Canonfire! Forums-viewtopic-Essential fluff sources for Greyhawk?

Thu Jul 08, 2004 6:01 pm Essential fluff sources for Greyhawk?

Just recently stumbled onto this forum, so please forgive me if this is covered somewhere and I haven't found it yet but...

When I first started roleplaying back in college some 10 years ago, my GM ran 2ED greyhawk games and I became pretty attached to the setting as a player. Since then I've gone on to run games in a handful of different systems but always in homegrown fantasy worlds, and personally devised adventures.

Now I've decided that regardless of what system I run, I want to base my games in Greyhawk. I'm getting too old and busy to do the work required for quality world building _and_ adventure creating, especially when the fantastic world of greyhawk and the old TOEE, Slavers, Against the Giants, etc are sitting out there waiting for me and my players.

Unfortunatly, I don't have ANY greyhawk materials. On top of that, a quick search on Greyhawk tells me that there are a half dozen different references out there. World of Greyhawk boxset, Greyhawk Player's Guide, Greyhawk Adventures, From the Ashes boxset, etc etc etc.

So for all you GH afficianados out there, what is/are the essential GH references I should find/buy/steal to run a game in GH? I don't care if the rules are 1e, 2e, 3 or 3.5e. I'm prone to switching off between GURPS and DnD anyway so the fluffy parts are much more important than the crunchy parts. What are the essential texts for someone planning on running campaigns (and probably long term ones) in Greyhawk.

Thanks,

James.

Thu Jul 08, 2004 6:42 pm

AD&D World of Greyhawk Boxed Set is essential. It is the world as of 576 C(ommon) Y(ear.) If you wish to follow the campaign's plot or set your campaign later in the established setting, you will need further resources.

Greyhawk Adventures has more fluff and a considerable amount of location specific magic items (armor of the Lortmills, tiger claws of the Chaykik [Tiger Nomads], etc.) It was written for AD&D but was advertised as compatible with AD&D2.

Greyhawk Wars is a stand-alone board game dealing with what is basically Greyhawk's World War. (It also conveniently establishes why crunchy bits change in the conversion to AD&D2.) The game itself is free-form, but the fluff establishes how the war progressed for plot purposes.

From the Ashes is basically the crunchy bits for AD&D2. The timeline is progressed to 586 CY. Fluff is plentiful.

Greyhawk Player's Guide new crunchy bits. Most of the fluff is recycled.

Scarlet Brotherhood has crunchy bits updating AD&D monks and assassins to AD&D2 and has lots of fluff including a basic Suel language dictionary.

Living Greyhawk Gazetteer updates the campaign to 591 CY and D&D3E. It is almost all fluff, the last few pages being the only crunchy bits and they are specifically the original character creation rules for the RPGA's Living Greyhawk campaign. As a stand-alone product, some information like weather and climate is recycled. Among the highlights are organizations that generate various exceptional classes from AD&D, specifically bards and hierophant druids from AD&D's Unearthed Arcana. I highly recommend this to players of any version of Greyhawk for just this reason.

And if you can find it, module WG8 Fate of Istus is a great travelogue of the Flanaess. Several cities are detailed as adventure locations and secrets are revealed.