Would D&D 3E...

Would D&D 3E, 4E and 5E have been better if the de facto setting for them had been Greyhawk rather than the Forgotten Realms/Nentir Vale?

All the coolest stuff comes from Greyhawk anyway.

>inb4 "GH was the default setting in 3E"... yes, but in name only, nothing was ever done with it beyond that one sad gazetteer book

No. 5e would be 10 times better if it had kept Nentir Vale as the default setting instead of the Overhyped Realms, though.

Nentir Vale was boring, basically "Make your own world, GM". Which is a fine goal in general, but it's not a substitute for an official campaign setting from the world's largest RPG.

Fuck off, Nentir Vale was the best thing that happened to D&D in the last 20 years. It was the right way to teach new DMs how to do a setting.

I love the silly names in Greyhawk too.

>Kingdom of Furry Undies

>The vulva diver river emerges from dian's rift

I agree with this. Even though the backstory of the region ("muh tieflings empire") is complete shit and I hate everything about it.

Who the fuck uses the default setting? Jesus fucking christ, are all DMs this unoriginal and lazy?

I'm an avid FR fag. I do recognize its downfalls. Power Creep (though Ed himself touched on this on the 3rd ed sourcebook, see On Concerns of The Mighty) of Marry sue heroes. Too many mediocre if not shitty novels

But I still love the FR the abundance of material, in vidya, in sourcebooks in novels makes me happy. I don't hate Greyhawk per se, and one might want to have a vagueish enviroment where the player and the dm fills the gap.Hell, Pathfinders Golarion is like that and thats one reason I don't like it. I think this is just a personal preference. But I do love how rich in material the FR is, I can pick a random spot on map and could mostly find an article on wizards 3rd ed archive about it at the very least. Usually I can find a sourcebook.
Greyhawk in 3rd ed was not supported fully, maybe that became detrimental. And I also hated how in 3rd ed every setting got its unique planes. I think this is reverted in 5e and I really hope all the old tsr settings make a come back, bound by an unified cosmology/planar system and if I may wish hard, spelljammer too.

I don't know, some people really hate FR. They hate the novels, they hate the powerfull npcs ( I mostly ignore them, then again this is might be ignoring the problem rather than solving it), they even hate the vidya. They hate how everyplace is mostly grounded in one way or another and DM's have little leeway to create their own stuff(which I disagree, but anyways). But I don't, even since I was a wee lad I liked FR, you can call me the infinitive engine generation, BG I-II started me on FR. Though it was not the first setting I knew, I had read a little bit of LotR, finished 2 books of Dragonlance but they never clicked with me. I hated dragonlance and just read it because everyone in my school was reading it (dragonlance was REALLY popular in my country back in early 2000s partly because it was the second translated novel after lotr). With FR something clicked I think its just a preference.

>inb4 "GH was the default setting in 3E"... yes, but in name only, nothing was ever done with it beyond that one sad gazetteer book

That's the fucking point though.
Some might say, "5e had an adventure about the ordning of giants so it's actually taking inspiration from fr!"
Except the adventure used the ordning in name only, shifted what it actually was and was about, and even altered the giant races as well as how they interact with one another.
As an FR fag I would love for them to use other settings as the main setting because at least that way there would be less "new lore additions" that completely shit on pre-existing lore, and perhaps finally we could get some proper follow-up to the changing tech in the world and how it fucks with alliances and the state of the world.

Lore butcher is rampant in FR ever since the transformation from 1st ed to 2nd I would say. I'm fine with Giants getting changed, at least we don't have a fucking spellplague.

It certainly has been widespread for a long time, I just think that's more reason to let another setting get the limelight for a while.

Theoretically? Yes. Game Design might have focused around being able to emulate the feel of Greyhawk, which is to say the Gygaxian style of gameplay, or the heavily doctored version of it you find in OSR.
I'd say it might have kept lethality more in mind for GMs when playing the game, which could have mitigated the power creep of 3E, which affected the development of 4E, and both had an impact on 5e.
Honestly it's all Butterfly Wing Beats from here.
But if it leads directly towards a more deadly 5e, I'm game for it.

You remind me of the player I had to ban after he couldn't stop meming about LOL LOL HE SAID LOL because I described an NPC as "his head lolls to one side".

I think it was like that between 2008-2014. 4th raped the realms so hard with spellplague most people just ignored it, and I think they got the memo, hence you don't see a lot of 4th ed FR material, only 2-3 of them exist if I remember correctly. People just ignored 4th ed and continued on with the 3rd ed lore, maybe those days are better than todays lore infringements I don't know.

Might have changed the way good/evil was approached in the rules; less didactic spell-win mechanics and more weird spell shit that didn't make sense.

The whole spellcasting system might have been more baroque and powered down, as it was in AD&D when magic-users had all kinds of limitations (race, reagents, segments, no warcasting, tiny hit points before the bloat, etc.) that nerfed them and which disappeared in later editions.

>banning people from game for saying LOL
>anti memer

Most people these days need everything spelled out to them as 'official canon' for some reason.

...

They should've just stuck to OD&D's setting from before Greyhawk.

Stop with this elitism. Homebrew and pre-made campaign settings were together ever since 80s. You can enjoy one without shitting over the other.

What, Blackmoor?

What are the chances of us getting a Greyhawk sourcebook for 5E?

I run all my fantasy games, even non D&D, in the Nentir Vale.
I'm almost 40 and I like not having to come up with a map and 20 NPCs, but I also don't want to read 3 books just to know who lives in the neighborhood.
Writing your own setting is great when you're in college and have 20 hours a day for leisure activities. It doesn't last forever though.

>Raped
4e FR is the only playable FR.

I think he means the odd and eerie wilds that combined the Whitebox wilderness rules and the Avalon Hill outdoor survival map.

Hasbro is playing so safe with D&D right now, that we won't see a greyhawk book unless they can guarantee tens of thousands of pre-order sales.


>Doesn't know the grey box

There should be at least 20,000 GH grognards left alive these days, no?

Yeah, but how many of them play 5e?

Yes, but they're all OSR fags, so you'd need quite the marketing to get them all to be onboard for a new wotc project, at which point you need even more orders to off-set the costs.

>Stop with this elitism
No, fuck off and stay gatekept.

> Needing 20 hours a day to worldbuild
> His job mandates him to think about the job and nothing but the job while at work
> He has no leisure time

...

Only if they exterminated all kender.

Nentir Vale was the setting we needed, but didn't deserve

Wish granted! There are no kender in Greyhawk.

Greyhawk is one of, if not the best campaign settings officially put out for any edition of DnD.
Birthright is another, actually.

What is the definitive Greyhawk product which details the setting?

>elitism
holy fuck, nice b8 (i hope).
Regardless, have a (((You)))

Gygax's World of Greyhawk boxed set combined with Sargent's From the Ashes.
I have an Encyclopedia of the Flanaess Ive been working on combining the two into one coherant tome encompassing all things Greyhawk, though im not ready to print yet, so no im not posting yet

This is one of the more recent and best ones.

The gazetteer is newer but it's a small and rather boring book.

>so no im not posting yet
Awww. sounds great. Is there a PDF of From the Ashes in Da Archive thread.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

There is i beleive in the osr thread, bit theyre kinda autists over 2e so who knows.
Also, that map should make any real grognard pissed. Dennis Tetreault is a fucking faggot and i wish him a death from ass and benis cancer.
I also have a city of greyhawk map i made that is basically as close to Gygaxs city as you can get. I keyed it with the same locations as the CoG boxed set, cause whereas the maps were shit, some of the descriptions were decent. Let me see if i can find an img or pdf small enough to post here....

I should mention that its close to completion, give me a week or so....
>map
None that will fit here.... im phoneposting like a complete faggot atm, when i get home ill get you a copy.
>full disclosure
I suck at photoshop, so its really not the best map youll see, but its straight up as gygax had it, if thats at all important to you

The Nentir Vale was lovely. Far more interesting than "Neo-Medieval Europe with a few obligatory demihumans tacked on", which is what Greyhawk gave us.

Nentir Vale itself was boring, but everything surrounding it (from Nerath, to the racial fluff, to the outer cosmology) was superb.
It was the first time fey in D&D felt like mythical fey, instead of Victorian fairies. It also really helped build up the difference between devils and demons (ironically, by moving Asmodeus in the same direction as Pathfinder).

>i have never read anything but Veeky Forums on this subject, the post

I actually have the grey box on my shelf. The only good part was sembia.

...yes? That's how jobs work, NEETanon.

>
>There is i beleive in the osr thread, bit theyre kinda autists over 2e so who knows.
>Also, that map should make any real grognard pissed. Dennis Tetreault is a fucking faggot and i wish him a death from ass and benis cancer.
What? Why?

>I also have a city of greyhawk map i made that is basically as close to Gygaxs city as you can get.

Did Gygax release some notes that made it different from what was in the published boxed sets?

Nothing would have saved 3E and 4E once autism set in.

You just don't need a number and percentile to simulate everything in the world to be able to tell a story.

The Fey Wild and the First World are also very similar making PF and 4e fey a lot alike and distinct from the Elysium-centered fey of AD&D.

>Default settings having anything to do with the quality of a system
disgusting
>Using the default settings ever
Absolutely Disgusting

Nentir Vale was pretty great. It was sort of like a teaching tool for making settings.

I've never really found any of D&D's more well-known core settings compelling in the slightest, so I'd say that one with that kind of functionality is infinitely superior to the rest.

a LOT of the TTRPG book writing of the late 200X's was acting in response to the absolutely lore-bloated settings of the late 90's and early 200X's, such as OWOD, and Great Wheel, where everything was filled to the brim with immutable lore and untouchable god-tier plot-protected NPC's that made everything fit together in a nice autistically completionist bow, but was terrible for actually running games in with players. Don't get me wrong, those settings were really fun to read about and absorb in lore-book and/or wiki-form, but if you ever stoped just reading game books and tried to run an actual game (then again we ARE on Veeky Forums so what are the chances of that?) you'd see how they did not work as GAME SETTINGS. Things like the Nentir Vale and the pre-god-machine NWoD were designed to be GAME settings first and "sitting by yourself reading a lore book for fun" settings second. From a running game's perspective, this is a good thing... however, from a "being able to sell new books without having to release much content, because most of the book is just more fanfic-tier lore bloat" perspective it wasn't, so things are slowly shifting back... sad.

Hi user. Im back phoneposting like a dbag, not home yet.
Denny 'im a huge faggot, pls rape my face' Tetreault has wormed his magic realm campaign bs into 3e greyhawk and his city of melkot
>im a good guy but my castle is this giant skull cause im 40+ and an edgy manchild
He also foisted that back alley coathanger abortion of a map and its now canon.... also ive met him and hes a pretentuous douche

>Gygax notes
There was an outline map in the front of one of his Gord the Rogue books that outlined districts and gates and all that. Its RADICALLY different, and much more realistic.
In addition, gygax wrote extensively about the CoG in the first couple books (when read 'chronologically') and its nothing like that bs Dennis 'I eat my own feces' Tetreault

Ill bump this thread till i get home, i promised a map and if im not drunk by the time i get home then ill deliver

>drinking while driving and/or on public transit

Take it easy, user. It's not that important.

user, i dont drive, i cab it when i drink

bitter fa/tg/uys, o you.

I haven't played Greyhawk, but 4E really played off the "points of light" strategy. It's a great system for playing characters that really feel heroic, moreso than 3.5 or 5E, in my opinion. Would Greyhawk lend itself well to that kind of setting?

Whose fault was the whole Rary the Traitor thing?

No. The PC superpowers of 4E don't fit Greyhawk's grey neutrality at all.

>ctrl+F Eberron
>0 results
Jesus you fucks

Keith Baker:
>"I deliberately made the world to be about your heroes, so I didn't put any Overpowered Mary Sues like Elminster or Drizz't"

Nobody mentioned Eberron because it's got nothing to do with OP's question, you moron.

>Why would you post better solutions to OP's question

How's that autism?

Not him, but did you even read the fucking OP?

Don't believe the maymays user

No, because Greyhawk is boring.

What? No it's not, at least not outside of Asia. Even then you're allowed to fucking think about other things

I wish 5e wasn't Greyhawk with a Forgotten Realms costume on.

I think the only thing that wasn't stolen from another setting was the Rage of Demons story and Tiamat.

I love Greyhawk, and I like FR, but 5e is generic as hell with the setting to the point that fans of either just see glimpses of the setting's former glory.

I'd like to see a true campaign book, any campaign for 5e from WotC, because as it stands, they're actively bastardizing decades worth of writing and lore to sell modules turned into Campaigns.

>anything Eberron
If you want adventurous magitech settings, play Final Fantasy. Eberron is a TvTropes setting where everything is mindlessly "subverted" for the sake of being "original". The only good thing that came of it were the warforged, and even then they're a pretty bog-standard construct race.

t. NEET

Can you read it anywhere? I've been looking, but I haven't found anything.

GH was the default setting for 3E.
So your answer is no.
I like FR much more anyway.

You have to look at the more setting-focused sourcebooks (Manual of the Planes, Secrets of the Plane Below/Above, Dungeon Survival Guide, Underdark, Heroes of X, etc) and the issues in Dragon & Dungeon to get the real gist of things, I'm afraid.

No it's not. Maybe your boss insists that not thinking about work is basically theft, but he also tracks your toilet breaks so you're not paid for them and have to work the time back, charges for drinks, and insists on you doing unpaid overtime as well.

Meanwhile, in the real world, working a real job, I'm free to think what I want so long as the work gets done properly and on time.

Implying you have a job

Clearly talking about Castle Greyskull

>Eberron is a TvTropes setting where everything is mindlessly "subverted" for the sake of being "original". The only good thing that came of it were the warforged, and even then they're a pretty bog-standard construct race.

The thing I love most about Eberron is that so many people look at it and can only see parts that are subversive or parts that are cliche.

The beauty of the setting is its complexity/depth. Nothing is what it appears at first glance (stuff played straight and twists alike), but it all actually makes perfect sense when you finally put it into proper context.

Like the Valenar Elves. Most people just see them and go, "So they're just swapping out raider orcs for raider elves" without understanding Tairandal culture, how Eberron actually acknowledges that elves training/fighting for centuries would actually allow them to produce on average superior soldiers, and how the Tairandal actually typically engage in combat in a typically elven fashion: highly mobile hit and run strikes that rely heavily on magical support and little concept of what humans consider "honor". There's even more to them than that, regarding WHY they fight and why they're even in Valenar, and how they manage to survive despite being such insufferable douches, but you'll never get to it if you just go from the initial impressions.

There's a lot of thought actually put into the setting and it allows for great stories.

Also, Warforged are really -not- a bog standard construct race. For one, they aren't "built", they're actually grown in a process that's closer to creating a homunculus than a golem/shield guardian.

This process isn't fully understood because its based on magical shit from an even older and more magically advanced civilization. The way they're created makes them actual LIVING things that are made of inorganic material, which is why Warforged have legitimate emotions and souls and why you can't just "design" a better one, can't just dismantle them for parts, or otherwise treat them like your bog standard construct.

>The beauty of the setting is its complexity/depth. Nothing is what it appears at first glance (stuff played straight and twists alike), but it all actually makes perfect sense when you finally put it into proper context.

>Like the Eldreth Veluuthra. Most people just see them and go, "So they're just swapping out raider orcs for raider elves" without understanding Cormanthyr culture, how Faerun actually acknowledges that elves training/fighting for centuries would actually allow them to produce on average superior soldiers, and how the actually typically engage in combat in a typically Cormanthyrean fashion: highly mobile hit and run strikes that rely heavily on magical support and little concept of what humans consider "honor". There's even more to them than that, regarding WHY they fight and why they're even in the western heartlands and the swordcoast, and how they manage to survive despite being such insufferable douches, but you'll never get to it if you just go from the initial impressions.

>There's a lot of thought actually put into the setting and it allows for great stories.

Lethality was decreased because the game went away from its wargaming roots towards narrative and storytelling and having the majority of your cast die in the opening scene isn't particularly conducive for a narrative.

The objective in OD&D was literally to get treasure which helped you level up. Now the objective in a game is totally nebulous.

It was the norm for players in OD&D to have 5 or 6 characters at a time all playing in the same world and when someone called a game they'd see who was nearby on the map and send them in, expecting them to probably die a lot of the time. This was a wargame mentality of sorts. They'd retire their characters at level 10 max. This is according to Tim Kask who was the first official TSR employee who was editor on dragon and played with Gygax regularly. He said they didn't expect that players would ever even want to play past level 10 or get attached to any one character.

It was a very different game really and nobody at the time has any idea where it would go.

The Eldreth Veluuthra fight to expel humans from their lands. Their warriors are not among the finest in the lands. And nobody ever initially confuses them for being anything than human hating elves who worship the usual elven deities in the usual elven ways, so on and so forth. They are exactly what it says on the tin.

Which isn't bad in and of itself. It makes them easy to get a grasp on and makes it hard to "mess them up".

But there's not much revelation going on.

im back, and apparently on a bender
>rary the traitor
Ive never used any of that crap, as it never jived with Robilar or what Rary was supposed to be. Robilar was originally created by Rob Kuntz, whom ive had the pleasure of chatting with at various conventions and events and so on. Its widely referenced across the internet, but in short Rob stated that whereas Robilar was a wild card and a bit of a loose cannon, he wouldve never betrayed the Circle of Eight or Greyhawk like that. I read the material once when it came out, laughed at how retarded it was and never used it.
I can see why they made Rary a traitor, as the character was made by one of the (in)famous Blume brothers for ODnD for one specific purpose: he wanted to get a magic user to 3rd level so that they would attain the title Medium and thus have the name Medium Rary.... its kind of the first meme character in a way I guess. Gygax just used the name for one of the personages in the Greyhawk world.

>map I promised user yesterday
pic related is my crap rendition of the City of Greyhawk. Im not good at photoshop or mapping in general with a computer, so this low res thing is the best I can do

One of the few good things to have come out of 3e Greyhawk was them retconning that to have been Bilarro instead.

No because 5E's version of FR isn't that offensive. It is a distinct, supported campaign setting, which is more than wizards did for Greyhawk in 3E, but if you don't like it it is easy to ignore or change.

The big fixes so far have been:

Most of the high level NPCs are gone, they're either dead, missing or just forgotten about.

A lot of the lore bloat has (at least for the moment) been ignored in favour of a slimmer game which has greatly improved the setting from where is was in 2007. You're not dealing with an FR where every square inch has been mapped out and there is no mystery unless you or your players choose to got back to 2E or 3E for lore which has been abandoned through edition updates.

The complaints about the changes to monster lore are greatly exaggerated because if you don't like it, it's your table you can ignore it or go back to an earlier version of lore or invent your own. It's a roleplaying game, you aren't bound to use the page of flavour text which precedes a monsters stats.

So substituting in another campaign setting wouldn't make the game better because the rules are good and you can always be a big boy and just write your won setting if you really, passionately hate even the slightest suggestion of FR.

because Waterdeep

Not a bad map. Do you have the descriptions to go with it?

What makes it different from the boxedset map?

Its from the City of Greyhawk boxed set.
>what sets it apart from the published map
When you see the map from the boxed set youll see how horrible it really is. A city of 50k+ ppl boiled down to an autistic subdivision

>Its from the City of Greyhawk boxed set.
That's nothing like any of the maps from the box set.

They should design an actual fucking campaign setting instead of a backdrop for a shitty fantasy novel.

Are we playing West Marches? What regions are good for that sort of shit? Are you writing dungeon modules over there? (Correct answer is yes.)

Are we playing a standard heroic quest plot? What are some good bumfuck nowhere towns the players can be from? What are some good NPCs for the call to action? What villains have slowly unfolding globe-spanning plans? Why do my players have to go through a dungeon to get to the next county?

Are we playing politics? What region has good bickering nobles? Do you know how damn many of these I'm going to need?

Oh gee, Elminster isn't the answer to a single one of these questions. What a shock.

Possibly, but it's not like they were ever going to do it anyway. After Gygax left TSR no one wanted to mess with "his" setting too much when people like Greenwood basically didn't care what WotC did with his setting as long as he got a royalty check.

Nentir Vale was great, would take it over Greyhawk and Realms any day.

Where do I need to look if I want to get into the Nentir Vale setting, user?

4e dungeon master's guide or the later dungeon master's book have the same basic info and outline. A bit more info has trickled out during the whole cycle of 4e. Unfortunately there hasn't ever been a collected gazzetteer thanks to that fucker Mearls. There was a wiki on the wizards site, I'll see if I can dredge up the link.

Thank you, user. Much appreciated.

It's pretty fast and loose really, but intended to be that way to give a lot of reason and room for adventures. Really the whole Points of Light idea really makes more sense for D&D than a sprawling setting with every inch documented like Realms.

Points of Light is technically how Forgotten Realms works, or st least how the North does. There are pockets of civilisation (Silverymoon, Citadel Adbar, Mithral Hall, Nesme, etc.) but as soon as you’re outside them and their immediate sphere of influence it’s the Wild West.

As said, it was never gathered in one place thanks to fucking Mearls. But, whilst there is literally scattered lore in everything but the adventures, here's what's in the sourcebooks:

* Manual of the Planes: Outline of the Cosmology/Multiverse as a whole.
* Secrets of the Plane Below: Elemental Chaos & the Abyss.
* Secrets of the Plane Above: Astral Sea.
* Demonomicon: Demons & the Abyss.
* The Shadowfell: Mostly focuses on Gloomwrought, the Shadowfell equivalent of Sigil, but does have more general material.
** Heroes of Shadow: More general Shadowfell information.
* Heroes of the Feywild: Lots and lots of Feywild info.
* Heroes of the Elemental Chaos: Yet more Elemental Chaos lore.
* Underdark: Covers the Underdark, which is practically its own subplane, including its Fewild and Shadowfell reflections.
* Primal Power: Primal Spirits and the Primal Way, most notably "why isn't this just Gods of Nature?"
* Psionic Power: Psionics and how it fits into the world.
* Player's Handbook Races: Tiefling and Dragonborn lore, depending on which one you read.

There's also lots of articles in Dragon & Dungeon, but you'd need to give me more time to go through my collection and write the list down from scratch.