One of my players pointed out to me that the City of Greyhawk (WotC version) does not make "sense". He said that the High Quarter should, in fact, be within Old City and the poor areas and slums should be where the current High Quarter is.
Here is his reasoning:
1) The noblility would have been the first to have built walls around themselves while the lower class would have been outside the walls. Thus, the Old City should, indeed, be where the nobles live.
2) The poor area and slums should be where the current High Quarter is; ie. near the docks. This is where most of the warehouses and river industry would be focused. It is where the working class would toil and where all the fishy and foul smells would be from gutting fish and the like. So, the finely landscaped High Quarter, as we know it, should really be an area of lower class residences and grimy industry.
As a side note, Gary's version of Greyhawk is not immune to these criticisms either.
Anyway, I struggled to explain why Greyhawk City is designed the way it is to my player so I was wondering if anybody could help me.
One of the most valauable skills a greyhawk DM can have is the ability to make bizarre canon things have sense with post-facto arguments. Let me try my hand at this one:
The city of greyhawk was a sleepy little trading community for
long before it was a city. The low class dwellings are the oldest part of the city still extant and were at some point walled.
Much more recently, under the rule of Zagig, Greyhawk became an important trade center and true city of note. The noveu-riche foreign and local merchants leveled the hovels near the river trade district and erected their mansions near the source of the wealth.
City of Greyhawk not making sense ? Well I will try and not break into a rant but I can't guarentee it :lol
Very, very, very, very few of the official maps of town and cities produced are even in the slightest bit accurate. Let me explain, cities grow from villages and hamlets (exception being Chendl which was a planned city). So it is possible to look at a map of a city and see its evolutionary history, a bit like looking at the rings in a tree stump.
I cant remember looking at a map and being able to see this growth, which is pretty amazing when you consider that some of this cities are hundreds of years old. So basically your players are right, Greyhawk makes no sense, so errr I would say it was magic or something and then run away
I might also add that I draw maps of the real world for a living in England, and have seen every modern city and town in detail, and you can still identify the medieval heart of every one of them.
WOW. i hadn't seen those before. Excellent work Yabusama!
As for GH's correctness...the 83 Guide said the village was there first. Then a warlord built his castle on a hill overlooking the village (I assume thats the Citadel). Then the city grew from there. It's greatest spurt of growth during Zagig's administration.
So as I see it, the warlord watched over and collected taxes and whatnot from the village(Old City) and the docks area (Future River/Foreign Quarter). Once wealth flowed into the city from the Cairn hills, the Old City could afford a wall like most towns for defense. I'd say a good center of the Old City could be the present day Thieves Guild HQ. The Citadel then began attracting other influential people who wanted to build among the hills and woods like GH's ruler, eventually requiring this area to be walled off when its neighborhood began to expand and touch on the dock area.
Finally with Zagig's renaissance there was a great amount of colleges, libraries, guildhouses, etc. that sprang up between this Old City and the Citadel. It filled a void that lay between the Citadel and the lower land Old City. To bring it all together the entirity was walled together, but clearly kept its inner wall divisions along social classes. Poor, Middle Class, Upper Class.
So you could say the city evolved like any medieval city, fortress first, then associated town, then a massive development at a later stage.
Strangely this is the rough timeline of London, originally a roman fort (latter a norman and medieval one), with outlying villgaes which acted as trade centres, and then in the late medieval period a rapid expansion in size. Strange through, Greyhawk looks absolutely nothing like London in layout, although both are onrivers, have forts etc...
As for GH's correctness...the 83 Guide said the village was there first. Then a warlord built his castle on a hill overlooking the village (I assume thats the Citadel). Then the city grew from there. It's greatest spurt of growth during Zagig's administration.
One of the most valauable skills a greyhawk DM can have is the ability to make bizarre canon things have sense with post-facto arguments.
How true indeed! _________________ "It is easier to milk a cow that stands still." Tzeliobas-Aristomenes, General Cleaning, Greyhawk Construction Company.
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