Greyhawk Thread. interesting stories/characters made in the setting?

Greyhawk is pretty boring to be quite honest.

>>54258857
Vastly better than Forgotten Realms, at any rate. Personally, I quite like the setting - despite being clearly D&D style fantasy, it manages to feel much more grounded than other D&D settings. It helps to know that a lot of the lore grew out of games that Gygax and his friends played.

>>54258706
to be honest its a hard setting to play as Wizards release NOTHING about it. they just release more FR content and I hate FR

>>54259066
>Wizards release NOTHING about it
And? OD&D, 1e, and 2e Greyhawk exist.

>>54259093
He means nowadays. after 4th edition nothing concerning the setting has been released.

>>54258706
We got a few coversions for old modules in the setting in Yawning Portal but no source books or anything major. they acknowledge it's existence but give us nothing.

>>54259066
I know that feel, man. I got excited when I saw the new UA was "Greyhawk Initiative" - I, for whatever reason, thought it was some kind of big Greyhawk-related project, rather than just a new way of handling initiative.

Forgotten Realms just doesn't interest me at all. I can't peg what it is, but I just cannot find anything about it to be intriguing or interesting, from the pantheon to the people.

>>54259245
I do like FR. I just tend to ignore any meta narrative. I tend to set any campaign in FR after Time of Troubles and let the players make their own history. basically just the stuff in the 90's box set. Which is what I do with GH but set before greyhawk wars (GH Wars were stupid)

>>54258706

4 years into a retroclone game set in Bissel. I think the GM's using a lot of old modules so maybe some of this is familiar, but we're basically chasing after this dwarf asshole named Obmi and his ring of thieves stealing not-Chinese artifacts. Also we killed a big ass dragon, found some dudes who got lost in a cave for 20 years, fought a cheese fungus hive mind disease, and now we're dealing with the cult of Incabulos in Thornward. Just leveled up to 6 as a fighter. Ballin.

>>54258706
The Greyhawk Grongard is writing a Great Pendragon Campiagn-style book if WotC puts the Greyhawk license on DMGuild.

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>>54258706
All those disgusting splitting rivers!

So glad this thread was made.

Running a post war campaign soon. Want to focus on the collapsed kingdom at the moment. Any suggestions?

>>54262915
By collapsed kingdom I meant the balkanized Great Kingdom by the way.

My thoughts right now are the Northern Kingdom sending minions to infect the sewers of old Great Kingdom territory(Greyhawk, Nyrond, Furyondy, Ahlissa, etc) to weaken them while they're all dealing with refugees. My PCs will start being hired to clear out a sewer in the Free City and can uncover hints of the conspiracy there. From there they can go wherever they want.

And of course Iuz will still be looming over plotting his next attack.

Anyone got good Greyhawk related pdfs?

Namely stuff about the setting both pre and post war.

>>54258706
>Reminder

>Iuz is not killed by your players but vaporized by nuclear strikes in Greyhawks's modern era.

>>54263030

wut

>>54263030
I knew dwarves ended up making cars, but what is this?

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>>54259245
>I got excited when I saw the new UA was "Greyhawk Initiative" - I, for whatever reason, thought it was some kind of big Greyhawk-related project, rather than just a new way of handling initiative.
I had the exact same reaction. Way to mis-name a house rule, Mike!

>>54260703
>Great Pendragon Campiagn-style book
What does that mean, exactly? A campaign setting book or a conversion of Grehawk to Pendragon? I don't get it.

>>54263030
It's funny to read the fiction embracing the power creep with the coming of each new edition.

>>54262915
>>54263010

Here's the link to the unpublished 1990s Ivid the Undying manuscript that details the Great Kingdom.

https://www.acaeum.com/library/ividundying.pdf

>>54267017
Thank you!

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One of my favorite places in the old Greyhawk is the Horned Society lands around Molag, which eventually got absorbed into the much more boring Empire of Iuz.

Are there any good canon sources of info about this place?

This little webpage has some stuff but I'm not sure if it's homebrew or not.

>The Horned Society itself is an organisation of lawful evil fighters, thieves, magi and clerics who are dedicated the worship of the dark god Nerull, and who are also devoted to the notion of dominating, and ruling, as large an area of the Flanaess as they possibly can.

http://stormdale.tripod.com/Greyhawk/Horned_Society.htm

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>>54267686
Bandit Kingdoms was a cool idea too.

http://stormdale.tripod.com/Greyhawk/Bandit_Kingdoms.htm

>>54266717
The Great Pendragon Campaign is a big campaign for the Pendragon system that follows the entire Arthurian timeline, from Uther's life to Arthur's death. You play knights from several generations over the timeline, participating in the big events of the story - driving off Saxons, unifying the kingdom, questing for the Grail, and so forth.
I think his idea for a Great Greyhawk Campaign is basically to start in the year that the first sourcebook for Greyhawk was released, and then give a detailed timeline of all the wars and changes that took place over the next twenty or so years (which got covered in summaries in different sourcebooks back when people still made sourcebooks for Greyhawk, but were always 'in the past', with no real way to interact with them).

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>>54268835
Oh, I see a metaplot. Mite b cool, but most of the events weren't that great and sometimes actively made the world worse to game in. While this might work for Pendragon because it's already based on a great romantic story, Greyhawk doesn't have a unifying story. Stringing together far-flung and disparate events seems like it would just result in player frustration & confusion. Particularly since many of these events were based on arbitrary things that happened to Gygax's players (eg, Rary going traitor).

>>54259245
I too felt that sinking feeling when I opened the pdf and realized it was just a rather clunky initiative system rather than the best D&D setting.

I think the reason you dislike FR but love Greyhawk is because FR feels like a commercialized effort to recapture what made Greyhawk great and falls flat on it's face at every step of the way. There's also for lack of a better word: a "nu-fantasy" feel to FR that just doesn't appeal to me the same way that Greyhawk does. There's also a Gygaxian charm to Greyhawk and while Gygax was a terrible writer of rules (and running a fair game), there's no denying that the man was thorough when it came to worldbuilding as is to be expected from a history enthusiast. Greenwood on the other hand, was a bit of a hack.

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>>54269759
>Greenwood on the other hand, was a bit of a hack.
>say that again to my beard and not on the internet and see what wizardry happens

>>54258706

What is the scale for this map? Approximately how big is a single hex?

>>54270450
If no one answers you, and you can stick around, I get off work in twenty minutes and can let you know when i get home. My partner got me the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer for Fathers Day and i can look. It should be in there somewhere.

>>54270566

I'll be here. Thanks, Anon.

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>>54270595
Alright. The map says that one hex equals 65 miles/ 104 kilometers. Also, I took a pic so you can see The Flanaess compared to the rest of Oerth. Hope that helps.

>>54270872
>Hyboria
>Fireland
>Area of Enlargement

Man, these are terrible place names. Who came up with this stuff?

>>54270913
There's also Ice Barbarians, Spikey Forest, and other goofy names. It was all GG as far as I know.

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>>54270942
>also Perrenland after Jeff Perren
Shit, we're lucky the biggest nation in Greyhawk isn't called Gygaland.

But then there's the three Urnsts.

On the other hand Phostwood, Rookroost and the Hellfurnaces are pretty cool names.

>>54271521
Honestly, its pretty creepy how it even looks like the mouth of the pit is carved to look like a landslide of people falling into the pit.

>>54271521
Three Urnsts isn't bad, they are rival principalities that all claim to be the true Urnst and thus have extreme tension. Geoff is the best duchy, by me. It's centrally located for high level adventures and constantly attacked by giants, has an elven kingdom within it that takes up about half the land of the duchy, and only has one town of note - the capital.

>>54258706
I ran a game set in Geoff, mostly travelling the Crystalmist to find a lost city of gold. It was filled with shadows and the animated corpses of giants. There they met and made a bargain with a lich like king who offered to train the still living wizard of the party in some unique magic if they'd help with a problem: a deepspawn in a chasm below the city had begun mass producing ettins and was using it's army to try and expand it's control. They eventually beat it, but of the party of 8 that set off for the mountain only three lived to tell the tale, including the mage who stayed behind.

>>54269759
What do you mean by "nu-fantasy"? I think I know what you're talking about, but I'm having trouble articulating it...

>>54258857
I'msure it is, but I'm still curious to learn more about D&D's first setting.

I'm gonna DM a Campaign in 5e and chose Greyhawk as setting. Can I get quick rundown on the place? All I know is they got an evil king in the North name Iuz.

>>54274469
>I'msure it is, but I'm still curious to learn more about D&D's first setting.

Then gaze upon their works, ye mighty, and despair:
http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=33&sid=9836229b6e18b0e2e06264f345b3d971

>>54269759
The thing is, I'm not even an oldfag. I only started DMing last August, and only started playing D&D at all in winter of 2015. Greyhawk just instantly caught my attention - the other settings either felt too much like FR or felt like they were trying too hard to be different.

Greyhawk really does feel alive. My campaign is set in Nyrond a few years after the Greyhawk Wars, and my players are imagining the Scarlet Brotherhood -everywhere-. It's pretty fun. I've also decided that the Nyrondese speak with a suspiciously Alabaman accent.

>>54274493
It's pretty generic, especially since almost every notable person and place in it has been adapted to other settings.

>>54269004
I understand what you mean.
On the one hand, the idea of the Greyhawk Wars isn't bad on the surface - it was hinted at in a lot of the early magazine articles, and such. Iuz was gearing up for a fight, the Great Kingdom was on the verge of collapse, and the various sea powers were getting ready to flex some muscle.
In practice, though, it all went down in a pretty lazy and contrived way - the worst being all of the 'Scarlet Brotherhood wins, they're just that sneaky lol' bullshit. So you end up with way too many places being ruled by just one or two different forces; everything feels way too homogenized all of a sudden. 'From the Ashes' tried to fix that, I know, but I'm not sure if it succeeded.
I know that the guy in question, the guy running the blog who's talked about doing that, has argued that Europe in any given twenty medieval years could go through a similar amount of changes, so this would be a book reflecting that sort of thing. I think that's also the point of 'Dark Albion', but I've never read it, so don't know how successful it is at it.

>>54274493
It was the 'first' campaign world; things are kept fairly simplified, and cut-and-dry, to make it easier to add your own personal touches to things.
About 500 or so years ago, two great empires about 1000 miles away destroyed each other in a magical MAD exchange; their populations migrated to the Flaeness, the area this all takes place in, and the typical mixing and interacting of invading peoples and local tribes eventually resulted in the various countries existing now. You've got the Great Kingdom, the big political power, in the east, though it's old and rickety at this point. There are many different flavors of barbarians in the north, from Vikings in the northeast to desert nomads in the northwest. There's a lot of independent duchies and baronies and small kingdoms, often threatened by some sort of humanoid menace. The Free City of Greyhawk, nearby the old castle of the world's greatest wizard, is a rich metropolis that attracts a lot of politicking and power-players. The big wizards that are around aren't all wise and mysterious and spotlight-stealing like Elminster; they're dicks who hate each other because of shared history, and they'll bribe you with magical loot to fuck with the other guys.
That's my basic understanding of it, at least. There are a few different wikis with a few different summations of it. There's also this - a 'style guide' to writing Greyhawk stuff, though I have no idea what year it's from, or how useful it actually is...
http://www.usmollards.com/dnd/WhatMakesGreyhawkUnique.pdf

>>54266707
That's as bad as that fucking 'Plan Escape' countdown clock for the 'Enhanced Edition' of Torment. I mean, it was a good game, but that was some unnecessary bullshit - I thought I was getting the actual goddamn setting again.

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>>54275433
Thanks! Have a cute iliti-dragon.

>>54275433
>they're dicks who hate each other because of shared history, and they'll bribe you with magical loot to fuck with the other guys.

Kind of. The Circle of Eight is ostensibly supposed to be Neutral and to promote Neutrality so that no faction or alliance, whether Good, Evil, Lawful or Chaotic, can dominate the Flanaess. In practice they tend towards Good because Evil tends to try to overrun everybody, but the idea was the each member of the Eight would represent one of the major alignments and thus cancel each other out.

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Here's the nice Dragon magazine map of Living Greyhawk. I have the hardcopy and was thinking of getting it framed...

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This is the "watered-down" version of Castle Greyhawk. I believe the original Gygax version had like 60 levels or something ridiculous like that.

>>54276442
rad

I've read the original version (well, the published version anyway) and its really neat to have a vertical visualization

>>54274724
You are not alone, that was what got me into Greyhawk too. The setting feel alive. FR its just 4 or 5 diferent places almost not connected among then. Greyhawk is diferent. Also, democratic country in a fantasy setting!

>>54276442
Fun fact, what Gygax originally created in the rules as "dungeons" would nowadays be called megadungeons by us plebs.

>>54258706
bump