The Oerth Multiverse

[geneweigel]

I've seen this over and over but no one really talks about it. So I'm posting the whole quote from POLYHEDRON #21 (JAN 1985). It says 1984 on his part.:

While at the convention, I was virtually
bombarded with questions and requests for
material. The answers to the most frequently
asked questions will be (or have
already been) in DRAGON® Magazine.
After so many requests, I went back home
and rapped a half-dozen or so short pieces
to appear under the old "Sorcerer's Scroll"
column heading, What I promised for
POLYHEDRON'" Newszine was a series of
articles detailing the map of the WORLD
OF GREYHAWK'" campaign setting. I am
currently working to put together information
on Greyhawk city and environs, the
Cairn Hills area, and then whatever strikes
my fancy - or some worthy fellow
RPGAer requests. That will begin in a
future issue. Frequency might be sporadic,
as my autumn -spring schedule is most
demanding and includes several long trips
to distant parts of the world. (So much for
cop-outs.)
My chief collaborator these days is one
Flint Dille, a screen writer, game enthusiast,
and history buff. Flint's grandfather
created Buck Rogers (and Flint currently
has a film script on Buck which is now in
the hands of his agent - perhaps there'll
be a new feature film coming one of these
fine days; the script is exciting - far better
than any of the material done to date, in my
opinion), while Flint himself has been the
writer for quite a number of animated
shows and has put in some time for George
Lucas. Anyway, as an "exclusive" for
RPGA Network members, Flint and I have
just signed a contract with the Wanderer
Book division of Simon & Schuster for four
HEROES CHALLENGEtm Game Books.
The hero of the saga is one Sagard, a young
barbarian. Although these works will be in
the S&S juvenile book line, reading level
and interaction is far higher than anything
vaguely like them currently on the market. I
think many of you will enjoy reading/playing
these adventures. All four will appear
under the auspices of Dungeons & Dragons
Entertainment Corporation and should be
available around the spring of 1985.
By the way, action lakes place on Yarth , a
place somewhat similar to Oerth, the setting
of Greyhawk, et. al. It has fewer magical
properties than Oerth but more than Earth.
It is not impossible that additional works
will be contracted for in months to come,
action being set on Yarth or perhaps another
alternate world, Aerth. On Earth, magic is
virtually non-existent. On Uerth, dweomers
are weak, chancy things. Yarth has a sprinkling
of things magical, Aerth is highly
magical, and Oerth is pure magic.

Was Aerth really Aerth though? I doubt it.

BTW WTF was he hanging out with the grandson of the guy who stole Buck Rogers? Should have seen it coming right there.

[grodog]

The interesting thing about Gary's various forms of Earth relative to the Great Wheel/multiverse is that Gary seemed to focus a lot more on alternate Earths/Prime Material Planes (perhaps due to his wargaming 'What If' background?) rather than the inner or outer planes. The continuums of Primes seemed more important to him than the rest of the multiverse (as seen through his Odd Alley/Weird Way stories mentioning the cross-Prime planar trade and travel).

This is an aspect of the planar cosmology for Greyhawk that's not really explored much, and warrants further digging!

Allan.

[GRWelsh]

I have always considered the worlds of GAMMA WORLD, BOOT HILL, and other game systems to be in alternate Prime Material planes, rather than simply in different time periods. Various Greyhawk campaigns as well are alternate Prime Material planes... The space ship in S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks I imagine came from an alternate dimension. It's how I've always seen Castle Zagyg, as well. It's obviously not Castle Greyhawk, but is an 'echo' of it with many close similarities in an alternate Prime Material plane.

Some alternate worlds are obviously best avoided!

[geneweigel]

Its obviously none of the worlds mentioned so I would imagine its a world derivative of Oerth and Erde (the Troll Lord universe) called... Zerth? Eerth? Gerth? Gerde?

[GRWelsh]

It would have to a name that looks like a typo. Like Tlerth.

[geneweigel]

I have more interest in Uerth at this point....

In the twilight, pounding drums rhythmically beat as massive stone letters emerge from the soil of a vast dry wasteland with an endless flat horizon...

CHANCY

THINGS

Seriously, some day, some day...

[foster1941]

The D&D movie treatment Gary co-wrote with Flint was supposedly about a cross-dimensional macguffin hunt that would've seen the hero(es) visiting several different worlds. I'm guessing the "parallel earths" conception comes from that and Earth, Uerth, Yarth, Aerth, and Oerth are the worlds that would have been visited. Since the concept of parallel primes being based on a spectrum of magical activity is different than the way they are described in earlier sources (where they mostly represent fictional worlds or different historical periods) I wonder if this isn't something that Flint initially came up with that Gary liked and adopted as "official."

[geneweigel]

Maybe its Gygax's involvement factor?

Or perhaps Dille cooked up some game books couldn't publish through TSR (company name not on the products) so they just said its not really Oerth?

[geneweigel]

I remember the first time I heard Gary say that guy's name rhyming with "silly".

I was like I need a moment to process this.

[GRWelsh]

I don't know if you guys ever saw this interview when EGG spoke about the movie:

thedelversdungeon.blogspot.com/2016/01/happy-2016.html

G: Yes, it started set in Greyhawk with two characters, a main protagonist and his antagonist (also a protagonist in her own right), both hired by the villain (Welles), to bring him the six missing parts (he already had one) of the “Scepter of Seven Souls”, and each was the soul of a world, and when he had them all, he could rule these multiple parallel worlds. So they were trying to find each part, and each part would of course be found in a different world, and would not immediately be recognizable. So they would have to search among potential objects, and move in to different genres – not all the action would be fantasy. That’s all I’m going to say on that topic. <chuckles>

[geneweigel]

Ideally, with Boorman (relevant: EXCALIBUR, ZARDOZ) and Welles (Relevant: Dark Tower game commercials) involved I'm kind of thinking slightly better version or parallel of KRULL (1983).

Of course, Greyhawk is going to be fog-filled Italian or Spanish Dark Age/Medieval location shots as typical era films were shot. Some of the character actors will be local so they'll have that not really American look like FLASH GORDON (1980).

Probably some up and coming somewhat known character actor as the villain that you'd never pick in a million years like Dabney (9 TO 5/TOOTSIE/WARGAMES) Coleman as overlord Wargar.

Of course, the protagonist would be some teen throwaway (Emilio BREAKFAST CLUB Estevez, Eric MASK Stoltz, etc.) and the "foil girl" to offset his crude ruggedness who switches gears into heroine by learning to be a thief (probably Rebecca RISKY BUSINESS De Mornay) then they team up with Welles apprentice a somewhat bumbling spellcaster (I'm picturing Judge FAST TIMES RIDGEMONT HIGH Reinhold or Keith CHRISTINE Gordon).

I can see the VHS cover with the protagonists holding a torch with Welles looking over it one of them is wearing anachronistic shades that they're raising to look out from under (portraying a scene where they arrive on Earth)...

ORSON WELLES
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

In a World of Adventure it Takes a Party to Save the Earth

Alright, I think thats what that would have been. <<<CRINGE>>>

[GRWelsh]

I was thinking of something like TIME BANDITS but instead of all of the time periods visited it would be alternate dimensions.

Other thoughts are this reminds of of the alternate Prime Material planes in Q1, and the artifact concept is at least superficially similar to the Rod of Seven Parts. Could this script have had a Gord/Evaleigh/Gravestone dynamic? With the female antagonist in a "heart-breaker" role?

[GT]

Aerth was the name of the Mythus Earth in Dangerous Journeys; and indeed it had powerful magics and gods, but slightly less so than Oerth. Aerth was itself one of several parallels in the system: Urth was Earth in the Fantasy-Science Fiction setting [Chaos ] Changeling, and there were others as well. The Unhallowed world we simply called 'Earth', and although many things (continents, history, famous people, etc. ) were the same there were obvious differences as well. Gary mentioned Yarth in the Gord books and several other places as well...

[geneweigel]

Thats interesting about Urth. So how does that work in the 1984 timeframe? Star Frontiers? Or was he planning an alternative to FRONTIERS? Every time I had mentioned FRONTIERS it seemed he didn't like it. I was surprised when Garycon was an inkling how his son Luke was acting like FRONTIERS was something good.

[GT]

I don't think Gary was a Star Frontiers fan himself--he was more the Metamorphosis Alpha guy. His Changeling system was basically set in an alternate to our solar system, where a cosmic cloud passed through and caused various effects. Urth is run by a central computer that keeps humanity in special preserves that emulate various eras of humanity. Luna is inhabited only by robots and androids that killed all humans there and wish to destroy them elsewhere. Venuz was terraformed but took the brunt of the cosmic cloud, so it is a wild planet where tech, psychogenics and low-caliber magick mix along with mutated humans, animals and plants. Marz was well-shielded and has the highest tech in the solar system, and the colonists there war against the forces of Luna and Urth's computer. There is also a colossal generation ship orbiting at the edge of the solar system that has been there for some time (think Aldiss' "Non-Stop". So basically, the system incorporated some of his favorite tropes: Burrough's Mars and Venus, Leinster's "Forgotten Planet", Ward's MA, etc. No FTL or anything like that...

[foster1941]

I remember reading somewhere that Star Frontiers was originally developed by TSR as a more "hard sf" flavored game but late in the process was completely re-written into the much simpler, cartoony, kid-friendly version that was ultimately published, and that the people who'd worked on the earlier version lamented that change of tone and focus. I don't know that the original version would've been any good either, but it likely would've been at least a bit better than what we actually got (disclosure: SF was the second rpg I ever owned after D&D, and I thought it was pretty cool when I was 9 years old, but by the time I was ~11 I'd already lost interest).

[foster1941]

It’s in the introductory article about the game in Dragon #65. Weird info to include in an article intended to sell and build hype for a new game. Apparently Schick and Zeb Cook designed the original version in 1979 (i.e. Gary era) and then a whole bunch of guys (Mike Gray, Hammack, Johnson, Sutherland, and Steve Winter) did the redesign in 1981 (i.e. Blume era). Gary and Luke Gygax are both included in the list of playtesters, alongside 32 other people. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Gary was one of the people who played and liked the original version better. Luke may well not realize that the game he remembers playing as a kid isn’t the same game as was actually published a few years later.

[geneweigel]

The whole story seems off. Was Zeb removed because they hadn't integrated space flight yet? Considering him and Winter did Second Edition with that same stale slick at a glance, hollow writing, skewed charts, unplayable monsters (dragons), missing standbys (demons) and the glib filler (ecologies) its no wonder.

SF play was this:

Chasing someone around in a mall map, then going to the planet then getting stuck in a wilderness with little supplies or rather "sci-fi" elements waiting for shit to eat your bullets.

[GRWelsh]

Feb 8, 2018 8:30:26 GMT -5 GRWelsh said:

I don't know if you guys ever saw this interview when EGG spoke about the movie:

thedelversdungeon.blogspot.com/2016/01/happy-2016.html

G: Yes, it started set in Greyhawk with two characters, a main protagonist and his antagonist (also a protagonist in her own right), both hired by the villain (Welles), to bring him the six missing parts (he already had one) of the “Scepter of Seven Souls”, and each was the soul of a world, and when he had them all, he could rule these multiple parallel worlds. So they were trying to find each part, and each part would of course be found in a different world, and would not immediately be recognizable. So they would have to search among potential objects, and move in to different genres – not all the action would be fantasy. That’s all I’m going to say on that topic. <chuckles>

The audio version of this interview of EGG by Bill Silvey is now on YouTube at this link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4A1IsQY2D4

[geneweigel]

That's the guy who confronted me in Knights and Knaves Alehouse forum last year after suggesting to me that we eventually play a game a few months prior to that. Bill "Dungeon Delver/used official TSR game wizards logo" Silvey, I think that he was implying that I didn't talk to Gary at all with some video of the evil priest stuffing hallucinogens down Indiana Jones throat from Temple of Doom. Don't know anything about him except he had a forum about 20 years ago so I went in and went out because everything seemed that it had nothing for me to contribute to. That's a hell of a long time to hold a grudge about disinterest maybe it was more. He seems like a person who feigns anger all the time so if that is what it is then I don't know what to say. I saw him briefly at the 2007 Lake Geneva Convention and there was as almost zero interaction (eye contact?). There was a lot of people there that were standard "con-ners" for some reason so it was difficult to tell who was who. (My cousin who shared the drive with me from NY seemed more interested in easy girls than the convention so that was the bullshit that I brought with me. So that was my problem in addition to the "Doom That Came To Pied Piper's Plane Project") So I don't know what exactly the problem is but it can't be that big. Unless I publicly humiliated his type of player in a generic way and he took offense. I can believe that as I was burned out on defenders of new D&D. If so then I'd like to know. Just clearing the air...