D&D’s Greyhawk finally goes Community Content

Greyhawk is the second-ever campaign setting for D&D, after Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, and it was the one associated with the core rulebooks until 2008.

Only now, Wizards of the Coast has enabled third-party publishers to create and sell adventures, spell books and other content for the setting. You can find those, and the Greyhawk golden oldies, over at the DMsGuild.

At the time of writing, the top five community content Greyhawk titles are;

• Heroic Maps’ Tales from the Yawning Portal: Tomb of Horrors Battlemap.
• Tessa Morecroft’s Tessa Presents 56 Maps for Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
• Tessa Morecroft’s Tessa Presents 56 Maps for Vecna: Eve of Ruin for Roll20.
• Christopher Hamwell, Eric Von Darknoir and Angela Spencer’s Evernight. Expanding Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
• Eventyr Games’ Danger at Dunwater – a Ghosts of Saltmarsh DM’s Resource.

Notice the Vecna theme? The lich appeared first in the World of Greyhawk in David Cook’s Vecna Lives!

The DMsGuild say;

The world of Greyhawk began as Gary Gygax‘s setting for his house D&D game.

This primordial Oerth was centered on Castle Greyhawk, an infamous series of dungeons created by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. The wider world got some attention too … and it was rather different from what TSR eventually published. Gygax’s original world of Oerth (pronounced “OITH”) looked a lot like the Mid-West that Gygax lived in, with the Nyr Dyv taking the place of the Great Lakes. You can still see this Earthly basis for D&D in early products like Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975) and the Monster Manual (1977), each of which references Earthly locales.

When Gygax was asked to create the World of Greyhawk product, he was somewhat surprised that other GMs weren’t interested in creating their own worlds. Nonetheless Gygax was game … except he didn’t want to spoil his world for his own players, so he decided to move the officially published Greyhawk away from its Earthly origins.

Gygax started out with a new map. He filled two large sheets of paper after learning that was the biggest map that TSR could print. (The maps were later finalized in full color by Darlene, with the result being one of the most famous and beautiful maps in gaming.) Afterward, Gygax wrote up descriptions of the countries and locales that were found on that map, drawing from his own campaign, but adjusting facts as appropriate for the new map.

Quick Links

• DMsGuild: Greyhawk