You're spot on. The Realms is basically "You Will Never Be This Cool: The Campaign Setting". Every little mayor of every little podunk town seemingly had unique, super duper special powers and abilities that the players would NEVER be able to emulate or achieve. You couldn't swing a dead vrock without hitting three servants of Mystra that are 20th level plus casters in at least one field and probably multiclassed to hell and back to boot...and all of which were written with the angry GM in mind ("Oh, what's this? You punched the barkeep because he was being a dick to you? That was the Simbul's favorite barkeep! Hope you like Time Stop flavored Delayed Blast Fireball suppositories!"). I loved the rules info that you could cannibalize, and the spells and items, but the Realms from late 1E through the entirety of 2E was absolutely terrible in terms of something to play. 3E was much better, because the NPCs were running on the same rules sets as the PCs were and there was a conscious decision to undo most of the GMPC stuff in the Realms by codifying it and making it playable as opposed to living in someone's fanfic. That obviously went out the window with 4E and onwards.
A friend of mine described the problem with The Forgotten Realms as "They had a bunch of writers work on parts, and every writer imagines that they are writing about the most badass part of the world."
I have always loved Greyhawk because it was so open to adding your own flavor to it, unlike The Realms which seems too set in place and can’t be changed from what is published.
The beauty of the Realm when it first came out was there wasn't all that lore. There were lots of wide open spaces with nothing but the DMs imagination to fill them up. Many supplements and novels later, all of that changed. In Greyhawk you have fairly stable kingdoms where most of the lands are at least claimed by some overlord and where geography helps provide natural borders between these varied realms. Early on, the Realms felt like it was a lot more unsettled, where there are numerous wide open spaces, much like migration era Europe after the population collapse of the late Roman Empire. Greyhawk felt like it was more set in the high or late middle ages. Again, countless supplements and novels later, all of that changed. For our little group in the late 1980s, this was a matter of taste and what sort of flavor of campaign world you were after. Both were fun to adventure in, and no we didn't feel constrained by what TSR published, especially if we had already developed a given area on our own.
I kinda liked the bits I saw of the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting too, the maps are what really sold me on that one, gloriously messy street plans that felt a lot more real than the Greyhawk ones in a way, but that said Greyhawk was always my gotto setting.
In FR every innkeeper is a retired 9th level thief with a +3 short sword under the bar. Every bouncer is a 7th level fighter wearing gauntlets of ogre power and swinging a +4 club.
One another difference - Forgotten Realms was heavily promoted while Greyhawk was pushed to the side. When I was younger I thought Greyhawk was generic and boring. My favorite setting (and ruleset) in my elementary and high school years was (BECMI) Mystara. When I started high school I was truly introduced to AD&D and for AD&D I preferred the settings of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms (yes - too many products!) and Ravenloft. But the real problem with Greyhawk was its lack of promotion. I read tons of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun novels when I was younger. Greyhawk: 1 Rose Estes novel (which if I recall I didn't even finish) and 1 post-TSR Gord The Rogue novel. There weren't that many novels out there and they were hard to find. It also wasn't promoted enough in the Dragon and Dungeon magazines which I bought at the time. This would've been from 1988 to 1994 so I'm guessing it had to do with the fallout of booting Gary Gygax from TSR in 1985. Now that I know more about Greyhawk (and a lot of that is thanks to the Greyhawk Grognard blog!) I truly appreciate the setting and realize my earlier impressions of it were wrong.
Agreed Greyhawk was less known, and the underground nature of it made it even better. It was for the truly dedicated and people who read Dragon and such. There were also novels before Rose Estes and Gygax's Gord series that were published outside TSR, that were set in Greyhawk. TSR official novels came out following the success of Dragonlance novels / and or contemporaneously. But overall Greyhawk was less understood. But also TSR back then had not evolved to their line of thinking that the realm people played in had to be a world fleshed out and copyrighted. TSR back then was promoting copyright infringement and merged worlds with Moorcock's Elric pantheon and Lankhmar pantheon on the Fiend Folio etc. The idea that the world should be fleshed out and copyrighted was an evolution of thought that was developing with the Gygax vs Arneson and TSR takeover and boot of Gygax days.
The early Realms stuff by Greenwood himself (the '80s Dragon articles, first boxed set, FR1, etc.) really is something special. Shortly after he sold the rights, however, the outside interference and inconsistent tone all those freelancers brought really tanked it creatively. To me, the history of the published setting as a whole is a cautionary tale about what can go wrong selling off your passion project for corporate exploitation. Personally, I disregard everything from the "Time of Troubles" onward. If there are nuggets worth using in the mountain published after that, they're likely not worth the time and effort to dig out.
I found The Realms over-magicked. City guards with magic armor and weapons? Powerful Mages everywhere. I prefer Greyhawk. Magic and high level characters were much less common. Don't even get me started on The-Drow-Elf-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named! 🙄😁 Sometimes less is more, like Gary's style. I don't need to know everything about everyone in a setting. That's my premise as a DM to create my own stuff and make it mine.
Greyhawk was the first, and designed as a framework where a DM and the players could fill it in, change it, twist it, add their own flavor, and just run with it. Characters aren't usually super-powerful and ultra-high levels in Greyhawk. You had to work hard and be lucky to get to high level. I began playing in 78/79, with years taken off at times (life occurs), and only had one character that made double digit levels. You always had the thought in the back of your mind that your character could die AT ANY MOMENT! The adrenaline rush of skating past disaster was a huge plus. Even when you didn't survive, it was often a cool story (fell for a Ring of Delusion, failed a saving throw vs Centipedes, etc) that we would talk about for years. I will say that I liked a fair number of the FR novels. As far as Greyhawk, Gygax's early Gord novels and the Paul Kidd Justicar novels were the best of the bunch, and were highly entertaining. I think you pretty much nailed the differences in this video. Excellent job! Looking forward to the next one.
One of the best things about Greyhawk vis-a-vis the Realms is that the bad guys seem to be slowly winning, at least in the big picture. But it's not some Tolkienesque/Manichean grand struggle, but rather a metastasizing unpleasantness, with Iuz, the House of Nealax, Vecna, the Pomarj, the Horned Society, the Scarlet Brotherhood, Tharizdun, the giants and drow, and Erythnul-only-knows how many other baddies (speaking of which, Erythnulites, Hextorites, Incabulites) all acting not only independently but against one another. Throw in all the elder dragons, beholders, demon princes, and literally 100% of all the potential Realms baddies, but like 20% of the good guys, and they're a lot lower level. Like, FR has Elminster, but in the late 6th century (post Co8, which most campaigns are), WoG has ... uh ... Lashton? Mightiest mage in the forces of the mightiest good kingdom, will get back to you when he figures out 9th level spells.
I am a fan of the Forgotten Realms. Back in the stone age (ie 1e days) I did of course get my hands on the greyhawk boxed set. I was fascinated by having locations for the modules available at the time. I found the setting information okay, mostly vague mostly "medieval" style stuff. I was 14 at the time...and honestly most of my games were chop up the monster and take his stuff. Oh the good old days lol. It was not long after when I discovered the 1e gray box of the forgotten realms. This boxed set was full of flavor and written in a way that "adventure" ideas spilled forth from the pages. I was hooked on the Realms after that. It also helped that the setting had a huge selection of novels available. I always made sure my players new that we were playing in my version of the Realms and things may or may not be as dictated in ""canon". Something that I still do today !
Like Antony said, the Realms were just overwhelming. I liked the realms boxed set, but when they started detailing everything, they lost me. I ran a few of their adventures, but changed them to be placed in Greyhawk. I think the Realms are what to aspire to with your own game, detail as you go that is, but for a setting, you can't beat the minimalist approach of the Greyhawk setting. In my games, I have tried to start off with few details, and build up to a FR level of description as I go. Start small and work up to massive. That's much easier to accomplish in the Greyhawk setting. Plus, as you said neither DM or Player can say, "hey that's not what sourcebook "x" says" because you are literally writing the sourcebook as you play.
Incidentally, I've long had a pet theory that Ed Greenwood's status as a Canadian contributes to the Realms being a generally nicer, cleaner place where there's a good chance the powers that be in places like Waterdeep really do have your best interests in mind. An extremely Canadian outlook, no? Meanwhile, you have Americans like Fritz Lieber and Gary Gygax using the gritty, graft-ridden likes of Chicago as the models for their fantasy metropolises. ;)
You say that, but being Canadian myself I tend towards the more historical end of things in my setting with cities & realms wildly differing in tone and culture.
Gritty is the word I’ve always felt described the Greyhawk setting best. It will always be my favorite. I loved a lot of things in the FR setting, some of which I introduced to my GH game, but overall I’ve never been a FR fan. It’s too safe and fluffy. I need the edginess and the grit of Greyhawk.
I just finished running a game in the Savage Frontier of Forgotten Realms. It was not safe...though the snow might have been fluffy. :P The frontier is one place in FR that feels more Greyhawk like to me, and I love the nordic feel the Northmen and Uthgardt have - both of which were front and center in the campaign.
One of the best grognards yet. Whole heartedly agree, Greyhawk was and is a shell world waiting for YOUR imagination and your players actions to shape and fill that magical realm of fun and adventure. The Forgotten realms was a game you played in. No real personal connection because everything is layed out for you. Every time you change something you have to follow the trail and change everything else downstream to make it mesh. You spend more time trying to avoid continuity errors rather then making YOUR fantasy realm. Greyhawk is where i play, and i unabashedly steal good ideas, people and things from Fogotten realms and find a home for them in the Dungeons and Dragons world....Greyhawk.
Only came across this video now, but thank you so much for putting into words the same thing that I've felt for many, many years. Started playing in '85 and picked up the original Forgotten Realms box set in '87, I think it was, and immediately fell in love with the setting. I was only aware of Greyhawk because one of my players had that box set and was constantly touting the virtues of that world over FR. Being an initially lazy DM, I loved that FR had so many things already detailed for you because it took a lot of the work out of answering questions for players, and the profusion of sourcebooks and adventures was a virtual smorgasbord of options for things to do and places to go. For me, the problems began when all the novels started to pour in. While I loved the Moonshae and Icewind Dale trilogies, I kinda wish they had stopped there. It was great reading stories about places on the map and featuring some of the npcs in the game materials, but as more and more novels got published, it became a runaway train of trying to keep up with all the changes, and somehow trying to incorporate them into the timeline of my campaigns. In other words, it was nigh on impossible. I think I got as far as the events of the Avatar trilogy and the fall of the gods before I checked out, unable to keep up and also unwilling to chart my own course because my players read those books too and it became difficult to keep anything a surprise. Same was true for Dragonlance and how all the events there were wrapped around the companions from the original novels, followed by a couple hundred subsequent books that charted Krynn's course for you rather than letting DMs do what they wanted without fear of contradicting all the ongoing history. In many ways, playing in the Forgotten Realms and Krynn felt like trying to run a campaign in Tolkien's Middle-earth, with all the incredible weight of established lore and history hanging over your head like an executioner's axe if you stepped out of line. With 5e, I think WoTC has kinda bungled FR because while they've kept all the history, they largely ignored just about everything other than the Sword Coast, or perhaps that's their way of saying the rest is still there, we just won't touch it so that you can? Anyway, I'm really hoping that the whatever they try to do with Greyhawk for 5.5 is a little better than their most recent attempts at reviving older settings (Spelljammer, Dragonlance, Planescape), which has been a pretty sorry affair so far. For all of their flaws, I do really miss TSR sometimes.
Hey Grognard! For me it'll already be Mystara. But I also grew up with Greyhawk also, and I tend to bring some AD&D adventures i into that one. Thanks for to our content.
Years ago I always wanted Greyhawk to be filled in more, and then as they did I realized it was lessened the more it was filled in. The great strength is the framework. My campaign took the cipher that is Keoland and made it our own, which was better than if we had a "product" for it. When the detail gets too dense, it is like playing a novel, which just isn't fun (cough... Dragonlance). We felt fine with countries breaking apart in civil war or changing alliances because of the sense of openness and evolution as evidenced by the Dragon updates on troop movements, etc. I also agreed about the heterogeneity and anomolies of Greyhawk being a strength. It allows for a much wider range of play. Thanks for this!
Greyhawk is what you get when Leiber meets Moorcock over at Tolkien's place, and then after they leave, Rowling comes over and that's Forgotten Realms.
WoG is older, and closer to my heart since I started with it. Any time a module or a book filled in a bit of the world, or even an old Dragon article, it was squeezed for information. FR, as you say, just has so much info, that it doesn't feel special.
I like the 1E Boxed set for Forgotten Realms, even in through most of 2E. I wouldn't call the Realms organic, lots of things have been shoehorned in since 1E. From Moonshaes to more recently Tortle colonies, lots of things were popped in. That said, Greyhawk is just cooler.
Even in the original boxed set several things were added to Ed Greenwood’s version of the realms, by TSR. Bloodstone area, Phalan, pretty sure the Moonshae area was added, those are off the top of my head. It definitely wasn’t organic as described.
great video. i took more inspiration from greyhawk directly from my current campaign than the realms. i call them these days ''the remembered realms'' because they just use the damn sword coast.
The thing I always loved about Greyhawk is the sense of global instability, there are areas of the world map that are blatantly owned by "less civilized" types and the "good guys" don't really have enough control of their own territories to go traipsing over and do anything about it (we clearly looking at you Iuz) and that potential for lawless chaos on such a scale facilitates ANY kind of adventure hook ya wanna roll with. Evil doesn't necessarily have to stay in the shadows to survive, it has home bases. Also the potential for PC's long term to attain lands of their own is an open horizon and that level of gaming where siege wars can potentially result between a PC controlled army and an army of demihumans can totally build up in the setting without any major story shifts for the most part. Essentially if Khelben Blackstaff lived on Greyhawk he'd be way too busy with his own problems to go solving the problems of the PC's so adventuring becomes so much more valid a "career choice"
I hear so many people complain that Hazards-of-the-Bro doesn’t make material for settings like Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Mystara, and others, but I consider that a good thing, seeing what they have done to Forgotten Realms. I like a framework where I can fill in the blanks as opposed to a setting that requires dozens of sourcebooks.
Currently running a lot of old greyhawk modules in the forgotten realms for my players right now. The two kind of combined really fits my and my players style and it’s super enjoyable.
I believe those are facts - that the Realms were conceived as a literary world and adapted later to D&D. Greyhawk was always a game world, which explains its slightly funky, edgy, anything can happen feel. I was always a little disappointed in FR as TSR's 'official' world.
That's not what I understand. Forgotten Realms was intended as a new setting for TSR DnD modules and novels after Gary got / was getting the boot. Ed Greenwood was more or less the loremaster of TSR after Gary was booted ..GG still had the rights to his novels and intended on and did destroy the world of Greyhawk after putting out four? More books. The GG might write more things to conflict with canon, who controlled the canon? TSR flipped everything to Forgotten Realms. Darkwalker on Moonshae I think was the first book? It may have predated the FR modules and Gary's departure...but the TSR plan to boot Gary and flip worlds was being cooked up by writers working for TSR when Darkwalker was published is my understanding. Perhaps Grognard can throw some info down here to correct us if we are wrong on the histrionics?
Major lean towards the World of Greyhawk. I'm a bit biased because I grew up in the late 70's and 80's and the Greyhawk setting inspired hundreds of hours of adventuring fun for me.
It's so frefreshing to hear a Greyhawk fan compliment Ed Greenwood and the Forgotten Realms, because there is so much (unnecessary) vitriol on the internet. You don't have to hate one because you like the other. I prefer Gygaxian Greyhawk for my campaigns, but there is a lot I like about Ed Greenwood's work also and I've converted some of his stuff for use in my campaign. I also like my player characters to be the "heroes of the realm" without a lot of high level NPC's around.
Lol I sort of took the opposite approach. I like the mythology and general layout of the Realms but I like the "adventurers are not something common" flavor of Greyhawk.
Amen to this. Filling in the map and having over powerful NPCs casting shadows the PCs have no chance of competing with isn't my bag. Both Dragonlance and later edition of FR are very guilty of this. The original FR hardback and box set were great.
They add a new continent, every so often, and it is unmapped until the DM maps it. In the latest couple of Editions, they wiped out the two oldest sections of Ed Greenwood’s world, the part that was Egypt and Sumerian based, because they thought that there was not enough interest in them. The reason that Greyhawk is so empty is that no authors were interested enough in it to set their novels there. Ed Greenwood was interested in telling stories, whereas Gary Gygax was just interested in playing his games there. If he wasn’t there, he let it stay empty.
Ths is perhaps too optimistic, but maybe the upcoming Vecna adventure will reintroduce Greyhawk. I also find running in the Realms stressful due to the extensive lore. I am new to the game, having dmed for my daughters during lockdowns. I don't have a lot of background and I don't want to screw anything up! Glad I am not alone in this.
With Baldur's Gate 3, sadly the FR popularity over Greyhawk is only going to worsen. It's sad because 3rd edition's launch was when I started. I grew up with it.
If you can't choose which you want just do both, shove a gate between the two settings somewhere .. Or have Ningauble introduce himself and announce he's decided to become their patron and he has a job for them, if they'd just caret to step through this shiny arch hanging in the air they'll find themselves within a days journey of where he needs them to be, then anytime you want top switch things out for the other setting just have him show up again with another little job for them.
Great comparison video, focusing on the "fleshed out" vs "bare bones" approaches to pre made fantasy worlds. I like Greyhawk a lot more, like a whole lot, the lore being things to build off. I always thought of Forgotten Realms as a fully fleshed out Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and there are a lot of similarities between the two, like FR was Greenwood's take.
I got the Forgotten Realms grey box back in the day, and it never it never fired my imagination like Greyhawk did. Maybe it's apt that Greyhawk is in a gold box and Forgotten realms in a grey box...? I think you're correct Joseph - just enough description in the gold box to fire the imagination and too much detail of Forgotten Realms to take in. Recently I ran Ghosts of Saltmarsh in 5th edition and part of the adventure was going to Niole Dra to meet with King Scotti himself. I had him as a battle-hardened Ranger but also a conservationist, personally directing the re-wilding of the Royal Gardens, and sleeping outside with his animal companions, albeit driving his entitled daughters nuts while the Queen looked on lovingly. I could see it all vividly in my mind just from the economical description.
Some other key differences... 4. Greyhawk is physically larger (map), yet has far more countries, cultures, and areas. 5. Greyhawk is less detailed. The main FR maps show roads and key cities and a level of detail which almost assumes there are no side roads, towns, villages, etc. Some pretty small stuff is shown on the FR maps(s) which are not on the Greyhawk map. This is often seen in FR modules (I remember RPGA, Living City days) where like three cities have most of the modules. 6. It is easier in Greyhawk to blow up a few hexes and play in it without 'disturbing' anything. You can put a town of 1,000 people in a hex, roads, small lakes, etc. 7. Greyhawk has more pseudo-real world references. You can think of people or countries in terms of historical Earth, even if different. I've found this to make running places easier -- you use your real world Viking knowledge for the Snow Barbarians or say Mongol history for the Wolf Nomads. I've seen this play out in Living Greyhawk but Living City did feel more generic. 8. LG worked better in a shared campaign setting than Living City. I never made the mental switch to FR. I didn't see the point to it. It does seem to rely too much on things outside of just a setting book. I never considers Dragonlance a setting as it was tied to closely to books and a really fixed story modules and characters. Arcanis is my second favorite setting -- more political, interesting races/classes, etc.
Best way I can put it is that Greyhawk feels like Gary & co put their home campaign in a box, and Forgotten Realms is an actual product. With the pros and cons that come with that distinction. FR gives you more lore, more areas, more *stuff*, but it feels a bit like a marketing manager okayed every page.
Thanks Grognard! Maybe if Jim Ward’s book was a boxed set like Ed Greenwood’s Gray Box, there would be a larger following. BECMI kids who were introduced to 2nd Edition by way of comic books or a friend, loved them boxed sets!
Very good video as always. I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I prefer Greyhawk over The Forgotten Realms due to the fact that Greyhawk is just a perfect campaign world setting for the DM to incorporate and make their own whereas The Forgotten Realms has way to much canon to it and leaves very little if any room for the DM to make it their own.
Funny you mention Keoland being sparse on official details and information. I picked it to begin my Campaign nearly five years ago. I’ve been able to enjoy adding my own details as well as tracking down information and little details from your blog and other greyhawk communities. This is something I have never felt comfortable doing with Forgotten Reams. It is a blast having a foundation and rich history to underpin my ideas and campaign on. Great video as usual. Looking forward to more. Oh and I know you worked on the areas beyond the Flanaess. So any future videos on the likes of Zindia, Nippon, and the celestial imperiums etc would be awesome. I also enjoyed your video on the Flanaess past before the great kingdom and the twin cataclysms
I started with greyhawk and will always be a favorite, but with forgotten realms because it is more whole cloth if you are just throwing a quick thin together to do with kids over school break for example, you can just pick it up and go
Having DMed and played in both settings, I always had a feeling that the Greyhawk world was a bit more designed as a fantasy world with an eye at not getting too far from possible realism while the Forgotten Realms were designed more as a place to play a specific game. I mean Gygax even had plotted out mass migration routes of humans as they populated the world in the far past.
You must be in my head!! I've been doing a deep dive into 1e Forgotten Realms this week. I've been a Greyhawk fan since the 1983 Box and never played or read the Realms. The 1e Campaign box set, and the 1e Savage Frontier are great tools, I'd argue on par with the 1983 Greyhawk box. Also, by just using those two sets only, you bypass 30 years of lore.
I never gave Forgotten Realms a fair chance. Gygax was kicked to the curb and suddenly TSR was shoving what appeared to be a Greyhawk replacement setting down our throats. I did buy the gray box and a few other items like Kara-Tur but that's it. I resented it, or rather what it stood for. No, that's not fair to Ed Greenwood, and we all wish the chips had fallen differently, but they didn't.
Video does a very good description of describing the difference between the two, I have dabbled with both setting, but mostly did my own stuff, ( as a 1st ed teen, mostly worldless jumping from cave to cave, trying be unable to get my others to embrace a world, then purchasing FR as it came out, and still unable to get a "world" interest, and latter using my modification of my brothers world, which at least somewhat irked him I think when I made changes and additions. being away from the game from ages and now getting back in, I am highly drawn to the concept of Hexcrawling, but not quite able to make it happen. While Greyhawk is much more suited for such, it not really perfect either. I currently sitting wanting to get stuff going again, and most likely going to go to to the create your own. I also wargame in 15mm using battlesystem rules, and starting to tend towards just running large battles using a slightly modified 1st Ed AD&D rules, which is really what all those hard cover books are really about, they are more for mass combat, then RPG, and that is the reason SO MANY PEOPLE have issues with them, as they think they are for RPG not RPG and Table Top Wargaming in sort of a TableTop MMO. While FR is much worse, Greyhawk does have lots of material that one must be familiar with, and can easily do thing "wrong" for those who have read it all. but since FR is the Current default, there are a lot more people familiar with FR then GH now days, to it is less of a issue.
A fun thing with the high magic feel of Forgotten Realms... it might be more tied to earlier editions (2e, 3e) as 5e seem to try to dial back magic items in a big way. "Plus" items only go to +3 and those are really rare and limited to the highest tier of play. Also attunement is now a thing, which limits the number of items you can have. So the question is if the game and the setting has grown apart a little... D&D is still "high magic" compared to some other systems but 5e is still trying to limit it a little.
Thematically I always felt that FR was more about the conflicts between the gods and their past deeds, while Greyhawk gives me more of a "Mortals vs Demons" vibes. I mean Iuz is half-demon and his lover was a demoness, who controlled the Temple of Elemental Evil (or was that added with the PC-Game? Don't remember). So while the feeling of Greyhawk is more low fantasy, it also gets more cosmic through the attacks of outsiders, while the gods of the realms are basically part of every day life.
Greyhawk: "You're just a bunch of dudes. Go explore or something idc" Forgotten Realms: "You're all god-like wizards, but don't you DARE leave the Swordcoast"
A lot of the Forgotten Realms aren't really very detailed, just the Moonsea Region and Sword Coast regions are detailed! Greyhawk is forever tied to Gary Gygax, which is why it got stuck on the back burner! I prefer Greyhawk over Forgotten Realms, but my favorite settings are 1 - Jakandor 2 - Planescape 3 - Dark Sun 4 - Greyhawk
Agree- I feel like the Realms is SOOOO fleshed out, it's too easy to contradict the "official" lore. Greyhawk is wide open. (That's not a dig at FR - I know that level of development works very well for a lot of people!)
Cool vid. I’ve ran a little bit of FR, but havn’t dove super deep into it. My players have had fun regardless. I’ve never ran/played in Greyhawk. I do think it is interesting and can appreciate it tho. Currious if you would consider a Greyhawk/Mystara comparison. Would make an interesting vid.
There are real differences between Oerth and Toril..BUT they are both located in the SAME Prime Material Plane and are linked directly by planar gates and spelljammer travel...so even though my campaign originated on Oerth..and I vastly prefer Oerth in every way...I long ago dispensed with the idea that they were really separate worlds...separate planets for sure... just my opinion..
Well of course FR has more stuff, they swapped out Greyhawk for it. In the beginning I was draw to FR because it was new and I could get in on the ground level. Then of course it all got filled in, some was good but a lot was overkill. Sembia was supposed to be for DMs' to make their own, and then it wasn't. I never kept up with the cannon but as the FR filled out and had other settings mashed into it - it lost something. 3e really took the FR into more saturation and convolution, and of course 5e is just sword coast. I had just went back to my own campaign setting.(in which I use the Greyhawk gods) I do respect Grayhawk as the OG and proper setting for real D&D.
I enjoy the Realms. But, Greyhawk is my first love and STILL my preference. Gygax for the Win!!!!! Not to mention I have around 50 adventures that I have mapped on my Oerth map for the original “Modules” including some “Newer “ 3.5 & 3ed adventures that are pretty seamlessly added. I love Greyhawk.
As an Eberron fan myself, who hasn't played in Greyhawk since the early 90s and isn't really fond of the Realms, I would love to hear your thoughts on the setting.
I always called Forgotten Realms "micro managed". Which is fine if you like that....but I break that cannon like a monkey with a cocoanut. I did read a stack of those Forgotten Realms books to try and get a sense of it....but most those books suck. The Drizzt books were awesome! "Spellfire" was good...if written badly. But those other books just fell way short of say books like the Dragon Lance novels which were just epic. The one thing I do prefer about Forgotten Realms is Evermeet. It's a total rip off of Tolkien's Undying Lands.....but I didn't care. I really enjoy playing Elves when there's a Evermeet out in the west to sail to. But other than that I'm Greyhawk all the way.
If I had to do an elevator pitch to describe the difference between the two it would be this..."Greyhawk is Game of Thrones, Forgotten Realms is Lord Of The Rings." Granted, things have changed alot in the last 20 years, but I still keep the older feel to these worlds when I run. I love both settings (in fact, the only TSR era setting I do not like is Spelljammer), and have spent many hundreds of hours in both.
WotC making Greyhawk the default setting for 3e was ideal for illustrating the whole kitchen sink aspect of the setting and gameplay. Such a shame they seem to have ditched the setting entirely for 5e, it would be nice to have some newer modules for the setting.
Yea i ignore a lot of cannon. I used the sword coast specifically as an easy starting point but the cities that are there arent always the same versions as in official lore. The rest of the world is a lot different.
Good video my man! I think FR has probably benefitted from having a single person to create & oversee its development (i.e. Ed Greenwood) whereas Greyhawk has been created & developed my a number of authors over the years (e.g. Gary Gygax, Jim Ward, Carl Sargent, Roger E. Moore etc) making it feel perhaps less cohesive than the Realms. Still, Greyhawk was my first campaign setting and I still love it and use it to this day :)
I’ve met Ed, he’s a hell of a nice guy. But Realms always seemed to lead to power jump campaigns. The old term is Monty Haul. It’s like World of Warcraft where when new levels are added, everyone is max level in a week. Agree with you. Forgotten Realms is too detailed.
Greyhawk forever, Forgotten Realms almost never! I had been a huge fan of Greyhawk for several years and remember the buildup to FR, it was going to so good, etc. I never liked the box set, didn’t like the darkish colors of the entire set, didn’t like that the maps that had no hexes, and hated the beige color of the pages in the two FR booklets. I don’t think I ever read the entirety of FR because I hated that dark beige paper! Greyhawk had great color to the hex maps, a great image with nice color on the box, white paper for the booklets that allowed me to read it over and over again. There was a great sense of epicness and wonder to Gary Gygax’s world. As far as I’m concerned, Greyhawk will always be the better fantasy world.
I always felt that the Realms was a great setting to read (in novels) and a terrible one to run for exactly the "overwhelmed by lore" problem you mentioned. I find it hard not to be logical and wonder with so many catalogued beings of incredible power in the Realms, why has all evil not simply been vanquished, or all good vanquished, or the planet destroyed by the sheer critical mass of super powerful beings. Also, in Greyhawk, I love the thought that it's a world that has seen previous ages come and go, and when the charcaters delve into a deep dungeon somewhere, that site might have been a place of power to some ancient civilisation from millenia ago and not related to the world's current status quo at all. I consider Greyhawk to have more "awe and wonder".
I would largely agree. But the stuff that was added on after Ed Greenwood handed the Realms over was a hodge podge of real world analogs like Mongolian cultures, Egyptian transplants along with the Egyptian gods, the Moonshae Island Celts and vikings, along with Mezzo American lands and cultures with Maztca, and don't forget Kara Tur and Al Qadim. Ed's original vision was for a world where you couldn't put your finger on exactly what the real world influences were, and as a result of the manyTSR add-ons, it did feel a little wierd with all the pseudo historical stuff juxtaposed with the pure fantasy. Greyhawk's inconsistencies seemed a product of the organic process of its development. Though, sadly, we never had much access to it back in the day. The few products they made for it in the 90s weren't evenly distributed for sale across the country.
Egypt and Sumerian influences come from Greenwood, and are why they are called “Forgotten” realms as opposed to the “Well Known Realms”. Not enough done there, though, so WotC nuked them in recent editions.
Forgotten Realms is mostly just Faerun though, specifically the Sword Coast. The rest of the world of Torilmay be mapped but it's not defined whats there.
With all the massive quantities of amazing magic and mundane items, item creation feats, and the item slots available in 3rd edition, I had always thought Greyhawk was proper high fantasy. By comparison, just reading the intent in 5e's books will tell you they wanted magic items to be rarer, not to mention the mechanics of only 3 attunement slots and lack of ability to craft magic items unless you're an artificer or forge cleric and Faerûn just looks less magical.
First there was a series by Gygax in Dragon, and then some appeared in Dragon Magazine. Len Lakofka then did a series in Dragon on the Suel deities. The Gold Box never had all the deities and their priests detailed, just a relatively small sample.
I've always been a Greyhawk guy - and, honestly, I think it was the year I came in - 1984 (my best guess anyways...) I always thought, as a kid, that Greenwood overwrote (and I loved Gary's floral prose? It colored my vocabulary to this day - LOL, yeah... I still do love it though, but, wow...). His Ecology articles in Dragon - nope, thought they were needlessly specific and self important. Ouch... remember this was my 13-16 year old self... with aftershock, not paying attention... Honestly, it took me a LONG time to actually even give Forgotten Realms a chance... I was either Greyhawk, homebrew, or literally anything else but... I was a grognard purist in the 90s... 00s... Then I played Baldur's Gate, the cRPG... And I said, "Oh shit, I think I mis-thought." Suddenly there was lore, established lore, locations... I ignored an entire generation of Greyhawk because I was a 1e purist in the 90s (yes, it was awkward). I thought Drizzt was basically an excuse for plushy Elric wannabe dark elves. Elminister was Gandalf on infomercial. Waterdeep was just another cheezy high fantasy trope. Yeah, um, I apologize. I went back and starting reading - as an adult. And I realized that Greenwood had been writing this stuff since before D&D, as a kid. Like I was. But nearly 20 years ahead of me. And, he acknowledges all releases as canon, not just his, and somehow works within it? Elminster's Guide to The Forgotten Realms is a masterpiece of D&D literature, with the pictures of old school handwritten notes and, wtf, slang? That is flavor. Hey, Ed, you still overwrite everything - but, keep it up, you're pretty good at it. I felt the need to chime in here - because I really want to run a game of the Realms that only uses the 1e stuff - and fills in the rest. The cRPGs were a very good primer - and it makes absorbing the other stuff easier, LOL. I still prefer Greyhawk... or Kalamar... or Harn... or Ravenloft... BUT... I used to hate the Realms for what was no damned reason - just because I followed Gary so hard as a kid. I saw an enemy where there was abundance. I felt that it dumbed down D&D... But, shit, man, I think I was the problem there - I never was a 'high fantasy' kid, I liked Lovecraft and Howard, Moorcock and Lieber - I did not read the Lord of the Rings in my early D&D years, because The Hobbit turned me off when compared. Yeah, I just admitted that... I have a lot of guilt around how I reacted the Forgotten Realms - and this topic, honestly made me remember to apologize for my long past purist. I'd sit at Ed's table, in a heartbeat. He's a godfather of campaign design, and he has a damn cool beard.
I like that the Realms world is more fleshed out, it's easier to delete something than to fill in the gaps. However what I love about Greyhawk are the characters, an area that the Realms is really bad at. FR is highly detailed, which I like, but the detail is often just boringly generic. I'm not interested in learning about the Forgotten Realms but Grayhawk history fascinates me.
I think that GMs should just ignore or follow lore as they desire. If a player complains just it's not what is written I'd simply tell them that it's my game setting, my lore to change. It's not like we're creating a series or a movie based on a book expressly to copy it, or be in its world. It's a game that should be adjusted to fit the desires or interests of those playing it. I'm currently running two campaigns in Cormyr using Castles & Crusades rules and I'd say that I stick to the lore about 75% of the time. I'm also following the 2e AD&D timeline and not the current 5e one. Though I will agree that lower magic works better. I prefer a game (which is why C&C is my preferred system now) that is a moderate magic level. This way you can either add or take away and it won't hurt anything. Compared to 3rd to 5th editions which became high magic games built into the system and it's difficult to remove any of it without hurting the game.
Forgotten Realms, in particular the Sword Coast and Faerûn at large, is a nigh insurmountable beast for new dungeon masters - it is just too much, especially with the weight of novels and games! Arguably Dragonlance is no better. Greyhawk has this semblance of "homeostasis" that many settings lack, even at its fullest at the end of Living Greyhawk, and some of the other settings like Mystara and the Nentir Vale in Fourth Edition despite being fairly minimalistic manage to be very usable settings in spite of that...
Well..., I played the Original Edition of D&D, including "Supplement 1: Greyhawk", but D&D wasn't really ready for prime-time yet. My favorite edition is still the 1st Edition of AD&D, and I have a complete collection of all the hardcover manuals and most of the adventures and supplements, including the 1980 "The World of Greyhawk" folio edition and the 1983 "World of Greyhawk" boxed set. 2nd edition wasn't bad, but I actively disliked 3, 3.5, and 4. I play mostly 5th edition now, but that's mostly because finding people who play 1st edition gets more difficult every year.
I prefer Greyhawk for its mood more "sword & sorcery/dark fantasy" instead of the high fantasy of the Realms. And the strong point of Greyhawk, imo, are the human etnicities, more unique and not so inspired in the real world folks.
I like a few things from the realms but as a gm I won't run games in the realms. I feel like there are far too many power NPCs running around that it makes zero sense that a low level adventuring group would ever be allowed to do anything important because the local power npc can do it. I also made the decision to distance myself from anything wotc and the realms are top of the list.
I've always used the Realms as a point of inspiration, I could never delve that deeply into the realms other than reading a few books here and there. To be honest, thats what most of the DnD settings are to me, is just cool ideas to snag and rework to put into my game. Greyhawk is probably the biggest inspiration though.
I took the Realms back to the original 1E greybox. I just dumped all the official canon and erased it. Of course, I only play 2E, so this is not really an issue. I personally hated the Time of Troubles and it never settled well with me so now I am just ignoring it. Forget canon. Make it up yourself. Let your players make the world their own.
The reasons one person might like one more than the other are the exact same reasons why another person preferred the other setting. Greyhawk always seemed more hodgepodge constructed, with gaps and blank parts of the information. Yes, Greyhawk has been considered low magic. It is unlikely that players can buy many magic items. They have to adventure for them. The Adventures are deadly in grungy trap filled dungeons. The Forgotten Realms are much more filled in and consistent in being a mid to high magic setting. The setting focuses on grand adventures and high fantasy. The adventures could be connect over a long campaign once the DM included plots and out of dungeon encounters within an area from the players favorite D&D novels.
Great Segment. Another unmentioned but semi-alluded to complimentary difference I note is historical genesis of the two worlds. Greyhawk was developed in T$R's early stages when it was just casually (Gygaxian) mercenary capitalistic and world development was not established as a business model necessity for each game created, and shared worlds and copyright infringement was more embraced. FR was generated in a post Gygax T$R now Wizards / Hasbro world where even more mercenary corporate execs intend copyright control considerations to prevail over creativity and imagination. On some level it has always been about TSR trying to sell more stuff. And about intellectual property right theft when among friends...ex Gary "stealing" the game from Arneson lol. Which he did. And was sued. But hey... Water under the bridge... But by the time Gary was booted via hostile takeover and Ed's FRs was being pushed, T$R Wizards had fully established it's business model modalities. For every new game a new world, and for each new world a new game kinda thing. Greyhawk comes from a less savagely capitalist structured time at TSR, FR from a more capitalist-intensive business model.
I have always preferred Greyhawk, to the Forgotten Realms. I prefer drawing inspiration from; darker and slightly, more grounded fantasy. My own home-brewed world takes more influence, from Greyhawk and Arneson's Blackmoor, Robert.E.Howards Conan, Tolkienian Middle-Earth. All mixed in with a more than healthy dose; of 80's style fantasy movies, comics and novels.
5e Realms sucks, but I’ve enjoyed both from my experience. Both have rather sword and sorcery inspiration, they go in some different areas from there. I have consumed for FR stuff and that probably won’t change since there is more for the Realms than there is for Greyhawk.
Organized play wasn't bad for me but we have some good DMs. Modules were blah, but so were the Living City ones. I did dislike that 5e added Dragonborn and then just added some event which has them walking around FR.
I find Greyhawk to feel a lot more like medieval Europe than the Forgotten Realms. The Flanaess has four major feudal kingdoms dominating much of the continent along with other smaller feudal states, plus the baklunish west very much feels like a stand-in for the Muslim world neighboring medieval Europe. In comparison, Faerun is full of free cities and city-states, with only Cormyr feeling more or less like a medieval european kingdom.
Forgotten Realms original boxed set was pretty good but then they made everyone an epic level magic user and a god infused fighter who is unstoppable.
Along with silly cosmopolitan cities and everything being 2020s Seattle medieval fair lol
You're spot on. The Realms is basically "You Will Never Be This Cool: The Campaign Setting". Every little mayor of every little podunk town seemingly had unique, super duper special powers and abilities that the players would NEVER be able to emulate or achieve. You couldn't swing a dead vrock without hitting three servants of Mystra that are 20th level plus casters in at least one field and probably multiclassed to hell and back to boot...and all of which were written with the angry GM in mind ("Oh, what's this? You punched the barkeep because he was being a dick to you? That was the Simbul's favorite barkeep! Hope you like Time Stop flavored Delayed Blast Fireball suppositories!"). I loved the rules info that you could cannibalize, and the spells and items, but the Realms from late 1E through the entirety of 2E was absolutely terrible in terms of something to play. 3E was much better, because the NPCs were running on the same rules sets as the PCs were and there was a conscious decision to undo most of the GMPC stuff in the Realms by codifying it and making it playable as opposed to living in someone's fanfic. That obviously went out the window with 4E and onwards.
A friend of mine described the problem with The Forgotten Realms as "They had a bunch of writers work on parts, and every writer imagines that they are writing about the most badass part of the world."
My group has been playing so long we all have some characters that are world shakers even in Forgotten Realms.
So true. Every village with 500 folk has an archmage and dragon hidden in the hills nearby.
I have always loved Greyhawk because it was so open to adding your own flavor to it, unlike The Realms which seems too set in place and can’t be changed from what is published.
The beauty of the Realm when it first came out was there wasn't all that lore. There were lots of wide open spaces with nothing but the DMs imagination to fill them up. Many supplements and novels later, all of that changed. In Greyhawk you have fairly stable kingdoms where most of the lands are at least claimed by some overlord and where geography helps provide natural borders between these varied realms. Early on, the Realms felt like it was a lot more unsettled, where there are numerous wide open spaces, much like migration era Europe after the population collapse of the late Roman Empire. Greyhawk felt like it was more set in the high or late middle ages. Again, countless supplements and novels later, all of that changed. For our little group in the late 1980s, this was a matter of taste and what sort of flavor of campaign world you were after. Both were fun to adventure in, and no we didn't feel constrained by what TSR published, especially if we had already developed a given area on our own.
Exactly why I run my campaigns in greyhawk
"That might be how Ed did it in his Realms, but we play in _my_ Realms" is my typical answer.
Both Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are equally great in their own right. I have had lots of fun with my friends in both worlds.
I kinda liked the bits I saw of the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting too, the maps are what really sold me on that one, gloriously messy street plans that felt a lot more real than the Greyhawk ones in a way, but that said Greyhawk was always my gotto setting.
In FR every innkeeper is a retired 9th level thief with a +3 short sword under the bar. Every bouncer is a 7th level fighter wearing gauntlets of ogre power and swinging a +4 club.
One another difference - Forgotten Realms was heavily promoted while Greyhawk was pushed to the side.
When I was younger I thought Greyhawk was generic and boring. My favorite setting (and ruleset) in my elementary and high school years was (BECMI) Mystara. When I started high school I was truly introduced to AD&D and for AD&D I preferred the settings of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms (yes - too many products!) and Ravenloft. But the real problem with Greyhawk was its lack of promotion. I read tons of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun novels when I was younger. Greyhawk: 1 Rose Estes novel (which if I recall I didn't even finish) and 1 post-TSR Gord The Rogue novel. There weren't that many novels out there and they were hard to find. It also wasn't promoted enough in the Dragon and Dungeon magazines which I bought at the time. This would've been from 1988 to 1994 so I'm guessing it had to do with the fallout of booting Gary Gygax from TSR in 1985.
Now that I know more about Greyhawk (and a lot of that is thanks to the Greyhawk Grognard blog!) I truly appreciate the setting and realize my earlier impressions of it were wrong.
Yep, having a Rose Estes novel as your introduction to Greyhawk books is definitely enough to put anyone off of it.
Agreed.
Agreed Greyhawk was less known, and the underground nature of it made it even better. It was for the truly dedicated and people who read Dragon and such. There were also novels before Rose Estes and Gygax's Gord series that were published outside TSR, that were set in Greyhawk. TSR official novels came out following the success of Dragonlance novels / and or contemporaneously. But overall Greyhawk was less understood. But also TSR back then had not evolved to their line of thinking that the realm people played in had to be a world fleshed out and copyrighted. TSR back then was promoting copyright infringement and merged worlds with Moorcock's Elric pantheon and Lankhmar pantheon on the Fiend Folio etc. The idea that the world should be fleshed out and copyrighted was an evolution of thought that was developing with the Gygax vs Arneson and TSR takeover and boot of Gygax days.
The early Realms stuff by Greenwood himself (the '80s Dragon articles, first boxed set, FR1, etc.) really is something special. Shortly after he sold the rights, however, the outside interference and inconsistent tone all those freelancers brought really tanked it creatively.
To me, the history of the published setting as a whole is a cautionary tale about what can go wrong selling off your passion project for corporate exploitation.
Personally, I disregard everything from the "Time of Troubles" onward. If there are nuggets worth using in the mountain published after that, they're likely not worth the time and effort to dig out.
I found The Realms over-magicked. City guards with magic armor and weapons? Powerful Mages everywhere. I prefer Greyhawk. Magic and high level characters were much less common. Don't even get me started on The-Drow-Elf-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named! 🙄😁 Sometimes less is more, like Gary's style. I don't need to know everything about everyone in a setting. That's my premise as a DM to create my own stuff and make it mine.
That is a 2e+ problem. 1e was pretty low level and even Bleak.
Greyhawk was the first, and designed as a framework where a DM and the players could fill it in, change it, twist it, add their own flavor, and just run with it. Characters aren't usually super-powerful and ultra-high levels in Greyhawk. You had to work hard and be lucky to get to high level. I began playing in 78/79, with years taken off at times (life occurs), and only had one character that made double digit levels. You always had the thought in the back of your mind that your character could die AT ANY MOMENT! The adrenaline rush of skating past disaster was a huge plus. Even when you didn't survive, it was often a cool story (fell for a Ring of Delusion, failed a saving throw vs Centipedes, etc) that we would talk about for years. I will say that I liked a fair number of the FR novels. As far as Greyhawk, Gygax's early Gord novels and the Paul Kidd Justicar novels were the best of the bunch, and were highly entertaining. I think you pretty much nailed the differences in this video. Excellent job! Looking forward to the next one.
One of the best things about Greyhawk vis-a-vis the Realms is that the bad guys seem to be slowly winning, at least in the big picture. But it's not some Tolkienesque/Manichean grand struggle, but rather a metastasizing unpleasantness, with Iuz, the House of Nealax, Vecna, the Pomarj, the Horned Society, the Scarlet Brotherhood, Tharizdun, the giants and drow, and Erythnul-only-knows how many other baddies (speaking of which, Erythnulites, Hextorites, Incabulites) all acting not only independently but against one another. Throw in all the elder dragons, beholders, demon princes, and literally 100% of all the potential Realms baddies, but like 20% of the good guys, and they're a lot lower level.
Like, FR has Elminster, but in the late 6th century (post Co8, which most campaigns are), WoG has ... uh ... Lashton? Mightiest mage in the forces of the mightiest good kingdom, will get back to you when he figures out 9th level spells.
Yeah, FR has the players observe the NPC fix everything. While in GH, you the player must fix things and stop the bad guys.
Oh man I haven't thought about the Pomarj in ages! Great nostalgia hit there.
I am a fan of the Forgotten Realms. Back in the stone age (ie 1e days) I did of course get my hands on the greyhawk boxed set. I was fascinated by having locations for the modules available at the time. I found the setting information okay, mostly vague mostly "medieval" style stuff. I was 14 at the time...and honestly most of my games were chop up the monster and take his stuff. Oh the good old days lol. It was not long after when I discovered the 1e gray box of the forgotten realms. This boxed set was full of flavor and written in a way that "adventure" ideas spilled forth from the pages. I was hooked on the Realms after that. It also helped that the setting had a huge selection of novels available. I always made sure my players new that we were playing in my version of the Realms and things may or may not be as dictated in ""canon". Something that I still do today !
Like Antony said, the Realms were just overwhelming. I liked the realms boxed set, but when they started detailing everything, they lost me. I ran a few of their adventures, but changed them to be placed in Greyhawk. I think the Realms are what to aspire to with your own game, detail as you go that is, but for a setting, you can't beat the minimalist approach of the Greyhawk setting.
In my games, I have tried to start off with few details, and build up to a FR level of description as I go. Start small and work up to massive. That's much easier to accomplish in the Greyhawk setting. Plus, as you said neither DM or Player can say, "hey that's not what sourcebook "x" says" because you are literally writing the sourcebook as you play.
Great points. Great video. Love your presentation. Can't wait to see where you go
Incidentally, I've long had a pet theory that Ed Greenwood's status as a Canadian contributes to the Realms being a generally nicer, cleaner place where there's a good chance the powers that be in places like Waterdeep really do have your best interests in mind. An extremely Canadian outlook, no? Meanwhile, you have Americans like Fritz Lieber and Gary Gygax using the gritty, graft-ridden likes of Chicago as the models for their fantasy metropolises. ;)
You say that, but being Canadian myself I tend towards the more historical end of things in my setting with cities & realms wildly differing in tone and culture.
Just started a Greyhawk 1e campaign with a bunch of guys of various ages. GREYHAWK LIVES ON!
Gritty is the word I’ve always felt described the Greyhawk setting best. It will always be my favorite. I loved a lot of things in the FR setting, some of which I introduced to my GH game, but overall I’ve never been a FR fan. It’s too safe and fluffy. I need the edginess and the grit of Greyhawk.
I just finished running a game in the Savage Frontier of Forgotten Realms. It was not safe...though the snow might have been fluffy. :P The frontier is one place in FR that feels more Greyhawk like to me, and I love the nordic feel the Northmen and Uthgardt have - both of which were front and center in the campaign.
One of the best grognards yet. Whole heartedly agree, Greyhawk was and is a shell world waiting for YOUR imagination and your players actions to shape and fill that magical realm of fun and adventure.
The Forgotten realms was a game you played in. No real personal connection because everything is layed out for you. Every time you change something you have to follow the trail and change everything else downstream to make it mesh. You spend more time trying to avoid continuity errors rather then making YOUR fantasy realm.
Greyhawk is where i play, and i unabashedly steal good ideas, people and things from Fogotten realms and find a home for them in the Dungeons and Dragons world....Greyhawk.
Only came across this video now, but thank you so much for putting into words the same thing that I've felt for many, many years. Started playing in '85 and picked up the original Forgotten Realms box set in '87, I think it was, and immediately fell in love with the setting. I was only aware of Greyhawk because one of my players had that box set and was constantly touting the virtues of that world over FR. Being an initially lazy DM, I loved that FR had so many things already detailed for you because it took a lot of the work out of answering questions for players, and the profusion of sourcebooks and adventures was a virtual smorgasbord of options for things to do and places to go.
For me, the problems began when all the novels started to pour in. While I loved the Moonshae and Icewind Dale trilogies, I kinda wish they had stopped there. It was great reading stories about places on the map and featuring some of the npcs in the game materials, but as more and more novels got published, it became a runaway train of trying to keep up with all the changes, and somehow trying to incorporate them into the timeline of my campaigns. In other words, it was nigh on impossible. I think I got as far as the events of the Avatar trilogy and the fall of the gods before I checked out, unable to keep up and also unwilling to chart my own course because my players read those books too and it became difficult to keep anything a surprise. Same was true for Dragonlance and how all the events there were wrapped around the companions from the original novels, followed by a couple hundred subsequent books that charted Krynn's course for you rather than letting DMs do what they wanted without fear of contradicting all the ongoing history. In many ways, playing in the Forgotten Realms and Krynn felt like trying to run a campaign in Tolkien's Middle-earth, with all the incredible weight of established lore and history hanging over your head like an executioner's axe if you stepped out of line.
With 5e, I think WoTC has kinda bungled FR because while they've kept all the history, they largely ignored just about everything other than the Sword Coast, or perhaps that's their way of saying the rest is still there, we just won't touch it so that you can? Anyway, I'm really hoping that the whatever they try to do with Greyhawk for 5.5 is a little better than their most recent attempts at reviving older settings (Spelljammer, Dragonlance, Planescape), which has been a pretty sorry affair so far. For all of their flaws, I do really miss TSR sometimes.
Hey Grognard! For me it'll already be Mystara. But I also grew up with Greyhawk also, and I tend to bring some AD&D adventures i into that one. Thanks for to our content.
(Snicker) The Pinkertons haven't showed up at my door yet to confiscate my Magic cards.
Yet...
Years ago I always wanted Greyhawk to be filled in more, and then as they did I realized it was lessened the more it was filled in. The great strength is the framework. My campaign took the cipher that is Keoland and made it our own, which was better than if we had a "product" for it. When the detail gets too dense, it is like playing a novel, which just isn't fun (cough... Dragonlance). We felt fine with countries breaking apart in civil war or changing alliances because of the sense of openness and evolution as evidenced by the Dragon updates on troop movements, etc. I also agreed about the heterogeneity and anomolies of Greyhawk being a strength. It allows for a much wider range of play. Thanks for this!
Greyhawk is what you get when Leiber meets Moorcock over at Tolkien's place, and then after they leave, Rowling comes over and that's Forgotten Realms.
Oof. That's tough. I wish I could disagree...
WoG is older, and closer to my heart since I started with it. Any time a module or a book filled in a bit of the world, or even an old Dragon article, it was squeezed for information. FR, as you say, just has so much info, that it doesn't feel special.
I like the 1E Boxed set for Forgotten Realms, even in through most of 2E. I wouldn't call the Realms organic, lots of things have been shoehorned in since 1E. From Moonshaes to more recently Tortle colonies, lots of things were popped in. That said, Greyhawk is just cooler.
Even in the original boxed set several things were added to Ed Greenwood’s version of the realms, by TSR. Bloodstone area, Phalan, pretty sure the Moonshae area was added, those are off the top of my head. It definitely wasn’t organic as described.
great video. i took more inspiration from greyhawk directly from my current campaign than the realms. i call them these days ''the remembered realms'' because they just use the damn sword coast.
Greyhawk is where I started and where I will finish!
"Stay safe from Pinkertons" hilarious! XD
The thing I always loved about Greyhawk is the sense of global instability, there are areas of the world map that are blatantly owned by "less civilized" types and the "good guys" don't really have enough control of their own territories to go traipsing over and do anything about it (we clearly looking at you Iuz) and that potential for lawless chaos on such a scale facilitates ANY kind of adventure hook ya wanna roll with. Evil doesn't necessarily have to stay in the shadows to survive, it has home bases. Also the potential for PC's long term to attain lands of their own is an open horizon and that level of gaming where siege wars can potentially result between a PC controlled army and an army of demihumans can totally build up in the setting without any major story shifts for the most part. Essentially if Khelben Blackstaff lived on Greyhawk he'd be way too busy with his own problems to go solving the problems of the PC's so adventuring becomes so much more valid a "career choice"
As a 3.5 DM, I feel that Greyhawk is the true Forgotten Realm.
I hear so many people complain that Hazards-of-the-Bro doesn’t make material for settings like Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Mystara, and others, but I consider that a good thing, seeing what they have done to Forgotten Realms.
I like a framework where I can fill in the blanks as opposed to a setting that requires dozens of sourcebooks.
Currently running a lot of old greyhawk modules in the forgotten realms for my players right now. The two kind of combined really fits my and my players style and it’s super enjoyable.
I believe those are facts - that the Realms were conceived as a literary world and adapted later to D&D. Greyhawk was always a game world, which explains its slightly funky, edgy, anything can happen feel. I was always a little disappointed in FR as TSR's 'official' world.
That's not what I understand. Forgotten Realms was intended as a new setting for TSR DnD modules and novels after Gary got / was getting the boot. Ed Greenwood was more or less the loremaster of TSR after Gary was booted ..GG still had the rights to his novels and intended on and did destroy the world of Greyhawk after putting out four? More books. The GG might write more things to conflict with canon, who controlled the canon? TSR flipped everything to Forgotten Realms. Darkwalker on Moonshae I think was the first book? It may have predated the FR modules and Gary's departure...but the TSR plan to boot Gary and flip worlds was being cooked up by writers working for TSR when Darkwalker was published is my understanding. Perhaps Grognard can throw some info down here to correct us if we are wrong on the histrionics?
Major lean towards the World of Greyhawk. I'm a bit biased because I grew up in the late 70's and 80's and the Greyhawk setting inspired hundreds of hours of adventuring fun for me.
It's so frefreshing to hear a Greyhawk fan compliment Ed Greenwood and the Forgotten Realms, because there is so much (unnecessary) vitriol on the internet. You don't have to hate one because you like the other. I prefer Gygaxian Greyhawk for my campaigns, but there is a lot I like about Ed Greenwood's work also and I've converted some of his stuff for use in my campaign. I also like my player characters to be the "heroes of the realm" without a lot of high level NPC's around.
Lol I sort of took the opposite approach. I like the mythology and general layout of the Realms but I like the "adventurers are not something common" flavor of Greyhawk.
Amen to this. Filling in the map and having over powerful NPCs casting shadows the PCs have no chance of competing with isn't my bag. Both Dragonlance and later edition of FR are very guilty of this. The original FR hardback and box set were great.
I LOVE that curtains!!!
They add a new continent, every so often, and it is unmapped until the DM maps it. In the latest couple of Editions, they wiped out the two oldest sections of Ed Greenwood’s world, the part that was Egypt and Sumerian based, because they thought that there was not enough interest in them. The reason that Greyhawk is so empty is that no authors were interested enough in it to set their novels there.
Ed Greenwood was interested in telling stories, whereas Gary Gygax was just interested in playing his games there. If he wasn’t there, he let it stay empty.
Ths is perhaps too optimistic, but maybe the upcoming Vecna adventure will reintroduce Greyhawk. I also find running in the Realms stressful due to the extensive lore. I am new to the game, having dmed for my daughters during lockdowns. I don't have a lot of background and I don't want to screw anything up! Glad I am not alone in this.
With Baldur's Gate 3, sadly the FR popularity over Greyhawk is only going to worsen. It's sad because 3rd edition's launch was when I started. I grew up with it.
If you can't choose which you want just do both, shove a gate between the two settings somewhere ..
Or have Ningauble introduce himself and announce he's decided to become their patron and he has a job for them, if they'd just caret to step through this shiny arch hanging in the air they'll find themselves within a days journey of where he needs them to be, then anytime you want top switch things out for the other setting just have him show up again with another little job for them.
EXCELLANT Video...I was around during the transition from Greyhawk to Realms...never got into them.
Great comparison video, focusing on the "fleshed out" vs "bare bones" approaches to pre made fantasy worlds. I like Greyhawk a lot more, like a whole lot, the lore being things to build off. I always thought of Forgotten Realms as a fully fleshed out Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and there are a lot of similarities between the two, like FR was Greenwood's take.
I'm irrationally biased against the Realms. Anything I say will sound like trolling, so i'll just say, you made some, good, valid points.
I got the Forgotten Realms grey box back in the day, and it never it never fired my imagination like Greyhawk did. Maybe it's apt that Greyhawk is in a gold box and Forgotten realms in a grey box...? I think you're correct Joseph - just enough description in the gold box to fire the imagination and too much detail of Forgotten Realms to take in. Recently I ran Ghosts of Saltmarsh in 5th edition and part of the adventure was going to Niole Dra to meet with King Scotti himself. I had him as a battle-hardened Ranger but also a conservationist, personally directing the re-wilding of the Royal Gardens, and sleeping outside with his animal companions, albeit driving his entitled daughters nuts while the Queen looked on lovingly. I could see it all vividly in my mind just from the economical description.
Some other key differences...
4. Greyhawk is physically larger (map), yet has far more countries, cultures, and areas.
5. Greyhawk is less detailed. The main FR maps show roads and key cities and a level of detail which almost assumes there are no side roads, towns, villages, etc. Some pretty small stuff is shown on the FR maps(s) which are not on the Greyhawk map. This is often seen in FR modules (I remember RPGA, Living City days) where like three cities have most of the modules.
6. It is easier in Greyhawk to blow up a few hexes and play in it without 'disturbing' anything. You can put a town of 1,000 people in a hex, roads, small lakes, etc.
7. Greyhawk has more pseudo-real world references. You can think of people or countries in terms of historical Earth, even if different. I've found this to make running places easier -- you use your real world Viking knowledge for the Snow Barbarians or say Mongol history for the Wolf Nomads. I've seen this play out in Living Greyhawk but Living City did feel more generic.
8. LG worked better in a shared campaign setting than Living City.
I never made the mental switch to FR. I didn't see the point to it. It does seem to rely too much on things outside of just a setting book. I never considers Dragonlance a setting as it was tied to closely to books and a really fixed story modules and characters. Arcanis is my second favorite setting -- more political, interesting races/classes, etc.
FR feels like medieval Europe, whereas Greyhawk feels like Dying Earth. Very different.
Best way I can put it is that Greyhawk feels like Gary & co put their home campaign in a box, and Forgotten Realms is an actual product. With the pros and cons that come with that distinction. FR gives you more lore, more areas, more *stuff*, but it feels a bit like a marketing manager okayed every page.
Great vid! Glad you tackled this subject
Thanks Grognard! Maybe if Jim Ward’s book was a boxed set like Ed Greenwood’s Gray Box, there would be a larger following. BECMI kids who were introduced to 2nd Edition by way of comic books or a friend, loved them boxed sets!
Very good video as always. I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I prefer Greyhawk over The Forgotten Realms due to the fact that Greyhawk is just a perfect campaign world setting for the DM to incorporate and make their own whereas The Forgotten Realms has way to much canon to it and leaves very little if any room for the DM to make it their own.
Funny you mention Keoland being sparse on official details and information. I picked it to begin my Campaign nearly five years ago. I’ve been able to enjoy adding my own details as well as tracking down information and little details from your blog and other greyhawk communities. This is something I have never felt comfortable doing with Forgotten Reams. It is a blast having a foundation and rich history to underpin my ideas and campaign on. Great video as usual. Looking forward to more. Oh and I know you worked on the areas beyond the Flanaess. So any future videos on the likes of Zindia, Nippon, and the celestial imperiums etc would be awesome. I also enjoyed your video on the Flanaess past before the great kingdom and the twin cataclysms
Love the channel Grog. Keep Greyhawk alive!
I started with greyhawk and will always be a favorite, but with forgotten realms because it is more whole cloth if you are just throwing a quick thin together to do with kids over school break for example, you can just pick it up and go
Having DMed and played in both settings, I always had a feeling that the Greyhawk world was a bit more designed as a fantasy world with an eye at not getting too far from possible realism while the Forgotten Realms were designed more as a place to play a specific game. I mean Gygax even had plotted out mass migration routes of humans as they populated the world in the far past.
You must be in my head!! I've been doing a deep dive into 1e Forgotten Realms this week. I've been a Greyhawk fan since the 1983 Box and never played or read the Realms.
The 1e Campaign box set, and the 1e Savage Frontier are great tools, I'd argue on par with the 1983 Greyhawk box. Also, by just using those two sets only, you bypass 30 years of lore.
I never gave Forgotten Realms a fair chance. Gygax was kicked to the curb and suddenly TSR was shoving what appeared to be a Greyhawk replacement setting down our throats. I did buy the gray box and a few other items like Kara-Tur but that's it. I resented it, or rather what it stood for. No, that's not fair to Ed Greenwood, and we all wish the chips had fallen differently, but they didn't.
Video does a very good description of describing the difference between the two, I have dabbled with both setting, but mostly did my own stuff, ( as a 1st ed teen, mostly worldless jumping from cave to cave, trying be unable to get my others to embrace a world, then purchasing FR as it came out, and still unable to get a "world" interest, and latter using my modification of my brothers world, which at least somewhat irked him I think when I made changes and additions. being away from the game from ages and now getting back in, I am highly drawn to the concept of Hexcrawling, but not quite able to make it happen. While Greyhawk is much more suited for such, it not really perfect either. I currently sitting wanting to get stuff going again, and most likely going to go to to the create your own. I also wargame in 15mm using battlesystem rules, and starting to tend towards just running large battles using a slightly modified 1st Ed AD&D rules, which is really what all those hard cover books are really about, they are more for mass combat, then RPG, and that is the reason SO MANY PEOPLE have issues with them, as they think they are for RPG not RPG and Table Top Wargaming in sort of a TableTop MMO. While FR is much worse, Greyhawk does have lots of material that one must be familiar with, and can easily do thing "wrong" for those who have read it all. but since FR is the Current default, there are a lot more people familiar with FR then GH now days, to it is less of a issue.
Outstanding description of the Forgotten Realms. What was your favorite area in the FR, and favorite area in GH?
Forgotten Realms would be the Dalelands.
Greyhawk would be the south-central Flanaess; from the Kron Hills to the Cairn Hills to the Pomarj.
A fun thing with the high magic feel of Forgotten Realms... it might be more tied to earlier editions (2e, 3e) as 5e seem to try to dial back magic items in a big way. "Plus" items only go to +3 and those are really rare and limited to the highest tier of play. Also attunement is now a thing, which limits the number of items you can have.
So the question is if the game and the setting has grown apart a little...
D&D is still "high magic" compared to some other systems but 5e is still trying to limit it a little.
Ed Greenwood -- Cannuck -- and 40min from my house .. but I still goto Greyhawk after 40+yrs
Thematically I always felt that FR was more about the conflicts between the gods and their past deeds, while Greyhawk gives me more of a "Mortals vs Demons" vibes. I mean Iuz is half-demon and his lover was a demoness, who controlled the Temple of Elemental Evil (or was that added with the PC-Game? Don't remember). So while the feeling of Greyhawk is more low fantasy, it also gets more cosmic through the attacks of outsiders, while the gods of the realms are basically part of every day life.
Greyhawk: "You're just a bunch of dudes. Go explore or something idc"
Forgotten Realms: "You're all god-like wizards, but don't you DARE leave the Swordcoast"
A lot of the Forgotten Realms aren't really very detailed, just the Moonsea Region and Sword Coast regions are detailed!
Greyhawk is forever tied to Gary Gygax, which is why it got stuck on the back burner! I prefer Greyhawk over Forgotten Realms, but my favorite settings are
1 - Jakandor
2 - Planescape
3 - Dark Sun
4 - Greyhawk
Agree- I feel like the Realms is SOOOO fleshed out, it's too easy to contradict the "official" lore. Greyhawk is wide open. (That's not a dig at FR - I know that level of development works very well for a lot of people!)
True I always played mystata and then forgotten realms plus lore novels than grey hawk. But both good.
Cool vid. I’ve ran a little bit of FR, but havn’t dove super deep into it. My players have had fun regardless. I’ve never ran/played in Greyhawk. I do think it is interesting and can appreciate it tho. Currious if you would consider a Greyhawk/Mystara comparison. Would make an interesting vid.
There are real differences between Oerth and Toril..BUT they are both located in the SAME Prime Material Plane and are linked directly by planar gates and spelljammer travel...so even though my campaign originated on Oerth..and I vastly prefer Oerth in every way...I long ago dispensed with the idea that they were really separate worlds...separate planets for sure... just my opinion..
Well of course FR has more stuff, they swapped out Greyhawk for it. In the beginning I was draw to FR because it was new and I could get in on the ground level. Then of course it all got filled in, some was good but a lot was overkill.
Sembia was supposed to be for DMs' to make their own, and then it wasn't. I never kept up with the cannon but as the FR filled out and had other settings mashed into it - it lost something.
3e really took the FR into more saturation and convolution, and of course 5e is just sword coast.
I had just went back to my own campaign setting.(in which I use the Greyhawk gods) I do respect Grayhawk as the OG and proper setting for real D&D.
I enjoy the Realms. But, Greyhawk is my first love and STILL my preference. Gygax for the Win!!!!!
Not to mention I have around 50 adventures that I have mapped on my Oerth map for the original “Modules” including some “Newer “ 3.5 & 3ed adventures that are pretty seamlessly added.
I love Greyhawk.
As an Eberron fan myself, who hasn't played in Greyhawk since the early 90s and isn't really fond of the Realms, I would love to hear your thoughts on the setting.
I always called Forgotten Realms "micro managed". Which is fine if you like that....but I break that cannon like a monkey with a cocoanut. I did read a stack of those Forgotten Realms books to try and get a sense of it....but most those books suck. The Drizzt books were awesome! "Spellfire" was good...if written badly. But those other books just fell way short of say books like the Dragon Lance novels which were just epic. The one thing I do prefer about Forgotten Realms is Evermeet. It's a total rip off of Tolkien's Undying Lands.....but I didn't care. I really enjoy playing Elves when there's a Evermeet out in the west to sail to. But other than that I'm Greyhawk all the way.
Lendore Isles in the SE corner of the map, out by the Great Kingdom is also somewhat an Elven Retreat to Arvandor as well.
If I had to do an elevator pitch to describe the difference between the two it would be this..."Greyhawk is Game of Thrones, Forgotten Realms is Lord Of The Rings." Granted, things have changed alot in the last 20 years, but I still keep the older feel to these worlds when I run. I love both settings (in fact, the only TSR era setting I do not like is Spelljammer), and have spent many hundreds of hours in both.
Forgotten Realms is extremely detailed. Nearly every single place on the maps, they are huge. Some of the islands are detailed Moonshae.
WotC making Greyhawk the default setting for 3e was ideal for illustrating the whole kitchen sink aspect of the setting and gameplay.
Such a shame they seem to have ditched the setting entirely for 5e, it would be nice to have some newer modules for the setting.
Yea i ignore a lot of cannon. I used the sword coast specifically as an easy starting point but the cities that are there arent always the same versions as in official lore. The rest of the world is a lot different.
Good video my man! I think FR has probably benefitted from having a single person to create & oversee its development (i.e. Ed Greenwood) whereas Greyhawk has been created & developed my a number of authors over the years (e.g. Gary Gygax, Jim Ward, Carl Sargent, Roger E. Moore etc) making it feel perhaps less cohesive than the Realms. Still, Greyhawk was my first campaign setting and I still love it and use it to this day :)
I’ve met Ed, he’s a hell of a nice guy. But Realms always seemed to lead to power jump campaigns. The old term is Monty Haul. It’s like World of Warcraft where when new levels are added, everyone is max level in a week.
Agree with you. Forgotten Realms is too detailed.
5e has done a lot of material for the Forgotten Realms, but only for the Sword Coast. 3.0/3.5 and 2e were more comprehensive about it.
Greyhawk forever, Forgotten Realms almost never! I had been a huge fan of Greyhawk for several years and remember the buildup to FR, it was going to so good, etc. I never liked the box set, didn’t like the darkish colors of the entire set, didn’t like that the maps that had no hexes, and hated the beige color of the pages in the two FR booklets. I don’t think I ever read the entirety of FR because I hated that dark beige paper! Greyhawk had great color to the hex maps, a great image with nice color on the box, white paper for the booklets that allowed me to read it over and over again. There was a great sense of epicness and wonder to Gary Gygax’s world. As far as I’m concerned, Greyhawk will always be the better fantasy world.
I always felt that the Realms was a great setting to read (in novels) and a terrible one to run for exactly the "overwhelmed by lore" problem you mentioned. I find it hard not to be logical and wonder with so many catalogued beings of incredible power in the Realms, why has all evil not simply been vanquished, or all good vanquished, or the planet destroyed by the sheer critical mass of super powerful beings.
Also, in Greyhawk, I love the thought that it's a world that has seen previous ages come and go, and when the charcaters delve into a deep dungeon somewhere, that site might have been a place of power to some ancient civilisation from millenia ago and not related to the world's current status quo at all. I consider Greyhawk to have more "awe and wonder".
I would largely agree. But the stuff that was added on after Ed Greenwood handed the Realms over was a hodge podge of real world analogs like Mongolian cultures, Egyptian transplants along with the Egyptian gods, the Moonshae Island Celts and vikings, along with Mezzo American lands and cultures with Maztca, and don't forget Kara Tur and Al Qadim. Ed's original vision was for a world where you couldn't put your finger on exactly what the real world influences were, and as a result of the manyTSR add-ons, it did feel a little wierd with all the pseudo historical stuff juxtaposed with the pure fantasy.
Greyhawk's inconsistencies seemed a product of the organic process of its development. Though, sadly, we never had much access to it back in the day. The few products they made for it in the 90s weren't evenly distributed for sale across the country.
Egypt and Sumerian influences come from Greenwood, and are why they are called “Forgotten” realms as opposed to the “Well Known Realms”. Not enough done there, though, so WotC nuked them in recent editions.
Forgotten Realms is mostly just Faerun though, specifically the Sword Coast. The rest of the world of Torilmay be mapped but it's not defined whats there.
With all the massive quantities of amazing magic and mundane items, item creation feats, and the item slots available in 3rd edition, I had always thought Greyhawk was proper high fantasy. By comparison, just reading the intent in 5e's books will tell you they wanted magic items to be rarer, not to mention the mechanics of only 3 attunement slots and lack of ability to craft magic items unless you're an artificer or forge cleric and Faerûn just looks less magical.
When were the deities first added to Greyhawk? Was it the gold box, or later?
Greyhawk box set officially. Dragon magazine first.
First there was a series by Gygax in Dragon, and then some appeared in Dragon Magazine. Len Lakofka then did a series in Dragon on the Suel deities. The Gold Box never had all the deities and their priests detailed, just a relatively small sample.
I've always been a Greyhawk guy - and, honestly, I think it was the year I came in - 1984 (my best guess anyways...)
I always thought, as a kid, that Greenwood overwrote (and I loved Gary's floral prose? It colored my vocabulary to this day - LOL, yeah... I still do love it though, but, wow...).
His Ecology articles in Dragon - nope, thought they were needlessly specific and self important. Ouch... remember this was my 13-16 year old self... with aftershock, not paying attention...
Honestly, it took me a LONG time to actually even give Forgotten Realms a chance...
I was either Greyhawk, homebrew, or literally anything else but... I was a grognard purist in the 90s... 00s...
Then I played Baldur's Gate, the cRPG...
And I said, "Oh shit, I think I mis-thought." Suddenly there was lore, established lore, locations... I ignored an entire generation of Greyhawk because I was a 1e purist in the 90s (yes, it was awkward).
I thought Drizzt was basically an excuse for plushy Elric wannabe dark elves.
Elminister was Gandalf on infomercial.
Waterdeep was just another cheezy high fantasy trope.
Yeah, um, I apologize.
I went back and starting reading - as an adult. And I realized that Greenwood had been writing this stuff since before D&D, as a kid. Like I was. But nearly 20 years ahead of me.
And, he acknowledges all releases as canon, not just his, and somehow works within it?
Elminster's Guide to The Forgotten Realms is a masterpiece of D&D literature, with the pictures of old school handwritten notes and, wtf, slang? That is flavor. Hey, Ed, you still overwrite everything - but, keep it up, you're pretty good at it.
I felt the need to chime in here - because I really want to run a game of the Realms that only uses the 1e stuff - and fills in the rest. The cRPGs were a very good primer - and it makes absorbing the other stuff easier, LOL.
I still prefer Greyhawk... or Kalamar... or Harn... or Ravenloft... BUT...
I used to hate the Realms for what was no damned reason - just because I followed Gary so hard as a kid. I saw an enemy where there was abundance. I felt that it dumbed down D&D... But, shit, man, I think I was the problem there - I never was a 'high fantasy' kid, I liked Lovecraft and Howard, Moorcock and Lieber - I did not read the Lord of the Rings in my early D&D years, because The Hobbit turned me off when compared. Yeah, I just admitted that...
I have a lot of guilt around how I reacted the Forgotten Realms - and this topic, honestly made me remember to apologize for my long past purist.
I'd sit at Ed's table, in a heartbeat. He's a godfather of campaign design, and he has a damn cool beard.
Agreement at Drizzt copying Moorcock. And the novels are not so well- written. Creative yes, but overkill on the lurid battle descriptions.
I like that the Realms world is more fleshed out, it's easier to delete something than to fill in the gaps. However what I love about Greyhawk are the characters, an area that the Realms is really bad at. FR is highly detailed, which I like, but the detail is often just boringly generic. I'm not interested in learning about the Forgotten Realms but Grayhawk history fascinates me.
I think that GMs should just ignore or follow lore as they desire. If a player complains just it's not what is written I'd simply tell them that it's my game setting, my lore to change. It's not like we're creating a series or a movie based on a book expressly to copy it, or be in its world. It's a game that should be adjusted to fit the desires or interests of those playing it. I'm currently running two campaigns in Cormyr using Castles & Crusades rules and I'd say that I stick to the lore about 75% of the time. I'm also following the 2e AD&D timeline and not the current 5e one. Though I will agree that lower magic works better. I prefer a game (which is why C&C is my preferred system now) that is a moderate magic level. This way you can either add or take away and it won't hurt anything. Compared to 3rd to 5th editions which became high magic games built into the system and it's difficult to remove any of it without hurting the game.
Forgotten Realms, in particular the Sword Coast and Faerûn at large, is a nigh insurmountable beast for new dungeon masters - it is just too much, especially with the weight of novels and games! Arguably Dragonlance is no better. Greyhawk has this semblance of "homeostasis" that many settings lack, even at its fullest at the end of Living Greyhawk, and some of the other settings like Mystara and the Nentir Vale in Fourth Edition despite being fairly minimalistic manage to be very usable settings in spite of that...
Well..., I played the Original Edition of D&D, including "Supplement 1: Greyhawk", but D&D wasn't really ready for prime-time yet. My favorite edition is still the 1st Edition of AD&D, and I have a complete collection of all the hardcover manuals and most of the adventures and supplements, including the 1980 "The World of Greyhawk" folio edition and the 1983 "World of Greyhawk" boxed set. 2nd edition wasn't bad, but I actively disliked 3, 3.5, and 4. I play mostly 5th edition now, but that's mostly because finding people who play 1st edition gets more difficult every year.
I prefer Greyhawk for its mood more "sword & sorcery/dark fantasy" instead of the high fantasy of the Realms. And the strong point of Greyhawk, imo, are the human etnicities, more unique and not so inspired in the real world folks.
I like a few things from the realms but as a gm I won't run games in the realms. I feel like there are far too many power NPCs running around that it makes zero sense that a low level adventuring group would ever be allowed to do anything important because the local power npc can do it. I also made the decision to distance myself from anything wotc and the realms are top of the list.
I've always used the Realms as a point of inspiration, I could never delve that deeply into the realms other than reading a few books here and there.
To be honest, thats what most of the DnD settings are to me, is just cool ideas to snag and rework to put into my game. Greyhawk is probably the biggest inspiration though.
I took the Realms back to the original 1E greybox. I just dumped all the official canon and erased it. Of course, I only play 2E, so this is not really an issue.
I personally hated the Time of Troubles and it never settled well with me so now I am just ignoring it. Forget canon. Make it up yourself. Let your players make the world their own.
The reasons one person might like one more than the other are the exact same reasons why another person preferred the other setting.
Greyhawk always seemed more hodgepodge constructed, with gaps and blank parts of the information. Yes, Greyhawk has been considered low magic. It is unlikely that players can buy many magic items. They have to adventure for them. The Adventures are deadly in grungy trap filled dungeons.
The Forgotten Realms are much more filled in and consistent in being a mid to high magic setting. The setting focuses on grand adventures and high fantasy. The adventures could be connect over a long campaign once the DM included plots and out of dungeon encounters within an area from the players favorite D&D novels.
All of my campaigns are in Keoland
Have you seen my video about Keoland?
Great Segment. Another unmentioned but semi-alluded to complimentary difference I note is historical genesis of the two worlds. Greyhawk was developed in T$R's early stages when it was just casually (Gygaxian) mercenary capitalistic and world development was not established as a business model necessity for each game created, and shared worlds and copyright infringement was more embraced. FR was generated in a post Gygax T$R now Wizards / Hasbro world where even more mercenary corporate execs intend copyright control considerations to prevail over creativity and imagination. On some level it has always been about TSR trying to sell more stuff. And about intellectual property right theft when among friends...ex Gary "stealing" the game from Arneson lol. Which he did. And was sued. But hey... Water under the bridge... But by the time Gary was booted via hostile takeover and Ed's FRs was being pushed, T$R Wizards had fully established it's business model modalities. For every new game a new world, and for each new world a new game kinda thing. Greyhawk comes from a less savagely capitalist structured time at TSR, FR from a more capitalist-intensive business model.
And the differences show in the products. Agreed Greyhawk more gritty and organic, FRs more gamed up and gimmicky.
I have always preferred Greyhawk, to the Forgotten Realms. I prefer drawing inspiration from; darker and slightly, more grounded fantasy.
My own home-brewed world takes more influence, from Greyhawk and Arneson's Blackmoor, Robert.E.Howards Conan, Tolkienian Middle-Earth. All mixed in with a more than healthy dose; of 80's style fantasy movies, comics and novels.
5e Realms sucks, but I’ve enjoyed both from my experience. Both have rather sword and sorcery inspiration, they go in some different areas from there. I have consumed for FR stuff and that probably won’t change since there is more for the Realms than there is for Greyhawk.
Organized play wasn't bad for me but we have some good DMs. Modules were blah, but so were the Living City ones. I did dislike that 5e added Dragonborn and then just added some event which has them walking around FR.
Oh boy someone's looking to start a fight😉 just kidding...grabbing popcorn.
I find Greyhawk to feel a lot more like medieval Europe than the Forgotten Realms. The Flanaess has four major feudal kingdoms dominating much of the continent along with other smaller feudal states, plus the baklunish west very much feels like a stand-in for the Muslim world neighboring medieval Europe. In comparison, Faerun is full of free cities and city-states, with only Cormyr feeling more or less like a medieval european kingdom.