Back in the 90s when I got into D&D Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms were often compared. So which one pulled you in and why?For me, It was FR . The boxed set art called to me and the little shop I brought my stuff had more FR. Once I branched put into other settings I didn't see a need for a 2nd "basic" fantasy setting and honestly Greyhawk seemed boring at the time. I understand now it's a rich setting, but at the time FR just won put as more interesting to me.What about you? Which one pulled you in and why?
Greyhawk is trash. The kind of trash you can easily bully people for liking. The only reason to spare those people is because they're likely fifty and older and it's not nice to bully the elderly.Faerun has a lot of dumb stuff, but it's also full of some outright amazing stuff that you can stumble upon by accident. Little things like a cult that mistakenly worships a Sphere of Annihilation as a god, with various levels of lipservice given to a nihilist philosophy while gathering their political enemies as "sacrifices" to throw into absolute oblivion.Or a floating city built on an inverted mountain, the last remnant of a destroyed magical empire, which only managed to survive by avoiding the empire-ending cataclysm with the entire city being transported to the Shadow Plane.Or a country of evil Wizards that actively engages in soft diplomacy and multi-layered diplomacy, with enclaves that serve as a way to spread their influence and culture while making people become dependent on their discounted magical items.Faerun has tons of dumb shit, but it also has ideas that actually make it a setting worth visiting.
>>97926300Greyhawk for me. FW was released along with 2nd edition and the TV cartoon to wrest D&D from Gygax.
>>97926550To be frank I don't give a rats ass what the TSR/ Gygax power struggle. That is behind the scene crap that most gamers at the time and even now knew nothing about.What about greyhawk as a setting calls to you over FR as a setting?
>>97926404"Full of dumb stuff" is a common issue for many things. But sometimes it's "so dumb" you just wanna roll with it lol.I do find FR to be a richer setting at lest pre 4e BS. Did you ever see any of the Arcane age stuff?
>>97926300Neither. My introduction to dnd was playing NWN in primary and thats set in FR but honestly I didn't really appreciate the setting at the time, it seemed pretty forgettable. Then in high school when I found my first tt group, we always just played in our own settings. It wasn't until years later that I joined another group and the DM there was really into some of the more interesting aspects of FR.Never got into Greyhawk. I started with 3.5e and I don't think it ever even got a sourcebook in that era.
>>97926404Can you actually give some criticisms of Gray hawk instead of just bitching?
>>97927867I will say ignore books after 3.5 If you can find the 3e FRCS it is magnificent as are many of the 2e source books. Such a lovely in depth setting
>>97927557I liked the 'Mad Max/Fallout' feel. There used to be two mighty magical empires spanning the continent, which destroyed each other in a magical war long ago. Most of the ruins scattered across the continent, as well as most of the monsters and magical artifacts, are remanants of these ancient (and later) wars.You also have the various gods, many of who created their own races, who are in an eternal battle against each other. Many of the races are in constant conflict with each other because "their creator god says so". All this gave motivations to the clerics beyond "Heal me!".The main thing I liked though was how everything was tied into Alignment. Alignment was mostly a 'Socially and religiously accepted behaviour' for certain races and areas. Some of the world (City of Greyhawk, etc) was Neutral alignment, happy just to do their own thing and not too bothered what their neighbours are doing, just as long as it didnt happen to them. Many places though were of the more exteme (Law, Chaos, Good, Evil) alignments, constanlty trying to change the world to their version of paradise and fighting their opposition and what they considered a version of hell. Alignment set the basic rules that most lived by, as well as guiding who the population would accept or chase out of town. It was balanced though, A Paladin in the LE Great Kingdom would have just as much trouble as a half orc Assassin in the Shield Lands. A party (depending on their alignment) could travel to wherever they would be welcome and fight for themselves or the factions they favoured. There was no 'Good guys/behaviour always win', it was down to the players.Most of the Ad&D rule books where created with Greyhawk in mind - the race alignments, the animosities, the magic items, the spells (named after named characters from Greyhawk), many of the classes, monsters and modules. They made sense as part of the Greyhawk setting, but often seem strange when dropped into others.
>>97927557Sorry, but this is relevent when you start a thread of two settings, one of which was created specifically to replace the other. Oh, we knew about it, many of us getting pissed off at Greyhawk no longer being supported just so the new IP owners could push a new setting, rule books and endless avalanche of splat books (over 50+?). It was the reason I avoided FR like the plague and stuck with the game system and setting I was familiar with - It might have had good points but we could see it was just a scam cash grab at the time, just like all the other later companies that started using 'kill the old to sell the new' as a sales tactic. Luckily, I still have a bunch of friends of a similar age today (though some have died), all of who continue to play the original system and setting with me. I know it isnt to good for the curent IP owners profits, but we are still having fun with what we play and know and that's the reason many of us play with it.FR may be good, but I have little experience of it. It seemed a weak copy of the previous product to me (as most successive editions tend to be) I leave other anons to argue for it.
>>97932138>Sorry, but this is releventIt really isn't.
i've only properly read Forgotten Realms 1E stuff, plus a few contemporary reviews in magazines, and i just really respect it as a setting.wasn't alive at the time, but it sounds like they faced a lot of similar problems we have today. the books and reviews went out of their way to explain there'd be NO 'canon' or 'storyline' (Dragonlance?). it's a kitchen sink setting for D&D DMs. hell, a whole region will forever intentionally be left blank (wonder how long that lasted).maybe R. A. Salvatore and those Drizz't novels changed all that, but 2E already has comic-book-y shit where the universe got reset because there's a new spell system and blahblahblah. what does that matter if it was a setting for people's actual games...? just publish as if it's for that ruleset, don't worry about the 'timeline' or which god killed which.the Grey Box is like those gazetteer books but about a whole damn world, just enough detail for the DM. want to hone in on Waterdeep and the North? great! there's a book all about that, you could run an entire Waterdeep campaign with just that. also the fold-out map + transparent hex overlay is ingenious.
I dismissed Greyhawk entirely because I thought the nation/culture names were stupid sounding
>>97926300Neither. When I got into DnD I honestly didn't know either setting even existed and thought you 100% had to build your own setting. I'm very grateful for that. I eventually learned about FR due to all the games but I also learned about all the baggage that came with it shortly after so that dampened my enthusiasm. I've never really been able to get into Greyhawk, but I respect it. It feels too much like a typical DnD setting to me, like something I could easily make myself. And that's not a bad thing at all, but it doesn't really motivate me to go out and consume lore.
>>97926404You’re sick in the head you deluded freak. You probably prefer Eberron to both like some retarded fag.>>97927557>Uhm, I actually don’t heckin’ care about the real issue, I just want to trash the OG setting for being boring!!
>>97926300Originally 1e box Forgotten Realms was better than the Greyhawk setting as depicted in its original box set. However, as the Forgotten Realms has gone on, the sheer amount of content made for it has significantly dropped the average quality. Time of Troubles had some serious issues, and from the Spellplague onwards, it's incoherent garbage. With the exception of Thay, the most interesting parts of the setting have long been de-emphasized.Greyhawk, in comparison, hasn't changed all that much. Sure, the 2e Greyhawk Wars stuff was pretty mediocre, but everything after that has basically gone back to the setting as depicted in that original box set. By virtue of more or less staying in place, Greyhawk is now far better quality than the Realms.
>>97932115Tying alignment to kingdoms is not something I like. Alignment is one of the D&D things I always cut from games.>>97932138>>FR may be good, but I have little experience of it. It seemed a weak copy of the previous product to me (as most successive editions tend to be) I leave other anons to argue for it.See to me Greyhawk always felt the weaker of the two.
>>97936228 The 4e team admitted they knew little of FR and never liked it. So they fucked it
>>97936322>See to me Greyhawk always felt the weaker of the two.Yeah, Greyhawk did have it's problems - it was released as a drip feed over a decade or two, there where modules, boxed sets and wargames, articles in Dragon, Imagine, White Dwarf and other magazines, all of which fed into the setting and developed it over time. If you weren't playing and collecting EVERYTHING, you invariably missed out on a lot of the interesting points and background. From what others told me, FR blander but was released mostly whole, so you had a good idea what it was about from the start. Greyhawk on the other hand, though very deep, had it's info scattered across countless media, has been mutated by fans and IP owners over time and is difficult to get a coherant picture of at times. I'm still searching forums for titbits today.
>>97932929I still have that transparent hex map.:)
The Grey box for Forgotten Realms is one of the best products that tsr ever put out, full stop. I liked that actual earth cultures that disappeared from our world had a presence in Faerun. I started with the Known World (tho I didn't know exactly what that was at the time) went the Greyhawk, which I did like, but it seemed more bog standard fantasy to me than Forgotten Realms when that grey box hit. It felt more epic in a lot of significant ways. I've got a lot of material from both settings and after analyzing both for 4 decades Forgotten Realms is the more interesting setting. Both settings were labors of love but Greyhawk felt like it was put together haphazardly where FR feels a bit more unified in scope. Over the years I grew to love FR but Greyhawk deserves respect if for nothing else but being the first official setting for 1e. Most d&d products owe Greyhawk for their existence.
>>97926300Forgotten Realms because that's where all good DnD vidya was set in.
>>97932115>They made sense as part of the Greyhawk setting, but often seem strange when dropped into others.My experience was opposite to that. Didn't know about Bigby, Rary, Tenser, and Melf being GH characters. Played with other people who didn't know either. No problem at all. It might have been as late as '88, after Gygax had left, before I found out about the origin of those names. Even after I found out I had no problem with the spell names being used in other settings. A lot of the time we dropped the name, like acid arrow not Melf's acid arrow. Never with Mordenkainen's Disjunction for some reason, probably because it was high level and disjunction by itself didn't mean much to us being not yet logicians or grammarians.
>>97926404>it also has ideas that actually make it a setting worth visitingJust stay well the fuck away from Cormyr. Or Waterdeep. Or Silverymoon.
>>97926300FR never grabbed me unless it was one of Ed Greenwood's lectures; but that's more of a point in favour of the man's enthusiasm.I think Greyhawk is more interesting; the history of Flanaess is more captivating than the history of The Sword Coast.
