Greyhawk

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Greyhawk, formally called the World of Greyhawk, began as a joke about how Gary Gygax pronounced a word. He named his fictional planet Oerth and said it in a Brooklyn accent, so it came out sounding like 'Oith'. That planet became one of the earliest campaign settings built for Dungeons and Dragons, though not the very first one. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign had already been running for about a year before Gygax started his. Even so, Greyhawk grew tightly bound to the early development of Dungeons and Dragons, beginning in 1972. It stayed connected to official Dungeons and Dragons publications until 2008. The world started as nothing more than a dungeon beneath a castle, built by Gygax purely to entertain his children and friends. That modest dungeon rapidly expanded into a nearby city, then into an entire world, published across several editions over twenty years. Greyhawk also served as the backdrop for the RPGA's Living Greyhawk campaign, a massively shared game that ran from 2000 to 2008. How does a private dungeon built for two children turn into a fully mapped planet with dozens of nations? What happens to that world's mythology once its creator is forced out of the very company that published it? And what does it take for a group of players' own characters to end up shaping the setting's official history?

• 2. The Basement Campaign

  ›

  In the late 1960s, Gary Gygax was a military history buff and pulp fantasy fan. He helped found the Castle and Crusade Society, a group of miniature wargaming enthusiasts focused on the Middle Ages. The Society published an occasional newsletter called the Domesday Book. In Domesday Book number 5, Gygax promised a new game setting for the Society. Around June of 1971, he delivered it in Domesday number 9: a map called the 'Great Kingdom.' Members began claiming territories on it, including Dave Arneson, an officer of the Society and a frequent newsletter contributor. Arneson claimed a stretch of land he named Blackmoor. Gygax reserved a territory of his own beside a lake called Nyr Div.

  Around the same time, in the late spring of 1971, Gygax released a fantasy supplement for Chainmail. Chainmail was a miniatures ruleset he was co-writing with Jeff Perren. The supplement added rules for monsters, wizards and magical weapons. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Dave Arneson was busy building his own fantasy game. Arneson was impressed by the 'Braunstein' role-playing sessions run by fellow wargamer David Wesely. He built the Barony of Blackmoor around a village, a castle and a set of dungeons. He represented the castle on the table with an actual plastic model kit. Instead of commanding regiments, his players each took one character into the Barony's dungeons, and Arneson soon folded Gygax's Chainmail fantasy rules into the mix.

  Arneson had been running his Blackmoor games for roughly a year and a half. In November or December of 1972, he traveled to Lake Geneva with fellow gamer David Megarry to pitch their creations to Gygax. Gygax, then a representative for a company called Guidon Games, was immediately drawn to the idea of individual characters exploring a dungeon. He and Arneson agreed to co-develop a set of rules, a project that would become Dungeons and Dragons. Gygax quickly built a dungeon of his own within his slice of the Great Kingdom map and named it Castle Greyhawk.

  Two of Gygax's children, Ernie and Elise, became its first players, taking the roles of Tenser and Ahlissa in that first session. They fought and destroyed the dungeon's first monsters, which Gygax later recalled as either giant centipedes or a nest of scorpions. They also found a chest of 3,000 copper coins, but it was too heavy for them to carry. After the children went to bed, Gygax stayed up building a second level. His friends Don Kaye, Rob Kuntz and Terry Kuntz joined the next session. About a month later, Gygax added a nearby city named Greyhawk, where characters could sell their loot and rest.

• 3. Mapping An Imaginary Earth

  ›

  Oerth's axial tilt runs 30 degrees, steeper than Earth's. That produces wider seasonal swings across the planet. Wizardly and divine magic bends the weather back toward something more livable for its people. Castle Greyhawk stood as Oerth's most famous dungeon, the home base of Gygax's own campaign. In the earliest days, players rarely left its passages. Gygax, though, pictured the rest of Oerth as a kind of parallel Earth, its imaginary cities and countries laid over real-world geography.

  In 1980, TSR commissioned an official folio for the World of Greyhawk and asked Gygax to draw its map. He chose to start fresh, keeping many of his old locales but giving them new geography. He wove Dave Arneson's Blackmoor into this new Oerth as a country of that name. Years later, in his 1988 novel Dance of Demons, Gygax destroyed this version of Oerth entirely and replaced it with a new world called Yarth.

  One hemisphere of the redrawn Oerth was dominated by a single massive continent, Oerik. Gygax decided to focus his first efforts there, and asked TSR's printing house how large a map it could produce. The answer came back at 34 by 22 inches, about 86 by 56 centimeters. At the scale Gygax wanted, only the northeast corner of Oerik fit across two such sheets. He called that corner the Flanaess, naming it for the Flannae, a peaceful people he imagined had once lived there.

  Filling in the Flanaess meant inventing dozens of new placenames, and Gygax often turned to the names of friends and family. Perrenland honored Jeff Perren, his old Chainmail co-writer. Urnst played on Ernst, close to the name of his son Ernie, and Sunndi echoed Cindy, one of his daughters. By the time Gygax finished, the map held 60 political states. A freelance artist from Lake Geneva, Darlene Pekul, turned his prototype sketch into a full-color map on a hex grid. Gygax liked it enough to switch his own home campaign over to it. The original Castle Greyhawk dungeon itself was never opened to public play. Its rooms and creatures survived only by seeding the adventures published later.

• 4. Zagyg's Bottom Level

  ›

  Writing for the European fanzine Europa in 1975, Gygax described what lay beneath 'Old Greyhawk Castle.' Before the Dungeons and Dragons rules were even in print, the dungeon already ran thirteen levels deep. The first was a simple maze of rooms, built for players who had never tried this kind of game before. The second held a Nixie pool and a fountain that endlessly spat out snakes.

  Level three housed a torture chamber and a row of small prison cells. Level four was a realm of crypts and undead. Level five centered on a strange font of black fire, guarded by gargoyles. Level six repeated itself as a maze stocked with wild hogs and the Wereboars that backed them up. Level seven wound through a circular labyrinth lined with a street of ogres.

  Levels eight through ten turned into caves and caverns full of Trolls and giant insects. A transporter nexus there was guarded by an evil wizard and his tough allies. Level eleven belonged to the dungeon's most powerful wizard, served by Balrogs. Its passages crawled with Martian White Apes, and its sub-passages held poisonous creatures guarding no treasure at all. Level twelve was filled with Dragons. The bottom level, thirteen, held an inescapable slide that carried anyone who fell in all the way 'to China.' Getting back required a long journey through what Gygax called 'Outdoor Adventure.'

  Side chambers added a barracks where Orcs, Hobgoblins and Gnolls fought each other constantly. There was also a museum, a huge arena, an underground lake, a giant's home and a garden of fungi. Anyone who survived to the bottom met Zagyg, the dungeon's insane architect. Zagyg was a reverse homophone of Gygax's own name, an inside joke about the sanity of whoever designed the place. Only three players ever reached him, and each did it alone: Rob Kuntz playing Robilar, Gygax's son Ernie playing Tenser, and Terry Kuntz playing Terik. Their reward was to be flung to the far side of the world, each facing a long solo trek back to the city of Greyhawk. Terik and Tenser eventually caught up with Robilar along the way, and the three finished the journey together.

  By the mid-1970s, a dozen players crowded into Gygax's basement most nights, with more than twenty showing up some weekends. Impressed by Rob Kuntz's imaginative play, Gygax made him co-Dungeon Master. That freed Gygax to work on other projects and to sit down as a player himself. He even scrapped his own bottom level to make room for new dungeons Kuntz had designed. By 1985, when the home campaign finally wound down, the combined dungeons beneath Castle Greyhawk ran to more than fifty levels.

• 5. Legends Born At The Table

  ›

  Don Kaye created the character Murlynd for the second-ever session beneath Castle Greyhawk in 1972. Gygax later called him the first player to invent a creative character name. Most others, Gygax included, simply used variations of their own names. Robert Kuntz recalled that Murlynd never actually fired his trademark six-shooters in play. Gygax banned gunpowder from his Greyhawk setting. As a tribute to Kaye's love of Westerns, though, he ruled that Murlynd carried two magical wands. They mimicked loud gunshots and delivered small, deadly blasts. Murlynd's name later attached itself to a magic item, Murlynd's Spoon.

  Rob Kuntz created Robilar for that same second session, a fighter Gygax named after a minor character from his own novella, The Gnome Cache. As Kuntz kept playing, Robilar grew rich and powerful, eventually becoming secret owner of the Green Dragon Inn in the city of Greyhawk. Robilar was the first character to reach the dungeon's bottom level, freeing nine demi-gods along the way. Gygax later revived them as Greyhawk's first deities: Iuz, Ralishaz, Trithereon, Erythnul, Olidammara, Heironeous, Celestian, Hextor and Obad-Hai. He also became the first to enter and conquer Gygax's Temple of Elemental Evil, freeing the demoness Zuggtmoy from her prison at its center. Gygax was dismayed that his own masterpiece dungeon had fallen to a single adventurer. He sent an army after Robilar, forcing him to abandon his castle and surrender the Green Dragon Inn.

  Ernie Gygax played the wizard Tenser. In his early adventures, Tenser joined Robilar and Terik in controlling the dungeon's first level while the trio ransacked the depths below. Tenser became the second character to reach the bottom level, going in search of Robilar after noticing he had gone missing. His name lived on in two spells, Tenser's floating disc and Tenser's transformation. Terry Kuntz's character, Terik, later followed the same trail down when Tenser and Robilar both disappeared. He became the third and last player ever to reach the bottom.

  Gygax's own first character, Yrag, was simply his name spelled backwards, created once Kuntz took over as co-Dungeon Master. His favorite character, though, was Mordenkainen, created in early 1973 and named for a figure out of Finnish mythology. Gygax never revealed exactly how powerful Mordenkainen became, describing him only as having 'twenty-something levels.' His name went on to mark several spells, including Mordenkainen's faithful hound, lucubration and sword.

  Bigby began as a low-level evil wizard controlled by Rob Kuntz. Mordenkainen eventually subdued him, turning him into a loyal henchman and then a full player character. Bigby's name later attached to spells such as Bigby's crushing hand and Bigby's grasping hand. Kuntz then decreed that every henchman who followed had to rhyme with Bigby. That rule produced Zigby the dwarf, Rigby the cleric, Sigby Griggbyson the fighter, an apprentice named Nigby, and later, Digby. Gygax's son Luke created the elf Melf, whose name marked the spell Melf's acid arrow. Brian Blume created the wizard Rary and retired him at 3rd level purely to land a joke: calling him 'Medium Rary.' Gygax later borrowed the name for the spells Rary's mnemonic enhancer and Rary's telepathic bond. Otto began as an evil non-player character wizard, defeated by Tenser and Robilar. He chose to serve Robilar afterward, later joining him in the raid on the Temple of Elemental Evil. His name marked the spell Otto's irresistible dance. Jim Ward created the wizard Drawmij, whose name is simply his own spelled backwards, later attached to the spell Drawmij's instant summons.

  Once Gygax's characters had piled up more wealth than they could spend, and an army to rival most nations', he formed the Circle of Eight. Its eight members were Mordenkainen, Yrag, Bigby, Rigby, Zigby, Felnorith, Vram and Vin. After three years of game time, their pooled resources produced the Obsidian Citadel, an octagonal stronghold. It meant the Circle would never have to travel far to find a fight. Years later, after Gygax left the company, writers Carl Sargent and Rik Rose remade the Circle for a new sourcebook. It turned Gygax's personal band of companions into a different kind of organization entirely, one that outlived the man who first assembled it.

• 6. The Long Wait To Print

  ›

  Gygax debuted Greyhawk in August 1974, inside a short story called 'The Expedition Into the Black Reservoir.' It ran in El Conquistador, a small press magazine out of Chicago. Oerth itself first appeared in writing in June 1976, in the debut issue of The Dragon. There, Gygax prefaced his serialized novella The Gnome Cache by noting that Oerth resembled Earth in its geography.

  For years, Gygax kept his home campaign free of organized religion, reasoning that low-level characters rarely interacted directly with gods anyway. Some of his players called on Norse or Greek deities instead, or even Conan's god Crom, whenever trouble ran deep enough. Eventually Gygax relented and jokingly invented two gods of his own. Saint Cuthbert converted non-believers with whacks of his cudgel, while Pholtus's followers refused to believe any other god existed. Both appeared in Chapter 2 of The Gnome Cache, in the second issue of The Dragon, marking the first published mention of a Greyhawk deity.

  In 1976, Gygax invited science fiction and fantasy author Andre Norton to play Dungeons and Dragons in his Greyhawk world. Norton went on to write Quag Keep, a novel following gamers pulled from the real world into Greyhawk. It became the setting's first published novel and, according to the reference work Alternative Worlds, the first novel based on Dungeons and Dragons at all. The Dragon excerpted it in its twelfth issue in February 1978, just ahead of the book's release.

  Between 1976 and 1979, Gygax quietly set ten early Dungeons and Dragons modules in the world of Greyhawk. Among them were Tomb of Horrors and the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief series. Others included the Vault of the Drow and the Village of Hommlet. Lawrence Schick added an eleventh in 1979, setting his own module White Plume Mountain there too, though the original Castle Greyhawk dungeons themselves stayed unpublished.

  Back in 1975, Gygax and Kuntz had published Supplement I: Greyhawk, a rulebook expansion covering new spells and classes. It gave away almost nothing of the campaign world itself. The only hints were an illustration of a stone head called the Great Stone Face and a passing mention of the snake fountain. Gygax reasoned that new players would rather build their own worlds than borrow his. He also worried that publishing his campaign would force him to recreate an entire new world for his own players afterward. That would undo thousands of hours of work.

  That reluctance began to crack once the 1978 AD&D Players Handbook connected ordinary spells back to Greyhawk. Those spells included Tenser's floating disc, Bigby's crushing hand, and Mordenkainen's faithful hound. The following year's Dungeon Masters Guide referenced the Castle Greyhawk dungeons directly. TSR had originally hoped to publish The World of Greyhawk folio in early 1979; it did not actually reach shelves until August 1980. The finished folio ran 32 pages, packaged with a two-piece color map of the Flanaess measuring 34 by 44 inches, about 86 by 112 centimeters. Reviewers were largely impressed, though some noted the folio said nothing about Greyhawk-specific gods. It also skipped the dungeons that had made the setting famous in the first place. Game designer Jim Bambra later called the set 'disappointing.' As he put it, 'there is only so much information you can cram into a 32-page booklet, particularly when covering such a large area.'

• 7. Gygax's Departure And Dragonlance's Shadow

  ›

  In the years right after the folio's release, Gygax kept expanding Greyhawk through his column 'From the Sorcerer's Scroll' in Dragon magazine. There, he detailed the private armies of characters like Bigby, Mordenkainen, Robilar, Tenser and Erac's Cousin. Most of the other projects he floated there never made it to print. These included a citywide map of Greyhawk, a full accounting of Castle Greyhawk's fifty dungeon levels, and army combat rules. In 1983, TSR finally released a full boxed set, quadrupling the folio's page count to 128. It brought the total number of named deities to fifty, though only three of the newest additions received complete write-ups.

  By the mid-1980s, Gygax had relocated to Hollywood. He spent his time approving scripts for the Saturday morning Dungeons and Dragons cartoon and chasing a film deal. His own output of Greyhawk material slowed to a trickle. TSR redirected its resources toward a brand-new setting, Dragonlance, whose success was helped along by a run of novels from Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. Hoping for a similar boost, Gygax wrote his own novel, Saga of Old City. It followed a rogue named Gord as he rose out of the Slum Quarters of the city of Greyhawk. Before its release in November 1985, Gygax had already finished a sequel, Artifact of Evil. He introduced Gord to readers early, through a short story in Dragon's special hundredth issue that same August.

  Returning from Hollywood, Gygax found TSR in serious financial trouble and helped steady the company's finances. A power struggle over its future followed anyway, and TSR forced him out on the 31st of December 1985. Development continued without him, but the setting never grew past the borders of the Flanaess again. TSR turned its attention toward yet another new world, the Forgotten Realms. Only three Greyhawk modules appeared in 1986 and 1987, and all of them were compilations of older material. Rose Estes took over the novel line in 1987, though Gygax kept the rights to Gord himself, so her five books followed different characters entirely. A planned sixth title, Dragon in Amber, was advertised in 1990 catalogs but never actually written.

  A canceled adventure called WG7 Shadowlords was meant to be written by Gygax and Skip Williams. Its catalog number was reassigned in 1988 to a very different project. That project was a comedic compilation of twelve dungeon levels, packed with modern jokes like the Amazing Driderman and King Burger. It shared nothing with Gygax's original vision beyond the name Castle Greyhawk. Genuine revival came that same year, when Jim Ward asked Dragon readers what they wanted from a new Greyhawk hardcover. Ward was one of the setting's original players and the creator of the wizard Drawmij. More than five hundred letters poured in. TSR paired that response with a new City of Greyhawk boxed set in 1989, written by Carl Sargent and Rik Rose. It rebuilt the Circle of Eight as eight wizards, Bigby, Otiluke, Drawmij, Tenser, Nystul, Otto and Rary, led by a ninth, Mordenkainen. One new member joined them too, a female wizard named Jallarzi Sallavarian. The set relocated Gygax's old Obsidian Citadel to the Yatil Mountains, reworking it as Mordenkainen's personal castle. A companion module that same year, WGA4 Vecna Lives!, gave a formerly minor lich named Vecna his first appearance as a demigod.

• 8. War, Reinvention And TSR's Fall

  ›

  Critic Rick Swan described the Greyhawk material of the early 1990s in blunt terms. He called it 'a crazy quilt, where odd-shaped scraps of material are randomly sewn together and everybody hopes for the best.' In 1990, TSR decided the decade-old setting needed a refresh. It pushed the timeline forward from 576 CY to 586 CY, centered on a war stirred up by the evil half-demon Iuz.

  Two prequel modules set up the coming conflict in 1991. WGS1 Five Shall Be One came from Carl Sargent, and WGS2 Howl from the North came from Dale Henson. A strategy war game called Greyhawk Wars followed. In the game's own accounting, the war broke out in 582 CY, six years after Gygax's original date. It spread until it touched almost every nation in the Flanaess. A peace treaty, signed in the city of Greyhawk two years later, gave the war its name. Rary had once been a minor character Brian Blume abandoned at 3rd level, but TSR had since elevated him into the new Circle of Eight. On the very day of the treaty signing, Rary turned on his fellow Circle members with Robilar's help. Tenser and Otiluke were killed, and Robilar and Rary fled to the deserts of the Bright Lands. Rob Kuntz, Robilar's original creator, publicly objected to the storyline, insisting his character would never have betrayed Mordenkainen. He unofficially suggested that a clone or evil twin had been responsible instead.

  TSR followed up in 1992 with From the Ashes, a boxed set primarily written by Carl Sargent, describing the Flanaess in the war's aftermath. It was packaged with a hex map, two large fold-out poster maps, twenty adventure cards, and two 96-page books. The set trimmed the human pantheon from fifty deities down to twenty-eight, adding one new demigod named Mayaheine. It also folded several regions together, cutting the total number of states from sixty down to fifty-eight. The old conflict between the Great Kingdom and its rebels gave way to a new one. This one pitted the land of Iuz against a mysterious, supremacist faction called the Scarlet Brotherhood. Sargent promoted the darker tone himself in Dragon's March 1993 issue, writing that 'the powers of evil have waxed strong' across the Flanaess.

  Sargent kept building on that vision through 1993 and 1994, working on a new book called Ivid the Undying. TSR canceled it in late 1994 and shut down all further Greyhawk projects. A single trace of that unfinished manuscript survived. In May 1995, Dragon's gossip column reported that TSR had released the Ivid the Undying file as a plain computer text document. Fans later used that file to reconstruct the book on their own. By the end of 1996, TSR could no longer pay its printers, and bankruptcy looked all but certain by 1997. Wizards of the Coast, flush with income from its card game Magic: The Gathering, bought TSR and everything it owned. Once the merger was complete, Wizards of the Coast decided Dungeons and Dragons had accumulated too many settings. It began eliminating several of them. That left the future of the Flanaess in the hands of a company that had never built a single level of it.