Thursday, January 30, 2020

Greyhawk and D&D 5

The next D&D 5 book, Wildemount, is already breaking sales records for D&D and is well on it's way to being one of the most successful D&D books ever outside of a core rule book.

Yet some people are still not happy.

In fact, what they want is Greyhawk.


I get it. I do. There are some things I would love to see too. I love Greyhawk, it was my world for my high school days...back in the 80's.

There are petitions out now and some have been out for a while.  And let's be brutally honest here, petitions like this never work. Combined they are still just over 1,170. In other words nowhere near the 773,000 subscribers to the Critical Role YouTube channel.

I see postings of people complaining about the lack of Greyhawk, Planescape, Spelljammer, and others.  I have to be honest here, they are often from people that I also see claiming they don't play 5e.   Even if they do, they a tiny, tiny sliver of the potential buyers.


Sorry. But there are just not enough of us to make it financially viable.

There is an option for people that want Greyhawk in 5e.  Just get the Greyhawk boxed set from DriveThruRPG.

The World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting for 1st Ed is still all you need to play.
It is just under $10 too.  I grabbed my boxed set and in 130 total pages, I found four (that's 4) that would need conversion.  You won't even need to convert these if you never use the Quasi-Deities.   I never have in 40 years.

The gods are all in 1st ed stats, but gods should not have stats in the first place.

Really. I have everything I need for a Greyhawk 5e game.  Would I like a Greyhawk 5e book? Yeah! I would love one really.  I am very much in that slim crossover on the Venn Diagram of "Just These Guys".  I am These Guys.

Maybe WotC will come out with it someday.  But in the meantime, I am doing ok and I suspect many of you really are as well.

9 comments:

Wicked Studios LLC said...

Opening up the DM's Guild is the best thing that WOTC could do for all their older settings, and for the current fans.

Xaosseed said...

I saw the point made elsewhere that I found good - if you were not allowed a re-issue of any old property and had to have something new, what would you like?

I was holding out hope for Spelljammer until I read that and it really made me think - what is the gap? What is the setting of *now* we would like?

Jason Zavoda said...


Ive been playing Greyhawk 1e homebrew for about 40 years and this year I'm running a 5e Greyhawk campaign. I was very pleased with Ghosts of Saltmarsh and would hope that any future WotC Greyhawk material follows the same pattern of enhancing the campaign and not striving for campaign shattering alterations, but you know it really doesn't matter. The Folio and the '83 boxed set are all that is needed. You take them and run with them whatever edition you play. Im all for more Greyhawk material but the best stuff comes from a DM who has made Greyhawk their own setting. Im much more in favor of Greyhawk as a hobby setting without anyone trying to make a buck from it but Ive no objection to those who want to give making some loose change a try though they'd probably make more working part time at McDonalds. For me the rewarding thing is having someone read something of mine and saying they liked it or were going to use it in their campaign. I still think 1e homebrew is an artform and 5e is a game, but 5e is what is being played and thats where I will be taking things as I get more familiar with the rules.

Zudrak (Michael G.) said...

Agreed, Wicked Studios.

It's not so much opening Greyhawk for 5e as it is opening it (via the DM's Guild) for writers like Joseph Bloch, Allan Grohe, Jeff Talanian, Carlos Lising, Mike Bridges, Scott Casper, Kristoph Nolan, Jay Scott, and Luke Gygax and cartographers like Anna Meyer to write material that would flesh out parts of the world that never were before, deliver new modules and other supplements, or (in the case of Mr. Casper and Mr. Bridges) write other Greyhawk things like comics, novels, etc.

If they were to re-release the maps for "5e" (statless but that's the current D&D iteration) that would go a long way towards quenching the thirst of the left side of Tim's diagram while possibly bringing in more from the right side because the PDF version of the maps do them no justice.

evildm said...

In my opinion what people should be doing now is just playing in greyhawk. Grab some new to DnD folk and take them to grayhawk. That's what I'm doing. I just started a roll20 campaign with brand new folks who are all new to DND. Their exposure has been of course critical role and other podcasts. They never even heard of greyhawk. Now I have them looking through old PDFs of grey hawk material and scouring the internet for bits and pieces of greyhawk lore, and they are loving it. Grayhawk is a great world, but it was your dad's world. I know this because I'm a dad. Whether we like it or not things have changed. wizards of the coast has moved on and that's okay. I do agree that they should open the DMS guild as well as put out all the living greyhawk material they can find. But for now instead of raging against the machine that is WoTC, get some new players and take them to Greyhawk. Who knows if enough of the new crop of players are exposed to Greyhawk WoTC will see the numbers and release new Greyhawk material. Then we can whine about that.

Ashur the Bear said...

Moved on? When was Forgotten Realms released? New material constantly. As long as it's all focused on the Realms, that is all most new players will know. Ghosts was great, opening DMs Guild is the way to go if they don't want to develop new products for Greyhawk.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

I do agree, open up DM's Guild to it. But there is a ton of material on DM'sGuild that is of questionable quality.

Norman J. Harman Jr. said...

They've already released against giants and saltmarsh, both easily reput in Greyhawk.

i'm glad they don't do the setting. Because then they might feel the need to shut down or limit all the great (better than any commercial endeavour could produce, because they are labors of love) fan created stuff. Like these https://www.annabmeyer.com/greyhawk-maps/ and tons more.

I've run three greyhawk campaigns, OSRIC (ToEE) 5ed (against the giants with Tharzid temple at end) and now 5ed (saltmarsh)with stuff that happened in OSRIC (they released Zugmotoy) affecting the 5e campaigns.

There seems to be a set of people who want and only play "official" stuff. That's really weird to me.

Cross Planes said...

I doubt we'd see it, but what if we got lucky enough to get someone like Carl Sargent to do a DMsGuild release if Greyhawk was opened up? We are lucky enough to be getting an Eberron book from Keith Baker.

WotC would stupid to overlook Critical Role. And like Tim, I'm one of "just one of those guys". It's like getting a full Forgotten Realms book. I loved the book they did for 3.x and I still love it when I use it for 5E.