Sat May 01, 2021 6:26 am
Re: Dragon 342 Olidammara
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| JasonZavoda wrote: |
I was scanning this article and it seemed fairly generic and without any Greyhawk links. 2 of the NPCs I found referenced in other Greyhawk products but even these seem somewhat scrubbed down as the city is called the Free City and never directly mentioned as Greyhawk that I noted. My eyesight is poor so I just had a quick scan rather than a read through.
What are Grehawkers thoughts on this article? |
Yeah, there's a line that says "Olidammara probably originated under the migrating people" and it seems likely that Sean K. Reynolds named a specific people, like the Oeridians, in his first draft and it got changed to something generic. Although, Olidammara has always been a common deity, so I actually prefer not giving him an ethnic origin.
Sean K. Reynolds' "Core Beliefs" articles share a good attention to things like aphorisms, holy texts, holidays, myths, magic items, NPCs, and other things that are useful to have. It tends toward the generic, so you can use it in non-Greyhawk campaigns and fill in the details to fit your own idiosyncratic version of Greyhawk, but you'll see the occasional mention of Oerth's days of the week, or mentions Greyhawk deities that didn't appear in the 3e Player's Handbook like Dalt and Iuz. "The Free City" was something Wizards of the Coast forced on Paizo when it was publishing the Age of Worms adventures; we know which free city they mean.
One very important bit of Greyhawk lore in the article, however, is that Sean K. Reynolds reconciled the story of Olidammara being captured by Zagyg with the idea that Olidammara wasn't one of the nine demigods. In this telling, Olidammara entered Castle Greyhawk to rescue his protégé Rudd—well, to loot Zagyg's treasure, but he tried to rescue Rudd once he realized she was there— and was turned into a carapaced animal as Gygax's telling had it. I thought that neatly "fixed" that fuzzy area of canon—I prefer Olidammara not being one of the Nine, as he was in Gygax and Kuntz's original campaign, but this ties Olidammara's own capture into the event while keeping it a separate thing.
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