I can't say that I ever particularly cared about Greyhawk or found it's flavor of kitchen sink D&D fantasy to be all that different from Forgotten Realms at the table.  The gods had different names but that didn't actually make any difference in play.  I used Greyhawk back in the 1st edition AD&D days because that's what I had.  Later, while running 2nd edition AD&D, I switched to Forgotten Realms because that's what a lot of the source material was for.  I also used other settings like Dark Sun but FR was my default setting because you could run any sort of D&D campaign somewhere in it.  You can do the same in Greyhawk.  They will probably mess up Greyhawk and I just don't care.       

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 19, 2024, 05:08:45 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 19, 2024, 03:30:47 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 19, 2024, 02:29:09 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 18, 2024, 09:50:20 PM

Quote from: Votan on May 18, 2024, 03:28:27 PM

Quote from: Omega on May 17, 2024, 02:51:52 PMConsidering how much they despise Gygax and co for being "White and Male"... The odds of them handling Greyhawk with nay respect approaches zero.

Fair. But here is the thing, if it is done well then we can use the awesome stuff. If it is done poorly, it can be easily ignored. All real play settings must diverge from the cannon setting, anyway, because at some point the world events will be different or an area that the DM fleshed out will be done differently. So it is probably a net positive.

That's not a bad take on it, but you won't find too many here that are willing to give it a fair chance. Even if it is good, they'll have to reject it to follow their narrative.

Nice No Win Scenario you created, you get the Kobiyashi Maru Award for blaming the customer. Wear it with pride.

You're really going to try and claim to be one of their customers? My point is that most of the posters here have totally written them off and are not their customers, which you either missed or...well, you do have your narrative to stick to don't you?

Well, you are right, I am not one of their customers. I wrote off WotC back when 4E came out because they delivered a shit sandwich of a game and claimed it was filet mignon. Then when customers weren't buying the crap they produced, they blamed the poor taste and the grognardism of those same customers.

Kinda like what you are setting people up for here.

If you think that the Greyhawk material will be woke shit, for you it means that people with that opinion will be "following the narrative" because they can't possibly look at the past decade and a half of WotC pushing some of the lamest crap out under the aegis of the D&D IP with older material changed to conform to "modern audiences" and predict that this will be more of the same. Instead, it has to be because the customers who don't hand over their paychecks for more WotC crap must be brainwashed sheep.

Fuck off and go try to gaslight someone else with your bullshit.

Greetings!

Good stuff, Jeff! Yeah, 4E was fucking BS. I refused to buy any of 4E, or play that dogshit set of game books.

I returned to 5E D&D, because I felt that the developers at WOTC had turned their backs on the BS of 4E, and seemed to have a kind of epiphany, in seeking to return the D&D game to more or less its cherished "Old School" roots. Most of my gaming friends also agreed, and were all eager to embrace 5E and give WOTC a second chance after the disaster of 4E. Having design consultants like RPG Pundit, Zak S, S. John Ross, and others, that I all knew and was familiar with their quality, likewise inspired my hope and a renewed sense of faith.

The early years of 5E were solid, and good. My only major complaints of the early 5E was the internal dynamic of promoting the Player Characters as being more like superheroes than medieval fantasy champions. Gradually, however, as you well know my friend, the Woke morons gained ever more control within the halls of WOTC, and the stupid train started rolling. The shitty, Woke books, the anti-White racism, the terrible tweets and other social media posts, the fucked up interviews, culminating with WOTC's attempt at reneging on the OGL, well, that was the proverbial "Straw that Broke the Camel's Back" for myself.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 19, 2024, 08:10:14 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 19, 2024, 05:35:49 PMI'm saying that for many (possibly most) of the people on this board, it must be shit or else their little worlds will implode. That's not me gaslighting, that's the effects of the continuous bombardment of anti-WotC posts on this site (and, yes, elsewhere too).

I can only speak for myself on this point, but the eventual quality of the OneD&D (or whatever they're calling it these days) DMG is largely moot to me. WOTC is one of two companies (along with Disney) where I have chosen to no longer give them any of my money, as a point of principle. In both cases, that is due to repeated acts of cultural vandalism and willful disrespect of the artistic works they hold the license to. Separate to the moral point, I also have no interest in either 5th edition or a prospective new edition of D&D.

Let's imagine the best case scenario, here: a competent, complete and tonally faithful explication of the Greyhawk setting, with the thoroughness and polish of the 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book. Let's go a step further and say that it's attached to a new edition of D&D so brilliantly designed that it instantly makes obsolete all the prior editions, the OSR, and every other fantasy RPG on the market. I would be surprised, to say the least, but it would only be a step in the right direction. It'd take several years of sensible, high quality products, sold at fair prices, and in the absence of slimy anti-consumer practices to get WOTC off of my personal shit-list.

Is all of that possible? Yes. Would I like to see it happen? Yes, actually. Unlike some other posters, WOTC is a company I used to like. But anyone whose brain is capable of pattern recognition wouldn't be holding their breath waiting for it.

Greetings!

I agree, ForgottenF!

I am certainly not holding my breath. I don't really care at all what WOTC does. Being forsworn from them as a customer and fan, it is liberating, but also melancholy to have thus gained a feeling of emotional distance. I have moved on, gaming with OSR games, and the 5E set that I already own.

Whatever WOTC does currently or in the future, to me, is no longer relevant. I refuse to support a company that hates me, and the long-standing traditions of the game. Other companies, other rule sets, have gone on to carry that banner faithfully, and with genuine respect, loyalty, and talent.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Apparently, the first edition of this game was published by Evil Hat.  Evil Hat announced an upcoming second edition a while back but this version is published by Darrington Press.  It's free of Evil Hat's usual virtue signaling screed about how all of the bad people are not allowed to play this game.  I don't know if this is because Darrington Press is publishing this version or because the minimalist nature of the game means that there is just no room for that.  It does include an X card which is baked into the setup and not as something optional.

The game itself is entirely card based.  There is a rules deck, a Queens deck and a question deck as well as the X Card.

The rules (?) deck is a series of card telling you how to set up the game and play it.  They are numbered and players are meant to take turns reading them out and following the instructions on them.  The basic setup is this.  The kingdom has been in turmoil for a long time.  The Queen is traveling to a distant power to seek their aid.  The characters (?) are the people she has brought along as her retinue.  They are the only people she is bringing with her.  She is bringing these people along because she knows they love her.  The rules (?) are very minimal.

One of the early steps in setting up is picking a Queen.  There are 13 Queens to choose from.  Each card consists of a piece of art and a title.  The titles are things like Witch Queen, Undead Queen or Computer Queen that describe the image.  This is what you get on the various Queens.  The players interpret who they think the Queen is based on this.    The images are ambiguous enough that different players might have very different ideas about who she is.  The Queen isn't really a character though everything revolves around her.  No one plays the Queen but the questions in the questions deck revolve around her.   

Next we come to the questions deck which is the meat of the gameplay (?).  Players take turns drawing cards from the questions deck.  Most of the consist of a statement follow by an often very loaded question.  A lot of it is stuff like "The Queen trusts you, but no one else in the royal court does. Why?".  The player can then either answer the question or pass.  They can also, by the rules as written, invoke the X card and remove that question from the game.  The next player can either answer that question or draw a new one.  These are essentially improv prompts.  This is the gameplay.  All of it. 

Part of the setup involves removing a specific question card from the deck.  The Queen is being attacked.  Do you defend her?  After the question deck is shuffled, the card is placed either about halfway down or in the bottom third depending on how long you want the game to run.  Drawing this card signals the end of the game.  Everyone answers it and then the game is over.  The further down it gets placed, the longer the game.

You may wonder why I have sprinkled question marks here and there.  It's I am not sure if these terms, as usually used in ttrpgs, even apply here.  There are no rules beyond reading the cards in order and following the instructions.  There is no resolution mechanic.  It's entirely narrative.  There are no characters in the normal sense.  There are no character sheets or stats.  Character is more of an emergent property that arises from people answering the various questions than anything else.  There is no gameplay in the conventional sense.  I'm not sure that this is actually a ttrpg.  It's very simple to play.  I have explained pretty much the entire game in this review.  It's easy to teach because there really isn't anything to learn.  You just read the cards in order and do what they say.  There is no GM and no prep at all.  The short version of the game is supposed to last 30 minutes.  I suspect that the actual play time will be largely determined by how voluble the players are.   

Roll20 implementation
I bought this game on the Roll20 platform.  There's just one problem.  The game requires you to remove a certain card from the deck, shuffle the deck and the put that card back in a specific part of the deck.  The problem is that there is no way to actually do that least step in Roll20.  This is a problem because the placement of that card determines when the game will end.  Darrington Press ported the physical version over to the Roll20 VTT without doing anything to adapt the game to the platform.  I'm not sure how such an obvious problem could have gone unnoticed if they did any testing on the Roll20 implementation at all.  Even a single test game would have made it obvious.  Roll20 has sent Darrington Press a message about the problem with a suggestion to revise the instructions so they can actually be followed on the Roll20 VTT.  We'll see if Darrington Press does anything to fix this issue.             

Quote from: Vic99 on May 19, 2024, 09:31:16 PM

Quote from: Lurker on May 19, 2024, 06:15:08 PMLet us know when it is released. I run a mash up of Call of Cathluh & Delta Green for my daughters periodically, and am always on the look out for a good adventure to use.

Thanks!  Since you use Delta Green, it's set in the 1980s.  Characters are thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail.

Any suggestions for making a forest ranger profession in Delta Green?

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 19, 2024, 08:33:57 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 16, 2024, 10:21:45 PMThe answer to this depends on how one defines magicians. For all of the middle ages, most peasant villages had some kind of wise man or cunning woman, who did folk magic. They were generally valued by the people; and contrary to the claims of some modern wiccans or whatever, they absolutely considered themselves to be Christians (at least after the very earliest part of the middle ages).

Complicating this is the fact that modern Wiccans are rather prone to making false and rather outlandish claims about witches and witchcraft in the Middle Ages.  One of them is buried in the phrase modern Wiccans.  This implies that there was such a thing as ancient Wiccans.  This fits in with the claims made by some Wiccans that Wicca is the survival of some Pre-Christian European tradition.  This is simply false.  All Wiccans are modern Wiccans.  Wicca is a modern practice invented in the 1950s by a guy named Gerald Gardner aka Scire.  The ancient coven that supposedly inducted him was pure fabrication.  He made it all up.  There are some rather outlandish claims about the persecution of witches by the Church in the Middle Ages too.  People talk about "The Burning Times" when millions of witches were supposedly burned by the Catholic Church.  Supposedly, so many witches were burned that the smoke blackened the sky.  This claim is, of course, absurd.  Some Wiccan authors, like Scott Cunningham, are honest about the origins of Wicca while others still promote these falsehoods. 

Then again, there are people who still promote Margaret Murray's work as if it had any validity at all.

As demonstrated by European fairy-tales, witches were originally not conceived to be human at all, but cannibalistic monsters/demons who looked like elderly women. "Witch" and "hag" were thus synonymous.

Quote from: David Johansen on May 16, 2024, 07:55:52 PMI think part of the problem is that many of these writers and commentators are ashamed that they like and play D&D and have to tear it down to show they are really grown up adults with adult attitudes and understanding.

What is funny is that there are plenty of notable conservatives like Michelle Malkin who are not in the least embarrassed by enjoying Dungeons & Dragons.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1772229319511213

One thing I have noticed about modern CoC scenarios is that a lot of them seem to be built entirely around one-shot play.  They are written assuming that players will be playing the provided pregens or characters built specifically for this scenario.  There is very little allowance for using existing characters without significant rewriting by the GM and, usually, a credulity straining contrivance or two.  This is fine for one-shot play at a convention but it limits their usefulness in ongoing campaigns.

On that note, include multiple hooks that can be used to pull in characters. 

Include a player map.  Lots of scenarios will give you one map with everything clearly labeled.  These can't be shown to players without a lot of extra work editing them or just asking players to ignore that arrow pointing to the secret door.

   

Quote from: jhkim on May 20, 2024, 02:19:00 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 19, 2024, 05:08:45 PMIf you think that the Greyhawk material will be woke shit, for you it means that people with that opinion will be "following the narrative" because they can't possibly look at the past decade and a half of WotC pushing some of the lamest crap out under the aegis of the D&D IP with older material changed to conform to "modern audiences" and predict that this will be more of the same. Instead, it has to be because the customers who don't hand over their paychecks for more WotC crap must be brainwashed sheep.

Your taste is totally valid - if you hated the past 15 years of D&D (4th ed and 5th ed), that's fine.

I recently wrapped up my D&D(5th) campaign of the last 1.5 years, and I'll be taking a break from D&D for a while. I haven't bought any WotC product for over a year, and I won't be getting the next edition.

---

However, having been on this board a while, I remember how RPGPundit consulted for and endorsed 5th edition - even including explicitly endorsing the LGBT inclusion paragraph in the Player's Handbook. He wasn't alone in this. D&D5 has been massively successful commercially and seen a huge increase in visibility of D&D in television, movies, and online. It is also the second longest-lived of D&D's twelve editions - except only AD&D1.

D&D5 book sales have dropped recently as the new edition was announced, but every edition has seen sales drop in the years after a new edition. Eight years after AD&D1 was released, TSR was bankrupt with massive debt and laid off 75% of its employees.

This doesn't obligate anyone to like 5th ed, but it makes it hard to claim that WotC is an objective failure that hates its players. I think it's a soulless money-grubbing corporation, but that's true of most big companies eventually.

If you think that the only reason that D&D book sales has dropped is because a new edition is coming out and not that the OGL has been threatened by WotC, that the latest modules were pandering crap (magical coffee shop? WTF?), that what was a game is now being pushed as a lifestyle brand (D&D fashion and shoes anybody?), that the company holding the IP views its customers as just paychecks to be looted, that any legacy product must be changed for "modern audiences" (that iconic male fighter facing a dragon was actually a woman! tits!), and is willing to send thugs to reviewers homes (Pinkertons for MtG!); then you are not just being willfully ignorant, but gaslighting as much as HippyDerp is trying to. Fuck off already.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 19, 2024, 05:35:49 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 19, 2024, 05:08:45 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 19, 2024, 03:30:47 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 19, 2024, 02:29:09 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 18, 2024, 09:50:20 PM

Quote from: Votan on May 18, 2024, 03:28:27 PM

Quote from: Omega on May 17, 2024, 02:51:52 PMConsidering how much they despise Gygax and co for being "White and Male"... The odds of them handling Greyhawk with nay respect approaches zero.

Fair. But here is the thing, if it is done well then we can use the awesome stuff. If it is done poorly, it can be easily ignored. All real play settings must diverge from the cannon setting, anyway, because at some point the world events will be different or an area that the DM fleshed out will be done differently. So it is probably a net positive.

That's not a bad take on it, but you won't find too many here that are willing to give it a fair chance. Even if it is good, they'll have to reject it to follow their narrative.

Nice No Win Scenario you created, you get the Kobiyashi Maru Award for blaming the customer. Wear it with pride.

You're really going to try and claim to be one of their customers? My point is that most of the posters here have totally written them off and are not their customers, which you either missed or...well, you do have your narrative to stick to don't you?

Well, you are right, I am not one of their customers. I wrote off WotC back when 4E came out because they delivered a shit sandwich of a game and claimed it was filet mignon. Then when customers weren't buying the crap they produced, they blamed the poor taste and the grognardism of those same customers.

Kinda like what you are setting people up for here.

If you think that the Greyhawk material will be woke shit, for you it means that people with that opinion will be "following the narrative" because they can't possibly look at the past decade and a half of WotC pushing some of the lamest crap out under the aegis of the D&D IP with older material changed to conform to "modern audiences" and predict that this will be more of the same. Instead, it has to be because the customers who don't hand over their paychecks for more WotC crap must be brainwashed sheep.

Fuck off and go try to gaslight someone else with your bullshit.

You're not at all following what I'm saying. I'm not saying it will be good (though it might be), I'm saying that for many (possibly most) of the people on this board, it must be shit or else their little worlds will implode. That's not me gaslighting, that's the effects of the continuous bombardment of anti-WotC posts on this site (and, yes, elsewhere too).

I agreed with the poster that said he'd wait and see how the new Greyhawk material pans out. If it's good, great. If not, he'll ignore it. My agreement that he should make up his own mind isn't gaslighting at all...

But you go on with your narrative...

That bolded part is you continuing to try and gaslight....