Alternate Oerths

-
The original Greyhawk Folio states of itself:
"The world of greyhawk is yours now -- Yours to do with as you wish. You can mold new states out of old ones or inflame ancient rivalries into open warfare as you tailor the world to suit the needs of your players."
To me, this is a feature of Greyhawk worth more attention. Of course, there is implicit permission to do so with any setting embedded into the very nature of roleplaying, but few settings put it out as their Raison D'Etre and then follow through. As I mentioned in my previous entry, part of the beauty of Greyhawk is how many things it leaves unsaid.
This is what the makers of the boxed set wanted you to see when thinking of Greyhawk
The Folio is a scant 55 pages, and was never originally meant to be a fully fleshed out world. It is presented as a skeleton for DMs to "use as the backdrop of a new campaign without changes; or, as an alternative, city, country or geographical descriptions can be used to fill in details for existing campaigns." It provides a basic canvas of history, kingdoms and a map that DMs can then apply their own creativity to. As settings go, the Greyhawk Folio is analogous to a coloring book, with part of the lines unfinished as well, but suggestive of various patterns. The later boxed set adds a few more details, such as a pantheon of gods, but follows the same basic template.

Although later products have since then painted over the unpainted parts of the canvas, the original spirit of Greyhawk lives on. Online, some have carried that torch admirably:

Greyhawk Online and the Oerth Journal has a feature called "Alternate Oerths" which I think should be bigger than it is (and for one, link to all the alternate oerths in the blogosphere, like the ones below).
      If there are more Alternate Oerths out there worth a mention that I have neglected, please share in the comments. If you ave your own that you have not yet shared with the blogosphere, now is the time to start writing it up! It would be very cool if we could maintain a repository of Alternate Oerths somewhere.

      Next up - My own Alternate Oerth: Mythic Greyhawk.

      Comments

      1. Mike Bridges19 July 2019 at 21:55

        I enjoyed this post a lot and look forward to Mythic Greyhawk.

        ReplyDelete

      Post a Comment

      Top 6 most viewed posts in the last 12 months

      The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

      -
      I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be th...
      Read more

      The 3 Mile Hex - The Natural Unit for Exploration

      -
      Image
      There will be interludes between the AD&D Appraisal series, to keep my own writing motivation going. I was going to do a 3-mile hex post outlining the virtues of it, but turns out Silverarm did that already and stole all my points  (even down to the "Outdoor Survival also uses 3 miles") and added more points I wasn't aware of myself. So go read that excellent piece and come back here. What I instead want to talk about is how the 3 mile hex is a very close fit to our natural sense of distance and visualisation and how the that makes the 3-mile hex the perfect blend between immersion and usable game artifact and how to actually bring that into your game.  Minaria hexmap. Scale: 1 hex = 50 miles. Not what we're going for here. A while back, Noisms contemplated the difficulty of creating a sense of wonder in journeys . The difficulty with journeys in RPGs is the scale of it. It becomes too big, and thus too abstract, to visualize, to immerse oneself into.  I tried, un...
      Read more

      In Praise of "Black Box" D&D

      -
      Image
      when it comes to non-Advanced D&D, The internet, and in particular the OSR blogosphere, has deserved praise galore for the B/X sets for D&D. And whilst not quite as enthusiastic, the Mentzer editions for those Basic and Expert sets also get plenty of praise for its art and way of introducing the game. The Holmes set also has its fair of passionate fans. And of course the original brown booklets themselves. Of newer releases, the Rules Cyclopedia also has a large following of fans. One release that hardly ever gets a mention is the 1991 'black box', by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning. Actually, the Rules Cyclopedia was published as a sort of companion to this set. Together  they represents the fifth and final edition of non-advanced D&D. "The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game" also labelled "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" It's short, 64 page booklet, so much the same as its predecessors, comes with a simple dungeon m...
      Read more

      Addendum: Why "Roll under" Ability checks really are the best of checks

      -
      Image
      My recent meditations on roll under ability checks and rant against the D20 unified mechanic has generated a bit of commentary and further clarified my own thinking on the matter. This post is an addendum to my  Using Ability Checks in B/X  article, seeking to further explicate why the "Roll Under" ability check truly is the best of ability checks. Earlier today, during my delvings into the blogosphere, I came across this box from  Quarrel & Fable , a Fighting Fantasy spinoff: First thing that struck me was how similar it was to my proposed resolution for Ability Checks . And secondly, it combined those thoughts with my memories of the old Fighting Fantasy  [FF] gamebooks and set my mind spinning into that cross section and how much I always liked the elegant simplicity of the FF mechanic. The best part about doing a post involving Fighting Fantasy is the chance to showcase some of the brilliant art in the gamebooks Now, I've given reasons already in prev...
      Read more

      How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying

      -
      Image
      It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides ...
      Read more

      The Fighter Across All Editions of TSR D&D

      -
      Image
      Ok, it's time to get back to elf-games. And why not look at the class that is simultaneously the most beloved and under-appreciated class in the history of D&D? I was going to include assessments of WotC fighters too, but honestly, they end up being so different, and embedded into different systems, that it's like comparing apples and oranges. I would still like to look at the 3e fighter, as that has at least a little continuity with TSR D&D but I think that's for a different post on why feats aren't so bad after all and have a place in all versions of D&D... Moving ON , let's dig in: OD&D : Fighting-Men, as they are called. They get d6 hit die like everyone else, but they start at HD 1+1 and gain more HD as they level than clerics or magic-users (at level 10, the fighter has 10+1, cleric 7+2 and and magic-user 7). They have no armor or weapon restrictions. For weapons, this only matters in regards to which weapons are typically magical (swords, figh...
      Read more