Greyhawk (supplement)

• 1. Introduction

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  Greyhawk, a slim 68-page booklet published in early March 1975, has been called the first and most important supplement to the original Dungeons and Dragons rules. Its title comes from Gary Gygax's home campaign, a world built around an imagined castle and the lands surrounding it. Yet the booklet contains almost nothing about that castle or that world. What it contains instead would shape every edition of the game that followed.

  Why would the authors name a book after a place they refused to describe? What rules were so essential that they warranted a separate publication? And how did a last-minute cover illustration end up being a copy of a comic book character? Those are the threads this documentary will pull apart.

• 2. A Game That Outgrew Its Rules

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  TSR published the original Dungeons and Dragons rules in 1974, but the game arrived with significant gaps. The character classes and monsters it listed were few in number, and players who wanted to run combat needed a separate rulebook entirely: Chainmail, a miniatures wargame manual that Guidon Games had published in 1971. From the start, D&D depended on material it did not fully contain.

  Over the two years that followed, TSR worked to fill those gaps with five supplemental books. Greyhawk was the first. Its reason for existing was not marketing ambition but practical necessity: Gygax and Kuntz had spent long hours playing in Gygax's home campaign, and in doing so had developed rules the original booklets never anticipated. The supplement was already in process when TSR co-founder Don Kaye died in January 1975, and it reached shelves just weeks later.

• 3. What the Book Actually Contained

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  Two character classes that would become permanent fixtures of the game made their debut in Greyhawk: the thief and the paladin. Before this supplement, neither existed as an official option for players. The booklet also pushed the spell system into territory the original rules had left blank, extending the available spell levels up to 7th, 8th, and 9th.

  The rules for weapon damage received a significant overhaul. Rather than treating all weapons as equivalent, Greyhawk gave each weapon its own damage value. More types of treasure and magic items also appeared, expanding the rewards available to adventurers. The monsters section introduced creatures that would become among the most recognizable in the game's history: beholders, displacer beasts, blink dogs, carrion crawlers, and lizard men all appeared here for the first time. Many of the new rules in Supplement I, as it was designated with the product number TSR 2003, eventually became standard rules in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

• 4. The Campaign That Stayed Hidden

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  A 2004 publication called 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons and Dragons suggested that Gygax used the booklet to share details of his Greyhawk campaign world. Gygax had no such plans in 1975. He believed that new players would rather build their own worlds than inhabit someone else's.

  There was also a financial calculation. He had spent thousands of hours developing the Greyhawk campaign, and he did not expect a published booklet to adequately repay that investment. There was a further concern: if he published his secrets, his own players would read them, and he would have to start over from scratch with an entirely new world.

  Only two traces of the actual Greyhawk campaign appear in the supplement. One is an illustration of a large stone head in a dungeon corridor, labeled The Great Stone Face, Enigma of Greyhawk. The other is a reference to a fountain on the second level of the dungeons that endlessly produced snakes.

• 5. The Art and Its Origins

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  Greg Bell provided the illustrations for Greyhawk, as he had for the original Dungeons and Dragons boxed set. Bell had first met Gygax through wargaming circles, and the two had an established working relationship by the time the supplement was in production.

  That relationship had an informal edge to it. Gygax had a habit of contacting Bell at the last minute when artwork was needed. Bell's solution, under time pressure, was sometimes to copy figures directly from comic book pages. The cover of the Greyhawk supplement shows a sword-wielding warrior, and that figure is a copy of a character called Dax the Damned, drawn by Esteban Maroto for a 1974 issue of the magazine Eerie.

• 6. Influence and Afterlife

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  Shannon Appelcline, writing in his 2011 book Designers and Dragons, identified Greyhawk as an innovation not just for D&D but for the hobby as a whole. At the time of its publication, supplements were largely unheard of in the wargaming industry. Games were revised and reprinted, but continually expanding a game with new material was something new.

  J. Eric Holmes drew on Greyhawk, along with the original D&D rules and the Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry supplements, when he revised the material for the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set in 1977. That same year, Ready Ref Sheets from Judges Guild gathered twenty pages of charts from the original boxed set, Chainmail, and Greyhawk into a single reference. Journalist David M. Ewalt noted that the supplement helped dungeon masters learn to construct adventures by example, bridging the gap between players who had learned the game directly from Gygax and those who encountered it in a hobby store. In 2013, Greyhawk was reproduced as part of a premium reprint of the original White Box rules; the reissue kept the original content intact while adding new cover art.