I came to Night Below late. When it was released, we had another prospective DM in the group, and we had an agreement not to buy adventures the other wanted to run. Night Below was one he wanted to do, but eventually never did. So I have it, but have never played or DMd it. From how it reads, it feels like a railroad done right - that is, touch point events, but a heck of a lot of freedom for the players to work between, and lots of "if" clauses that mean player character actions have a tangible influence on the flow of the campaign. Anyway one day.... In the meantime, I'd love it if you could share your thoughts on it!
Excellent coverage. From the Ashes and Ivid the Undying really inpsired some of my own writings and why I'm stiring up a new GH campaign for people who have never played it.
@@WillyMuffinUK My first real campaign I played in was set in the Great Kingdom, but with Rauxes replaced with City State of the Invincible Overlord; and Tegel Manor not far away. I was about 14y and the group was double my age. The DM was an ass, but the campaign was good. Also where I first played Traveller.
Thanks for this video, i recently learned of Carl Sargent via B11 King's Festival and have been becoming increasingly obsessed with these campaign settings prior to forgotten realms that I'm most familiar with.
Carl Sargent's Greyhawk, was, for the most part, my Greyhawk. I didn't get into D&D in general or Greyhawk in specific until Gary Gygax was already gone, in 1989 with the City of Greyhawk boxed set (still my single favorite D&D/Greyhawk product of all time, I managed to get lucky and buy a near mint second copy after my original got pretty worn down and scribbled on). So I knew much about the city itself, but not the greater world until From the Ashes.
Thank you for the video. In my campaigns, I prefer to do the miles of my hexmaps in multiples of 5. So my most common ones are 5 mile hexes so my players can travel 3 hexes a day comfortably or 4 a day if they want to take a point of exhaustion
@@WillyMuffinUK I agree with that. Great videos, mate. I found you while looking for more Dark Sun content and I've been watching most of your stuff these past 10 days
The observation about the city map is interesting. A team of game designers and illustrators could create a three dimensional city map that is both artistic and functional. If done the right way, the results would be worth the effort.
They could, and in a few cases have. The problem with that particular generation of Greyhawk city maps is that they are, while stylistically evocative, not the most useful. Partially because they are so busy with line art that when presented at the size they are within the books, they just look like random scribbles. It's a shame, because the style could have been made to work, probably.
I've been wondering if Turnbull and Morris ever fleshed out Keoland in their home games. That whole southwest region of the Flanaess strikes me as synonymous with the UK, and Keoland has always been strangely void of TSR published info. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the Marklands! Glad I own a physical copy now... didn't realize the digital scarcity. Strange. Thanks for the video!
Keoland does feel a bit Englandy - Furyondy a bit French, for that matter. Unfortunately, I have no information on whether either gentleman even ran campaigns in Greyhawk - I wouldn't be surprised if they did not. The Marklands thing puzzles me. I've scoured it for anything WotC might have found too problematic to put out, but given the disclaimer they use and in relation to other old materials aterial they have made available, it doesn't make sense. The only thing I can think of is that maybe they don't have a clean enough digital copy in their archives to produce one from. It is a strange omission.
@13:28 These military breakdowns (like the ones shown @20:30), do not merely "follow on" from the Greyhawk Adventures Wars boxed set to emphasize the wargaming possibilities of Greyhawk. They are also immediately useable for the Battlesystems 2e rules, which were released a few years earlier. Few people recognize how AD&D 2e in the early 90’s attempted to restore the earliest wargaming roots of D&D, with excellent adventures like Patriots of Ulek that threw beginning characters immediately into some mass battles (care of the wonderful Battlesystem 2e rules). One could also point to early 2e supplements like Tome of Magic, that dedicate a considerable amount of material to Battlesystem wargaming. In any case, why not cover The Vale of the Mage? It's admittedly pre-FTA, but it is still a nice 2e-era Greyhawk regional sourcebook.
Well, we'll agree to differ on Patriots of Ulek. That aside - indeed. Greyhawk was very much set up as a "war world" - it's a shame they didn't go down the route of Gold & Glory and The Horde Campaign - both Forgotten Realms BattleSystem books. I wouldn't go so far as to say TSR were attempting to restore those wargaming roots - they hadn't left. Remember, BattleSystem originally came out in 1985, the 1989 version being rather simpler and better integrated in its update for 2nd Ed. BECMI had War Machine from Companion on. Before that, we obviously still had Chainmail and Swords & Spells. My general point being, it was fairly late into 2nd Ed when those roots faded. Why not Vale of the Mage - because, as you note, it's not Sargant. Although I agree, it is a good book, and somewhat rescued the line for me after the horrifically bad Gargoyle and Child's Play.
Two authors having different ideas, and sloppy checking by a TSR that really didn't care about the setting. There was a snippet in Dragon, IIRC, that discarded the Istus map from canon.
I need this, guess I'm gonna have to print out "Ivid the Undying". You mentionned you had to clear the file a bit before printing through Lulu ? Care to share some details ? Thanks for this fanstastic video, that's what I call a real Rpg channel. :)
Yes. Basically, TSR released it as a plain text RTF. Someone formed that into a PDF with cover and Sargent-era formatting, but didn't use fonts and styles that could be embedded for POD. I took their work and cleaned it up for POD, including embedding fonts, and separating the cover for Lulu. More than happy to share the results.
My copy of 'Ivid the Undying,' page 27, does not have the map insert on "The Grand Gazetteer" that you and your printer were able to find; it just has a blank space. Could you provide a link to that map, if possible, please?!? Thanks!
It has floated around for a while. Quick Google search for me just now found it here: davidleonard-greyhawkmusings.blogspot.com/2023/09/north-province-part-2.html - although that's far from its origin point!
Ok this is weird, but months ago, I added to my watch later list a playlist titled "History of D&D through advertisements". I lost my youtube account and I have been looking for that playlist for ages. I think it was yours, but I dont see it anywhere. Can you please confirm or deny this?
Is there anyway you can send me your download of Ivid the undying so I can get my own print on demand for it, I would be willing to reimburse you for your effort, I work 65 hours a week in a steel mill so I have little free time, also what print on demand service did you use??? Thanks for any help you could provide in advance. Thanks Dave
@@davemann4201 I didn't get an email through - but here's a link. Let me know how you get on. www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/nhgnvvxlf8229uumfqukf/h?rlkey=zo1u8olwq4i7cnr2lvp32ysr9&dl=0
One reason why I preferred FR over GH is how in FR the sourcebooks had all of the buildings on the town/city maps fully described, accompanied with detailed npcs and plenty of plot hooks and even magic items sprinkled in, while I found the opposite to be true with most if not all GH supplements. Although it had some interesting themes such as a once proud post-war kingdom, famine, espionage, tension and distrust even among the good-aligned nations it still felt somewhat bland. IDK did you ever manage to run a campaign using the Marklands? Off-topic question but didn't you say you used to DM for the RPGA? What was it like? Did you ever get to meet some of the lead writers in TSR? Would you say your very familiar with the entire 2nd AD&D line of books? Would you ever run 2nd edition again?
The FR v Greyhawk thing is very much "horses for courses". People that likes detail tended towards FR, people that preferred relatively skeletal scaffolding with which to build their own detail preferred Greyhawk - I feel it was good that both options were available. Did I ever manage to run a campaign using The Marklands (and, I'll add, Iuz the Evil to that equation) - yes.
From your off-topics: Yes, from around 1986 through to the early 2000s. It was fun - lot of different people and play styles met in a concentrated format (as in, time-restricted play slots), and a lot of different knowledge levels. I didn't just DM 2nd Ed. AD&D - I got involved in 1st Ed., BECMI, Cyberpunk, 3E, and... others that escape my memory. The most fun ones for me were the nonstandard settings (Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Oriental Adventures, for example) and the "just for the heck of it" novice games - I often just threw the rules away and had fun with stripped-down basics to give these new role-players fun without bombarding them with mechanics. Yes, I met some writers and other folk involved in TSR and gaming. Most memorable for me on that front were Gary Gygax, Ed Greenwood, Marc Millar, Loren Wiseman, Ryan Dancey, and Dave Gross, but I've met others. There are plenty I haven't met that I wish I had. From an artist perspective, Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
Am I familiar with the entire 2nd Ed. line - other than Birthright, yes. Birthright didn't really impress me, so I never bought any of those books. Virtually everything else, yes. Do I know all that off the top of my head? Nope. It's been 20 years since I ran a 2nd Ed. game, so a bunch of stuff would need a layer of rust knocking off it. Would I run 2nd Ed. again? Absolutely. In fact, in having a think about what to include in my ramble about campaign sources video and hunting down my Dark Sun box for that (I have over 40 years of stuff squirreled all over the place - sometimes, finding things in the house is an archaeological effort all of its own), I've started to knock some of that rust off in order to piece a 2nd Ed. Dark Sun campaign together to run with the kids and co.
@@WillyMuffinUK what system do you run these days? Also thanks for the video. Only found the channel recently, stumbling across the Traveller mileu video. The content is insightful. You give some of the best overviews I've seen of old school material, without lavishing on the nostalgia or engaging in too much tribalism over settings. It's refreshing.
@@condomsurlatete Thank-you :) Glad to have you here. As for system - depends what mood I'm in and who I'm playing with. On and off: D&D 5E D&D BECMI Traveller T5 Call of Cthulhu 7th RuneQuest AiG Rolemaster RMSS Free League Aliens Free League Twilight 2000 Those are current mains. And when adventuring solo, SoloQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, and Star Smuggler.
I think you deserve the title of “the most RPG channel” in UA-cam. Thanks for sharing all these old-school stuff.
I'm not quite sure what that title means, given the number of RPG channels out there - but I'll take it as a compliment 🙂
I didn't know much about his Greyhawk work. I have and absolutely love Night Below!
I came to Night Below late. When it was released, we had another prospective DM in the group, and we had an agreement not to buy adventures the other wanted to run. Night Below was one he wanted to do, but eventually never did.
So I have it, but have never played or DMd it. From how it reads, it feels like a railroad done right - that is, touch point events, but a heck of a lot of freedom for the players to work between, and lots of "if" clauses that mean player character actions have a tangible influence on the flow of the campaign.
Anyway one day.... In the meantime, I'd love it if you could share your thoughts on it!
Excellent coverage. From the Ashes and Ivid the Undying really inpsired some of my own writings and why I'm stiring up a new GH campaign for people who have never played it.
At least one Greyhawk campaign should be compulsory for all D&D players 😉
@@WillyMuffinUK My first real campaign I played in was set in the Great Kingdom, but with Rauxes replaced with City State of the Invincible Overlord; and Tegel Manor not far away. I was about 14y and the group was double my age. The DM was an ass, but the campaign was good. Also where I first played Traveller.
@@naughtkris That sounds like fun! Lankhmar was "my" Greyhawk City for some time - mix'n'match was the order of the day back then 🙂
Thanks for this video, i recently learned of Carl Sargent via B11 King's Festival and have been becoming increasingly obsessed with these campaign settings prior to forgotten realms that I'm most familiar with.
Unfortunately, so many good writers are no longer on this plane of existence. Carl did some good work in his time.
Love Greyhawk, always have. My 1st (and I bet MOST players) adventure was of course T1 Village of Hommlet.
It's a classic!
Carl Sargent's Greyhawk, was, for the most part, my Greyhawk. I didn't get into D&D in general or Greyhawk in specific until Gary Gygax was already gone, in 1989 with the City of Greyhawk boxed set (still my single favorite D&D/Greyhawk product of all time, I managed to get lucky and buy a near mint second copy after my original got pretty worn down and scribbled on). So I knew much about the city itself, but not the greater world until From the Ashes.
Glad you got on board eventually 🙂
Thank you for the video. In my campaigns, I prefer to do the miles of my hexmaps in multiples of 5. So my most common ones are 5 mile hexes so my players can travel 3 hexes a day comfortably or 4 a day if they want to take a point of exhaustion
To be fair, any hex scale can work - it's consistency that's important to me 🙂
@@WillyMuffinUK I agree with that. Great videos, mate. I found you while looking for more Dark Sun content and I've been watching most of your stuff these past 10 days
@@Toatony Thank you 🙂
The observation about the city map is interesting. A team of game designers and illustrators could create a three dimensional city map that is both artistic and functional. If done the right way, the results would be worth the effort.
They could, and in a few cases have. The problem with that particular generation of Greyhawk city maps is that they are, while stylistically evocative, not the most useful. Partially because they are so busy with line art that when presented at the size they are within the books, they just look like random scribbles.
It's a shame, because the style could have been made to work, probably.
I've been wondering if Turnbull and Morris ever fleshed out Keoland in their home games. That whole southwest region of the Flanaess strikes me as synonymous with the UK, and Keoland has always been strangely void of TSR published info. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the Marklands! Glad I own a physical copy now... didn't realize the digital scarcity. Strange. Thanks for the video!
Keoland does feel a bit Englandy - Furyondy a bit French, for that matter. Unfortunately, I have no information on whether either gentleman even ran campaigns in Greyhawk - I wouldn't be surprised if they did not.
The Marklands thing puzzles me. I've scoured it for anything WotC might have found too problematic to put out, but given the disclaimer they use and in relation to other old materials aterial they have made available, it doesn't make sense. The only thing I can think of is that maybe they don't have a clean enough digital copy in their archives to produce one from. It is a strange omission.
@13:28 These military breakdowns (like the ones shown @20:30), do not merely "follow on" from the Greyhawk Adventures Wars boxed set to emphasize the wargaming possibilities of Greyhawk. They are also immediately useable for the Battlesystems 2e rules, which were released a few years earlier. Few people recognize how AD&D 2e in the early 90’s attempted to restore the earliest wargaming roots of D&D, with excellent adventures like Patriots of Ulek that threw beginning characters immediately into some mass battles (care of the wonderful Battlesystem 2e rules). One could also point to early 2e supplements like Tome of Magic, that dedicate a considerable amount of material to Battlesystem wargaming. In any case, why not cover The Vale of the Mage? It's admittedly pre-FTA, but it is still a nice 2e-era Greyhawk regional sourcebook.
Well, we'll agree to differ on Patriots of Ulek. That aside - indeed. Greyhawk was very much set up as a "war world" - it's a shame they didn't go down the route of Gold & Glory and The Horde Campaign - both Forgotten Realms BattleSystem books.
I wouldn't go so far as to say TSR were attempting to restore those wargaming roots - they hadn't left. Remember, BattleSystem originally came out in 1985, the 1989 version being rather simpler and better integrated in its update for 2nd Ed. BECMI had War Machine from Companion on. Before that, we obviously still had Chainmail and Swords & Spells. My general point being, it was fairly late into 2nd Ed when those roots faded.
Why not Vale of the Mage - because, as you note, it's not Sargant. Although I agree, it is a good book, and somewhat rescued the line for me after the horrifically bad Gargoyle and Child's Play.
Yes you are correct, I just checked and it is still not on Drivethrurpg.
Which, Marklands? Yes, and I'm really not sure why.
Also, is it ever explained why the map of Rel Mord in WGR4 differs from the one in Fate of Istus?
Two authors having different ideas, and sloppy checking by a TSR that really didn't care about the setting. There was a snippet in Dragon, IIRC, that discarded the Istus map from canon.
I need this, guess I'm gonna have to print out "Ivid the Undying". You mentionned you had to clear the file a bit before printing through Lulu ? Care to share some details ? Thanks for this fanstastic video, that's what I call a real Rpg channel. :)
Yes. Basically, TSR released it as a plain text RTF. Someone formed that into a PDF with cover and Sargent-era formatting, but didn't use fonts and styles that could be embedded for POD. I took their work and cleaned it up for POD, including embedding fonts, and separating the cover for Lulu.
More than happy to share the results.
My copy of 'Ivid the Undying,' page 27, does not have the map insert on "The Grand Gazetteer" that you and your printer were able to find; it just has a blank space. Could you provide a link to that map, if possible, please?!? Thanks!
It has floated around for a while. Quick Google search for me just now found it here: davidleonard-greyhawkmusings.blogspot.com/2023/09/north-province-part-2.html - although that's far from its origin point!
Thank you so much! @@WillyMuffinUK
Ok this is weird, but months ago, I added to my watch later list a playlist titled "History of D&D through advertisements". I lost my youtube account and I have been looking for that playlist for ages. I think it was yours, but I dont see it anywhere. Can you please confirm or deny this?
I believe it is this you're looking for - well, part one of 3 (so far) : ua-cam.com/video/dYQQlsyBdhA/v-deo.html
@@WillyMuffinUK Thank you so much!
Ummm, am I the only one who is COMPLEATLY distracted by the coffie cup? 😄🤣
🤣 It's usually tea - coffee I generally reserve for camps and meetings!
@@WillyMuffinUK I sit corrected. Allow me to rephrase- Ummm, am I the only one who is completely distracted by the "TEA" cup???
😁🤣
@@MsGorteck 🤣
Is there anyway you can send me your download of Ivid the undying so I can get my own print on demand for it, I would be willing to reimburse you for your effort, I work 65 hours a week in a steel mill so I have little free time, also what print on demand service did you use??? Thanks for any help you could provide in advance. Thanks Dave
I would imagine so - I can create a share link to Dropbox.
Personally, I use Lulu as a POD service.
Thanks Willy, let me know what info you need for the link. Also I sent you an email on your music website with my email. Dave
@@davemann4201 I didn't get an email through - but here's a link. Let me know how you get on.
www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/nhgnvvxlf8229uumfqukf/h?rlkey=zo1u8olwq4i7cnr2lvp32ysr9&dl=0
Thanks Willy, I really appreciate you doing this, I will let you know when I get the print on demand in the mail
@@davemann4201 No worries - good luck!
One reason why I preferred FR over GH is how in FR the sourcebooks had all of the buildings on the town/city maps fully described, accompanied with detailed npcs and plenty of plot hooks and even magic items sprinkled in, while I found the opposite to be true with most if not all GH supplements. Although it had some interesting themes such as a once proud post-war kingdom, famine, espionage, tension and distrust even among the good-aligned nations it still felt somewhat bland. IDK did you ever manage to run a campaign using the Marklands?
Off-topic question but didn't you say you used to DM for the RPGA? What was it like? Did you ever get to meet some of the lead writers in TSR? Would you say your very familiar with the entire 2nd AD&D line of books? Would you ever run 2nd edition again?
The FR v Greyhawk thing is very much "horses for courses". People that likes detail tended towards FR, people that preferred relatively skeletal scaffolding with which to build their own detail preferred Greyhawk - I feel it was good that both options were available.
Did I ever manage to run a campaign using The Marklands (and, I'll add, Iuz the Evil to that equation) - yes.
From your off-topics:
Yes, from around 1986 through to the early 2000s. It was fun - lot of different people and play styles met in a concentrated format (as in, time-restricted play slots), and a lot of different knowledge levels. I didn't just DM 2nd Ed. AD&D - I got involved in 1st Ed., BECMI, Cyberpunk, 3E, and... others that escape my memory.
The most fun ones for me were the nonstandard settings (Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Oriental Adventures, for example) and the "just for the heck of it" novice games - I often just threw the rules away and had fun with stripped-down basics to give these new role-players fun without bombarding them with mechanics.
Yes, I met some writers and other folk involved in TSR and gaming. Most memorable for me on that front were Gary Gygax, Ed Greenwood, Marc Millar, Loren Wiseman, Ryan Dancey, and Dave Gross, but I've met others. There are plenty I haven't met that I wish I had. From an artist perspective, Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
Am I familiar with the entire 2nd Ed. line - other than Birthright, yes. Birthright didn't really impress me, so I never bought any of those books. Virtually everything else, yes. Do I know all that off the top of my head? Nope. It's been 20 years since I ran a 2nd Ed. game, so a bunch of stuff would need a layer of rust knocking off it.
Would I run 2nd Ed. again? Absolutely. In fact, in having a think about what to include in my ramble about campaign sources video and hunting down my Dark Sun box for that (I have over 40 years of stuff squirreled all over the place - sometimes, finding things in the house is an archaeological effort all of its own), I've started to knock some of that rust off in order to piece a 2nd Ed. Dark Sun campaign together to run with the kids and co.
@@WillyMuffinUK what system do you run these days?
Also thanks for the video. Only found the channel recently, stumbling across the Traveller mileu video. The content is insightful. You give some of the best overviews I've seen of old school material, without lavishing on the nostalgia or engaging in too much tribalism over settings. It's refreshing.
@@condomsurlatete Thank-you :) Glad to have you here.
As for system - depends what mood I'm in and who I'm playing with. On and off:
D&D 5E
D&D BECMI
Traveller T5
Call of Cthulhu 7th
RuneQuest AiG
Rolemaster RMSS
Free League Aliens
Free League Twilight 2000
Those are current mains.
And when adventuring solo, SoloQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, and Star Smuggler.