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Post by geneweigel on Aug 31, 2009 14:01:05 GMT -5
Man, I was plied with the sauce last night.
There are several old TSR hands that would contradict you in a heartbeat over anything and usually became such a distraction that THE POINT* of having a Greyhawk website to contradict endless "bad Greyhawk" and "bad Greyhawk fans" became pointless.
*The redemption of THE POINT cannot be done by anyone willing to compromise and (as I later realized) may never be done in the name of "Gygax". His persona was/is just too big and people want to see what they want to see there by focusing.
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Post by GRWelsh on Aug 31, 2009 17:59:51 GMT -5
Anyone actually have any scans -- or see any of the original maps?
I think I've made this observation before... but the scale of the city as given in the CITY OF HAWKS map is implausible if not impossible for a population of 58,000.
58,000 people (with those in the immediately surrounding countryside brining it up to 75,000+) is not at all implausible as the population of a major medieval era city. But it is implausible that such a number of people would have a city of Greyhawk's dimensions: 8-9 miles long by 4 miles wide. That's larger than imperial Rome when it had over a million inhabitants.
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Post by geneweigel on Aug 31, 2009 19:23:43 GMT -5
I'm at "the point" ( ) where I can't even care! After Yggsburgh/Castle Zagig turned out to be not what I was looking for at all in any form there isn't much to energize me now. I have as much enthusiasm about a Forgotten Realms gazetteer for anything they do with his stuff now. That said, I still retain full respect for Gary and even find LA a thrill to read but I can't say that I'm much of a fan of his newer cowritten adventures.
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Post by Scott on Sept 1, 2009 11:55:59 GMT -5
Never saw scans, but I heard Gail Gygax is going to be auctioning off Gary's stuff. I guess Gygax Games was such a bust that she's decided that's the only way to make any money off of the material. Maybe you could buy some stuff. I don't worry about the population figure clashing with the city size. If I had to choose, I'd go with the population figures and make the area smaller.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 1, 2009 12:39:25 GMT -5
Never saw scans, but I heard Gail Gygax is going to be auctioning off Gary's stuff. I guess Gygax Games was such a bust that she's decided that's the only way to make any money off of the material. [SNIP] Well, I don't even give a crap at this point but I've come to the realization that a big factor is all the wannabes coercing her. It would be fine to me if all these folks had it geared the right way but even when he was alive they were bending him wrong. He even told me that directly, countless times, and it wasn't just some kind of appeasement crafted for me. He was very torn at the hand that came the easiest and most rewarding but he always implied it was out of his hands (as we all are pretty sure how all these "deals" went down without him anyway). It was not just that of course, because he had to tiptoe around content (as we all know "Greyhawk" didn't have powdered wigs!). Anyway, I think I'm really really going to be a bigger fan of Gary towards the end of my life when all the IP bullshit goes away and all the incoherency that the opportunists bring goes along with it!
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Post by Scott on Sept 1, 2009 14:35:33 GMT -5
Gene, I know. I accept that, but try to relax a bit and jump in or tune out. We're just musing a little on the possible layout that Gary used back in the day.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 1, 2009 14:54:56 GMT -5
Yeah, I've got to tune it all out for a while especially if I'm going to GaryCon... "Hi, you don't me but I was Gary's editor in his latter days...""YOU.... SONNUVA!!!!"
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GT
Wizard
Duke of Indiana, Knight Commander
Posts: 2,032
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Post by GT on Sept 1, 2009 19:13:38 GMT -5
I never really thought about the dimensions of Greyhawk, but Constantinople under Justinian was a triangle roughly 4 km (about 2 1/2 miles?) on each side and had a population of around 500,000... By comparison, however, West Lafayette/Lafayette here in Indiana are roughly 8 miles by 4 miles and have a population of 87,000--but that's with today's sprawling suburban areas. One must wonder if the map in the Gord books was printed out of scale, or if the scale is inverted: 3 inches equals 1 mile. Did Gary actually state anywhere in the Gord books what the dimensions of the city were, outside of the map?
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Post by Scott on Sept 2, 2009 6:51:55 GMT -5
I think Rome and Constantinople are bad models for Greyhawk, maybe for Rauxes. Maybe Venice would be a better reference. There was great fluctuation throughout the city's history. The population dropped to only 50,000, but peaked at almost 200,000, both figures were reached during the early Renaissance period. Greyhwak was recently on a downward spiral, turning into a backwater, so the population may be small for it's size. There are numerous head-scratching population figures in the Guide.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 2, 2009 10:46:49 GMT -5
The New City (the really big part) was created by the Archmage Zagyg and isn't as densely packed as the old city (the original town [foreign quarter is the original village]) with buildings but the population in the the Old City is sparse anyway.
The dungeon is huge and the city is connected to the dungeon via the military complex deep below the city. This was supposed to be the heavy-hitting city that should have been the hub of the AD&D game.
Sure you can make the Old City the "town" of the Lake Geneva original D&D campaign and make the dungeon to the East but that can't change what was intended with the population numbers. That would infer that Gary was wrong when he was in his prime. Thats a pretty big leap to make when the real answers are huge (i.e. that this isn't "low magic land" at all).
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Post by Scott on Sept 2, 2009 11:59:03 GMT -5
I don't know if I'd say he was wrong, but 'editorial mishap' is always a possibility. I don't really have a problem with the numbers. There are enough possibilities to explain them.
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 2, 2009 20:01:16 GMT -5
I don't think he was wrong about the population numbers. The population was given as 53,000 (city), 70,000+ (including surrounding area) in the 1980 Folio, and 58,000 (city), 75,000+ (including surrounding area) in the 1983 Guide. So, it seems he intentionally increased the population... There are other population increases, as well, in the Guide. My impression is that EGG kept making Greyhawk bigger and bigger over time. Wasn't the original (circa 1972-76) smaller, and more like a frontier town?
An in-game reason for Greyhawk's population growth was even given: "Several years ago a series of treasure troves was discovered in or near Greyhawk castle. Immense wealth began flowing into the city, and artisans and mercenaries began flocking to Greyhawk due to this boom. Local lords used this influx of hard money to revitalize the city..." (Folio Gazetteer, p. 11).
Perhaps CITY OF HAWKS was continuing that trend of growth, but by that point (1987) perhaps EGG was 're-imagining' his city on a scale far grander than ever before, and to intentionally give it a physical scale greater than cities like Rome and Constantinople. It is possible that at this stage, EGG envisioned Greyhawk's population to be in the hundreds of thousands, or even upwards of a million.
That seems more plausible to me than either a very sparsely populated city, or huge walls surrounding a group of suburbs...
I know... magic this, magic that, Greyhawk wasn't a low-magic world... but still -- there was a lot of attention to detail inspired by, if not directly based on, historical facts.
It may simply be that the flaw lies in trying to match up the population figures in the 1980/83 "published for gaming" Greyhawk with the 1987 "published for fiction" Greyhawk, and they just don't match (and weren't intended to).
However, I don't feel they were intended to be THAT different. So, in conclusion, what I think is most likely is that the scale given in CITY OF HAWKS was either an oversight or an editorial error. Greyhawk is, after all, a medieval era city in a temperate latitude. In Europe no such city anywhere near 40 degrees latitude acquired a population of over 100,000 prior to around the year 1500 or so. And EGG knew his medieval history...
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GT
Wizard
Duke of Indiana, Knight Commander
Posts: 2,032
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Post by GT on Sept 2, 2009 21:04:11 GMT -5
Yeah; I'm looking at the square-mileage being "off" on the Gard maps versus the population---the given area is greater than Lafayette and West Lafayette combined; and I just can't see them being "walled"--magic or no. How big is the Walled City of Visby? I'd have to look at Wikipedia to answer that; but I'm opting for an editorial error here. ^__^
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Post by GRWelsh on Feb 21, 2013 12:58:38 GMT -5
This is the old thread I was thinking about. It seems like I repeat myself and bring up the same topic every few years! That's just great. Aging is a wonderful thing...
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Post by geneweigel on Feb 21, 2013 15:16:52 GMT -5
I think its a challenge to talk about because its like this twilight world of Gygax musings with further musings and musings on the musings... Heh, I think I was recharged recently by reviewing all the Gygax e-mails to see if it was possible. I honestly would rather a miracle happen instead and have a lost file from the 80's pop up than try to connect the dots of all the hints. If I was to "do it again" it would have to be multi-planar variants to resolve it all!
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 22, 2014 9:27:17 GMT -5
I was cleaning out "junk" this weekend and I came across an old binder. In it, I have a blown-up photocopy of the City of Hawks map, which I used as the basis for my own hand-drawn map. And this map has notations such as what streets, taverns and other locales are in what quarter, etc. There are also a few pages of type-written quotes from the sources: Guide, Gord books, etc. There is also a sketch of hex map that was trying to magnify the Darlene hex Greyhawk is in, and the surrounding hexes (i.e. 90 mile diameter region). I think what I always got stuck on was where exactly to put some local sites, such as Greyhawk Castle, the Cairnway, Terrik's castle, the castle of the evil fighter lord that was south of the city, and other things. Wasn't there also a village named Thistleby close to the city? And the stronghold of "The Monk" (who painted Klinchak's tower) north of the city, somewhere up in that peninsula? Also, wasn't there something about pilgrimages that started in the Processional in Greyhawk and then went north to the Nyr Dyv? I thought that was for St Cuthbert. Perhaps some chapel or pilgrim site on the shores of the lake.
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Post by Scott on Sept 22, 2014 10:12:14 GMT -5
Part of me would still like to work on something like that, but I also think that if I am going to do that much work I should just come up with my own world. I guess you could always go the thinly disguised route.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 22, 2014 11:15:15 GMT -5
As far as a shrine of Cuthbert on the lake yeah. But as an aside, every deity was (according to Gary directly to me) going to be well represented in the city, as well as the region, so the nature of the City of Greyhawk is not this "happy castle" that it (and seemingly most D&D campaigns to some degree) degraded into with the advent of anti-D&D (because its evil) sentiment being under Lorraine Williams ((continuing Dragonlance in the wrong direction, legitimizing Forgotten Realms, handing a false Oriental Adventures, image-driven Dark Sun and Planescape, pushing mish mosh crap like Mystara/Known World, Council of Wyrms and Birthright, etc.)
As far as Thistleby, I've got notes but its mostly vapid. He is an oligarch named Constable Lord Baron Thistleby from the novels. Gary added his name was "Gerald". In the novel, he speaks for the troops in the Citadel and Bastion Island.
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 22, 2014 11:15:27 GMT -5
I am always in favor of being creative and doing your own world, too, of course. Thirty years ago, no one that I played with even considered using a published world. It was just kind of a given that everyone made up their own world... I only remember one kid who owned the World of Greyhawk (had to be the Folio) and it was viewed as a mere curiosity, mainly for its maps. But interest in EGG's works and a vague feeling that Greyhawk = the AD&D world combined with time and nostalgia is what continues to drive my interest. I'm talking about a Greyhawk project done purely for personal satisfaction, not for publishing or any other goal... But as much as I can, I'd like it to be 'accurate'* and to draw on from legitimate sources as much as is possible.
* I know, I know, don't say it.
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Post by Scott on Sept 22, 2014 11:31:36 GMT -5
I think you're micing up two of Terry's characters. Terrik had his stronghold north of the city. I don't remember any mention of the Monk ever having one.
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