Quote from: James J SkachIt's sad that I have to go back to my 1980 falling apart brown folder gazetteer. Yes, I know there are more recent versions (I have Greyhawk City and From the Ashes) - they just ain't the same for me. However, I'd guess, and it's just speculation, that if they put out another version like that - two huge maps and a sparse but relatively complete accounting of the politics, history, and geography, it would sell immensely well....

I loved the poster maps for the old Greyhawk gazetteer. However, the book itself was nearly useless as a gaming aid. When the PCs are walking across Almor on their way to the dungeon of Quesqueton, an entry that tells me Almor has 4,000 heavy cavalry, 6,000 medium infantry, and 8,000 heavy infantry, and trades in cloth and gemstones, is of practically no use to me. The entries in Greyhawk look like they were written for a political wargame, rather than as support for boots-on-the-ground D&D adventuring.

For a campaign setting to be of any use to me, I need the following:

• Some colour about the geography and flora and fauna, written at the scale that will be seen by a band of adventurers wandering around the setting.


• An outline of the political situation, including how that situation affects bands of adventurers wandering around the setting.


• Brief summaries of various settlements and communities, with particular attention paid to adventure hooks and encounters that would be encountered by a band of adventurers visiting the settlements.


• Sample wilderness encounters for each region, at the scale that would be encountered by a band of adventurers wandering around the wilderness.


• Sample lairs and adventure sites at the scale that would be encountered by a band of adventurers wandering around the setting.


• NPCs who are likely to be met by a band of adventurers wandering around the setting.

If the authors of a setting are frustrated fantasy novelists looking for a platform to demonstrate their enthusiasm for world-building, then I'll give it a miss. I'll buy your hackneyed fantasy novel if I want to pay for that kind of shit, thank you very much.

Quote from: James J SkachIt's sad that I have to go back to my 1980 falling apart brown folder gazetteer. Yes, I know there are more recent versions (I have Greyhawk City and From the Ashes) - they just ain't the same for me.

Pretty much the same feeling here, though for me it's the 1983 box, just enough fleshing out to let me run it on the fly and make what I want out of all the material without having to change or delete major pieces.

Quote from: HaffrungI loved the poster maps for the old Greyhawk gazetteer. However, the book itself was nearly useless as a gaming aid. When the PCs are walking across Almor on their way to the dungeon of Quesqueton, an entry that tells me Almor has 4,000 heavy cavalry, 6,000 medium infantry, and 8,000 heavy infantry, and trades in cloth and gemstones, is of practically no use to me. The entries in Greyhawk look like they were written for a political wargame, rather than as support for boots-on-the-ground D&D adventuring.

...snip interesting stuff...

Yeah, don't get me wrong.  It's why I said "sparse." In many ways, I'm kind of extreme past Pundit (perhaps) on this continuum in that I like that it was so sparse.  That world was open to a lot of interpretation and was slowly fleshed out over years in articles and such.

I've toyed with the idea of trying to piece together all of the individual time lines of all of the various Living Greyhawk regions to try to provide some more of the detail you're talking about - just to see what Greyhawk, as a whole, looks like at the end of this run of the campaign...

But, in general, I've got no objection to your list - we simply differ (perhaps widely) on the level of detail.

EDIT: also note (not to be argumentative, just to show how we used it) that when we walked across Almor (or wherever) we went by the random encounter tables in the DMG based on the terrain/climate/etc. But in general, I see where you're coming from that it seems written more for a game of Fantasy Risk.