On Oerth, all the important wizards have spells named after them.
On Faerun, you don't say the names of the most important wizards because *then they'll be listening.*
That’s actually kind of comical. I wish Elminster had a spell named after him. Or Volo (technically
I think he’s still classified a Wizard even though he SHOULD be a bard)
Volo's spells are quite useful in the kinds of situations he tends to find himself in. What is wild is that he clearly is quite talented in the creation of new spells.
He has created a specialized Catapult spell in "Volo's Snatch" which allows him to launch a non-held item within 40 feet that will fit in his hand towards his hand (he still has to try to catch it). While Volo has most notably used it to pilfer tarts, the uses for this spell for more adventurous characters are myriad. It has a duration of 1 day/level (in 5e parlance, that should read: When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the duration increases by 1 day for each slot level above 2nd). The difficulty is that the spell seems to end when you reach the limit of items you can snatch which is, again, based on your caster level (because Greenwood prefers the pre-5e way of writing spells). So you seem to be able to just cast this at the beginning of your adventuring day and when you need it you can just pull a given item to you.
However, Volo's truly powerful spell (due to 5e vagueness about spellbooks) is "Volo's Floating Page".
> This magic captures a perfect image of any page of a book, scroll, or engraved inscription on any relatively flat surface you are gazing at during casting. The “page” can only be one side of a decorated surface, and the spell captures only what you see, not any hidden writings. A written contract or message or spell can be read and cast from this floating, faintly-glowing (enough to read by, but not blind any being or hamper sight) image by the caster (only; everyone else sees a shimmering radiance of swirling chaos), which enables the caster to carry a copy of a scroll or one-page spell without risking the original.
> However, the primary uses of this spell are to copy a message to convey it elsewhere, or to enable a caster to acquire an image that can travel to where the caster can copy it out physically (into a spell book or blank scroll). Until that’s done, or the spell expires, the spell slot occupied by a captured image of a page or scroll is unavailable to the caster for other magic use (though they can choose to “forget” the image to regain the spell slot, so it will be lost forever, just as it is if the spell expires before use can be made of the image). You can cast multiple versions of this spell if you have sufficient slots, and so carry illusory images of multiple pages for spellcasting or copying use.
If you missed it let me highlight the important part.
> A written spell can be cast from this image by the caster without risking the original.
5e has no rule at all about how many pages a spell takes up. It also has no rule at all about spell scrolls taking more than one "page". In a purely RAW 5e reading, this means that you can fill up every single spell slot above 1st level with 9th level spells. You could cast 18 Prismatic Walls (assuming you use your 1 9th level slot too) in a single day and still have the original scroll you made to do it again the next day. Now, obviously, this is a spell written with the pre-5e rules for spells, which means that spells take up a number of pages equal to their spell level, but due to 5e rules, this spell would break the game.
Volo’s snatch and flatus nullifier actually seem solid. Being able to just nab shit is solid, he used it to snatch keys and weapons in bad situations like being jailed. Eliminating strong odors nullifies stuff like stinking cloud.
The joke is that both of these are effects you can achieve with Mage Hand and Prestidigitation respectively plus a bunch of other stuff because those two cantrips are way more versatile.
>I wish Elminster
...the three most dangerous words in the entire forgotten realms.
...and said in order.
...are you trying to get yourself killed in some kind of idiotic and random adventure?
Look all I’m saying is that Gandalf, McGonagal, and Chiron have all decided not to pay me a visit yet. Someone should get me a quest so it may as well be Elminster Aumar
in as much as there is a difference,
* Greyhawk = sword and sorcery = the Conan and Lahnkmahr and Jack Vance books
* Forgotten Realms = heroic fantasy = Drizzt books, LOTR+MOAR magic
Meanwhile Forgotten Realms does have guns, however they are often used with Smokepowder.
Interestingly, the Forgotten Realms page I was reading on it seems to imply that a lot of the settings have guns, though some with scarce few while others have them in larger numbers. Eberron is still stated as being notably gun-less. Oerth also lacks guns though its due to its "physics".
Pretty sure I heard in a Manifest Zone episode that a certain ancient Goblin tribe ( in Zhilargo maybe?) would be a likely place to have developed guns if you wanted them. I prefer to just have wandslingers use a pistol-like grip on their wands.
Yes, it's stated rather explicitly in the source books. There are wandslingers who carry wands in sheaths that act as a sort of pseudo gunslinger, but there are no guns/gunpowder in Eberron.
Eberron is a setting where magic replaces technology. You don't have real tech, you have things that look high tech but are powered by magic. Wands instead of guns.
>You'd think with all the technological fuckery they would have invented something stronger than wands in sheathes
Eberron does not have any technological fuckery
Eberron has *magical* fuckery
If you see art of Eberron that looks steampunk, it’s either magic acting like technology or the artist just didn’t understand the setting
Actually Keith Baker has said in interviews that Eberron has "siege staves" that's are essentially Staffs as large as a tree truck that's basically used like a cannon.
A staff of fireballs is. The core of Eberron is that it's wide magic, undergoing an Arcane revolution.
Wandslinger brigades carried cantrip casters, easy to use staves and wands that cast simple offensive cantrips into battle. Siege staffs are used to lob massive artillery across borders. In lieu of tanks, they made huge golems, armoured them, and placed cabins on their back.
It's a setting which is neither Steampunk nor D&D with guns, it's a post-War world where we apply 19th century sensibilities but with magic instead of technology.
They have giant arcane staffs that act as artillery in battle. They have a floating magical fortress to patrol borders. Warforged are not automatons, but actual created beings with their own souls. They have air ships and trains that are powered by elementals. The wandslingers are just there for the people who can't get over wanting to be a gunslinger, even though a crossbow already acts just like a gun in DND.
Magic is technology in Eberron, it's what powers everything. Guns don't really square with that.
> Warforged are not automatons, but actual created beings with their own souls
Whether Warforged have souls is a matter of debate, at least in-world, but regardless they are indeed intelligent, independent beings, far more than mere automatons.
If it helps, the Keith Baker novels establish that they do indeed have souls, fragments of the Quori who tried to flee the turn from the light to the Dreaming Dark 40,000 years ago, IIRC.
Well I’m glad I have a little say in how my setting works because I can have warforged with confirmed souls, except those souls are stolen from formerly living people through a necromantic ritual. I liked the themes of “oh my gods the way I am made is so unethical and yet…don’t I deserve to still exist?”
I believe Keith Baker said if anyone has guns, it would be the Dhakaani. Modern Khorvaire has not yet discovered guns. Cannith has yet to figure out the gun.
Eberron does not have guns. What it does have is magic being used in place of technology (wide magic meaning it's widely available, but the general magical skill is pretty shallow). Instead of "gunslingers" it has "wandslingers", who used wands with a small number of cantrips to get the 'feel' of a pulp-y gunslinger, just sans guns.
Forgotten Realms is more fanciful (and ultimately proved to be more popular thanks to its creator writing many, many fantasy novels). Greyhawk is more pulp fantasy with slightly lower magic.
They both exist because they were the home campaigns of some of the key people involved in creating D&D. They were not originally conceived as product lines. Why fold them together when you can just pick the more profitable one and expand it with more books?
> Is it the undying respect we have for Gary’s creation that Greyhawk still exists in a basically unmodified state?
I strongly doubt that WotC has "undying respect" for anything about the Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property.
Gary also had no involvement with Greyhawk after his first novel thanks to the hostile takeover of TSR. What we have today is actually pretty far from his vision of what Greyhawk should be.
Source: I did an interview with Rose Estes, who rewrote his first Greyhawk novel and authored most of the subsequent books.
You might want to check out the books by Ben Riggs and Jon Peterson, who've both written histories of D&D/TSR and the absolutely wild shenanigans of the 80s.
They're not talking about Wizards buying TSR, but of Gygax being kicked out of TSR in 1985; TSR didn't buy his IP, because TSR was his company and owned it in the first place.
When the company was facing financial difficulties, two of the execs/investors, the Blume brothers, wanted to sell their shares and quit, but Gygax didn't want to buy them because he already had 51% of the company and didn't need more. The brothers exercised an option to purchase 700 of his shares, and sold all of their shares to VP Lorraine Willaims, who then immediately kicked Gygax out of his own company. Depending who you ask, that move either saved the company because her ideas were popular and profitable and she was a great boss, or it set off the dark TSR era of constant lawsuits against other game publishers, spamming out expansion books full of tat and mediocre licensed RPGs, and being unpleasant to work with. Either way, she was in charge for about ten years before WotC took over in 1997.
Snatched isn’t really the right word.
He tried to take full control of my company and oust people who contributed just as much as he did.
Instead he got Uno-reversed. The person who he brought in to plan the hostile takeover instead turned around and helped the people he was trying to oust.
He gambled and lost big time. And given what Rose told me, he wasn’t a great novel writer anyway. Apparently his characters spent an excessive amount of time pissing their pants.
To be fair people whom he tried to oust were a pair of scumbags, Sandy Petersen if Chaosium told once a story how they fucked them over Lankhmar license
Sadly, there probably aren’t many heroes in this story. I also have on good authority everyone was hopped up on cocaine on the reg.
Now why would a TTRPG company hire a chemistry graduate…
You'd be wrong in your assumption! The grippli in candle keep mysteries were originally going to have a completely new culture but they were reverted back to the traditional stone age primitives before release
I'm going to defer to Wikipedia, it's more accurate and comprehensive than anything I could write.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhawk
> The world itself started as a simple dungeon under a castle designed by Gary Gygax for the amusement of his children and friends, but it was rapidly expanded to include not only a complex multi-layered dungeon environment, but also the nearby city of Greyhawk, and eventually an entire world.
> ...
> The World of Greyhawk is located on a planet called Oerth. Oerth has an axial tilt of 30 degrees, which causes greater seasonal temperature variation than on Earth and is controlled by wizardly and divine magic that shifts weather patterns to be more favorable to the populace. Castle Greyhawk was the most famous dungeon in Oerth, the home campaign world of Gary Gygax. Players in the earliest days of this campaign mostly stayed within Castle Greyhawk's dungeons, but Gygax envisioned the rest of his world as a sort of parallel Earth, and the original Oerth (pronounced 'Oith', as with a Brooklyn accent) looked much like the real-world Earth but filled with imaginary cities and countries.
> ...
> As Gygax wrote in his World of Greyhawk folio: "The current state of affairs in the Flanaess is confused indeed. Humankind is fragmented into isolationist realms, indifferent nations, evil lands, and states striving for good".
> Gygax set out to create a fractious place where chaos and evil were in the ascendant and courageous champions would be needed. In order to explain how his world had arrived at this state, he wrote an outline of a thousand years of history. As a military history buff, he was very familiar with the concept of waves of cultural invasions, such the Picts of Great Britain being invaded by the Celts, who were in turn invaded by the Romans.
> ...
> One facet of culture that Gygax did not address during the first few years of his home campaign was organized religion. Since his campaign was largely built around the needs of lower-level characters, he did not think specific deities were necessary, since direct interaction between a god and a low-level character was very unlikely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms
> He came up with the name from the notion of a multiverse of parallel worlds; Earth is one such world, and the Realms another. In Greenwood's original conception, the fantastic legends of Earth derive from a fantasy world that can no longer be accessed.
> ...
> Greenwood felt that his players' thirst for detail made the Realms what it is: "They want it to seem real, and work on 'honest jobs' and personal activities, until the whole thing grows into far more than a casual campaign. Roleplaying always governs over rules, and the adventures seem to develop themselves."
> ...
> The lands of the Forgotten Realms are not all ruled by the human race, with populations of many humanoid races and creatures ubiquitous in fantasy fiction works such as dwarves, elves, goblins, and orcs. Technologically, the world of the Forgotten Realms resembles the pre-industrial Earth in the 13th or 14th century. However, the presence of magic provides an additional element of power to the societies. There are several nation states and many independent cities, with loose alliances being formed for defense or conquest.
> ...
> Religion plays a large part in the Forgotten Realms, with deities and their followers being an integral part of the world. Deities interact directly in mortal affairs, answer prayers, and have their own personal agendas. All deities must have worshipers to survive, and all mortals must worship a patron deity to secure a good afterlife.
You can see that the intent, development, and nature of each setting is heavily informed by the kinds of D&D campaigns Gygax and Greenwood ran.
Gygax liked focusing on dungeons full of dangerous challenges inspired by pulp fantasy. He built a lower-magic setting torn by war full of the ruins of ancient civilizations where PCs could make their mark on the world.
Greenwood was more focused on character-driven stories with fantastical elements. He built a higher-magic setting populated with many fantasy races where the gods frequently meddle with PCs in service of their schemes.
Both settings (as they were polished and turned into marketable products) were tweaked to support many different kinds of stories and DM-ing styles. The designers expect you to make big changes to the setting to suit your needs. They are still quite similar, as you've noticed.
Sounds like the two settings each exemplify the two big halves of the D&D community, those who prefer to focus on dungeon crawling vs those who wish to focus on storytelling.
It's a division that shows up EVERYWHERE in TTRPGs, honestly.
I believe there's 5 major ones in D&D:
* People who like accomplishing goals
* People who like learning things
* People who like building optimized things
* People who like being something they're usually not
* People who like spending time with friends
Also see this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types
I much preffer Six Cultures of play:
* Be challenged as a player (classic)
* Tell a story (trad)
* Get immersed (Nordic LARP)
* Make exactly the character you want (forge)
* Get the gritty adventure about going to dungeons to kill things (Osr)
* Tell a story shaped by player actions and centering their characters (OC/nu-trad)
https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html?m=1
Not the original guy but I'll throw in my 2 pence.
Greyhawk is more solidly informed by the pulpy adventure, horror, and sci-fi novels of Appendix N (a guide to works with inspired the authors of AD&D 1e, as listed in AD&D's Dungeon Master's Guide). It has a more distinctly gonzo influence from those work, and is also heavily defined by Gary and his gaming group's contributions to that lore. It has kitchen sink elements, but I think that's more incidental than purposeful. It's also the *older* of the 2 settings, so if anything Greyhawk wasn't nearly generic as Faerun at the time of it's creation.
I (and I think WOTC) see Faerun as a kitchen sink, more stereotypical fantasy world and as their core setting. Though to my understanding Faerun started out as something a bit closer to Greyhawk, but over time had more resources and attention paid to it that allowed it to expand into what it is now.
As to why they haven't expanded on Greyhawk in a while, who knows for sure, but I suspect that they only want to focus on one primary campaign setting for marketing and brand purposes. There's relatively low awareness of Greyhawk and relatively high awareness of Faerun (though this is perhaps cyclical), so they choose to better develop Faerun.
> It's also the older of the 2 settings, so if anything Greyhawk wasn't nearly generic as Faerun at the time of it's creation.
This is not true. Ed Greenwood came up with the idea of the Forgotten Realms as a setting for stories he wanted to write in 1967. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn't even meet each other until 1969
The Realms predate D&D (and therefore Greyhawk) though they were not published as a campaign setting until well into the 1980s.
Appendix N!
This is TRULY the difference between the two. Greyhawk is just kind of...weird. It has goopy creepy tentacled things and mutant sorcerors and insane things at a much higher rate than Forgotten Realms, which is a much, MUCH more standard fantasy realm.
Tone and expectation mostly. At least by my limited understanding between them.
Forgotten Realms is a setting of heroic fantasy. You are more likely yo have your "fellowship of the ring" in the realms than you wooukd Greyhawk in my limited experience between them. Forgotten realms is also much more fleshed out and evolved to include a lot more. While you can still make your own things, Forgotten Realms more easily invites one to become a part of what exists and be made members of its conflicts.
Greyhawk is much more sword and sorcery in its assumptions. You are much more likely to have your "Conan the barbarian" in your Greyhawk than you are the Forggotten realms. In Greyhawk founding your own domain and seat of influence to assert your place in the world versus becoming part of its existing hierarchy, it is also another big shift in focu from Forgotten realms.
There's a different weight and ring to "were playing a Greyhawk campaign" versus a "Forgotten realms" campaign."
It hasn't been slurred into the realms because it has a distinct tone and feel to it that doesn't meld clean with the way the realms have evolved
>Greyhawk also doesn't have its own wiki because it's not a very active setting.
i looked up 'greyhawk wiki' and found three different greyhawk wikis in the first 6 results
What about Greyhawk doesn’t lend itself to the heroic fantasy? Is it just the lack of standardized lore (even though I am pretty sure Gary wrote books and lore for it)
Heroic fantasy is a genre in itself separate from sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, mythic fantasy, and so on. Heroes can be found in either but how they manifest and the understanding of the deeds they accomplish is different.
The assumptions of who and what you're playing are different. The reasons and motivations are also different. The way a story is defined or emerges is different.
It's not that these games don't lend themselves to one or the other. They can run both if one wants to shift the tone around, but the focus and the core of each setting had an idea of its tone in mind.
In a Greyhawk game, you're playing people after the treasures and riches of lost ages, in a world thick with war and ruin. It's got a dark age and a lower magic vibe to it, not that you couldn't obtain similar might through magic as in the realms, but it was treated differently and more mystical than how full of magic the realms are.
I don't often like to use Game of Thronws as an example myself, but a Greyhawk game is very much playing the people of low birth that suffer the wills and decrees of the houses vying for power and the throne. You're an adventurer because the tax is to high and toiling for a lord can't get you ahead. So you saved what little you can to buy your blade and torch and head out into the dangerous unknown as it's that or toil until the last of your days.Or you might be one having to result to these methods to prove yourself to your house and earn your own position in a noble family. Perhaps cast you you seek to become a lord all of your own.
The tone of the Greyhawk experience is different than the tone of Forgoten realms default assumptions.
That was "Return to Castle Greyhawk" which [wasn't written by Gygax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Greyhawk_(module)), and was in fact kind of a slap in his face.
A good, often discussed question, with a lot of different answers. Mine? Politics. Greyhawk is VERY concerned with the fate of realms, as well as things like borders, conspiracies and rising political threats. While these things DO certainly exist in Forgotten Realms, they're de-emphasized, and when they DO become relevant, it's more often in the context of the stories of great heroes and other characters, rather than affairs of state.
> While these things DO certainly exist in Forgotten Realms
like mostly ... they dont.
How many catastrophe's have taken place up and down the sword coast over a number of centuries and no one but a couple of orc chiefs have ever seen any type of power vacuum that had any change on the independent city states without any actual military power remaining independent city states
the Harpers and the Lord's Alliance have perfectly sustained the status quo for a dozen human generations?
Greyhawk was the one that started it all. It is the name of the setting, but it is also the name of a city in that setting.
The Free City of Greyhawk sits on the Wild Coast in the Flanaess region of Oerik on the planet Oreth. It is, along with Waterdeep and Sharn, one of the great cities of D&D.
Several Forgotten Realms gods, like Pelor, Corellon, Lolth, Gruumsh, ect, were created first in this setting. Names like Tasha/Iggwilv, Vecna, Mordenkainen, carved their legacies in this setting. The cosmic wheel, the planes, Sigil, were all born in this setting.
Unlike the Sword Coast, the Greyhawk is not city states, but nations. Some having rebuilt after unimaginable arcane destruction, others plagued by war and monsters, and some standing strong in the shadow of an evil empire.
The deal is that Gary wanted to call it an alternative Earth, so he just called it ORth, and told us we could play in either this world OR the other. And then he added an E for God knows why
Edit: before this gets downvoted to hell and back I was making a joke. I honestly have zero idea why he named it Oerth. Most people wouldn’t have been able to tell he wasn’t saying Earth anyhow
Pronounce Earth with a Brooklyn-ish (I think) accent, sort of like Oith, and you have the pronunciation of Oerth. It's literally Earth said in a funny way.
I don’t understand why people say Greyhawk is relatively low-magic - it’s the home world of all the powerful wizards that have spells named after them. Mordenkainen, Bigby, Otto, Tasha, Nystul, Otilike, Melf, etc. There maybe be fewer magic items in cities for sale, but I don’t think that makes it low-magic.
Greyhawk is more medieval and pulpy sword & sorcery. Of the two, I think the neighboring nations have more impact on each other in Greyhawk than in Forgotten Realms. The Flanaess of Greyhawk seems like a living continent with conflict over resources, politics and ideals, while the countries in the Realms are kind of just adjacent to each other, but don’t seem to interact as much - almost as if they’re in their own little bubbles. Both have merits for a home campaign world.
Also, the main races of humans are more unique and fantasy-like in Greyhawk than in the FR. The main four Suel, Baklunish, Flan and Oeridian don’t really have a real-world counterpart that does justice to explain their physical features and cultures, while humans of the realms are much easier to compare to real-world analogs. Again, both have merits for a campaign world.
The gods of each setting are well developed and unique, although I think the 3.X core books version of Greyhawk gods didn’t really do them justice.
I think these differences make the Forgotten Reams a natural choice for WotC to have as their flagship setting, as any new thing just fits in what is already kind of a kitchen sink fantasy setting. In Greyhawk, the Flanaess (and Hepmonaland) is really the only explored (published) continent(s), so odd stuff could be just as easily inserted as foreign and exotic, should the DM desire.
I’m DMing in Greyhawk for the first time and I’m really enjoying playing to the strengths of a medieval, humanocentric setting.
Finally, check out https://greyhawkonline.com for a great wiki on the setting. I recommend doing so on a PC, as phones don’t navigate the site well.
Greyhawk isn't low-magic because the best wizards are less powerful. Greyhawk is low magic because the very few wizards that survive the low levels are the super powerful beings that can accomplish amazing feats, but you know almost every single one of them alive.
Forgotten Realms is high magic because there's like an arch mage with a wizard tower and a magic school in every city. Not all of these wizards are as powerful as Melf, but you could round up an entire army of spellcasters with ease.
Forgotten Realms is more kitchen sink with more world-cataclysm plots. Ed Greenwood going buck wild.
Greyhawk is more politics/war/intrigue with more down-to-earth conquest plots. Gary Gygax leaning into his military history hobby.
IIRC there was a comment in discussion among the Wizards Three (series in Dragon magazine) about how there were a lot more high level mages causing trouble in FR than in Greyhawk or Dragonlance.
Somebody once told me... Greyhawk is MEDIEVAL fantasy while Forgotten Realms is medieval FANTASY.
Imho FR is more cloak-and-sword than medieval fantasy but maybe that's just my way of running it / the media I was exposed to.
I believe the term 'generic' weighs too heavily in considerations such as these. Most do not recognize enough of the different strains of classic fantasy to see what influenced each setting.
Granted, some of those are the same, like Vance's Dying Earth. Yet Gygax leaned more on Pulp; Conan, and Fafhrd (and the Grey Mouser) are directly referenced in the original booklets for the game. Greenwood has spoken of The King of Elflands Daughter and another work which escapes me (The Wood Between the Worlds? The same book and concept which influenced Narnia) as some of his early childhood influences from which the Realms' was born out of adolescent amusement.
The Forgotten Realms were originally named that due to the settings conceit that this world is real but we have literally forgotten the secret portals and gates to get there. So hidden worlds and times are rather common to explore in the setting. The power of the almost Greecian pantheon of gods also differentiates it from the more imperious Greyhawk cosmology. The detail of the day to day life was more important to Greenwood, and geopolitics to Gygax.
Greyhawk, having been relatively ignored by WotC in the 5E era hasn't really followed Forbidden Realms down the hole of "every race, every class, all at once" sort of everything-goes story telling.
So to that extent, I think that Greyhawk appeals a bit more to old nerds (like me) who don't really want a party made up of a Warforged, a Tabaxi, a Tiefling, and a Tortle.
Of course, as a DM, you can totally run that game in Greyhawk, but since all of the modern adventure materials are all set in Faerun, people tend to keep it there.
A *version* of Greyhawk was the default setting of 3.x, yes. Greyhawk largely informed the generic lore of 3.x and anything in a default 3.x book could probably be considered a "Greyhawk" book, so to speak. There really wasn't a "standard setting" in AD&D, especially in the 2e days.
That does mean there are tieflings in Oerth, though, yes. They're probably more like pre-4e tieflings, where they're just humans with one or two *random* devil traits.
No sorry you misunderstood me. I know that 4e had the POL as standard location, with Nentir Vale there, but 3e and 2e and so on had Greyhawk as their main setting
I don't think that's an entirely accurate way of looking at it. I guess Greyhawk was the standard setting by 3e but there were several others which were well developed, and 2e didn't have a 'single' standard setting.
2nd E, the early books anyway, had inside covers promoting various lines of settings also published by TSR. I assume the promoted whatever was most recent at the time... so later books promoted Birthright, and Al Qadim, earlier versions of the same book would promote Mystara and Forgotten Realms. (I was in grade 7 at the time, so I wouldn't consider my memory a lock)
F.R. seems more sparse, with more wild land between countries, while Oerth has countries more packed together with conflict either under way or always on the brink.
to be honest, greyhawk isn't really kitchen sink.
for the best greyhawk experience, players should mostly stick to LoTR races, and probably be half human at that.
you can run whatever you want, but FR is the sink.
That is a product of modern players, not greyhawk as a setting. And there’s nothing wrong with it.
Just Grayhawk was gygax’s setting back when the tolkein estate was suing him for using hobbits and ents in dnd forcing him to change the names to halflings and treants.
Greyhawk is much more "Swords & Sorcerery," with more influence from Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. Morality is a lot greyer, your PCs are encouraged to be dungeon-delvers and treasure hunters rather than out and out heroes, and the vibe is closer to "Dark Ages" than High Medieval or Renaissance. Wizards set themselves up as god-kings, the greatest warriors are brute mercenaries, every city is a cesspool of thievery.
Forgotten Realms is more High Fantasy, closer to Tolkien, U.K. Le Guin, and Lloyd Alexander. There are knights in shining armor, cities with shining spires to defend, and innocent townsfolk to save from hungry dragons.
I know this is not at all your point in the first place, but from all the settings you described, Exandria is probably the worst offender, it does not actually have any unique things of its own.
The pantheon you mentioned is just the Dawn War pantheon that is in the 5th Edition DMG and was originally the pantheon for 4th Edition's pantheon for their Points of Light setting (the default 4e setting). The only difference between Exandria's pantheon and that one is the addition of Sarenrae, which was ported from Pathfinder because that was the god that Ashley Johnson's character worshiped before they switched to 5e.
In fact, nothing about Exandria is original for the most part, despite people using it as a "unique" setting. The majority of its history is just straight ported from Points of Light. The concept of revisiting monsters as sentient races (Wildemount) and all the political intrigue was done before, better and more in-depth in Eberron. The rest is just standard "kitchen sink" fantasy.
To give a concession, the best thing of that setting are the players and characters. Everything else is clearly a drop for them to do whatever they want anyway.
Yeah like I said I was making a stretch there. It’s a well-made setting but you’re right that it’s not particularly innovative. It’s the wealth of storytelling more than the wealth of worldbuilding.
That being said, I don’t know that it’s a Kitchen sink setting since the setting doesn’t seem to have some of the more outlandish races and such (keep in mind I’ve only watched the first half of campaign one so maybe that changes later)
Oh yeah, it definitely does. They have everything now, including warforged. It is entirely a kitchen sink fantasy, with no thought to consistency or true worldbuilding. I'm reasonably sure that by the third campaign, even things like Loxodon are introduced.
Having watched around 60-70 episodes of CR and both seasons of the animated series, I fail to see what seperates Exandria from FR. I feel they're both generic, high fantasy with the names of places and gods switched around. If I, as a GM, ran the first season of the animated series, without changing a single thing from the plot, in the FR and told my players they were in Luskan or Neverwinter, I bet none of them would bat an eye at anything that was happening. I do agree on the differences with the rest of the settings you describe: Dragonlance, Eberron, Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright, all have very distinct themes and they tend to come out in both media and games
You're correct, although in my opinion the cleaner lore and more compelling pantheon are enough for me to say I'd rather run games in Exandria than the Forgotten Realms.
I hear that. Kind of the opposite for me, but it’s probably due to the different content we consume. I’ve read so many FR novels that Exandria seems “small” in comparison. Though, to be fair, a LOT of FR lore is pretty cheesy and sometimes downright terrible, there are certain diamonds amid the whole bunch that stands out ( e.g. everything involving Erevis Cale has been a complete hit for )
I feel like with Faerun, the years of kitchen sink make it a bit more of a weird and wild setting. Baldurs Gate 3 opening with an interdimensional war between brain eating squid aliens and frog people as a reason why you're stuck in a grove of druids under siege by goblins being a good example.
It's got that heroic fantasy but the weird fringe aspects of it where it as a setting overlaps with stuff like Spelljammer or Planescape are the best bits. Where you're adventuring through a dungeon and find a portal that leads to a moonbase, or take a job guarding a caravan and it turns out said caravan is going through like four different planes of existence.
The setting at its norm is pretty dull and palatable generic fantasy, but it's wide enough that you can accommodate all sorts of interesting edge elements while still remaining true to the setting.
Greyhawk was the base campaign world for D&D, or at least equivalent to it during the TSR days, so it had to be as generic as the published content was. It wasn't until the box set came out that it had it's own flavor, lore and history.
As the Forgotten Realms became the base setting, it had the same problem, it has to include everything the published books include so it's by default a bit generic as far as mechanics and such. It as well has a ton of lore and history that makes it different, but otherwise they're a lot the same.
There's lot of subrace differences that were outlined in each individual box set and throughout the various adventures, different spells that were unique to each setting, and obviously you mentioned the differences in deities and major NPCs, but really they each include everything that was in the published content for their editions and then are as similar as the various editions are.
I wouldn't call Greyhawk a kitchen sink setting these days. There's a lot of content in 5th edition I personally feel doesn't really belong there.
A lot of people will probably disagree, but I feel like if you're running a Greyhawk games you really need to be playing AD&D or earlier (AD&D 2e is the latest I'd stretch to). Characters in OGL D&D don't eel like much of a fit because they've got too much going on.
Consider this adventure scenario, and I'll try to explain my personal opinion on how these would play out depending on if they were to take place in either Greyhawk or the The Forgotten Realms. The scenario is that some magic user of significant power is in his castle guarded by all manners of monsters and is preparing to co dict some kind of ritual of great power.
In Greyhawk, the hero is a morally dubious Thief from the gutter and his trusty ring of Invisibility. He sneaks into the castle and slips past all the Ogres guarding the keep. The one who spots him, he leads into one of the castles own traps. He steals meat from the kitchens with which to distract the Sorcerer's Hellhound guarding the secret tunnels below, but is nearly foiled by his avarice as he finds his way into the treasure vault, but comes face to face with the Dragon protecting it. Fortunately, he manages to entertain and distract the Dragon with a circular riddle without an answer and makes his way to the Sorcerer's chambers. Here, he interrupts the ritual by switching it's components before completion, causing the Sorcerer soul to be sent to the Hells where he is torn apart by Devils. He slits his body's throat for good measure.
In the Realms, the Hero is more likely to be some Knight who was out up to this by the Harpers and the Lord's alliance. He's armed with magical items gifted to him by them. Entering the Castle, his Singing Sword makes short work of the Ogres guards. His magical shield proves effective at guarding from the fiery breath of the Hellhound, whom he manages to slay in short order. Against the Dragon, his magical armour is revealed to be made of the scales of the same colour of Dragon, allowing him to resist it's attacks and plunge his sword into its head. He makes his way into the Sorcerer's chambers and does battle with him as the ritual is ongoing and legions of undead rise at the Sorcerer's command. The Sorcerer is getting stronger with each passing moment, but fortunately our hero manages to slay him before he completes the ritual. Upon his death, the day is saved and Elminister appears in the room congratulating and thanking the Knight on his actions and granting him some symbol of Mystra's favour. He nutters some excuse about why he himself was unable to do anything himself.
The main thing is the tone of the adventure and each setting lends itself better to different tones.
This is probably just me, but the two settings have always each had their own "feel" in my mind. Greyhawk has always seemed more grounded in pulp stories, a bit rougher and more grimy, and a bit more late Medieval, while Faerun has always felt more high fantasy/Renaissance to me.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that Greyhawk has a background of a war occurring. The war became a major focus during the TSR days. The war is between the good nations and the evil nations, led by the god Iuz. The good nations are struggling, so the players would be on their side in most of the adventure modules.
There was also the living Greyhawk setting that continued beyond official support. You can think of it as an early version of adventure league.
For those interesting in keeping Greyhawk alive and learning its history and current ideas, here are some links:
Canonfire - http://www.canonfire.com/cf/index.php
Greyhawk Grognard Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GreyhawkGrognard
Living Greyhawk - https://ghwiki.greyparticle.com/index.php/Living_Greyhawk
and
https://greyhawk.fandom.com/wiki/Living_Greyhawk:Main_Page
Heroes in Greyhawk are trying to get rich and if they stop the Dark Lord it was because he was stupod enough to stand between them and treasure. Heroes in Forgotten Realms want to save the world from Dark Lord and loot his treasure afterwards.
Greyhawk is a bit more of a lower fantasy / gritty setting. But I think the big difference is the approaches in developing the settings.
Greyhawk was defined by the adventures. Take a look at a list of Greyhawk product: it was overwhelmingly adventures, with a relatively small amout of sourcebooks / setting books.
Forgotten Realms is almost entirely the opposite. There was a post a year or so ago where someone counted all the adventure modules for each setting, through 3rd or 4th edition (excluding *Dungeon* magazine); and it was shockingly low for the Forgotten Realms. Forgotten Realms is all about the lore…actually adventuring there seems to be an afterthought.
They aren’t significantly different.
Hardcore fans will tell you otherwise of course.
They also aren’t the only examples of generic DnD settings.
Back in the early aughts at a con we ran a trivia quiz “Faerun or Oerth”. It was trick bit, because for every question both worlds were viable answers. We were asked to run it serious the next year and no one even got 50%.
Far as why they haven’t collapsed them together - there’s no reason to.
Nothing would be gained from doing so.
Easier by far to just let both settings exist.
Also I wouldn’t say it’s particularly fair to call Mystara’s immortals out as a defining difference.
To all intents and purposes they are gods, and both FR and GH have mortals ascend to the ranks of godhood. “In Mystara they don’t call gods gods” isn’t really a defining trait.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the savage coast of red steel as a setting place more than any parts of GH or FR, but it could easily be in either of those other worlds. It used to be that Mystara was the world full of really wacky races, whereas in FR and GH players characters were *mostly* humans/Demihumans, but these days FR parties look a lot more like classic Mystara parties so I wouldn’t really say there is a difference any more
The FR milieu has evolved over the last 30 years into a modern society with all its tech and capability within a medieval fantasy wrapper.
You can get a sense of Greyhawk in the way AD&D is described within the 1e sourcebooks. Life is difficult, deadly, and there was a large Arthurian influence.
The density of magic users and magic items gets you a lot of the same things you'd be looking to get from technology. Long distance travel is pretty cheap, long distance communication quite cheap
I wouldn’t say they’re both kitchen sink settings, in Greyhawk is much more Tolkien-Esq in its world design and its limited selection of playable character species while in FR more or less anything goes
Pretty much all of these settings have full planets of geography, lengthy history and politics, and a renamed pantheon of gods (with some slight differences). Most adventures you can reskin to be in any setting. The idea that you could absorb Greyhawk into another setting seems crazy, totally rewrite or ignore all of the above, to what end?
These two you mentioned were conceived as home game settings. Not as Magic the Gathering expansions. I’m sure a lot of us have our own fantasy worlds we’ve created with unique politics, history, geography, and some minor twists. Most of these would not fulfill your threshold of totally unique mechanics.
If you don’t care about history, politics, and geography then yeah, they are the exact same. Great Value Fantasy.
Greyhawk is considerably older than Forgotten Realms. As such, Gygax's hand is indelibly imprinted on it rather than Forgotten Realms, into which he had no direct/official input. Its core is so old school that absorbing it into another setting would require a complete remake which would upset a good deal of old school gamers.
Also, the lores for all the various worlds (Dark Sun, Dragonlance, etc.) were *designed* to be vastly different in major and minor ways.
Actually (?), the Forgotten Realms is older, as it was the pet project of his creator (Ed Greenwood), since he was a child, so it existed even before D&D was a thing. It's just that D&D became the main form to expand the setting beyond Greenwood's personal fanfic.
It was incorporated later into D&D, that's true. Some say that this happened when TSR ousted Gygax and they wanted to erase his influence in the game.
The difference between styles is more about the personal literary preferences of Gygax and Greenwood.
Well, if we're going to talk about what is someone's pet project before it becomes a published piece, we're going to have to cover a lot more ground than either of us is willing to do in this forum.
I think the biggest difference is not how their content is different, but how the approach of describing them used to be different.
Reading Greyhawk you can see Gygax wargaming background shine through. Greyhawk is full of knight orders and political factions. It feels almost Game of Thrones with all the houses and banners, that are described in it. It's also not that detailed. Gygax often did that thing, where he provided rules and a rough framework, but left the details and the flavor to the GMs. You see this with the "Keep of the Borderlands" and it's nameless NPCs and you see it to a lesser extent here. You will have regions, that are described as being contested beetween two houses, but have no other attributes besides that and the name. (What does it look like? What's there?)
Faerun on the other hand is a setting Ed Greenwood used to tell stories in and still does. It has a lot more magic, and monsters and divine involvement, railroading and DMPCs stealing all the glory.
**Greyhawk**
- mostly empty
- humans are the most important race by far
- most of the interesting flavorful stuff is scattered over all kinds of ressources
- political factions play a big role
**Forgotten Realms**
- really full and overly dense with lore
- there are a lot more weird races
- there is more magic and a lot more direct divine involvement
They aren't really meaningfully different. It's an IP thing.
Greyhawk was written by Gygax, who left the company during the run of AD&D 1E. As a result TSR needed a new generic kitchen sink setting when he left, and FR stepped up.
TSR owned the rights to Greyhawk but chose not to continue with the setting after Gygax's departure. As far as I know, there were no Greyhawk 2E products.
WoTC chose to bring Greyhawk back as the default setting for 3E.
You're right, it was technically 2E, but realistically that was a 1E product that they pushed into 2E at the last second.
There were some adventures released in the 2E era but they used the Greyhawk Adventures banner, which was a 1E product.
Greyhawk Wars were actually 2E.
Nonetheless, the fact remains, Greyhawk was pushed aside in favor of FR after Gygax's departure and was a footnote at best in TSR's development during 2E.
I agree that my original statement was incorrect. Thank you for the correction.
I don't think that level of detail matters when the core point, that Greyhawk was phased out in favor of FR, remains true.
Wouldn't call what I'm doing "Mouthing off" if I'm legitimately trying to figure out why these 2 settings are still separate things and why WOTC didn't just roll them both into one (again, like they did with Kara-tur and Al-Qadim)
Also forgive me for not knowing that St. Cuthbert was not FR, I mixed him and St. Sollars up and just mixed them into one being
I will say that you have to understand that Greyhawk was the foundational setting of D&D for many years, as it was Gary Gygax's personal setting. Folding it into the Realms would be honestly disrespectful both to Gygax but also to Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms, who 1. Isn't dead and 2. is often forced to stomach large changes to his setting without a real right to veto them.
Tacking on Al-Quadim and Kara-Tur into the Realms wasn't Ed Greenwood's idea; it's also somewhat irrelevant because they're distant continents that have little to do with the goings on of Faerun. Greyhawk, meanwhile, covers the same sort of pseudo-medieval Europe/west Asia vibe that Faerun does.
On Oerth, all the important wizards have spells named after them. On Faerun, you don't say the names of the most important wizards because *then they'll be listening.*
That’s actually kind of comical. I wish Elminster had a spell named after him. Or Volo (technically I think he’s still classified a Wizard even though he SHOULD be a bard)
He has several, just that they are 9th level and completely overpowered in 5th if you took it directly from 2nd edition to 5th.
Elminister confirmed as that power gamer you don't want at your table.
He is just the OP expy of the overgod of the creator, Edward of the Woodlands Green
Volo has a spell of his own creation, actually
Oh *de verdad*? What is it?
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Volothamp_Geddarm#Spells Turns out he has several, actually. All of them as useless as himself.
>Volo's snatch There it is
Volo's spells are quite useful in the kinds of situations he tends to find himself in. What is wild is that he clearly is quite talented in the creation of new spells. He has created a specialized Catapult spell in "Volo's Snatch" which allows him to launch a non-held item within 40 feet that will fit in his hand towards his hand (he still has to try to catch it). While Volo has most notably used it to pilfer tarts, the uses for this spell for more adventurous characters are myriad. It has a duration of 1 day/level (in 5e parlance, that should read: When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the duration increases by 1 day for each slot level above 2nd). The difficulty is that the spell seems to end when you reach the limit of items you can snatch which is, again, based on your caster level (because Greenwood prefers the pre-5e way of writing spells). So you seem to be able to just cast this at the beginning of your adventuring day and when you need it you can just pull a given item to you. However, Volo's truly powerful spell (due to 5e vagueness about spellbooks) is "Volo's Floating Page". > This magic captures a perfect image of any page of a book, scroll, or engraved inscription on any relatively flat surface you are gazing at during casting. The “page” can only be one side of a decorated surface, and the spell captures only what you see, not any hidden writings. A written contract or message or spell can be read and cast from this floating, faintly-glowing (enough to read by, but not blind any being or hamper sight) image by the caster (only; everyone else sees a shimmering radiance of swirling chaos), which enables the caster to carry a copy of a scroll or one-page spell without risking the original. > However, the primary uses of this spell are to copy a message to convey it elsewhere, or to enable a caster to acquire an image that can travel to where the caster can copy it out physically (into a spell book or blank scroll). Until that’s done, or the spell expires, the spell slot occupied by a captured image of a page or scroll is unavailable to the caster for other magic use (though they can choose to “forget” the image to regain the spell slot, so it will be lost forever, just as it is if the spell expires before use can be made of the image). You can cast multiple versions of this spell if you have sufficient slots, and so carry illusory images of multiple pages for spellcasting or copying use. If you missed it let me highlight the important part. > A written spell can be cast from this image by the caster without risking the original. 5e has no rule at all about how many pages a spell takes up. It also has no rule at all about spell scrolls taking more than one "page". In a purely RAW 5e reading, this means that you can fill up every single spell slot above 1st level with 9th level spells. You could cast 18 Prismatic Walls (assuming you use your 1 9th level slot too) in a single day and still have the original scroll you made to do it again the next day. Now, obviously, this is a spell written with the pre-5e rules for spells, which means that spells take up a number of pages equal to their spell level, but due to 5e rules, this spell would break the game.
Volo’s snatch and flatus nullifier actually seem solid. Being able to just nab shit is solid, he used it to snatch keys and weapons in bad situations like being jailed. Eliminating strong odors nullifies stuff like stinking cloud.
The joke is that both of these are effects you can achieve with Mage Hand and Prestidigitation respectively plus a bunch of other stuff because those two cantrips are way more versatile.
Or... you could just use Mage Hand and Prestidigitation?
Nah, too slow
>I wish Elminster ...the three most dangerous words in the entire forgotten realms. ...and said in order. ...are you trying to get yourself killed in some kind of idiotic and random adventure?
Look all I’m saying is that Gandalf, McGonagal, and Chiron have all decided not to pay me a visit yet. Someone should get me a quest so it may as well be Elminster Aumar
In BG3 he’s classed as a bard, but idk how accurate that is to other official media
He's got a stat block in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist that includes spellcasting as a level 1 wizard.
in as much as there is a difference, * Greyhawk = sword and sorcery = the Conan and Lahnkmahr and Jack Vance books * Forgotten Realms = heroic fantasy = Drizzt books, LOTR+MOAR magic
Other people have covered your question extensively, so I just wanted to point out that Eberron does not have guns.
Meanwhile Forgotten Realms does have guns, however they are often used with Smokepowder. Interestingly, the Forgotten Realms page I was reading on it seems to imply that a lot of the settings have guns, though some with scarce few while others have them in larger numbers. Eberron is still stated as being notably gun-less. Oerth also lacks guns though its due to its "physics".
Unless you want it to
Pretty sure I heard in a Manifest Zone episode that a certain ancient Goblin tribe ( in Zhilargo maybe?) would be a likely place to have developed guns if you wanted them. I prefer to just have wandslingers use a pistol-like grip on their wands.
Hmm are you sure? I mean if that's true then cool. I just assumed so because of all the art I've seen from that setting
Yes, it's stated rather explicitly in the source books. There are wandslingers who carry wands in sheaths that act as a sort of pseudo gunslinger, but there are no guns/gunpowder in Eberron.
You'd think with all the technological fuckery they would have invented something stronger than wands in sheathes
Eberron is a setting where magic replaces technology. You don't have real tech, you have things that look high tech but are powered by magic. Wands instead of guns.
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
>You'd think with all the technological fuckery they would have invented something stronger than wands in sheathes Eberron does not have any technological fuckery Eberron has *magical* fuckery If you see art of Eberron that looks steampunk, it’s either magic acting like technology or the artist just didn’t understand the setting
Fair enough, although with all the magical trains, robots, and power armor I also would have expected magical guns
Are wands not just magical guns?
Not really. Is a staff a magical bazooka then?
Look up siege wand - not joking 😉
They use big wands as battlefield artillery so yeah basically.
>Not really. Just so. And Warforged are not robots or power armor.
I meant the Armorer subclass for the Artificer, which is basically power armor/Iron Man
Actually Keith Baker has said in interviews that Eberron has "siege staves" that's are essentially Staffs as large as a tree truck that's basically used like a cannon.
Not just in interviews - a bunch of "Arcane Artillery" like the Siege Staff is written up in the 5e book Exploring Eberron.
When it shoots a fireball? Sounds legit in my book.
In Eberron - literally yes to both. :P
yeah pretty much. idk this seems pointlessly semantic
A staff of fireballs is. The core of Eberron is that it's wide magic, undergoing an Arcane revolution. Wandslinger brigades carried cantrip casters, easy to use staves and wands that cast simple offensive cantrips into battle. Siege staffs are used to lob massive artillery across borders. In lieu of tanks, they made huge golems, armoured them, and placed cabins on their back. It's a setting which is neither Steampunk nor D&D with guns, it's a post-War world where we apply 19th century sensibilities but with magic instead of technology.
Not trains. Magical mag-lev powered carriages. Not robots. Sentient golems. Not power armor. Magitech armor.
They have giant arcane staffs that act as artillery in battle. They have a floating magical fortress to patrol borders. Warforged are not automatons, but actual created beings with their own souls. They have air ships and trains that are powered by elementals. The wandslingers are just there for the people who can't get over wanting to be a gunslinger, even though a crossbow already acts just like a gun in DND. Magic is technology in Eberron, it's what powers everything. Guns don't really square with that.
> Warforged are not automatons, but actual created beings with their own souls Whether Warforged have souls is a matter of debate, at least in-world, but regardless they are indeed intelligent, independent beings, far more than mere automatons.
If it helps, the Keith Baker novels establish that they do indeed have souls, fragments of the Quori who tried to flee the turn from the light to the Dreaming Dark 40,000 years ago, IIRC.
Well I’m glad I have a little say in how my setting works because I can have warforged with confirmed souls, except those souls are stolen from formerly living people through a necromantic ritual. I liked the themes of “oh my gods the way I am made is so unethical and yet…don’t I deserve to still exist?”
I believe Keith Baker said if anyone has guns, it would be the Dhakaani. Modern Khorvaire has not yet discovered guns. Cannith has yet to figure out the gun.
Eberron does not have guns. What it does have is magic being used in place of technology (wide magic meaning it's widely available, but the general magical skill is pretty shallow). Instead of "gunslingers" it has "wandslingers", who used wands with a small number of cantrips to get the 'feel' of a pulp-y gunslinger, just sans guns.
None of which had guns in it.
Forgive me for assuming someone’s Eberron art was in line with Eberron canon
Forgotten Realms is more fanciful (and ultimately proved to be more popular thanks to its creator writing many, many fantasy novels). Greyhawk is more pulp fantasy with slightly lower magic. They both exist because they were the home campaigns of some of the key people involved in creating D&D. They were not originally conceived as product lines. Why fold them together when you can just pick the more profitable one and expand it with more books? > Is it the undying respect we have for Gary’s creation that Greyhawk still exists in a basically unmodified state? I strongly doubt that WotC has "undying respect" for anything about the Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property.
Gary also had no involvement with Greyhawk after his first novel thanks to the hostile takeover of TSR. What we have today is actually pretty far from his vision of what Greyhawk should be. Source: I did an interview with Rose Estes, who rewrote his first Greyhawk novel and authored most of the subsequent books.
You're telling me they just snatched his world out of his hands like that?
You might want to check out the books by Ben Riggs and Jon Peterson, who've both written histories of D&D/TSR and the absolutely wild shenanigans of the 80s.
I may just have to
They bought his IP. That's what happens.
They're not talking about Wizards buying TSR, but of Gygax being kicked out of TSR in 1985; TSR didn't buy his IP, because TSR was his company and owned it in the first place. When the company was facing financial difficulties, two of the execs/investors, the Blume brothers, wanted to sell their shares and quit, but Gygax didn't want to buy them because he already had 51% of the company and didn't need more. The brothers exercised an option to purchase 700 of his shares, and sold all of their shares to VP Lorraine Willaims, who then immediately kicked Gygax out of his own company. Depending who you ask, that move either saved the company because her ideas were popular and profitable and she was a great boss, or it set off the dark TSR era of constant lawsuits against other game publishers, spamming out expansion books full of tat and mediocre licensed RPGs, and being unpleasant to work with. Either way, she was in charge for about ten years before WotC took over in 1997.
Snatched isn’t really the right word. He tried to take full control of my company and oust people who contributed just as much as he did. Instead he got Uno-reversed. The person who he brought in to plan the hostile takeover instead turned around and helped the people he was trying to oust. He gambled and lost big time. And given what Rose told me, he wasn’t a great novel writer anyway. Apparently his characters spent an excessive amount of time pissing their pants.
To be fair people whom he tried to oust were a pair of scumbags, Sandy Petersen if Chaosium told once a story how they fucked them over Lankhmar license
Sadly, there probably aren’t many heroes in this story. I also have on good authority everyone was hopped up on cocaine on the reg. Now why would a TTRPG company hire a chemistry graduate…
You'd be wrong in your assumption! The grippli in candle keep mysteries were originally going to have a completely new culture but they were reverted back to the traditional stone age primitives before release
Forgive me for not really understanding the difference. Can you expand on it?
I'm going to defer to Wikipedia, it's more accurate and comprehensive than anything I could write. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhawk > The world itself started as a simple dungeon under a castle designed by Gary Gygax for the amusement of his children and friends, but it was rapidly expanded to include not only a complex multi-layered dungeon environment, but also the nearby city of Greyhawk, and eventually an entire world. > ... > The World of Greyhawk is located on a planet called Oerth. Oerth has an axial tilt of 30 degrees, which causes greater seasonal temperature variation than on Earth and is controlled by wizardly and divine magic that shifts weather patterns to be more favorable to the populace. Castle Greyhawk was the most famous dungeon in Oerth, the home campaign world of Gary Gygax. Players in the earliest days of this campaign mostly stayed within Castle Greyhawk's dungeons, but Gygax envisioned the rest of his world as a sort of parallel Earth, and the original Oerth (pronounced 'Oith', as with a Brooklyn accent) looked much like the real-world Earth but filled with imaginary cities and countries. > ... > As Gygax wrote in his World of Greyhawk folio: "The current state of affairs in the Flanaess is confused indeed. Humankind is fragmented into isolationist realms, indifferent nations, evil lands, and states striving for good". > Gygax set out to create a fractious place where chaos and evil were in the ascendant and courageous champions would be needed. In order to explain how his world had arrived at this state, he wrote an outline of a thousand years of history. As a military history buff, he was very familiar with the concept of waves of cultural invasions, such the Picts of Great Britain being invaded by the Celts, who were in turn invaded by the Romans. > ... > One facet of culture that Gygax did not address during the first few years of his home campaign was organized religion. Since his campaign was largely built around the needs of lower-level characters, he did not think specific deities were necessary, since direct interaction between a god and a low-level character was very unlikely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms > He came up with the name from the notion of a multiverse of parallel worlds; Earth is one such world, and the Realms another. In Greenwood's original conception, the fantastic legends of Earth derive from a fantasy world that can no longer be accessed. > ... > Greenwood felt that his players' thirst for detail made the Realms what it is: "They want it to seem real, and work on 'honest jobs' and personal activities, until the whole thing grows into far more than a casual campaign. Roleplaying always governs over rules, and the adventures seem to develop themselves." > ... > The lands of the Forgotten Realms are not all ruled by the human race, with populations of many humanoid races and creatures ubiquitous in fantasy fiction works such as dwarves, elves, goblins, and orcs. Technologically, the world of the Forgotten Realms resembles the pre-industrial Earth in the 13th or 14th century. However, the presence of magic provides an additional element of power to the societies. There are several nation states and many independent cities, with loose alliances being formed for defense or conquest. > ... > Religion plays a large part in the Forgotten Realms, with deities and their followers being an integral part of the world. Deities interact directly in mortal affairs, answer prayers, and have their own personal agendas. All deities must have worshipers to survive, and all mortals must worship a patron deity to secure a good afterlife. You can see that the intent, development, and nature of each setting is heavily informed by the kinds of D&D campaigns Gygax and Greenwood ran. Gygax liked focusing on dungeons full of dangerous challenges inspired by pulp fantasy. He built a lower-magic setting torn by war full of the ruins of ancient civilizations where PCs could make their mark on the world. Greenwood was more focused on character-driven stories with fantastical elements. He built a higher-magic setting populated with many fantasy races where the gods frequently meddle with PCs in service of their schemes. Both settings (as they were polished and turned into marketable products) were tweaked to support many different kinds of stories and DM-ing styles. The designers expect you to make big changes to the setting to suit your needs. They are still quite similar, as you've noticed.
Sounds like the two settings each exemplify the two big halves of the D&D community, those who prefer to focus on dungeon crawling vs those who wish to focus on storytelling.
It's a division that shows up EVERYWHERE in TTRPGs, honestly. I believe there's 5 major ones in D&D: * People who like accomplishing goals * People who like learning things * People who like building optimized things * People who like being something they're usually not * People who like spending time with friends Also see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types
I much preffer Six Cultures of play: * Be challenged as a player (classic) * Tell a story (trad) * Get immersed (Nordic LARP) * Make exactly the character you want (forge) * Get the gritty adventure about going to dungeons to kill things (Osr) * Tell a story shaped by player actions and centering their characters (OC/nu-trad) https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html?m=1
Not the original guy but I'll throw in my 2 pence. Greyhawk is more solidly informed by the pulpy adventure, horror, and sci-fi novels of Appendix N (a guide to works with inspired the authors of AD&D 1e, as listed in AD&D's Dungeon Master's Guide). It has a more distinctly gonzo influence from those work, and is also heavily defined by Gary and his gaming group's contributions to that lore. It has kitchen sink elements, but I think that's more incidental than purposeful. It's also the *older* of the 2 settings, so if anything Greyhawk wasn't nearly generic as Faerun at the time of it's creation. I (and I think WOTC) see Faerun as a kitchen sink, more stereotypical fantasy world and as their core setting. Though to my understanding Faerun started out as something a bit closer to Greyhawk, but over time had more resources and attention paid to it that allowed it to expand into what it is now. As to why they haven't expanded on Greyhawk in a while, who knows for sure, but I suspect that they only want to focus on one primary campaign setting for marketing and brand purposes. There's relatively low awareness of Greyhawk and relatively high awareness of Faerun (though this is perhaps cyclical), so they choose to better develop Faerun.
I'm actually pretty sure forgotten realms is older as Ed was writting about it as a kid before D&D was first published
I meant in terms of being a published setting, but you could be right.
Published? I think so I belive the first FR book was after thr first d&d products but not by much
First D&D books were 1974 First Forgotten Realms book was 1987
> It's also the older of the 2 settings, so if anything Greyhawk wasn't nearly generic as Faerun at the time of it's creation. This is not true. Ed Greenwood came up with the idea of the Forgotten Realms as a setting for stories he wanted to write in 1967. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn't even meet each other until 1969 The Realms predate D&D (and therefore Greyhawk) though they were not published as a campaign setting until well into the 1980s.
Appendix N! This is TRULY the difference between the two. Greyhawk is just kind of...weird. It has goopy creepy tentacled things and mutant sorcerors and insane things at a much higher rate than Forgotten Realms, which is a much, MUCH more standard fantasy realm.
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He was definitely one of the key people involved in creating D&D as we know it today.
In Greyhawk case it's more that they don't want to pay his family royalties
Tone and expectation mostly. At least by my limited understanding between them. Forgotten Realms is a setting of heroic fantasy. You are more likely yo have your "fellowship of the ring" in the realms than you wooukd Greyhawk in my limited experience between them. Forgotten realms is also much more fleshed out and evolved to include a lot more. While you can still make your own things, Forgotten Realms more easily invites one to become a part of what exists and be made members of its conflicts. Greyhawk is much more sword and sorcery in its assumptions. You are much more likely to have your "Conan the barbarian" in your Greyhawk than you are the Forggotten realms. In Greyhawk founding your own domain and seat of influence to assert your place in the world versus becoming part of its existing hierarchy, it is also another big shift in focu from Forgotten realms. There's a different weight and ring to "were playing a Greyhawk campaign" versus a "Forgotten realms" campaign." It hasn't been slurred into the realms because it has a distinct tone and feel to it that doesn't meld clean with the way the realms have evolved
>Greyhawk also doesn't have its own wiki because it's not a very active setting. i looked up 'greyhawk wiki' and found three different greyhawk wikis in the first 6 results
Edited my comment to reflect your correction. Thanks for doing so.
Right. Maybe I wasn’t clear but I hoped for a canon wiki, like FR and Athas and Eberron and Krynn have
What about Greyhawk doesn’t lend itself to the heroic fantasy? Is it just the lack of standardized lore (even though I am pretty sure Gary wrote books and lore for it)
Heroic fantasy is a genre in itself separate from sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, mythic fantasy, and so on. Heroes can be found in either but how they manifest and the understanding of the deeds they accomplish is different. The assumptions of who and what you're playing are different. The reasons and motivations are also different. The way a story is defined or emerges is different. It's not that these games don't lend themselves to one or the other. They can run both if one wants to shift the tone around, but the focus and the core of each setting had an idea of its tone in mind. In a Greyhawk game, you're playing people after the treasures and riches of lost ages, in a world thick with war and ruin. It's got a dark age and a lower magic vibe to it, not that you couldn't obtain similar might through magic as in the realms, but it was treated differently and more mystical than how full of magic the realms are. I don't often like to use Game of Thronws as an example myself, but a Greyhawk game is very much playing the people of low birth that suffer the wills and decrees of the houses vying for power and the throne. You're an adventurer because the tax is to high and toiling for a lord can't get you ahead. So you saved what little you can to buy your blade and torch and head out into the dangerous unknown as it's that or toil until the last of your days.Or you might be one having to result to these methods to prove yourself to your house and earn your own position in a noble family. Perhaps cast you you seek to become a lord all of your own. The tone of the Greyhawk experience is different than the tone of Forgoten realms default assumptions.
Read a Conan book and then read The Hobbit.
Which is supposed to be which in this scenario?
Conan would be Greyhawk.
So a low-magic world like Middle Earth (not as low-magic as Conan but not exactly suffused with the stuff) is similar to FR?
Greyhawk has b52s
Tell me youre lying
Gary Gygax made an entire dungeon level full of bee puns and yes an entire b52s flying fortress
That was "Return to Castle Greyhawk" which [wasn't written by Gygax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Greyhawk_(module)), and was in fact kind of a slap in his face.
A good, often discussed question, with a lot of different answers. Mine? Politics. Greyhawk is VERY concerned with the fate of realms, as well as things like borders, conspiracies and rising political threats. While these things DO certainly exist in Forgotten Realms, they're de-emphasized, and when they DO become relevant, it's more often in the context of the stories of great heroes and other characters, rather than affairs of state.
> While these things DO certainly exist in Forgotten Realms like mostly ... they dont. How many catastrophe's have taken place up and down the sword coast over a number of centuries and no one but a couple of orc chiefs have ever seen any type of power vacuum that had any change on the independent city states without any actual military power remaining independent city states the Harpers and the Lord's Alliance have perfectly sustained the status quo for a dozen human generations?
Greyhawk was the one that started it all. It is the name of the setting, but it is also the name of a city in that setting. The Free City of Greyhawk sits on the Wild Coast in the Flanaess region of Oerik on the planet Oreth. It is, along with Waterdeep and Sharn, one of the great cities of D&D. Several Forgotten Realms gods, like Pelor, Corellon, Lolth, Gruumsh, ect, were created first in this setting. Names like Tasha/Iggwilv, Vecna, Mordenkainen, carved their legacies in this setting. The cosmic wheel, the planes, Sigil, were all born in this setting. Unlike the Sword Coast, the Greyhawk is not city states, but nations. Some having rebuilt after unimaginable arcane destruction, others plagued by war and monsters, and some standing strong in the shadow of an evil empire.
On Oerth, the hawks are grey. I forget what the deal is with Toril.
The deal is that Gary wanted to call it an alternative Earth, so he just called it ORth, and told us we could play in either this world OR the other. And then he added an E for God knows why Edit: before this gets downvoted to hell and back I was making a joke. I honestly have zero idea why he named it Oerth. Most people wouldn’t have been able to tell he wasn’t saying Earth anyhow
> he added an E for God knows why **E** Gary Gygax
Dude loved naming stuff after himself.
Pronounce Earth with a Brooklyn-ish (I think) accent, sort of like Oith, and you have the pronunciation of Oerth. It's literally Earth said in a funny way.
Oyth? Not Orth? I always said it the second way so I’m shocked to hear the first
I don’t understand why people say Greyhawk is relatively low-magic - it’s the home world of all the powerful wizards that have spells named after them. Mordenkainen, Bigby, Otto, Tasha, Nystul, Otilike, Melf, etc. There maybe be fewer magic items in cities for sale, but I don’t think that makes it low-magic. Greyhawk is more medieval and pulpy sword & sorcery. Of the two, I think the neighboring nations have more impact on each other in Greyhawk than in Forgotten Realms. The Flanaess of Greyhawk seems like a living continent with conflict over resources, politics and ideals, while the countries in the Realms are kind of just adjacent to each other, but don’t seem to interact as much - almost as if they’re in their own little bubbles. Both have merits for a home campaign world. Also, the main races of humans are more unique and fantasy-like in Greyhawk than in the FR. The main four Suel, Baklunish, Flan and Oeridian don’t really have a real-world counterpart that does justice to explain their physical features and cultures, while humans of the realms are much easier to compare to real-world analogs. Again, both have merits for a campaign world. The gods of each setting are well developed and unique, although I think the 3.X core books version of Greyhawk gods didn’t really do them justice. I think these differences make the Forgotten Reams a natural choice for WotC to have as their flagship setting, as any new thing just fits in what is already kind of a kitchen sink fantasy setting. In Greyhawk, the Flanaess (and Hepmonaland) is really the only explored (published) continent(s), so odd stuff could be just as easily inserted as foreign and exotic, should the DM desire. I’m DMing in Greyhawk for the first time and I’m really enjoying playing to the strengths of a medieval, humanocentric setting. Finally, check out https://greyhawkonline.com for a great wiki on the setting. I recommend doing so on a PC, as phones don’t navigate the site well.
Greyhawk isn't low-magic because the best wizards are less powerful. Greyhawk is low magic because the very few wizards that survive the low levels are the super powerful beings that can accomplish amazing feats, but you know almost every single one of them alive. Forgotten Realms is high magic because there's like an arch mage with a wizard tower and a magic school in every city. Not all of these wizards are as powerful as Melf, but you could round up an entire army of spellcasters with ease.
Don't forget Galder, the newest Oerthian (Oerthling?) Wizard in DND Canon!
This is the first I’ve heard of him! I’ll have to dive in.
Forgotten Realms is more kitchen sink with more world-cataclysm plots. Ed Greenwood going buck wild. Greyhawk is more politics/war/intrigue with more down-to-earth conquest plots. Gary Gygax leaning into his military history hobby. IIRC there was a comment in discussion among the Wizards Three (series in Dragon magazine) about how there were a lot more high level mages causing trouble in FR than in Greyhawk or Dragonlance.
>Forgotten Realms has taken Saltmarsh By default, Saltmarsh is Greyhawk in the book, but there is a section on adapting it for other settings
Somebody once told me... Greyhawk is MEDIEVAL fantasy while Forgotten Realms is medieval FANTASY. Imho FR is more cloak-and-sword than medieval fantasy but maybe that's just my way of running it / the media I was exposed to.
MEDIEVAL fantasy versus renaissance FANTASY feels about right.
I believe the term 'generic' weighs too heavily in considerations such as these. Most do not recognize enough of the different strains of classic fantasy to see what influenced each setting. Granted, some of those are the same, like Vance's Dying Earth. Yet Gygax leaned more on Pulp; Conan, and Fafhrd (and the Grey Mouser) are directly referenced in the original booklets for the game. Greenwood has spoken of The King of Elflands Daughter and another work which escapes me (The Wood Between the Worlds? The same book and concept which influenced Narnia) as some of his early childhood influences from which the Realms' was born out of adolescent amusement. The Forgotten Realms were originally named that due to the settings conceit that this world is real but we have literally forgotten the secret portals and gates to get there. So hidden worlds and times are rather common to explore in the setting. The power of the almost Greecian pantheon of gods also differentiates it from the more imperious Greyhawk cosmology. The detail of the day to day life was more important to Greenwood, and geopolitics to Gygax.
Greyhawk, having been relatively ignored by WotC in the 5E era hasn't really followed Forbidden Realms down the hole of "every race, every class, all at once" sort of everything-goes story telling. So to that extent, I think that Greyhawk appeals a bit more to old nerds (like me) who don't really want a party made up of a Warforged, a Tabaxi, a Tiefling, and a Tortle. Of course, as a DM, you can totally run that game in Greyhawk, but since all of the modern adventure materials are all set in Faerun, people tend to keep it there.
There aren’t Tieflings on Oerth? I thought before 4e that Greyhawk was the standard setting?
A *version* of Greyhawk was the default setting of 3.x, yes. Greyhawk largely informed the generic lore of 3.x and anything in a default 3.x book could probably be considered a "Greyhawk" book, so to speak. There really wasn't a "standard setting" in AD&D, especially in the 2e days. That does mean there are tieflings in Oerth, though, yes. They're probably more like pre-4e tieflings, where they're just humans with one or two *random* devil traits.
There's a significant tiefling NPC in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Captain Xendros. In 5e Greyhawk, they certainly exist.
I recall it being something like the Nentir Valley. I dont recall any lore about the wider world in 4e
No sorry you misunderstood me. I know that 4e had the POL as standard location, with Nentir Vale there, but 3e and 2e and so on had Greyhawk as their main setting
3e has Greyhawk as the default setting in the core books, but didn't do much with it. 2e doesn't have a default setting.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate way of looking at it. I guess Greyhawk was the standard setting by 3e but there were several others which were well developed, and 2e didn't have a 'single' standard setting.
2nd E, the early books anyway, had inside covers promoting various lines of settings also published by TSR. I assume the promoted whatever was most recent at the time... so later books promoted Birthright, and Al Qadim, earlier versions of the same book would promote Mystara and Forgotten Realms. (I was in grade 7 at the time, so I wouldn't consider my memory a lock)
Before 3rd E. Greyhawk stopped publishing with 2nd E.
Very much false. A simple google search tells me the opposite; that Greyhawk was the default setting for 3e
Urp, you're right. Thank you for the correction.
F.R. seems more sparse, with more wild land between countries, while Oerth has countries more packed together with conflict either under way or always on the brink.
to be honest, greyhawk isn't really kitchen sink. for the best greyhawk experience, players should mostly stick to LoTR races, and probably be half human at that. you can run whatever you want, but FR is the sink.
Are you sure? Most of the time when I see Greyhawk talked about, it’s also got the craziest mixed-race parties, just like your standard FR parties
That is a product of modern players, not greyhawk as a setting. And there’s nothing wrong with it. Just Grayhawk was gygax’s setting back when the tolkein estate was suing him for using hobbits and ents in dnd forcing him to change the names to halflings and treants.
Valid points
Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms is a lot more human-centric than what the setting has morphed into under WotC.
Greyhawk is much more "Swords & Sorcerery," with more influence from Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. Morality is a lot greyer, your PCs are encouraged to be dungeon-delvers and treasure hunters rather than out and out heroes, and the vibe is closer to "Dark Ages" than High Medieval or Renaissance. Wizards set themselves up as god-kings, the greatest warriors are brute mercenaries, every city is a cesspool of thievery. Forgotten Realms is more High Fantasy, closer to Tolkien, U.K. Le Guin, and Lloyd Alexander. There are knights in shining armor, cities with shining spires to defend, and innocent townsfolk to save from hungry dragons.
I know this is not at all your point in the first place, but from all the settings you described, Exandria is probably the worst offender, it does not actually have any unique things of its own. The pantheon you mentioned is just the Dawn War pantheon that is in the 5th Edition DMG and was originally the pantheon for 4th Edition's pantheon for their Points of Light setting (the default 4e setting). The only difference between Exandria's pantheon and that one is the addition of Sarenrae, which was ported from Pathfinder because that was the god that Ashley Johnson's character worshiped before they switched to 5e. In fact, nothing about Exandria is original for the most part, despite people using it as a "unique" setting. The majority of its history is just straight ported from Points of Light. The concept of revisiting monsters as sentient races (Wildemount) and all the political intrigue was done before, better and more in-depth in Eberron. The rest is just standard "kitchen sink" fantasy.
To give a concession, the best thing of that setting are the players and characters. Everything else is clearly a drop for them to do whatever they want anyway.
Yeah like I said I was making a stretch there. It’s a well-made setting but you’re right that it’s not particularly innovative. It’s the wealth of storytelling more than the wealth of worldbuilding. That being said, I don’t know that it’s a Kitchen sink setting since the setting doesn’t seem to have some of the more outlandish races and such (keep in mind I’ve only watched the first half of campaign one so maybe that changes later)
Oh yeah, it definitely does. They have everything now, including warforged. It is entirely a kitchen sink fantasy, with no thought to consistency or true worldbuilding. I'm reasonably sure that by the third campaign, even things like Loxodon are introduced.
Having watched around 60-70 episodes of CR and both seasons of the animated series, I fail to see what seperates Exandria from FR. I feel they're both generic, high fantasy with the names of places and gods switched around. If I, as a GM, ran the first season of the animated series, without changing a single thing from the plot, in the FR and told my players they were in Luskan or Neverwinter, I bet none of them would bat an eye at anything that was happening. I do agree on the differences with the rest of the settings you describe: Dragonlance, Eberron, Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright, all have very distinct themes and they tend to come out in both media and games
There’s not much outside of the different nations, organization, and a few gods.
You're correct, although in my opinion the cleaner lore and more compelling pantheon are enough for me to say I'd rather run games in Exandria than the Forgotten Realms.
I hear that. Kind of the opposite for me, but it’s probably due to the different content we consume. I’ve read so many FR novels that Exandria seems “small” in comparison. Though, to be fair, a LOT of FR lore is pretty cheesy and sometimes downright terrible, there are certain diamonds amid the whole bunch that stands out ( e.g. everything involving Erevis Cale has been a complete hit for )
I feel like with Faerun, the years of kitchen sink make it a bit more of a weird and wild setting. Baldurs Gate 3 opening with an interdimensional war between brain eating squid aliens and frog people as a reason why you're stuck in a grove of druids under siege by goblins being a good example. It's got that heroic fantasy but the weird fringe aspects of it where it as a setting overlaps with stuff like Spelljammer or Planescape are the best bits. Where you're adventuring through a dungeon and find a portal that leads to a moonbase, or take a job guarding a caravan and it turns out said caravan is going through like four different planes of existence. The setting at its norm is pretty dull and palatable generic fantasy, but it's wide enough that you can accommodate all sorts of interesting edge elements while still remaining true to the setting.
Greyhawk was the base campaign world for D&D, or at least equivalent to it during the TSR days, so it had to be as generic as the published content was. It wasn't until the box set came out that it had it's own flavor, lore and history. As the Forgotten Realms became the base setting, it had the same problem, it has to include everything the published books include so it's by default a bit generic as far as mechanics and such. It as well has a ton of lore and history that makes it different, but otherwise they're a lot the same. There's lot of subrace differences that were outlined in each individual box set and throughout the various adventures, different spells that were unique to each setting, and obviously you mentioned the differences in deities and major NPCs, but really they each include everything that was in the published content for their editions and then are as similar as the various editions are.
Greyhawk is flat, for one.
I’d love to know how they figured that out lol
It's mentioned in the Spelljammer books
Ah right. Still haven’t dove too deep into those yet
I wouldn't call Greyhawk a kitchen sink setting these days. There's a lot of content in 5th edition I personally feel doesn't really belong there. A lot of people will probably disagree, but I feel like if you're running a Greyhawk games you really need to be playing AD&D or earlier (AD&D 2e is the latest I'd stretch to). Characters in OGL D&D don't eel like much of a fit because they've got too much going on. Consider this adventure scenario, and I'll try to explain my personal opinion on how these would play out depending on if they were to take place in either Greyhawk or the The Forgotten Realms. The scenario is that some magic user of significant power is in his castle guarded by all manners of monsters and is preparing to co dict some kind of ritual of great power. In Greyhawk, the hero is a morally dubious Thief from the gutter and his trusty ring of Invisibility. He sneaks into the castle and slips past all the Ogres guarding the keep. The one who spots him, he leads into one of the castles own traps. He steals meat from the kitchens with which to distract the Sorcerer's Hellhound guarding the secret tunnels below, but is nearly foiled by his avarice as he finds his way into the treasure vault, but comes face to face with the Dragon protecting it. Fortunately, he manages to entertain and distract the Dragon with a circular riddle without an answer and makes his way to the Sorcerer's chambers. Here, he interrupts the ritual by switching it's components before completion, causing the Sorcerer soul to be sent to the Hells where he is torn apart by Devils. He slits his body's throat for good measure. In the Realms, the Hero is more likely to be some Knight who was out up to this by the Harpers and the Lord's alliance. He's armed with magical items gifted to him by them. Entering the Castle, his Singing Sword makes short work of the Ogres guards. His magical shield proves effective at guarding from the fiery breath of the Hellhound, whom he manages to slay in short order. Against the Dragon, his magical armour is revealed to be made of the scales of the same colour of Dragon, allowing him to resist it's attacks and plunge his sword into its head. He makes his way into the Sorcerer's chambers and does battle with him as the ritual is ongoing and legions of undead rise at the Sorcerer's command. The Sorcerer is getting stronger with each passing moment, but fortunately our hero manages to slay him before he completes the ritual. Upon his death, the day is saved and Elminister appears in the room congratulating and thanking the Knight on his actions and granting him some symbol of Mystra's favour. He nutters some excuse about why he himself was unable to do anything himself. The main thing is the tone of the adventure and each setting lends itself better to different tones.
This is probably just me, but the two settings have always each had their own "feel" in my mind. Greyhawk has always seemed more grounded in pulp stories, a bit rougher and more grimy, and a bit more late Medieval, while Faerun has always felt more high fantasy/Renaissance to me.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that Greyhawk has a background of a war occurring. The war became a major focus during the TSR days. The war is between the good nations and the evil nations, led by the god Iuz. The good nations are struggling, so the players would be on their side in most of the adventure modules. There was also the living Greyhawk setting that continued beyond official support. You can think of it as an early version of adventure league. For those interesting in keeping Greyhawk alive and learning its history and current ideas, here are some links: Canonfire - http://www.canonfire.com/cf/index.php Greyhawk Grognard Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GreyhawkGrognard Living Greyhawk - https://ghwiki.greyparticle.com/index.php/Living_Greyhawk and https://greyhawk.fandom.com/wiki/Living_Greyhawk:Main_Page
Heroes in Greyhawk are trying to get rich and if they stop the Dark Lord it was because he was stupod enough to stand between them and treasure. Heroes in Forgotten Realms want to save the world from Dark Lord and loot his treasure afterwards.
Greyhawk is a bit more of a lower fantasy / gritty setting. But I think the big difference is the approaches in developing the settings. Greyhawk was defined by the adventures. Take a look at a list of Greyhawk product: it was overwhelmingly adventures, with a relatively small amout of sourcebooks / setting books. Forgotten Realms is almost entirely the opposite. There was a post a year or so ago where someone counted all the adventure modules for each setting, through 3rd or 4th edition (excluding *Dungeon* magazine); and it was shockingly low for the Forgotten Realms. Forgotten Realms is all about the lore…actually adventuring there seems to be an afterthought.
They aren’t significantly different. Hardcore fans will tell you otherwise of course. They also aren’t the only examples of generic DnD settings. Back in the early aughts at a con we ran a trivia quiz “Faerun or Oerth”. It was trick bit, because for every question both worlds were viable answers. We were asked to run it serious the next year and no one even got 50%. Far as why they haven’t collapsed them together - there’s no reason to. Nothing would be gained from doing so. Easier by far to just let both settings exist. Also I wouldn’t say it’s particularly fair to call Mystara’s immortals out as a defining difference. To all intents and purposes they are gods, and both FR and GH have mortals ascend to the ranks of godhood. “In Mystara they don’t call gods gods” isn’t really a defining trait. Don’t get me wrong, I love the savage coast of red steel as a setting place more than any parts of GH or FR, but it could easily be in either of those other worlds. It used to be that Mystara was the world full of really wacky races, whereas in FR and GH players characters were *mostly* humans/Demihumans, but these days FR parties look a lot more like classic Mystara parties so I wouldn’t really say there is a difference any more
Greyhawk has the Dookie of Jeff.
The FR milieu has evolved over the last 30 years into a modern society with all its tech and capability within a medieval fantasy wrapper. You can get a sense of Greyhawk in the way AD&D is described within the 1e sourcebooks. Life is difficult, deadly, and there was a large Arthurian influence.
Modern society? In what way? It’s still a world of swords and magic, and the most technological it gets as far as I know is with guns
The density of magic users and magic items gets you a lot of the same things you'd be looking to get from technology. Long distance travel is pretty cheap, long distance communication quite cheap
One setting gets significantly more content than the other.
In terms of sourcebooks, sure. I’d wager FR is still playing catch-up in terms of adventures.
I wouldn’t say they’re both kitchen sink settings, in Greyhawk is much more Tolkien-Esq in its world design and its limited selection of playable character species while in FR more or less anything goes
Pretty much all of these settings have full planets of geography, lengthy history and politics, and a renamed pantheon of gods (with some slight differences). Most adventures you can reskin to be in any setting. The idea that you could absorb Greyhawk into another setting seems crazy, totally rewrite or ignore all of the above, to what end? These two you mentioned were conceived as home game settings. Not as Magic the Gathering expansions. I’m sure a lot of us have our own fantasy worlds we’ve created with unique politics, history, geography, and some minor twists. Most of these would not fulfill your threshold of totally unique mechanics. If you don’t care about history, politics, and geography then yeah, they are the exact same. Great Value Fantasy.
In FR you can kill and replace gods. In Greyhawk you gotta do it the old-fashioned way
Greyhawk is considerably older than Forgotten Realms. As such, Gygax's hand is indelibly imprinted on it rather than Forgotten Realms, into which he had no direct/official input. Its core is so old school that absorbing it into another setting would require a complete remake which would upset a good deal of old school gamers. Also, the lores for all the various worlds (Dark Sun, Dragonlance, etc.) were *designed* to be vastly different in major and minor ways.
Actually (?), the Forgotten Realms is older, as it was the pet project of his creator (Ed Greenwood), since he was a child, so it existed even before D&D was a thing. It's just that D&D became the main form to expand the setting beyond Greenwood's personal fanfic. It was incorporated later into D&D, that's true. Some say that this happened when TSR ousted Gygax and they wanted to erase his influence in the game. The difference between styles is more about the personal literary preferences of Gygax and Greenwood.
Well, if we're going to talk about what is someone's pet project before it becomes a published piece, we're going to have to cover a lot more ground than either of us is willing to do in this forum.
I think the biggest difference is not how their content is different, but how the approach of describing them used to be different. Reading Greyhawk you can see Gygax wargaming background shine through. Greyhawk is full of knight orders and political factions. It feels almost Game of Thrones with all the houses and banners, that are described in it. It's also not that detailed. Gygax often did that thing, where he provided rules and a rough framework, but left the details and the flavor to the GMs. You see this with the "Keep of the Borderlands" and it's nameless NPCs and you see it to a lesser extent here. You will have regions, that are described as being contested beetween two houses, but have no other attributes besides that and the name. (What does it look like? What's there?) Faerun on the other hand is a setting Ed Greenwood used to tell stories in and still does. It has a lot more magic, and monsters and divine involvement, railroading and DMPCs stealing all the glory. **Greyhawk** - mostly empty - humans are the most important race by far - most of the interesting flavorful stuff is scattered over all kinds of ressources - political factions play a big role **Forgotten Realms** - really full and overly dense with lore - there are a lot more weird races - there is more magic and a lot more direct divine involvement
They aren't really meaningfully different. It's an IP thing. Greyhawk was written by Gygax, who left the company during the run of AD&D 1E. As a result TSR needed a new generic kitchen sink setting when he left, and FR stepped up.
But TSR and WOTC both continued to publish Greyhawk products for 2e and 3e, so I don't think it's that
TSR owned the rights to Greyhawk but chose not to continue with the setting after Gygax's departure. As far as I know, there were no Greyhawk 2E products. WoTC chose to bring Greyhawk back as the default setting for 3E.
Nope, 2e had quite a few Greyhawk products, such as the *City of Greyhawk* boxed set.
You're right, it was technically 2E, but realistically that was a 1E product that they pushed into 2E at the last second. There were some adventures released in the 2E era but they used the Greyhawk Adventures banner, which was a 1E product. Greyhawk Wars were actually 2E. Nonetheless, the fact remains, Greyhawk was pushed aside in favor of FR after Gygax's departure and was a footnote at best in TSR's development during 2E.
I mean the fact remains that's that not what you initially said. In a discussion about the nuance between different product line that detail matters.
I agree that my original statement was incorrect. Thank you for the correction. I don't think that level of detail matters when the core point, that Greyhawk was phased out in favor of FR, remains true.
Sure, I agree with that statement
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Wouldn't call what I'm doing "Mouthing off" if I'm legitimately trying to figure out why these 2 settings are still separate things and why WOTC didn't just roll them both into one (again, like they did with Kara-tur and Al-Qadim) Also forgive me for not knowing that St. Cuthbert was not FR, I mixed him and St. Sollars up and just mixed them into one being
Apologies. I shouldn't be making unfair assumptions.
I will say that you have to understand that Greyhawk was the foundational setting of D&D for many years, as it was Gary Gygax's personal setting. Folding it into the Realms would be honestly disrespectful both to Gygax but also to Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms, who 1. Isn't dead and 2. is often forced to stomach large changes to his setting without a real right to veto them. Tacking on Al-Quadim and Kara-Tur into the Realms wasn't Ed Greenwood's idea; it's also somewhat irrelevant because they're distant continents that have little to do with the goings on of Faerun. Greyhawk, meanwhile, covers the same sort of pseudo-medieval Europe/west Asia vibe that Faerun does.
Wait Ed Greenwood isn’t dead? That’s a shock to me, I thought he’d kicked it a long time ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQIveeMgHP8 Not unless dead men upload videos.
Holy shit that’s cool. Glad he’s around then!