World Replacements: Greyhawk, Lost Lands

One of the most underrated experiences in the OSR right now is all the work Frog God Games put into Lost Lands, Swords & Wizardry, and the old-school adventures they put out regularly. This is a fantastic collection of work, easily exceeding the original Greyhawk module series releases. And every one of these is a classic old-school adventure, anchored by the fantastic king of the mega-dungeons Rappan Athuk.

The world has some Gygax content with the Necropolis adventure, so the world has a pedigree from the master himself. If you play Castles & Crusades in this world (like I plan to), you have even more Gygax-ian charm since he was involved in that game as well, to a certain degree.

And one after the other, the Frog God Games adventures fill in the blanks and eliminate the need to replay the A-series, S-series, or others (I love them, but they have been overdone and need to be put in the Hall of Fame). There are years of old-school adventures here with options of Egyptian-style adventures, Norse, pirate, and many other themes. I dare say the "theme park" elements were done more complete than their Pathfinder counterparts, with complete campaign support for each. And again, Castles & Crusades has Norse and Egyptian sourcebooks, so you can take the flavor and game of these lands to the next level with lore and system support, should you play C&C.

It is a fantastic world, and if you are into the OSR with any game and not taking a look, you are missing out. And since S&W is 99% B/X compatible, any OSR game you prefer will let you jump right in. Even the current OSR king of the hill, Old School Essentials, can drop right in and play here with no changes at all. If I were to play straight OSR, I would do Swords & Wizardry as my first choice, just because of the lessened reliance on modifiers, the magic resistance, and the AD&D-lite feel of the game. Otherwise, I play Castles & Crusades because I can run dozens of party members in various groups with little record keeping and hassle, and the system runs super smooth.

And we have a resident mega dungeon here, too, with the fantastic Rappan Athuk. This is all the mega-dungeon you need for one world, a massive tome, and incredibly expandable with thousands of adventures and stories locked within this book. And there are a few expansion books to this massive tome, with wilderness adventures and even deeper levels.

What Do I Lose?

Well, the classic Greyhawk dungeons. I could always toss them in here if I really wanted since the original modules were never really tightly tied to the Greyhawk setting, with Temple of Elemental Evil likely being the one with the most substantial ties. Still, those can be tweaked and changed to fit a little better. If I put those adventures in the world, I would change them extensively. I might as well; they have become a bit cliché as it is and need reimagining. Some have been horribly over-revisited, such as the Tomb of Horrors. Otherwise, put these dungeons in the Hall of Fame and give me cool new ones.

I was never a part of the Living Greyhawk crowd, so I am not profoundly tied to most of the world. We based our games on Greyhawk City and the Almor region. I can't say I would miss any part of this world since we came to it so late in 1985, and it never really took off with us.

We lose the Greyhawk Wizards Council, which we never really saw a need for, and they tended to be troublemaking Elminsters in our world anyways, no significant loss. They saw the need to brand a few of the spells as their own out of ego too, which was like, bleh. Characters-wise, I can't think of many beyond a few NPCs that we loved that I would want in the new world. They are not official ones, so they could jump quickly.

Greyhawk City was almost entirely populated by high-level adventurers in our world, and it was sort of uninteresting aside from a few hangouts.

What Do I Gain?

An entire unexplored world without as much baggage and botched reboots. I am getting dozens of fresh OSR adventures, many of them hundreds of pages long, and an old-school world that feels Greyhawk authentic.

I hate feeling like I am dumping on Greyhawk since it was never really given a chance. When Gygax was forced out of the company, the world was abandoned. It never really recovered without a champion and driving force of creativity. All that is left are the original classic modules, and even those are becoming like songs that have been remade by different artists too many times.

Because TSR and Wizards never gave Greyhawk world love, the modules were used for reboots repeatedly, and the company never really took care of the land where these came from. And as a result, nothing grows there anymore. Sustainable farming means you will always have food. Sustainable product management means taking care of your game worlds, so they will always produce fun for future generations. You can't milk nostalgia forever.

So I find a game world that is taken care of and has many adventures and support for OSR fun on the level of a Goodman Games, and I say, here is a place and a company that cares.

This is the easiest choice I had to make with finding replacement worlds since the level of OSR support and flavor of the adventures as old-school dungeon crawls fit perfectly. And I have played none of these, so this is like finding a classic game collection you have never experienced.

Lost Lands is my Greyhawk. Frog God Games is my adventure source.

Castles & Crusades and/or Swords & Wizardry are my games.

And I am excited about this change.

Greyhawk

I do love Greyhawk. While we started in the Mystara setting, we revisited Greyhawk during the 3E era and rediscovered a wonderful and fantastic place.

Part of me wonders if a lot of the inspiration for the Forgotten Realms was to somehow "erase" Greyhawk after Gygax was forced out of the company. You see many of the same sorts of "but we do it better" things in the Realms and much more annoying godlike GMNPCs. And we still see the classic Greyhawk modules pushed hard as IP, with no love or recognition for the place from which they came.

All the great modules started here:

• A1-A4
• C1-C2
• D1-D3
• The incredible GDQ Series
• The S series, including Tomb of Horrors
• The T series, including Temple of Elemental Evil
• ...and many more

And then we have the really sloppy "borrowing" of the classic Greyhawk adventures for the 4E non-setting, some "place floating out in space" valley map that was never really intended to matter beyond "level 1-10 MMO starting zone" before planar adventures began. There were 4E versions of the significant campaign settings, minus Greyhawk, which was one we wanted to see. Most of the 4E settings were not as great as the originals, and the Forgotten Realms one all but destroyed the world we loved.

It is frustrating and sad since these are the great IP settings of fantasy. Every bit as significant as Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, or Star Trek.

You look at the above list of adventures, which are as great as "the battle of the death star" or other iconic moments in cinema history but played out on people's kitchen tabletops. And the setting from which they came feels like it sits ignored.

I swear Wizards does not know what they own at times.

And I get the feeling that modern D&D is more about the planes, with the 4E cosmology still present and influential in the setting and all of the Magic the Gathering settings being used as substitutes for the great works of art that were the original campaign worlds. We also see micro-settings tied to a single adventure, which is okay, but I don't feel they compare to an entire world.

Those who revived Greyhawk for 3E knew how important a world was. Funny how a lot of those creators moved on and became Paizo, and created a strong world of their own which continues to this day.

I would love new novels and books for all of the classic D&D settings. I would love new takes and new heroes. I love new adventures in these worlds as good as the GDQ adventure series or the Tomb of Horrors. I would love to see "the new classics." I would love to see the original creators consulted and brought in, along with an A-list group of writers to craft new stories.

But I know better.

...

These settings are likely abandoned and shall live on cherished in our memories.

And it is for the better.

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?

The Nentir Vale (NSFW rant)

https://scots-dragon.tumblr.com/post/185426933202/the-big-fucking-dd-4e-rant

This.

This hurt to read. And it is about this:

It seems like heresy, but what the Trans Dragon Goddess (TDG, she/her) is saying is the 4E base setting is a lazy bastardization of Greyhawk. A lot of the 4E modules reimagined the classic Greyhawk modules and those were sloppily placed around the world.

To top it all off, we never got a world book for the 4E world. One was planned, but it never came out. That was the one book we were waiting for too.

Now, my brother and I loved this valley and setting, and it felt like home to us in our 4E days. We wanted a break from the mess D&D 3E had become for us and this seemed new and fresh. We did have a lot of fun here, but ultimately the lack of world info led us to make up a lot, and it never really meshed well with the modules or other official content, and all of the releases started plane-hopping and this world got left behind and put on the back burner as a "home base."

We loved it, we tried to expand it, but every book they released undercut our efforts. The version floundered, they went Essentials, and we knew the game was dead.

But what TDG is saying is painfully right. She goes on to talk about the changes to Planescape and the worse wrecking ball of a job 4E did to the Forgotten Realms, collapsing the entire Underdark (FU Drizzt!), shoehorning in dragonkin and eladrin into the setting, and how these places can never really be the same. Some of the changes just felt spiteful and mean.

And yes, she is right.

And I get this feeling there is little respect for earlier works and new creators constantly wreck and try and reinvent them to chase fads, like 4E's courting of the World of Warcraft crowd. There is this revisionism each new edition, where the AD&D Greatest Hits get replayed through 5E, 6E, and so on. The entire modern dungeon-punk faux-anime aesthetic - that started in 4E and is amplified today - feels wrong for Greyhawk and the Realms.

As if they would ever do a setting book that large again, they seem averse to the entire idea. What I want to see is a "new" Tomb of Horrors type module from these creators. Where are the new classics? Where are the new and original dungeons and adventures? At least Paizo puts its stock in new experiences and new adventures and experiences like Rise of the Runelords and Kingmaker as this generation's "classic module experiences."

Otherwise, Wizards feels like a Hollywood nostalgia remake outfit.

Even the Forgotten Realms in a way was a "reinvention" of Gary Gygax's work with Greyhawk, and you can see a new group of creators coming in and trying to one-up everything he did in the original setting. We have Lolth and the classic GDQ series! Well, we have Drizzt. We have Mordenkainen! Well, we have the "more Gandalf like" Elminster. And then the GMNPCs from the books ended up being god-like problem solving un-killable characters who eliminated the need for the PCs at all.

Bleh.

It is like going to a restaurant all your life and loving it and then finding the better place they were trying to copy and realizing you can't eat at the old place anymore because everything they tried to do to change things made it worse.

Derivative changes to be hip and cool. The turkey dinner in the hip faddish place that sprinkles inedible, sour cranberries all over the dish because "it looks cool."

You aren't supposed to eat them!

What a waste.

And the place you like now sticks to the basics. Good, hot food. No waste. Completely edible. Local sourced, and they make note of it so you can help small family farms too. Tasty. They aren't doing anything faddish or fancy, but the food is solid, tastes great, and is nutritious without going overboard on fats and salt. Sensible portions. They give you nicely seasoned vegetables too. And you get a small dessert as a treat.

You walk out feeling fed.

The fad place overdoes it, you love the giant plate of food and it is full of fat and salt, but an hour later you feel sick.

There are parts of the Realms I love and would take home to my games, but other parts that just felt too much like metaplot to explain away edition changes and the entire setting felt corporate and like it was trying to "support the company's current products" instead of being a place of imagination and storytelling.

But the modules I love, the ones I keep coming back to, are never from the Forgotten Realms setting era. They are from the classic Greyhawk and Mystara eras of the game. The Giants series. The Tomb of Horrors. The B-series. All of them are greats that stand the test of time, and they are recreating those for 5E. I can't really name one series of modules from the Realms era that really stuck with me over the years and has had this cultural impact on my life.

But I know going back is just trying to relive those moments, and what I really need are new adventures that amaze me for the first time again. I found some of those in Paizo's adventures.

And yes, we were big on AD&D 2e, but we never played modules. This was all character-driven plots and pulp adventure, and we ignored the FR setting adventures for the most part. These days, even if I play in classic Realms, I know what is coming and it casts a shadow over that setting - even if I say it never happens there are those things in the back of my head like a poorly written sequel movie that ruins the charm of the original.

The Trans Dragon Goddess wrote a great article, thank you. My world feels a little upside-down today, but that is okay. When you start to realize the lies you have been fed all your life were a bit hollow and there are better things out there to spend your time with, it hurts a little, but you get over it.

The Nentir Vale still feels like home, but if I were ever to go back here and adventure again, I would bring this little piece of home back with me to Greyhawk, where it belongs.