Greyhawk: From the Ashes

 

Gary Gygax was forced out of his company. The ill-advised Greyhawk Wars products. Whatever you do next with the Greyhawk setting, there is no way to win here. So what do you do?

1992, just a few years before the bankruptcy of TSR, and one year away from Magic the Gathering's release. Games like Vampire the Masquerade and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay were taking over the tabletop space, a space that would not even last a few more years before MtG steamrollered everyone. I remember the hobby shops of the time converting to 100% MtG and putting the pen-and-paper games way in the back of the store.

AD&D 2nd Edition had the Forgotten Realms on one side, and the novels were bestsellers. Greyhawk was sort of in a mess. Enter, From the Ashes, an attempt to position Greyhawk to be more of a Warhammer Fantasy setting, and they even hired a great writer who worked on those products to take Gygax's setting and inject some life into the world by positioning more as "dark fantasy."

Us? We ignored this, and we picked Greyhawk back up in 3rd Edition D&D. We were in the Realms happily playing our pulp adventures and blissfully unaware of the mayhem coming from the fantasy novels, and the horrible modules that would soon come out. We also had Warhammer Fantasy and played Advanced Heroquest, so a revamped Greyhawk setting seemed like a weak "me too" sort of product that felt a bit desperate from a TSR trying to compete with Games Workshop.

Tearing It Down

Honestly, at this point, Greyhawk was kind of what it was, and with the Forgotten Realms being the darling of the company the writing was on the wall. But no darling setting lasts forever with this company, as the Realms would discover during its 4E run. One of the strange things about the creative types big companies hire is they constantly feel the need to tear down, ignore, denigrate, or reinterpret everything that came before to prove their stuff is better.

It is the scourge of feeling they will never live up to the good things which came before, and that feeling they will never make something that will ever last as long as a Greyhawk or even a Forgotten Realms. Then again, they are put in this position by nostalgia-drunk companies that never will hire visionaries or give their current teams the freedom to do something big, daring, and new. And I am not talking about a one-off book. Will these companies ever trust their team to build an entirely new setting and support it?

Will this generation ever have its own Forgotten Realms?

Or are we doomed to disposable one-off micro settings, unsupported by product lines and novels, that will fade into history?

I think part of the problem these days is a big company will point at the original thing that was popular, stand at a table full of newly-hired creators, tell them to make something like that, and what happens is the team realizes they can't (or the company won't let them create anything new), so they spend all their effort tearing down the old version and telling us why it was bad.

This is why I support small indie creators these days. They can think big and dream big without the pressure of pleasing shareholders.

Dark Greyhawk

None of this would matter anyway for Greyhawk, since Magic: The Armageddon was hitting the pen and paper gaming scene the next year. Everyone in our circles gave up pen-and-paper gaming. People said Magic was like D&D and you can play without a DM.

And it killed tabletop roleplaying in the 90s.

People are divided about this product. A lot of gamers love OG Greyhawk, the setting of all the classic modules, the high magic high fantasy mix, and the innocence of the setting that almost felt like a Mystara.

People that hated Greyhawk Wars hated this setting since it seemed like an unwelcome change from the long-running campaigns they had going, and it felt very "metaplot" to them. Some really liked how this shook up the setting and introduced many bad guys, ruins, and lands they had to free from evil. Some who started in 2nd Edition AD&D had some of their best and most memorable adventures here, and others liked having a setting free from the influence of the bestselling novels.

I do think Warhammer Fantasy is a better dark fantasy setting, and you can never remove some of that Greyhawk optimism and high-level-ness from the world. This place was the center of the universe, where it all started, and everything that came after would endlessly end up copying this setting again and again. Also, Greyhawk's 2e bad guys were not memorable at all. With Warhammer, you have Chaos and a lot of cool evil forces you can name right away. With Greyhawk's destruction, um, Iuz that guy? Orcs? The bad dragon? Some evil wizard? The undead punk-rock thing on the cover?

Looking back at the PDFs, and not the adventures for this setting, I can say this feels like an interesting start for a fresh take on Greyhawk, one that I could take in a lot of directions. The original Greyhawk feels almost like a copy of Baldur's Gate and hitting "new game," one where all the original modules get reset and everything is ready to be played for the first time again - for the hundredth playthrough.

From the Ashes feels like a fresh campaign start that takes a great setting and pushes it into an alternate timeline future with plenty of room to make things your own. Yes, a lot of fan-favorite kingdoms got destroyed, but this is where you step in to rebuild them, heroes.

Dark Greyhawk +30

So 1992, meet 2022, thirty years older and in our unhappy middle ages. If I ran a campaign here, I would set this 30 years after From the Ashes in the year CY 615. And here is where the heresy begins.

I would play this with Dungeon Fantasy using the variant GURPS rules. I know that isn't even AD&D. These rules are the furthest thing from AD&D you can possibly play in Greyhawk with. Well, the Grayhawk Wars changed the world like before WW2 and after. That old AD&D magic is gone, burned out, and changed fundamentally by that event. Some say the last remaining Council of Eight had something to do with the nature of how magic changed.

I need to break with AD&D since there is this thematic need to change the rules of the world and let people know things are never going back to how they used to be. It is too easy to play AD&D 1e or 2e and just say, come on, why not reset the Tomb of Horrors again? Why is your world so messed up? Just reset it to normal, please, someone hit New Game!

The pull of AD&D is too strong. And there need to be consequences for the company abandoning this world. The world in turn abandons them. A price is paid for freedom and a future. This is Greyhawk in its Micky Rourke older actor comeback phase. This setting is older, beaten, bruised, and has been through hell and back.

But we are never going back to the old ways. Things work now more like Dungeon Fantasy. The world is a different place. Legends of how things used to be still are floating about, but that is not how it is today. Yes, there is magic in the world, but things have grown up a little. Magic is not as easy. Life, overall, is not as simple or easy anymore.

And the next part of heresy completes the circle.

TL 4 begins in Greyhawk. The first armies begin using gunpowder. Adventurers can use these clumsy weapons too. And the world begins to change as the armies of evil to the north start facing the bang of cannons and the new world begins to develop. GURPS Low Tech also has some great companions dealing with low tech societies, warfare, and economies.

I know one of the natural laws of Greyhawk back in the day was "no gunpowder" and this feels like a complete heresy. Well, what can I say, the world has changed, the war happened, and things are way different today. Somehow, the rules are now broken. Learn to survive.

We aren't going back.

Part of why I wanted to use a GURPS-based system is the excellent support for the gunpowder era this game has. There is a huge wealth of information that even OGL gunpowder supplements can't touch, and this also opens up the opportunities for seamless time travel throughout infinite worlds - again, something that AD&D did with Gamma World and Boot Hill that rarely gets talked about today.

Greyhawk comes out of the dark ages and enters the Renaissance. Ancient evils from the long-lost places of legends, such as the Tomb of Horrors, are still out there, and other cosmic horrors lie underneath the surface of this now developing world - threatening to tear it all down and plunge the world, not into another world war, but this time the end of life on the world itself. Armageddon is what evil seeks to do this world, to take any chance it has to grow and become a free and prosperous gem in the stars.

All of the evil if this world seeks this same world-ending destruction. Like the chaos cults of Warhammer, evil knows that as technology advances their time here grows short. The only hope for evil now is to burn it all down, end the world, summon the great comet to smash the world into dust, and this is their destiny if they are not stopped. Since the knowledge of the past is now gone, new heroes must arise using what we know today to stop them. The impending Armageddon of all is a key feature of a dark fantasy world, and this checks the box. Hell shall come to Greyhawk, and it shall be evil who marches it in.

One last thing...

And the piece of Greyhawk that got ripped off to create 4E Nentir Vale would be returned. For some reason, the Valley of the Mage is gone, and in its place lies this strangely familiar place.

And the strange circle of life would be complete, my 4E experience would have an ending in a place it was taken from a long time ago, and new heroes could rise up and make this world their own. Something happened. Bahamut tried to escape this fate by creating a new reality somewhere, and it failed. He was forced to return, his plans in tatters, and his hopes crushed.

This is how I would play this world.

Tear it down.

Burn it down.

Change the rules.

Pay homage to the past.

But move it forward relentlessly.

Give the world its final act.

And instead of having this world be the "default unchangeable setting for classic modules" there would be a real fight for its future. And this future cannot be stopped. We are not playing around in the past anymore, but the past is always there to haunt us.

The world lost its innocence because of the Greyhawk Wars (and what TSR/Wizards did). Gunpowder is here. Technology is advancing.

The question is, how will your heroes shape the future of this world?

How will they play on the stage of a world's twilight?