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[geneweigel]

The immersive feel of it lends itself to D&D as well especially the soundless void broken by interactions but the weird perceptions of the effects can be written off as dimensional distortion and it seems the producers were well aware of it.

WARNING: If you haven't please do not watch the 1991 series or the Will Ferrell 2009 movie

As an interesting aside in 1974-1977 series, the actor that played the brother "Will" was the lover of Richard "Shogun" Chamberlain at the time of filming. The dad wanted more money and was replaced in the 3rd season 1976-1977 by the uncle fresh off the 1974 Planet of the Apes TV series.

[Scott]

I thought about making it a Demi-plane reached through the Greyhawk dungeons. If you ever come upon a small raft moored in the edge of an underground river, beware.

[GRWelsh]

I used to assume it was set in our past... But there were no australopithecus -- or whatever the Pakuni are supposed to be -- contemporary with dinosaurs so I'm glad they made it an alternate universe. Also, it had three moons so it couldn't be earth of the past! Was it the world of the Altrusians who pulled in elements from other universes onto their world before devolving into the Sleestaks?

One of my neighbors during the time of this show was named Slezak and we used to call him Sleestak all of the time.

Replacing the dad with the uncle on the show was completely lame, and I even thought that as a kid.

[geneweigel]

Mar 10, 2022 13:57:06 GMT -5 Scott said:

I thought about making it a Demi-plane reached through the Greyhawk dungeons. If you ever come upon a small raft moored in the edge of an underground river, beware.

I just watched one by Larry Niven about a Civil War immortal "old coot rebel" who got stuck in there. Weird. The set really is what makes the show. You "improve" that and something major is lost. They didn't want to depart from the soldier until he told them the way out of the caves. The combination of weird minerals from this episode might be a good game element.

[geneweigel]

Mar 10, 2022 14:23:33 GMT -5 GRWelsh said:

I used to assume it was set in our past... But there were no australopithecus -- or whatever the Pakuni are supposed to be -- contemporary with dinosaurs so I'm glad they made it an alternate universe. Also, it had three moons so it couldn't be earth of the past! Was it the world of the Altrusians who pulled in elements from other universes onto their world before devolving into the Sleestaks?

One of my neighbors during the time of this show was named Slezak and we used to call him Sleestak all of the time.

Replacing the dad with the uncle on the show was completely lame, and I even thought that as a kid.

I used to play act everything when I was a kid so sleestaks were down pat. Make arms rigid, widen legs and hiss slightly. "Chaka" became almost a slur for "hippier" kids by the "squarer" kids. It almost seems like the crude screen effects jumped the shark with The Cars' video of "You Might Think" but I guess it came back with Zoom calls.

[Zenopus]

Some players from this game have surfaced over on Facebook after seeing my post about it. One of them wrote a long reply about how the game came about. Select quotes:

How it came about:

I found him on one of the Greyhawk message boards back around 2000-2001. I asked him a few Greyhawk-related questions and he would quickly reply and was very responsive. I just asked him, "What's the chance of playing with the Master if we're ever up in Lake Geneva?" He replied to let him know the date and he would make it happen. He said Ernest Gary Jr. Gygax ran a game on Saturdays at the library. I got the group together, confirmed all who wanted or could go, and emailed him back. It was on! I rented a large SUV from my local car guy (note the vehicle had less than a thousand miles on it when rented) and we took off ... We drove from Nashville Friday night and got into the Moosejaw Inn close to midnight. We woke early and I called Gary (he had been magnanimous enough to give me his home phone number). He stated that the library was renovating and was closed (my heart sank)...SO we would just have to come by his house and play! We fairly flew to his house. We brought some Tennessee sippin' whiskey as an offering. Gary was AWESOME. He told us tales of the old days as a kid in Lake Geneva, TSR stories, and was a fantastic host.

Sounds like they ended up socializing more than playing ("talked drank, and smoked for 14 hours - had two encounters but never made it to the city"), but a few more details from the game:

We encountered the super-specter and I forget who was level drained. We went to the temple district and my son managed to be cursed by one of the temples: he had to donate to ANY shrine, temple, or religious edifice of ANY KIND that he came across. We ran into a leprechaun who cursed us as a group as well. (That little bastard got us later in the real world...). We found a Rhennee wise woman who read our future and saw "Orange, water, and GREAT DANGER..." We played from 11am to 1am before leaving. I have to say it WAS the greatest gaming session of my life.

Regarding the City on the Edge:

What little I remember is that it was an ancient evil that had somehow again became a concern. It was incredibly ancient and had faded from memory. It pre-dated the Bakluni and little if anything was on record about it or it's inhabitants.

And another player's impression of the City and the game in general:

Nothing but the vaguest rumors. We didn’t get too far beyond the leprechaun. Hraki was not entertained by the frivolity of that rainbow-loving folk ... Mostly I recall being in the sitting room at the front of the house. EGG was playing and running random encounters with no books and no dice (thankfully, we didn’t have to enter any combat because my own impression was that when EGG reached for the dice, you were at their mercy).
His presence as a DM, in other words, was very much centered on the players rather than on a book or series of notes.

Some of these quotes are from the Greyhawk Adventures Group, in the comments here:
www.facebook.com/groups/greyhawkadventuresgroup/posts/941869706440689/

The others were in the comments to a private share of that post, which I can't seem to link to here.

[GRWelsh]

Thanks for posting the additional details here, Zach. That is so awesome that EGG ran a World of Greyhawk adventure for some fans just because they asked him to! Especially considering how his focus was on promoting new IP at that time.

[Scott]

Yeah, it’s crazy how friendly and flexible he was. He invited me to come and DM a Greyhawk game for him. That’s how I found about Nigby, former apprentice of Bigby, one of the characters he was thinking about using. The other was Louhi Sharpnose, his gnome illusionist/thief.

[Zenopus]

What "Greyhawk message boards" were around circa 2000-2001? Greytalk (mailing list), Canonfire (not sure when this started), Lejendary.com, forum at Gygax.com, ?

Regarding the fortune, "Orange, water, and GREAT DANGER...", what do we think the orange might be? Fire? Orange-colored sand or buildings? Setting sun (i.e., heading west)? A link to the Elemental Plane of Fire? Wordplay to make it sound like fire, but it's something else?

The water may be the Drawmidj, as that's the location of the city, and the "GREAT DANGER" is surely the inhabitant(s).

Perhaps they are in the order they would be encountered: "Orange", the Drawmidj location of the city, danger in the city.

[Scott]

Canonfire grew out of the Greytalk mailing list as forums became more common. Gary had his own mailing list that split into two separate mailing lists, one game related and the other everything else. Those kind of faded also as mailing lists were replaced by message boards.

I would take that 'water' referred to the Drawmidj. Not enough info to guess at the meaning of 'orange'.

[geneweigel]

There was an official D&D forum that updated right around the time of 3rd edition for a full wipe then they did it again afterwards and it was all the "human torch" posts that I made were gone. 3rd "update/wipe" I just gave up. There was a Greyhawk forum in there somewhere. It was mostly me antagonizing Carl Sargent fans and most likely the reason Sargent died in obscurity because I was pretty frightening back in those days. The reference I see is in my [e-mail] e-mail in 2004 with some old stalker from the 1980's still holding a candle saying they found me on the internet as "Human Torch" then I replied the avatar name originated from the official D&D forum 8 years ago (1996? Is that right?).

here is the last official Greyhawk forum that I posted in that I have a reference to in my notes from 2001:

web.archive.org/web/20010811152624/http://boards.wizards.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=246

there was a lot of switching around where TSR.com was automatically switched to the card game website and I think. I can't find a wayback machine link to the Greater Troll stats that I did for 2nd edition. So they might not have pre-Wizards TSR on there.

[geneweigel]

Here is the 1996 TSR-owned Dangerous Journeys page:

web.archive.org/web/19970424044532/http://tsrinc.com/games/dj/dj.html

Here is the Lejendary forum:

web.archive.org/web/20010607005218/http://www.lejendary.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

Dragonsfoot which had a separate forum from the present forum because I recall all my posts were gone from the original cascading forum version.

Here is Dragonsfoot Internet Village

web.archive.org/web/20010218020525/http://www.dragonsfoot.org/

(Heh, I like "contact Mark" the guy that Gary told me to talk to and took all the work that I did for DF to an early grave with not one human being knowing what I was talking about? I mean its sad but I didn't even get a follow up from anybody. Always have a contingency plan. Well, in the case of Gary have an ironclad contingency plan! }

And the remnant of the cascading forum:

www.dragonsfoot.org/cgi-bin/forum/view.pl

[grodog]

Mar 16, 2022 7:59:30 GMT -5 Zenopus said:

What "Greyhawk message boards" were around circa 2000-2001? Greytalk (mailing list), Canonfire (not sure when this started), Lejendary.com, forum at Gygax.com, ?

There wasn’t as much as today:

- as Scott mentioned, CF! grew out of Greytalk, and launched in 2001 in July/August (and I’m pretty sure that I archived the Gygax games groups before Yahoo Groups went belly-up)
- Scott and Gene both had older incarnations of their boards, as did Bill Silvey
- The Grognard’s Tavern predated K&KA but not DF, but it doesn’t seem to have a dedicated GH board
- Wizards had the old Greyhawk board that Gene mentioned, which was an outgrowth of their old listserv email lists
- there was Usenet too, but I don’t recall much Greyhawk from there

Edit: it’s hard to tell from the abysmal phone interface, but it looks like the PPP boards were around by mid-2002 at those latest.

Allan.

[geneweigel]

Gary pointed me to Greytalk and my first reaction was that I couldn't believe the anti-Gary sentiment with Gary actively on there. Very weird.
He seemed completely a super-adaptive personality whereas regular designers/fans just would go with the flow he would be constant amongst complete opposite viewed trendsters. I guess he had to be but from my perspective at the time, I looked at his "tolerance" as a flaw. Now, I don't know what to make of it. I certainly, as someone who held a candle for a return of Gary through a dark age, have zero tolerance of disrespect for Gary but the double talk of how there were "editions" and this bastich is signing a 2nd edition books and "Cyclopedias" right in front of me as I sat there. I mean that was just mind blowing to me but that was his universe. My brain was like, "GARY!??!? WHY!?!??!?" I guess there was a level of capitulation where he just reached the point where this was reality.

I still recall at GenCon 2002 standing at the Wizards of the Coast booth with Rob and me grabbing the latest book with Robilar depicted and showing him and him immediately demanding that I have respect for these people. I must have had a face on that looked like the Green Goblin because I don't remember saying shit. It seemed, he was in full panic mode and I couldn't possibly imagine that was going to be the reaction. From my perspective, the creative perspective, he should have been how can I work with this and give them suggestions right there but I was not aware that he had already worked with some of them and this was the best that they could deliver from his input.

I'm never going to be on that page because I don't accept goblins looking like Hello Kitty/Stewie and Kobolds look like Draconians/Skeksis/Snarfquest. It just ain't happening. I'd rather just ignore it and focus on output of the actual representations of things that float. I certainly would never allow any of my stuff to be processed for "conversion" like the gnoll bard where Rob defended it without seeing it yet. Hell, Rob's blind gnoll bard defense should be enshrined as the ideal for future gnoll bards.

I was always on Gary's and Rob's side because that will always be the future of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS when the eyes are opened and full vision is restored. D&D will always bend and will always need to be bent back.

[GRWelsh]

I have a lot of fondness for Greytalk since that was around when I first got on the internet and found other Greyhawk and early D&D fans. That was the promise of the internet, right? To connect people with similar interests from around the world. I was going to Pitt at the time and I had a student account and was using the university computers to browse the internet for the first time. I remember those early web browsers like Lycos, Webcrawler and Navigator. I found a web page called "The Assassins" which was a write up of someone's campaign set in the World of Greyhawk. There was also some website named something like "The Adventurers" or a tavern. I found Erik Mona's review (as Iquander) of the Gord books including his critiques of the ones authored by Rose Estes. That was what let me to Greytalk in late 1996. I sent the request by email and was added to the listserv. Greytalk was the successor to discussion forums in magazines like DRAGON and the precursor to modern online forums and discussion boards. My initial impression of Greytalk was that it leaned in the academic direction, with kids who played D&D in the 80's grown up and now having fun applying university education to all things Greyhawk. Unfortunately, it did sometimes have the early equivalent of flame wars. You'd think a mailing list dedicated to Greyhawk would be all pro-Gygax but there was some anti-Gygax sentiment on there as well.

[geneweigel]

Its like when you lose track of what you said its the worst feeling but I've got a pretty tight memory for pulling out shit that I've forgotten where I surprise myself. That said I wish I could get back to the exactness of all the heated moments on TSR forums and warm my hands on all that "fireballing" (As GT put it.).

The biggest pull that I had for 2E Greyhawk in the 1990's was when I went and stayed with my mother in 1989 who just moved to Albany (Which had widespanning regional colleges and hospitals as well as the NY state bureaucracy of endless state workers.) and it was boring as fuck there so people were apt for D&D and they were hep to what was at the mall bookstores. So I just cleaned out everything that I could grab at the bookstores, at the toy stores and at the comic stores. There was a dedicated game store in Schenectady but I only went there every now and then. I recall reading FROM THE ASHES (1992) in a mall waiting for Dorothy to be finished in the Gap. All I was thinking was: Not again! Having felt like I just went through this "lite porn" with CITY OF GREYHAWK boxed set (1989) and all the tie-ins VALLLEY OF THE MAGE (1990), CASTLES (1990), the FALCON series (1990), CHILD'S PLAY(1990), PUPPETS(1989), VECNA LIVES (1990), FIVE SHALL BE ONE/HOWL FROM THE NORTH(1991), GH WARS (1991), etc. This was what put pressure for me to be the provider as DM, where all the other old shared campaign DMs walked, combined with the people who guilted me into: 1) buying more Dragonlance then bailing, 2) running the Dark Sun overbaked and unplayable campaign, 3) the Ravenloft shit show games, and 4) the demand for checking out "Spelljammer".

So this was a frustration with TSR output and the demand that had me become the way that I was. In the 80's, my games were wild and imaginative but the crunch for official was due to the void of the Gygax voice which would be so nurturing.

By 1994, I was transitioning my old Gamma World (1978/1983) campaign (1983 to 1990) to Rifts (1990) which was a stupid mistake. So in rpg gaming in general, I went from running creative campaigning to just providing official "mostly book covers" type content to appear fresh. Rifts is a good example of that, a few sessions clunking through and using the visuals of 20 books then once the gee whiz robots were done and Palladium shifted illustrators the campaign crashed hard. I felt like my sci-fi ideas that sprung from Gamma play as a baseline had picked up a venereal disease. It was to the point where I had to kill my "Frankenstein monster". D&D official was over for me, I think the last 2E thing that I bought was PLAYERS OPTION: SPELLS AND MAGIC (1996) because some player asked if he could use spells from there.

So me entering the internet with all this baggage looking for answers to years of frustration and despair the question burned "Where was Gary Gygax?" He was literally in some grail castle in my mind.

[GRWelsh]

I was pretty lucky because in the early 1990's my friend Eric started DMing for us again. Although it was 2nd edition, Eric was the creative sort of DM who was our 1st edition DM from the 1980's. Eric made everything up and so wasn't bound to the then-current TSR output. But all of us were buying the same stuff as you and at some point I remember thinking "It's shiny and slick, but not good." I finally decided to sell all of my 2nd edition stuff to Eric who owns a hobby shop. He tried to talk me out of it and convinced me to keep my 2nd edition PH and DMG which I did. But I sold everything else 2nd edition and said I was going back to 1st edition. That's where I've been ever since. I'm not a "hater" -- it's more like I was waking up from a trance realizing I didn't need to buy everything just because TSR published it and it said AD&D or Greyhawk.

In the past year since I've been DMing again it's like the light came back on and I realized I don't need a damn thing. Wasn't that a point EGG and RJK were always trying to make back in the 1970's? "Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?"