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

[Staffan]

Oh yeah, I have no problem with either approach.

But for me, personally, in my world-building? I just physically cannot work from the bottom up. Now, I generally don't do much work in the middle, but I need to start with the gods and powers and the fundamental truths of the world, or I just cannot start making villages.

Same here. I need to know the big picture before working on the small one. I don't need all the steps in between, but I need to make some calls about what I'm painting before I put brush to the canvas.

In some cases, the big picture can be a case of delegating choices to the local level, or of stealing things from elsewhere, but those are still calls I'm making at the top level. For example, I could say "This world has a myriad of greater and lesser divinities, and the ones which are worshipped vary a lot from region to region." That's basically me delegating pantheon creation to the local level, but it's still a call I'm making that this setting doesn't have large-scale religions.

 

[TiQuinn]

Moreso if you have all those things running around on mountains, to drag out when appropriate, then you don't really have legs to stand on if you start complaining about people wanting to play a cat-person or fey rabbit (which both date back to 1E. I remember Pooka and their selective invisibility power) and saying its making the world the cantina scene

If you're dragging all those out, your world already is the cantina scene, its just arbitertily denying people playing races at that point.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh.

 

[Vaalingrade]

No. its simply if you are running a classic D&D campaign world that is anthrocentric it is extremely unlikely monster races could function as an adventuring group that needs to interact with wider society.

A MOS EISLEY game is the assumption that all these sentient races are integrated. Maybe FR in 2020's is that, and Planescape certainly is, but Greyhawk I don't think ever had anything but an Anthrocentric world build. For me a Mos Eisley adventuring party would break the versimiltude.

The idea that hundreds of sapient species are unable to field one of two members that can interact with society at large breaks verisimilitude is why I put zero value in the concept as it applies to D&D. It's just shorthand for 'I don't like it'.

 

[MNblockhead]

I think this is the difference between the setting, taken at face value as published, and the scenarios and dungeons that Gygax ran in the setting. The "connective tissue" between these two things might be Zagyg as a god, and the associated quasi-deities, especially Murlynd.

True, but looking at the '83 boxed set as published, it is chock full of tables to roll to see what magic items different randomly encountered NPCs would have. While it stated that NPCs with levels above 10th would be rare and that high-level NPCs would mostly be high-level leaders of in the various governments, cults, religious orders, etc.; I don't find the number of 1-10th level NPCs you can randomly encounter in Greyhawk to represent a gritty, low-magic campaign.

What sticks out to me about Greyhawk, more than anything, is how much Gary's wargamer roots are exposed. For such a small amount of material, a lot of attention is given to troop movements and migration. He also seems to lean into high-level political changes and clashes. It seems designed to support large skirmishes and battles as much as small-party adventures.

And that isn't surprising. Blackmoor and Greyhawk grew out of wargames with named characters doing side missions and dungeon delves. I think it is these strong remnants of wargame culture in early D&D that gives Greyhawk a different flavor from more modern settings. It will be interesting to see whether WotC gives a nod to this. I'm expecting it won't, and it will make sense for them to cut a lot of that out. But it would be nice to have some example tables of how to model political shifts, population movements, and conflicts among different kingdoms. It could be done in one or two pages. Just enough to help give DMs some flavor, to create a sense of a living world, while still focusing on the party's adventures.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I’m missing something here…are you saying a DM needs to figure out how all of those things fit into an ecology of their game world? Versus use them when they feel the need to use them?

Not quite.

Remthalis and myself have pointed out that, in terms of a "Curated setting" where you harshly limit PC options because you don't feel like that many sentient races can co-habitate, that the monster manual tends to make it very clear that there are a lot of sentient races that tend to be ignored in that calculation.

Mournblade countered with the idea that the planet is large, and so it makes sense to them that some remote mountain tribe of monsters might not be known about by the people.

My counter-point was that, while the planet is large, each DnD ecosystem, in theory, holds between 10 and 30 different sentient groups. It can make sense, sure, that a single lost and isolated tribe is in the mountains that only adventurers come into contact with... but fifteen? And these aren't the mindless beasts, these are the intelligent creatures with language. And when you consider this is true in every DnD ecological niche... I don't know, it starts feeling like a stretch to say that only humans and the occasional elf or dwarf make trade agreements or travel around, when you have a book of 180 some odd sentient beings with language set up in every place on the globe.

 

[MNblockhead]

It makes sense to me - I know all about Appendix N but having a read a few of the books and stories, sometimes actually finding those inspirations in the actual setting is hard unless one looks at the Vancian magic system, or just the pure existence of a thief class or a barbarian class, etc.

And let us not forget how weird a lot those appendix N books were. It was less that there wasn't powerful magic in Conan's world, but the protagonist was not a weilder of magic and magic was rare and powerful societies with magic/advanced science we ancient fallen civilizations whose ruins Conan explored. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser encountered powerful magic, it is just that they were generally the unfortunate targets who used bravery, recklessness, charm, and guile to come out ahead, or at least escape from, their encounters. Don't get me started with the Dying Earth setting, which was by no means low magic. It depends which book you were reading. The protagonist for one series in the setting may be a clever rogue, but in other books you had a cabal of powerful mages flying off to other worlds and even to the end of the universe.

And those weird influences were on display in Gary's adventures. Crashed spaceships, D&D versions of Alice in Wonderland, and all manner of weird encounters in gonzo dungeons. People often write about how Gary didn't like wizards and put in all manner of ways to destroy a party's magic items, cause them to lose levels, and make it very long and hard process to get to high levels. As well as his focus on humans, putting restrictions on demi-human characters. Some seem to take this to mean that his vision of D&D was low magic and more gritty realism. But looking at his adventures, it obviously was not. I think, at least early on, had a vision of characters against powerful, weird, mysterious forces that they had to be clever to best or avoid.

Yet, even that is not the full picture. Keep in mind that many of the spells in D&D were created by players in his game. Reading Greyhawk and seeing it peppered with names and accomplishments of the PCs from his home game, gives a hint to some of the high-powered, gonzo, shenanigans players got into in the games he ran.

I often feel that when talking about Gary you have to split him into Gary the TSR businessman and Gary, the guy who loves to play games. He has written on many occasions that he ignored many of the rules in his home game. All those weather-generation tables in Greyhawk? He didn't use them. He published tools that DMs might find useful and which TSR could sell and make money from. So he had to be a sales person and lean into how useful and even necessary they were (to the point of getting pretty offensively wrong-bad-fun in some of his letters and articles in Dragon Magazine), but he ran his own game how, in the early days at least--and again later in life--he expected everyone would. Take the rules you like, ignore those you don't, and make the game your own.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yet I don't know too many DMs who highly curate the Monster Manual the same way they do player species.

Really? I'm not saying I go through the entire Monster Manual and pre-curate everything. But I have a general idea of the kind of campaign I'm going to run. What flavor, the main themes, some over-arching plots, etc. And as I zoom into the adventures and encounters, I'm selecting the antagonists based on the wider backdrop.

 

[MNblockhead]

And everything the DM does in D&D has to be all about what the players care about? What about what the DM wants and finds fun? Heck, what about what the players might enjoy more because of the detail that went into the world they're experiencing through their PCs? Maybe worldbuilding is pointless to you, but other folks feel differently, and it's hard not to see your comments as denigrating to playstyles you don't share.

Ugh, for real. My players always forget that I'm supposed to be having fun too.

Whole threads with hundreds of posts have been written over this debate. I've never saw much point in the debate. It is a table decision. If the DM and players are agree to setting and are having fun, then they are doing it right. I've run games with many restrictions on player options and game that were pretty much anything goes. Both have been fun. I've been running games for the same group of people for about 10 years so I lean more towards the players deciding what kind of setting we'll play in. But we get there by me pitching a number of campaigns I would be interested in running.

Well, sure, but that's just session zero "Let's get started" info. That's not what anyone means by actual "worldbuilding".

Generally, yes. But some groups use session zero to collaboratively build the world. I love the idea in theory, but I find it too much work in practice. If I had more time for prep between sessions, or was better at improv, I think it would be a fun way to run a campaign. For now, however, I think I would more enjoy playing in, rather than running, a collaboratively created world campaign.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Really? I'm not saying I go through the entire Monster Manual and pre-curate everything. But I have a general idea of the kind of campaign I'm going to run. What flavor, the main themes, some over-arching plots, etc. And as I zoom into the adventures and encounters, I'm selecting the antagonists based on the wider backdrop.

Out of curiosity, do you create a new world for every campaign? Or do you re-use worlds?

 

[Hussar]

As far as the DMG Greyhawk section goes, wouldn’t it make the most sense to do the high level, top down stuff for the new dm, then present a methodology for building bottom up?

I mean, sure, top down can work great, but telling prospective DM’s that they need to do 20-40 hours of homework before they even start writing an adventure seems like a really bad idea.

Heck, telling them they need to do two or three hours of homework before play starts is a very steep barrier to play.

There’s a very good reason why Adventure Path modules are popular.

We want the DMG to get people excited to be DMs. Don’t we?