favored world to game on

[S'mon]

The Wilderlands of High Fantasy although Greyhawk is a close second.

Wilderlands of course! I guess Mystara after that. Then, um, maybe FR.

[Melan]

I love DL more than FR, personally. FR is such a kitchen sink that it just doesn’t end up having a lot of meaning, to me. DL at its best is about death knights, lost cities, dragon orbs, flying citadels, elf babes, mage towers, and time travel. The problem is it’s easy to appreciate the fantasy of it, but as a world to game on (presumably in a style palatable to me and most other K&Kers), you have to rip out a bunch of bad to dig down to the good. You’d essentially end up rebuilding from the ground up, in the end merely taking inspiration from DL. It’s a lot of work. Might as well use a setting I like better, like ME or GH, or just do a complete homebrew, with all the coolness that that comes with.

I feel similarly and have likened using the Dragonlance setting to using a dictionary to pound a nail. It’d probably get it done, but there are far better tools for the job.

A friend of mine ran great game set in DL. He completely ignored canon, and did as he wished.

A long, long time ago, in the darkest days of 2nd edition, I played in a legitimately fun DragonVance game. The GM was both a Dragonlance fan and a Jack Vance fan, and while he didn't really get DL, he did get Vancian sociopathy. And so, we played on a Krynn populated by Jack Vance NPCs, playing Vance-inspired low-level scumbags. It was a very good mini-campaign, although probably not what Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman intended.

[francisca]

As a player: really whatever, as long as the DM isn't a slave to canon and/or a railroader.

As a DM: Greyhawk or Homebrew. I've run a few one-offs in Lankhmar and Hyperborea, but not enough to develop a good feel for the setting as I would run them in a campaign.

[austinjimm]

Homebrew world is Black Sabbath. Greyhawk is Rush. Forgotten Realms is Britney Spears. Dragonlance is Tiffany.

Philotomy, then what is the Wilderlands? Genesis? Talking Heads?

Homebrew is crossing the Sands of Nod astride a giant lizard to Robin Trower's "Too Rolling Stoned," then repelling an ambush of Black Dwarves on the side of Skull Mountain to Rainbow's "Kill the King," and finally, deep on the 3rd level of the dungeon, facing the flaming/shrieking Redblack Skull to Cirith Ungol's "Frost and Fire."

When you homebrew it all in there.

[francisca]

When you homebrew it all in there.

You know, I hope that if you asked people who have played with me more than a few times, they tell you it feels like "Rich's game", no matter if it is in Greyhawk, my own homebrew, Lankhmar, etc..., and no matter if I'm using AD&D, AS&SH, or my tweaked up OD&D/Planet Eris/Green-shirt-Wayne d20/d6 system.

[SimperingToad]

Homebrew mostly. BitD, I had a Greyhawk Folio, and we used that as our game world. It does hit the sweet spot for me. Just enough detail for a basic framework, but you get to decorate the house as you see fit. Unlike FR, which comes fully furnished, and you have to strip out all the trimmings you do not find palatable in order to make it your own home, which is quite a task. DL has a lot of nice ideas, and I think I could work with it once the book PCs and plots are removed. Just don't use the mods as anything but locales the players might stumble into. Might work. Middle-earth I had tried many years ago, but there was a little too much expectation of what and who were around, kinda like FR in a way. Just too well-known I suppose.

[grodog]

I was thinking [support for non-GH settings] would have been a bit more even..

We have a Greyhawk board here, and no other setting-specific boards, so I wasn't terribly surprised at the level of support for the setting here.

I liked the way the moon phases fucked magic up on Krynn when I ran a game using Dragonlance. That was about the only thing I liked besides a few magic items. I found that while I enjoyed the fiction it didn't inspire me to game the way Burroughs, Leiber, or Howard did.

I might use the moons again in a homebrew or hybrid setting but I don't have the DL Adventures book that had the table anymore. One of the books I haven't reacquired in the years since I last liquidated my collection.

I'd forgotten about that, might go back and look it up for use with Greyhawk's or ASSH's moons. ASSH's moons always remind me of the Chaos Moon from WRFP's Old World---the normal moon Mannslieb and the dark/Chaos moon Morrslieb.

Greyhawk I find intimidating. I'm uncomfortable with "making it my own"...it feels a bit like trying to take Shakespeare and convert it to contemporary slang.

Hmmm. We should talk about that sometime at NTX, Chris (or GaryCon if you make it). I'm far from a canon purist (in both directions---I'm willing to use material from later eras/editions of Greyhawk in my games too), and while I understand wanting to master all of the setting's material would be a monumental task for anyone (and certainly not a task that I've ever completed), I find Greyhawk's canon liberating in that there are large chunks of it that are so much complete drek that I don't mind never knowing anything about those, which frees me up from worrying much about the other stuff that might be of semi-marginal to useful value.

I'd like to set up a game or campaign to run in almost-historical Republican Rome...but I'm not sure how enjoyable it would be for the player. I dig on ancient quotidian minutia, my players not so much.

Have you read Glenn Rahman's roman novel, The Gardens of Lucullus (co-written with Richard Tierney)?

I ran into the same problem with Flashing Blades.

I'd still like to try this out at NTX sometime (and ideally to compare with Lace & Steel). Finding the time, though, is always the hard part....

Allan.

[Falconer]

FWIW, it took me a while to grok Greyhawk, too, at first. The WoG Gazetteer is a pretty dry listing of nations. It wasn’t until reading the Gord novels that I really felt like I began to get my bearings, and even then I felt like I was missing something, because there were references to things that had appeared in the modules, primarily T1-4, S4, WG4, G1-3, and D1-3. Finally, it was anecdotes from Gary’s home campaign that really made it all come together. So, it was a bit of a journey. But Greyhawk was always intriguing and had a cool flavor, so, it was worth it. It’s not so much that I wanted to be a purist so much as drilling down to the original author’s intent seemed the best way to find meaning in it.

I even think Ed Greenwood is far and away THE one to read if you want to grok FR. He is a shitty writer, but, at least in his writings FR feels like SOMETHING.

[ThirstyStirge]

I had heard it rumoured that Arneson (?) had taken an old, historical map of the Dutch coastline and used it to create the Blackmoor map, although the scale and topography where altered. Maybe I read that over on The Comeback Inn forum. If that's true, I'd love to see the Dutch original for comparison!

http://jamesmishler.blogspot.com/2009/1 ... -maps.html

You just earned yourself some Cool Points.
Linky bookmarked!

[T. Foster]

FWIW, it took me a while to grok Greyhawk, too, at first. The WoG Gazetteer is a pretty dry listing of nations. It wasn’t until reading the Gord novels that I really felt like I began to get my bearings, and even then I felt like I was missing something, because there were references to things that had appeared in the modules, primarily T1-4, S4, WG4, G1-3, and D1-3. Finally, it was anecdotes from Gary’s home campaign that really made it all come together. So, it was a bit of a journey. But Greyhawk was always intriguing and had a cool flavor, so, it was worth it. It’s not so much that I wanted to be a purist so much as drilling down to the original author’s intent seemed the best way to find meaning in it.

This. The World of Greyhawk is much more about a particular feel and mindset than it is about dry numbers and specific details, and that feel and mindset comes more from the modules and novels than it does from the gazetteer (which is, of course, full of dry numbers and specific details). The World of Greyhawk is a very 19th-century (or at least pre-WWI) feeling place dressed up in medieval drag. Greyhawk City is Victorian London out of Dickens, the machinations of the Great Powers are Diplomacy (and the clashes of their armies are Little Wars), the adventuring/frontier paradigm comes out of the mythic Old West, and the exploration and discovery of Lost Worlds (with their attendant heavy does of exoticism and orientalism and spiritualist hokum) come out of Conan Doyle and Burroughs and Kipling and Haggard and Richard Francis Burton. Even the medievalism itself is a 19th-century affectation, owing much more to Victorian-era romanticism than to the actual historical period.

It's not a realistic world, even as it pretends to be - there are tons of numbers and details about mundane stuff like major exports and weather patterns and historical migration patterns and types of trees and proper forms of address and lists of deities but it's all window-dressing and doesn't stand up to hard scrutiny. It's not there with the expectation that it will actually become relevant in play; it's there to provide an illusion of depth and tickle the imagination that it could be an almost-real place, even though it's not - to make it seem like the World of Greyhawk is someplace that actually exists, just out of reach.

The World of Greyhawk is a looking-glass dreamworld where, basically, all of the stories Gary Gygax read as a kid are actually true and where everything is ginned up for maximum adventuring potential, overlain with a patina of faux-plausibility. It takes a "Eureka!" moment to grok that mindset and get into that headspace, and reading the World of Greyhawk folio cover to cover probably isn't going to induce it (though re-reading it once you are there it all makes sense). Reading Gary's modules and novels might, but even there I think there's some missing key that keeps a lot of people from really "getting" it. Maybe a background in Victoriana? Not just the work of the "appendix N" authors but a familiarity with the cultural matrix in which they were formed and the stuff that inspired them as children?

Perhaps the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (released in 1911) might be something of a Rosetta Stone here. Gary always effusively praised that particular edition above any later revisions, and - since he was a high-school dropout - it's likely he picked up much of his knowledge and world-view from studying that peculiarly old-fashioned (even in the 40s-50s, when he presumably encountered it) document. Alas, I don't have any personal familiarity with that version, so I can't really say to what extent this is actually true or just something that feels like it might be true, might help explain why a mid-century American created a fictional world that seems so much of a piece with Victorian ideas and ideals.

[Flambeaux]

Hmmm. We should talk about that sometime at NTX, Chris (or GaryCon if you make it). *snip*

We should definitely make time to talk at NTRPG Con. Definitely no GaryCon for me: between school and the new job I'm beyond slammed.

Have you read Glenn Rahman's roman novel, The Gardens of Lucullus (co-written with Richard Tierney)?

I have not. I'll add it to my post-school reading list.

I hope to run FB at the Con again someday. I need to get a group running it, or find a group playing it I can learn from...once I have a bit more leisure time.

[garhkal]

As a player: really whatever, as long as the DM isn't a slave to canon and/or a railroader.

When you say 'not a slave to canon', what are you meaning?

[austinjimm]

The World of Greyhawk is much more about a particular feel and mindset...

I think this is the crux of it. I may have Greyhawk all wrong. I haven't ever read the novels, so my "feel" for it comes only from it's portrayal in module text and illustration. To me, Greyhawk sometimes comes off as this sort of high renaissance setting:


Whereas, in my game, I'm often going for more of an ancient gritty motif:

[Chainsaw]

I’m kinda going for this in my game. \m/

[Juju EyeBall]

Throw in a little Korgoth of Barbaria and that's the ticket, my man.