful hatred of the old. It means that the old must be justified by more than just age, especially if it's going to claim a degree of importance high enough that no future ideas, no matter how well-liked, may ever expand or enhance what has already been written down.

Dismissing what is old solely because it is old is chronological snobbery. But dismissing what is new solely because it is new is fawning traditionalism. We can, and should, do better. Gygax was not afraid to deviate radically from any strict notion of S&S in Greyhawk, as evidenced by the Barrier Peaks. The notion that a Faustian bargain for power, or a person with scaly skin and intensely bad halitosis, is somehow inherently a bridge too far while literal space aliens and ray guns are perfectly cromulent is pretty dubious, to put it mildly.

That doesn't mean we should intentionally overturn the applecart unless it's warranted that we do so. Chesterton's fence and all that. If something were legitimately a serious issue, and we could clearly articulate why and what would make it better, then I think there's room for that. Like, to invent a fake example, if there were a kingdom really obviously built on a bunch of racist stereotypes of (say) Chinese and Japanese culture, that would be pretty uncool. It would be reasonable to say that, insofar as those harmful stereotypes could be removed, they should be—and if they can't be, maybe that whole society needs to be retconned out because it's not good to celebrate racist caricatures. I'm fairly sure no such blatant caricatures exist in Greyhawk.

But, particularly when it comes to the addition of things, I'm not really seeing why it's such an attack to desire to add them. Warlocks seem like a highly precedented idea, people getting dangerous powers by consorting with questionable entities sounds exactly like the kind of thing the morally-grey adventurers of that world could get into. And major influences, like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, already have shades of it, since the latter uses magic on occasion.

 

[Demetrios1453]

You are missing my point. Actually there aren't "plenty of books" out there that cover Greyhawk. What there actually are is a couple of folios, a shopping list of Dragon articles and a lengthy list of adventures set in Greyhawk. Books? Not so much.

Well, actually...

In the "TSR is trying to publish as much as possible to stave off bankruptcy" era, they published the WGR series, which was a mixture of modules and regional sourcebooks. WGR4 covered Nyrond and Furyondy, and WGR5 covered the Empire of Iuz. WGR7 was going to cover the Great Kingdom, but it was cancelled when already complete (it was later uploaded to the WotC website for download). At that point they brought the series to a sudden end, which was likely due to TSR being brought to a sudden end shortly afterwards. But if they had continued, we might very well have seen FR-type coverage of all the Flanaess in further sourcebooks like those.