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Post by Scott on Dec 27, 2015 13:21:19 GMT -5
At the time Gary got ousted he was leading the Flanaess into some big conflicts. Iuz and Iggwilv were getting ready to launch their war, and the Great Kingdom was getting ready to explode. Has anybody given any thought to what the results of these conflicts would have been?
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Post by geneweigel on Dec 28, 2015 21:35:42 GMT -5
As far as the campaign drifting after the loss of Gary and avoiding the official dross it was hard to nail anything down but of the highlights this is what I did, I had Eclavdra as comfortable on the surface world as a post-UA drow and the whole Eilserv clan was in exile under GHC where they were at war with the drows of my devising that weren't really drow but rather other dark elves. Most of the chaotic evil powers who were assembled in the novels were broken up and replaced. Tsuggtmoy had a replacement in a new TOEE based underground cult, Iuz was ruler in name only with a another cambion using his name, and Lolth was eclipsed by other new gods and demons. The barbarians had a prophesied son of Odin invade the Aerdi and I redid Ivid to be REH-type sepent man after having one adventure where I descibed him as feeble-minded and weird and didn't like how it cam across. Eventually as I mentioned numerous times I just collapsed the universe as per the novels in one plane-galloping adventure.
As for where the official stuff was headed. The Suloise and Aerdi were segmented off as well as overseas to Lakofka, Kuntz and Mentzer in that order leaving Gary with the "common" area covered by the gods included in the boxed set as well as Keolandish, Baklunish, Nomads, Blackmoor, the Ulek states, Perrenland and the Mage Vale.
We were going to have a major Orient play into the Flanaess probably led by Froideval with Gary's oversight heavily playing in.
Probably a major shift with Scarlet Brotherhood being destroyed to remove the monk connection.
Probably DEITIES & DEMIGODS OF THE WORLD OF GREYHAWK articles with Gary himself tackling more gods of the Baklunish, Flan and maybe Oeridian with Rob to balance out all the Suel gods. Then follow up with various quasi-Asian deities.
The success of "WASP'S NEST" while unknown we could just assume that it would change everything in the RPG universe to date with products aiming for detailed cities.
The SHADOWLAND series would probably have had a major effect on World of Greyhawk products. Perhaps even an Oriental Shadowland crossover.
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Post by Scott on Dec 29, 2015 12:24:03 GMT -5
I'm not talking official, or product wise. I'm just curious if anybody considered how the wars would go. What was the result of the War mentioned in the Isle of the Ape intro, or the looking battles described in the Dragon articles?
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Post by geneweigel on Dec 29, 2015 16:01:57 GMT -5
Anything but Williams' produced Cook, Ward, Sargent and Moore will do for me. I cringe everytime I read anything based on "Greyhawk Wars". I think the impending doom might have been a threat which was only fulfilled by the wrapping up of the GORD THE ROGUE before Gary had to "let go of the red wagon" as he put it.
All that aside, Gary always said the D&D world wasn't like Tolkien so even though most D&D players, myself included, "snorted a big tray of Tolkien blow" to round out their campaigns it wasn't where Oerth was supposed to go. That is, I think Gary wanted WOG to have large scale and small scale battles about nothing (ala Seinfeld) starring action personalities and the absence Gary had driven people to crutch it on Tolkien's homebodies go adventuring with a big world changing arc.
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Post by Scott on Dec 29, 2015 17:38:55 GMT -5
I think the Tolkien influence was inescapable. I go through phases of degrees of Middle Earth feel. I know Gary envisioned a more late middle ages/early ren period feel, and I go back and forth between the two. Lately the Song of Ice and Fire has been gaining ground. That is good inspiration for battles for battles' sake.
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Post by maximus on Dec 29, 2015 19:58:10 GMT -5
Like many others, Tolkien was my intro to the fantasy genre. Once I started playing D&D in '80 or so, the only things his work really influenced were how I portrayed Goblins/Orcs and Elves.
As far as Greyhawk goes, I saw the direction continuing on from the Dragon articles. Iuz's grand plans would be delayed as he was being attacked from almost all angles. Nyrond was ascendant, as the Great Kingdom fought foes both internal and external. I don't recall much being said about Keoland and the Western Flaness, but I would imagine that the former provinces would continue to have problems from the Crystalmists.
I never bought into the Sargent stuff, even though it appeared as if he was trying to continue where Gary left off. I did buy the City of Greyhawk boxed set, and was promptly disappointed.
My campaign tended to focus more on the individual adventures rather than developing the world. By the time I got around to that, we were all in college and hardly got together to play.
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Post by geneweigel on Dec 30, 2015 9:45:01 GMT -5
Here is some background on what was going on in my head towards the end of my original Greyhawk campaign.
I had a bad habit of buying out the comic store every Thursday night from 1984 to around 1991 (I was already out when DEATH OF SUPERMAN came out in 1992) so once I phased out comics the gaming remained and I just continued to buy everything D&D until 1995 at that point I completely stopped buying TSR products after dealing with ten years of unplayable and useless products. I read through the Moore/Mona material for Greyhawk in the late 90's but it wasn't worth anything. That was a demented time with a lot of new blood being affected by the heavy talking while playing D&D because "Williams D&D/Forgotten Realms" lacked a lot of content. Ten years ago, I think the shitty direction that third edition took made people question the history of the D&D brand so if you had answers about the shift in D&D content over the years it became interesting to play it like it was. I don't know about this whole OSR thing. They just seem like a bunch of 2E era carpet baggers repackaging junk.
From 1994 to 2004 there was a lot of "Yeah, yeah, Greyhawk was great." but it always had a hollow ring to it as if FR was better. A lot of the direction my Greyhawk campaign took towards the end in the late 1990's was because of the underlying disdain from people hot off an FR campaign. So the NPCs that I introduced at that time didn't even seem like I made them compared to the cleverly composed ones that I was dishing out a few years prior. Instead I was cropping up all these throw away characters because of emphasis by the players on socializing with pretty "little" people and totally ignoring the "brutes with treasure maps in their fists".
This was why the move to destroy GH for the old players and start anew with a revived flavor so regardless of published GH my campaign wouldn't fall into that pit.
At the height of my GH campaign I had introduced an Atlantis-like country South of the Azure Sea but the main NPC from that area was so politically incorrect that I shelved him for good. I should have never had to do that and that drove me away from D&D products.
That is until Gary was falsely reported as returning to D&D... but thats a Greyhawk campaign that deserved to die...
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Post by Scott on Dec 31, 2015 14:32:20 GMT -5
I've thought about ways to have PCs influence the big picture. Like have the results of Iggwilv's war influenced by the players' results in Isle of the Ape. I was thinking of something similar with the Maze of Zayene series.
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Post by maximus on Jan 1, 2016 11:42:48 GMT -5
Did you ever have PCs at a high enough level to influence affairs on their own? I had my group complete D1-3 with the average level being around 12. They never got much beyond that, so I doubt they would have been able to affect, or should I say manipulate, global events on say the level of Tenser or Mordenkainen.
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Post by Scott on Jan 1, 2016 12:19:25 GMT -5
Maylin (The Wandering Wizard) is 13th level. He has a few henchmen, but no stronghold or army. He's been granted title and land in Furyondy, but he hasn't done anything with it yet. He wants to build a castle but he keeps blowing his gold. The Supernal Cedric Magno, High Priest of St. Cuthbert (Order of the Billets) is 10th level. Same as above, except he has the gold, he just hasn't been motivated to build a stronghold yet. Those are the only higher level PCs I DM for. To me these characters could influence the world around them, in a limited area, or larger if working as proxies for a greater power, but neither of these players have shown much of an interest. They like killing monsters and taking treasure. I have two PCs myself that, in theory, live in the same world, but I haven't had a DM in years. Gildon the Glib, an 11th level bard. Talivar, an 11th level magic-user. If I had a DM my magic-user would be more involved in the big picture.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 2, 2016 1:20:07 GMT -5
By the time everyone was high enough to level a mountain, mainstream D&D thought was beaming out that being a long time player was inherently bad in so many ways. It was difficult to interact with once elaborately powerful personalities and their powered assistance ala the Duke in C1 and Tenser in WG6 when Greyhawk lost Gary. I like to imagine that Greyhawk product under Gary would have continued tactical support for high level play in Greyhawk. Its hard to imagine a real 2nd edition that ironed it all out instead of that slapdash nwp garbage heap. Perhaps because its the reality everyone has to put up with. Straining to picture the future of any GH locale to be replaced by something else is difficult. Maybe its in what to put there in the context of how is it going to handle powerful and veteran players? In my categorizing of every country in the late 80s, I had made sure that every unknown leader was fleshed out (bandit kings, bone marchers, best vampire, etc) and the unknowns usually leaned towards having a counter arsenal because they were blank spaces. Its hard to say if Nerof Gasgol had an artifact but shouldn't he? In this light, post-war GH was probably never going to happen because then it would have to cut back on dynamic shit like that. I think we've lowered our expectations so much that we can't see Greyhawk as it was eventually going to be. I can imagine a high level Unoerth gazetteer by Gary would have probably been all our favorite in that alternate timeline...
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Post by Scott on Jan 3, 2016 10:53:29 GMT -5
I'm not thinking about anything published or official. I disregard all that stuff. I was just curious if anybody gave any thought to the outcomes of the looming conflicts in their own game.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 3, 2016 14:20:56 GMT -5
I know but talking hypothetical product is good for provoking ideas.
I think knowing what I know now about Arneson I would have Blackmoor more of a chance. Maybe in the alternate publishing universe Arneson and Gygax would have had a reformation and Blackmoor would have been more prominent with Egg of Coot getting a serious D&D light shined on it for treatment. Maybe a fall out of Iuz would have provoked it.
As for just playing what was there, the states of the Sheldomar Valley and the Iron League never came into play much. You could nuke them off the map and nobody would know the difference.
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Post by Scott on Jan 3, 2016 14:36:09 GMT -5
In general, I think there are too many states. Look at Westeros from the Song of Ice and Fire. It's as big as the Flanaess, but it's Seven Kingdoms. If you combine them, it would be easier to give each a more distinct flavor. I would have the whole Iron League absorbed back into the Great Kingdom, as well as make all of the provinces, the See etc. just The Great Kingdom. I've also considered consolidating all of the Sheldomar states into a single state. Furyondy and Veluna need to be unified, and throw in the Shield Lands too. Etc.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 3, 2016 15:00:58 GMT -5
Its almost as if the two areas that I mentioned needed more evil nuance. The Iron League has it in theory but its lame.
All that gh article league talk that Kuntz was doing sounded like a redo of the Iron League, I directly asked what the White League had to do with the Iron League and it was dismissed as something else. Looking back I can't dismiss Kuntz's disinterest in what Gary did. And if it was because Gary nailed down the actions of the pre-WoG Great Kingdom map map where everybody had a "kingdom" where was Ernie's? Terry's? Don Kaye's? Did their areas have similar events? We know Perrenland seemed to have had problems with a Middle Eastern frontier but was this a reflection of Jeff Perren's gameplay?
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Post by maximus on Jan 3, 2016 19:46:17 GMT -5
I'm not thinking about anything published or official. I disregard all that stuff. I was just curious if anybody gave any thought to the outcomes of the looming conflicts in their own game. Thinking back 30 + years, my last time DM'ing the group had them in service to Furyondy. They were commissioned to assault Iuz in his stronghold. Thanks to some poor DM'ing on my part, the party was able to defeat him. Had we continued, it no doubt would have shifted the balance of power in the area drastically. They were set to move on the Horned Society when we stopped playing. I'm looking around for my old notes, but all I have been able to find so far is a few old character sheets from that time period. I forgot I had a pretty bad ass Ranger.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 3, 2016 21:58:15 GMT -5
Someday I'd like to iron out the Greyhawk campaign to have a return to Greyhawk in the future. As well as split whats mine from what I filled in for sure. Heh, I just went through a pile of vague characters that I did artwork for but I can't recall if they were from a module or not. Its overlooked stuff like that just irks the shit out of me. Their is this orc captain and it seems as if he has a life of his own but it has to be something that I created. GAHH! I redrew Nerof Gasgol based on Gary's description of him. Mentzer's stuff seems like just another Keoland yet not as intimate.
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Post by Scott on Jan 4, 2016 8:50:43 GMT -5
When did you draw Nerof? I think you showed me that before.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 4, 2016 12:55:51 GMT -5
When I showed Gary my Greyhawk campaign material he mentioned that I wasn't even close to how he imagined Gasgol. I found my version of Gasgol almost but not totally erased. I was going to redraw the "new" version over it: Here is the "new" version as it appeared on the website:
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Post by Scott on Jan 4, 2016 13:46:47 GMT -5
Same website that had the Greyhawk at night with the castle in the background? That goes back a while.
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