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Ultimately, you have to decide what's best for your campaign. Half orcs are clearly intended to be a playable race, so setting them to be "kill on sight" is not good for that. On the other hand, m ...

Yeah, there's a fair bit of GH name dropping and such. The Saltmarsh write up I actually thought was awful, though. And the "GH" gods in 3rd are only similar to the real GH gods. Quite a lot of t ...

Hmm, international policy isn't appropriate for this forum. Sadly, I can't resist correcting blatantly false information. Your understanding of the IMF and the World Bank is seriously flawed. Some ...

I don't know about whining and bashing WotC. I could care less about that. I do know they haven't managed to produce a single thing I've wanted to buy since the 3.0 core rules came out (I did buy th ...

Finally, though real-life mythology and religion can be useful when fleshing out the planes and the gods it really can't explain the cosmology of D&D simply because all of these gods and being ...

Sorry, I know next to nothing about mythology.

Unlike in fantasy campaigns, one's patron deity was usually determined by where one was born (mediterranean religions particularly) or one's social st ...

Yes, you can post it. What you can't do is deny that the trademarks are WotC's rather than yours and you can't make money off of it. The only way a fansite like this is going to get in trouble is i ...

Bah. You don't survive on any forums, even relatively mild ones like this one, if you get offended that easily. I certainly don't. You can disagree with my ideas all you want. I'm perfectly capab ...

You guys are really beginning to depress me! Sad

You just need to realize that there are bazillions of rule books out there, only two of which are necessary to play the game: The DMG ...

Each of us will run our game in the manner we see fit. And this is both fitting and proper, we are the DM. I'm simply trying to explain, as simply and logically as I can, why your method does not wo ...

I didn't say they all got the same reward. I said they all went to the Land of the Dead. Sure, there were various minor exceptions. The Einheriar of Valhalla and of Freyja's hall were a tiny fract ...

Well, my academic background is in cultural anthropology and religious studies, so that affects my thinking on these matters. I tend to approach things from more of a 'real world' perspective than a ...

Well, I do things rather differently.... First, most of my "priests" are not spell wielding clerics. Those are the equivalent of special orders. So its not that easy to find someone able to ...

Are you asking if I agree with GVD that the whole edifice of Greyhawk will crumble without the Great Wheel? No, I don't. Don't use it in my campaign in the first place.

But it is the way Greyha ...

Why would you say that? The Great Wheel is used to show how belief shapes reality. But Greyhawk normally uses planar connections simply as a fantastical adventure location without worrying about ...

Speaking of Wolf Nomads, are the Rose Estes Novles about the Wolf Nomad Mika-Oba considered part of cannon?

Just in case this was a serious question..... NO! *laughs* Rose Estes is generally co ...

The 'problem' with the dragons in GH is not that they don't exist.. they are all over the place. Its that they don't /do/ anything. Brazzemal dozes all day in the Hellfurnaces. There's that drago ...

I pretty much agree completely,though I don't have exactly the same choices as yours. I've made other changes and interpretations along those lines, however. Wee Jas is the 'leader' of the Suel ...

Yes, the general Greyhawk tendency in the Gygax era was always 'we have cool races and actual pantheons, but...uhh... they don't matter and everyone gets along just fine'. I never particularly care ...

Well, dunno if the answer is simple.... but its pretty obvious: make it up. That's what I did, which is how I ended up with the groupings that I have.

Eww? That's almost de rigeur in divine circles :P Though if you mean She's actually a hermaphrodite who literally self impregnated, then you would be a little out there....

Well, I don't have fighting between the pantheons as a specific theme... I mostly have a Gods vs Demons theme in that regards, with the different pantheons reluctant allies in that. But I do play u ...

There are several meanings to mortar. The one he is using is the paste that one seals bricks and stone together when making walls.

The gorgon blood thing wasn't a rule... it was an example given i ...

Sure thing.

Changing the denomination would work.. that's a "realistic" price guide for medieval era England (prior to the late 13th century introduction of the longbow and the even later introduct ...

Actually, IMC he's a demonlord rather than a demi god. But I use a variant cosmology where the gods are one team and the demons are the other.

Wastri is more of the semi-half-sort-demi-god of the ...

So long as the Big Three are percieved to be the Big Three - that perception fostered by their overexposure - they will tend to continue to appear and only increase their overexposure thereby. It ...

Well, neither of those things are particularly what I was talking about, but whatever. You want a more historical (snerk) price list? Here you go. Oh, this is the 'big city' price list. Things ...

Well, every game has pricing already (though some are more abstract than others). You can also find 'historical' prices with sufficient diligence in websearching.

But you won't find prices for al ...

The incompetent game designer will use them if they can argument is rather flawed. The incompetent game designer will do poor quality, incompetent work whether or not its with Iuz or Wastri or someo ...

Umm, if that is your point I have absolutely no idea what you are responding to. There's not one suggestion anywhere in this thread that Iuz ought to be walking around laying smack down personally. ...

Well, that assumes that they care... But assume they do. What do you propose that they do? Stride into battle and smite the legions of Iuz? Iuz isn't on the front lines slinging divine power agai ...

If not, then whats the sense of maintaining any level of continuity.

Continuity is not stasis. Vecna being a god and half the Great Kingdom being trashed or ruled by undead is no more "cont ...

At what point does your position differ from "thou shalt not change at all"?
The published world of Greyhawk....and in particular the bits we are arguing about... are not EGG's vision anymore. ...

Its hopeless, sorry. You are better off going with game balance like D&D does. Nothing else about D&D or its *cough* economics is even remotely realistic, so imposing realism on pricing is ...

I could be wrong, but I thought smillan was making fun of the lack of originality that is in some Greyhawk stuff. ie "Yeah, some of the Golarion stuff is goofy, but do they have an Orcreich?"

I'd personally have Iuz regrouping after the Flight of Fiends, concentrating his personal attention on Abyssal matters as he restores the web of alliances and servants that he had prior to that. Mea ...

Well, I haven't bothered to get any Pathfinder stuff but I suspect you are overly harsh in some of those things. Its not really possible to be entirely original. If those places are all transparent ...

Well... the whole idea of gods as an active villain the PCs are directly confronting is very bad. I don't think anyone was actually suggesting that. The fact that the PCs do that with regards to Iu ...

There are certainly plenty of other evil gods and an functionally unlimited number of demon lords and the like to use if you are interested in setting up bad guy groups for your campaign.

There ...

I do think it is rather funny that there is call for Tharizdun to go when he isn't even there in the first place.

Maybe you missed how they turned every reference to the Elder Elemental God i ...

To redevelop Iuz now - at this late date, after all the poor use he has been put to - would IMO stretch credibility within the setting and, if Iuz was not not overexposed before (for sake of discu ...

Well, Mort, I agree with some of your post. Iuz really needs to get out of stasis.. either he needs to be shown to be effective or he needs to get clobbered. I'd rather he was made effective, since ...

Tharizdun is definitely overused, considering he's supposed to be a secretive and mind boggling whacko god that hardly anyone remembers. Not to mention all this bs about him also being the Elder Elem ...

Add in that your best and brightest (or a large fraction of them) are studying some form of magic and you have even less reason be assured of technological innovation.

As for why wizardry doesn't m ...

Yes, its right. Tieflings "merely" have lower planes ancestry, as mentioned. They explicitly do not have an infernal parent. The relationship is more distant than that.

Cambion and alu-demon wer ...

Well, Greyhawk does have too many deities if you add in the swarms of gods that have been retrofitted to the world since the original Folio and Boxed set.

There aren't /that/ many gods in the origi ...

Yeah, unless you started with Greyhawk there's never been any confusion about whether Lolth is a demoness or a Goddess. She was a demoness in 1e GH (and like all the major demon lords, effectively ...

Yeah, several of the guys who wrote the Ars Magica rules ended up as part of the 3rd edition design team. Anyway, I'll add to the agreement that Ars Magica is an awesome system. Melee combat is a ...

The short version on Resbin is that there is no consensus. Flan, Zahindian, and Olman are the three candidates. You can construct strong arguments for and against the reasonableness of all three c ...

Uhh, I don't see where you get the game for free. Unless you mean the playtest editions.

And I haven't the faintest idea what BESM is. You do, once in a while, see something that isn't D&D o ...

I seriously doubt that Pathfinder will do better than 4e. Fourth edition isn't the sort of fantasy game I'm interested in playing, but there are lots and lots of folks who are into exactly that kind ...

I don't know about the Oerth Journal article, but one thing to keep in mind about older sources of information on the PC based characters in Greyhawk: Gygax refused to give anyone the stats for them ...

Eileen, I think he meant the fudge that 3e used saying that Erythnul was granting Yeenoghu's gnoll clerics their spells in exchange for unspecified favors was 100% lame. Not simply using the thralls ...

Greyhawk is using the default Nature of Religions and Nature of Divinity from 3.0E Deities & Demigods so demon lords and devil princes can not start as a god, but becoming one is another story. ...

So that leaves the door open for plenty of additional languages and dialects for the individual DM to make up.

Sure, but you rarely see much actually done with this. Primarily because people ...

The quote I gave you is from the original printing of Deities and Demigods in 1980. The one with the Melnibonean and Cthulhu Mythos still in it. I never bothered with later editions, so I don't kno ...

Well, I think that every country having its own language is probably too far, but the basic GH structure is overly simple. Just look at Europe. There are a few big languages "Germanic" "Latin" ...

The other thing you might be overlooking is that the adventure modules were in effect the sourcebooks for Greyhawk during the 1st edition era. The Folio and the later boxed set campaign setting and ...

Lolth was introduced in the D-series, which came out before Dieties and Demigods, for one thing (not sure if she's in Gods, Demigods, and Heroes). In fact, she was printed as a demoness in the Fiend ...

The 4e alignment system doesn't particularly support designations such as Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil. Alignment is, in fact, largely irrelevant from what has been revealed. Both 4e demons and de ...

To be honest, your views on monster appearance and what makes something a demon or a devil are so different from mine that I'm having a hard time grasping what you are saying. So I think I'm just goi ...

I'd just like to point out that law and chaos is about how one acts, not about how one looks. Lolth most certainly acts chaotic, regardless of whether or not you think a dark elf form is suitable fo ...

No revision is necessary.

No offense, but "Duh". However, what does that have to do with anything? I don't even need to use the MM.. I hardly do at all as it is. But if I am interested in usi ...

The change is rather more extreme than you seem to think. Demon lords like Graz'zt and Malcanthet require massive rewriting, because their "shtick" is now only for devils. Frankly, most of the wo ...

Seems to me that the easiest way to deal with dragonborn is to just change their background fluff to suit them replacing the lizardmen that already exist in large numbers in Greyhawk.

But, frank ...

Oh, there's a number of things to dislike about the post war material and the "elvish retreat comes to Greyhawk" is certainly high on my list. And the wild coast is certainly another.

Just don't tell Leomund. He's really sensitive about the subject.....

There was interesting discussion on the subject of Lendor, Lendore, and the Lendore Isles last year (IIRC). I'm sure the thr ...

Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh definitely rocks the Casbah as a starting point. Lots of good stuff you can do with that.

If you are considering it, you might want to look at Wolfsire's excellent ex ...

Oh, I like the Co8 fine. I just don't like seeing them turned into a GH equivalent of the Harpers. As a group of buddies who happen to be personally powerful, they are kind of interesting. There ...

Definitely agree with GVD's summary. Greyhawk is about its places and about verisimilitude.. it seems like a real world, not a stage for PCs. And that verisimilitude is conveyed with hints and ti ...

As for Mordenkainen, he's always on his own side, seeing everyone as pawns no matter how powerful they can be. He'll always manage, indirectly mostly, to bend them to his needs. At last it's all abo ...

Well, sure. That's pretty obvious. Its kind of like the "well, if you don't like the rule, just change it in your home game" argument. That's always true and there's nothing to discuss about it. ...

In the real world of polytheistic religions (at least those organized into pantheons), there was a pretty clear division that allowed for jus cogens type arrangements. There was always "that gods" ...

My point was that Greyhawk was consciously assembled from a variety of sources. Gary and Rob were rather vehement about not using the "official" campaign or any of their character's stats. And man ...

3. Greyhawk has an organic feeling, because a lot of the things described in the initial releases of the setting were generated during actual play with actual characters, therefore defying any sor ...

Campaign Sourcebooks always trump core rules. The FRCS has all manner of changes to the core rules. So does the Ebberon CS. A GH CS would work fine as well in that sense.

The real question is s ...

Well, I haven't studied the area extensively. It just doesn't look like that much land on my map.

If it has strategic location, strong fortresses, and an importance to trade it would doubtless ...

I'm not quite sure what your question is? You are wondering if the Janasibs should have large cities or not? I don't think so. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to form large cities there, ...

Just because dwarves *can* be wizards doesn't mean that many are or that any of them are particularly powerful. Same goes for anything else. The PC classes are just that...classes for PCs. They ...

The world of Greyhawk is amazingly unurbanized. The Sheldomar Valley is a massive area and it has fewer major towns and cities than England did in the 12th century, much less Flanders or Italy.

T ...

What I want from my game is consistency and and fun. If I wanted brutal reality I would play harnmaster where if the combat itself doesn't kill you, the infection rules will.

hah. This hap ...

I don't really see how it matters one way or the other. There's no rational reason for WotC to allow negative speech about a product still under development. After all, the whole point of playtest ...

Well, I've generally been of the opinion that the game would be well designed. Wizards has generally done a good job with game design and these particular designers are not noobs. The "issues" wit ...

There are lots of reasons. Perhaps they couldn't, because he was just too powerful. There is nothing saying that the gods known in the Flanaess today are the first ones in the world. Perhaps Th ...

Well, again, we don't know anything about the properties. That's the big flaw in the article. Sure, cutting out five item slots (7 for low levels if you count the rings as gone) is significant. S ...

The other thing that is implied in the article, but can't be known for sure since they didn't tell us what those items do, is that the non core 3 items are supposed to be much weaker than what is curr ...

I think you didn't read it carefully enough, Mortellan. Its quite a big change.

First, all the "Plus" bonuses are now concentrated into three slots: weapons for attack/damage, armor for AC, and n ...

Medieval loans were not structured like modern loans, with a percentage of interest due. You borrowed "X" amount of money and agreed to pay 1.5X on a specified date or whatever.

Getting a loan whe ...

I use the ones in the Gazeteer as guidelines for fleshing out what sorts of creatures are present in a particular swamp, mountain, or other region. I don't actually roll on them to determine what the ...

He's pretty much given those thoughts... at least up to 3rd edition. Dunno if he's bothered to comment on 4e or not. His preference these days is for stat block lite, skill oriented game systems. ...

Well, yeah, I wouldn't actually run a long term campaign of any sort in a wuxia style game. But it would be interesting to read and maybe fun for a change of pace mini campaign.

Anyway, my poi ...

Do they actually have any Greyhawk names besides some of the gods? Which is something I don't think they are going to fix anyway. I'm sure even if they did make their own setting, they'd probably u ...

To be honest, if this was just a new fantasy game, I'd find it kind of interesting. I like watching the wuxia style films and have played a few games that tend in that direction (Earthdawn does, for ...

Ummm, what? Greyhawk has hardly brought homebrews crashing to their knees. No campaign setting has done that, though the FR has come closer than any other. Greyhawk was created as an exemplar fo ...

I think that I've always disliked critical hits and always will. So I'm not overly fond of any mechanics for it. But automatic max damage is better than "multiple times normal damage" mechanisms.
...

I think that's what the Eladrin are for... The new elf is mainly surprising in the culture that they've given it, rather than the mechanics. And that was covered in an article some months back rath ...

Well, the game originated as a tactical miniatures skirmish game and its apparently being moved back in that direction, except with an anime/video game polish instead of a wargames one.

That doesn' ...

The typical video game paladin is a "buffer". In the case of Diablo2, the paladin has a number of auras to choose from. Just like a D&D paladin has the protection from evil and resist fear ef ...

Yeah, I did notice that height/weight issue. Its beyond slender. The height of elves has always been world specific. They are short in GH, human height in the FR, taller than humans in Dark Sun, a ...

Amusing as that is, I don't really think they are "dumbing down" the game. And using squares certainly isn't a dumbing down move even if they are. Its not really any different from the earlier edit ...