Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms

Well what do you know. A new post not even a year and a half after the last one. 

World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting

Forgotten Realms Campaign Set

I have been on a bit of a nostalgia kick of late, and pondering two of the classic TSR campaign settings. Specifically two of the three to come out of AD&D 1e, namely Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. I’m not sure why I’ve never viewed Dragonlance in the same vein as the other two, perhaps because Dragonlance was so tied up in a seemly all consuming story that just left less room for personal adventure. Or perhaps because TSR just never published as logical a starting place for Dragonlance as Greyhawks’s World of Greyhawk folio followed by the gold box World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting in 1983, or the gray box Forgotten Realms Campaign Set in 1987.

Modern me enjoys and appreciates both settings a great deal, but if you were to force me to choose one, I’d come down on the side of Greyhawk. This hasn’t always been the case. As I’ve stated here before (even if years before at this point), I got my start in the hobby as an 8th grader in 1990 in the early days of AD&D 2e, and I quickly became a bit of a Forgotten Realms fanboy. 

 A steady diet of Dragonlance fiction paved the way to adding the Forgotten Realms fiction into the mix. If memory serves the first two FR novels I read were Greenwood’s Spellfire, and Salvatore’s The Crystal Shard. Whatever else you want to say about TSR’s Forgotten Realms novels of that era, for me they certainly did a fine job of demonstrating how both adventure and adventurers had a place in the Realms. And did so without going the Dragonlance route of tying nearly everything to a massive campaign event, be it the current version of the event (the war of the lance as shown in the original trilogy and the DL series modules), the first version of that event (the first war of the lance with Huma and co.), or the aftermath of the event (the post war stuff, including the Legends trilogy which did the double duty of telling us the fates of Caramon and Raistlin while simultaneously presenting the history of the cataclysm). In any event fairly early on in my gaming journey (some time before the AD&D 2e version came out in 1993), I picked up the gray box, and tried to figure out how to make use of it. 

 I initially found the World of Greyhawk to be a bit silly. I was at that time completely unaware that any Greyhawk novels existed, so I didn’t have the in to it that I did with the Forgotten Realms. Also in those days my only sources of information about products was almost exclusively the pages of Dragon Magazine, and the Wargames West catalog (to a lesser extent the adventures in Dungeon Magazine suggested products I might want to consider picking up as well). The realities of TSR at the time meant a definite bias towards the Forgotten Realms. My knowledge of European political structures and how they changed from the middle ages into the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s was rather lacking, so the idea of independent baronies, counties, and duchies outside of a kingdom seems strange and laughable to me. So all the various Ulek and Urnst states just confused me. My first major Greyhawk purchase was the 1988 Greyhawk Adventures hardback. It didn’t really help sell me on the setting. I also didn’t begin to collect all the classic 1e era modules set in Greyhawk until late in the life span of AD&D (and the majority were only picked up after the advent of later editions of D&D), so I didn’t have their legacy to stoke the fire of any Greyhawk fandom in me. 

 My opinions on Greyhawk began to change in the latter half of my high school days (probably in 1993). It was the Carl Sargent penned From the Ashes box set (October 1992) that started me down the road to appreciating and even preferring Greyhawk. Reading the history of the Flannaess and seeing a seeing a logical enough reason (perhaps not good enough to survive contact with an expert in geopolitics or history, but more than good enough for a lay person wanting a logical-ish fantasy gaming world) for the campaign world to exist as it did, dramatically changed my opinion of Greyhawk. 

 I went off the college in the fall of 1994 and entered my golden age of role playing (at least in terms of frequency). And I didn’t make much use of either setting. I used the specialty priests in the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardback (1990), but that was hardly my only source of AD&D 2e specialty priests. I did continue to pick up products for both settings. It wasn’t until D&D 3.0 that I finally set a campaign in the Forgotten Realms. I don’t remember much about it, aside from vague sense of being disappointed at how it went. For Greyhawk I didn’t actually acquire the gold box until sometime in the mid 2000s (before 2008 and 4th edition). And it wasn’t until the 4e days that I set a campaign in the World of Greyhawk when I translated the U1-3 modules from AD&D 1e to 4e (with some prep work ahead of time, but largely on the fly at the table). My memories of this campaign are much more favorable. 

 I think I’ll be continuing this soon, with thoughts on how the ‘83 gold box and ‘87 gray box compare to each other, and how useful I find their contents.