Quote from: thedungeondelver;833279OK:

The City of Greyhawk
TSR: AD&D 2 (1989 Box)

I actually just got that recently from the RPG effects of a player that passed away.

Quote from: Omega;833281I actually just got that recently from the RPG effects of a player that passed away.

I'm sorry for your loss, use the set well; I'm sure they'd appreciate that.

Hey, thedungeondelver, IIRC the 3rd Edition Greyhawk stuff was mostly in the RPGA Living Greyhawk campaign sections of Dungeon and Dragon magazine during that era. Don't forget those.

Quote from: jeff37923;833308Hey, thedungeondelver, IIRC the 3rd Edition Greyhawk stuff was mostly in the RPGA Living Greyhawk campaign sections of Dungeon and Dragon magazine during that era. Don't forget those.

Very true; I assumed the question was just about 2e product but yeah it about doubles or halves again if we inclued the LGG and Dungeon & Dragon magazine content.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;833090And here's something, if Greyhawk is doing so well, why is it in 4 and 5e, they've more or less ditched it for FR?  

In my opinion it is because Forgotten Realms is more mallable and more of a blank slate than Greyhawk. Greyhawk is a patchwork of realms with a few city-states. Forgotten Realms is a patchwork of city-states with a handful of realms.

So if you designing something it probably slightly easier to find a corner of Forgotten Realms to set it in than it is Greyhawk.

Understand it is not dramatically different, but just enough.

Personally, I like Greyhawk way better than Forgotten Realms. And I view the use of FR as being a bit lazy. There are plenty of empty spaces in Greyhawk to set most types of modules.

Quote from: estar;833354In my opinion it is because Forgotten Realms is more mallable and more of a blank slate than Greyhawk. Greyhawk is a patchwork of realms with a few city-states. Forgotten Realms is a patchwork of city-states with a handful of realms.

That is funny. I allways saw it the other way around. Greyhawk being the more open setting and Realms being the increasingly more locked down one.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;833249Except I didn't lie.

Whoever told him no one played Greyhawk did.

Quote from: Omega;833356That is funny. I allways saw it the other way around. Greyhawk being the more open setting and Realms being the increasingly more locked down one.

The Realms has more details published. But Wizards doesn't seem to be as beholden to that detail as you would think. They are willing to jump ahead in time and change things up to get the module they want setup. Look at the area covered in the Lost Mine, Elemental Evil, Horde of the Dragon Queen, and what they did a couple of years back in those areas.

Most of it set in area of scattered settlements and city states.

Quote from: S'mon;833019Wow, I loved Hollow World! It was really well done & I'm looking at using it in my Classic D&D Karameikos campaign once the PCs are higher level and won't be scared at large scale exploration. Sending them to the Land of Ancient Traldarans seems like a great fit, but almost everything is great (the Merry Pirates are a bit much maybe).

I always regret not buying the Hollow World boxed set when I saw it on a stall in the Amsterdam book market.

Quote from: JeremyR;832980I would guess Hollow World, which was like a sub-setting for Mystara.

I mean, they literally got rid of it when they switched Mystara to 2e AD&D, saying it didn't actually exist.

I think the thing with Birthright is that the main boxed set only focused on one region of the setting, and that all the additional regions seemed like afterthoughts.

When did they remove Hollow World? I was collecting all of those books at the time, and don't remember them retconning HW out of Mystara....my impression was they started small with Karameikos and Glantri, then never got any further with the Mystara conversion to 2E.....but that they simply never got around to addressing all the other stuff. Or did I just get lucky and not have read the One Thing that removed Hollow World from Mystara at the time? Which I'll say is lucky because I loved HW and had all of it back then, used it for my 2E games.


On the OP: I"ll second/third Jakandor and raise everyone with the Tale of the Comet universe, another Odyssey product that was mainly aimed at providing an excuse for DMs to blow shit up in time for 3E.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;833258I don't think he's saying you did, I question the source.  Lisa Stevens may have overstated the case.  Or she could have told the truth.  The issue for me, is that I'm trying to remember anything that was Greyhawk specific that wasn't an adventure, whereas I have several 2e books on various parts of the realms, including the old Undermountain Box Set.

If someone could point me to some Greyhawk box sets or books in the 2e era, I'd appreciate it.  I'm honestly curious.

There was more 2E Greyhawk product than you remember. Greyhawk Wars boxed set followed by a bunch of modules, From the Ashes Boxed Set (and more modules), then later the revival with no boxed sets, but a bunch of modules (Return of the Eight, Greyhawk Player's Guide, The Adventure Begins, Scarlet Brotherhood, Slavers, Star Cairns, Doomgrinder, etc.)

I've been collecting 2E Greyhawk lately, and there is a lot of it.

There were the Vecna modules that also delved into a crossover with Ravenloft, too. All 2E era.

Quote from: camazotz;833416On the OP: I"ll second/third Jakandor and raise everyone with the Tale of the Comet universe, another Odyssey product that was mainly aimed at providing an excuse for DMs to blow shit up in time for 3E.

   I don't think that was the intent; Tales of the Comet was planned for release in early 1997, and wound up being one of the first products released under WotC management. If anything, it may have been meant to prime the pump for Alternity.

  The three products that were marketed as 'campaign ending/transition' items were all early 2000 releases--The Dungeon of Death (FR--kill off your characters!), The Apocalypse Stone (generic--blow up or shake up your setting!), and Die Vecna Die! (Greyhawk/Ravenloft/Planescape--shake up the multiverse!)

Quote from: Battle Mad Ronin;833120One of my first campaigns, when I was like 13 or something, was set in Ravenloft and run by an older (20s) guy from the local after-school activities center/club. He ran it out of the old AD&D box for Ravenloft. It was a blast, gothic horror vampires and sword-fighting and what have you. We players fucked up the campaign of course, we were young and stupid and had an idiot in the group whose response to everything was "my CE wizard attacks him". Still we had a good time, fondly remember that setting.

I found the D20 edition in a bookshop some years later and got all excited. Then I briefly looked through it. They had rules for halflings. And all the art was the same generic mid-fantasy shit you'd see in the worst of the early 2000s third-party D20 drivel that flooded the market at the time. Halflings in fucking Ravenloft? Guys in scale-mail(e)? Wizards throwing magic missiles? Fuck that shit, lame as all hell. Ravenloft was good becauseit had a very clear tone, gothig horror, and they fucked it up by trying to make it adhere to the worst of the blandness and streamlining that came with the 3rd ed. A terrible shame.

I wonder which one you looked at. That stuff was always there in each core campaign set, primarily because the original Ravenloft premise was that you started in some normal fantasy land and got kidnapped  by the mists into Ravenloft....so de facto the setting had to assume that anything you could play in Greyhawk or FR would be able to make its way to Ravenloft.

Even without the core conceit of "kidnapped in horror land" all of the usual fantasy stuff could be found somewhere in the Domains of dread, a byproduct of the weird domain-prisons constructed in the likeness of the dark lords' homelands. Vecna had a domain ripped from Greyhawk for a while, and Soth's domain was from Dragonlance. The "big lich" Azalin of the campaign had also been ripped from Greyhawk. However, for every "classic fantasy" region with elves and halflings there were usually a half-dozen domains with none of or very few such tropes.

Honestly though, every damned book in the 80's (even Dark Sun) without exception included all the checklist tropes because TSR didn't want to overlook any possible playable option for someone, cause that was like leaving money on the table...it was the way it was done, and the DM's job was to cut that crap out to suit to taste and make it more interesting. It just so happened that in the meat of the Ravenloft world, most of the good bits were in the modules and the gazetteers. Some of the modules from back then remain the best modules ever released (for that style of play).

Quote from: thedungeondelver;833000I'll opine al-Qadim.  I don't recall ever hearing of anyone playing a campaign in it*, nor seeing the lone dusty boxed set move from the RPG store shelf until...well wait, no, it was still there the last time I cared to look.

Also for some reason it sticks out in my head that tons of it got pulped when WotC took over from TSR, because they had tons of it still sitting in the warehouse because it hadn't sold.

...

* - now patiently awaiting 2 or 3 posts from people going NUH-UH!  I PLAYED IT!

I'm literally running a campaign in it right now. I post my session write-ups and notes on this very site.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;833424I don't think that was the intent; Tales of the Comet was planned for release in early 1997, and wound up being one of the first products released under WotC management. If anything, it may have been meant to prime the pump for Alternity.

  The three products that were marketed as 'campaign ending/transition' items were all early 2000 releases--The Dungeon of Death (FR--kill off your characters!), The Apocalypse Stone (generic--blow up or shake up your setting!), and Die Vecna Die! (Greyhawk/Ravenloft/Planescape--shake up the multiverse!)

Actually yeah you are definitely right....it was a SF add-on, not the one I was thinking of. That was an apocalypse type module (Apocalypse Stone and the others you mentioned) which provided an end of the world scenario for DMs.