Can anyone help? Or at least suggest which areas to focus on for as "lite" of a setting as I can get?
Ok, but 32 pages isnt "a couple of pages" like I asked for.
I guess you lose, then.
Ok, but 32 pages isnt "a couple of pages" like I asked for.
Pick up Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins and just refer to the short summaries of the history and various areas. The whole book is more than 6 pages, but that section is about that long.
If you want something that is just 6 pages or so long, your options are significantly more limited, especially since you haven't noted what region of Greyhawk you are interested in, or any real guidelines for what you would consider the relevant areas to focus on. You could just pick up the LGG, pick a nation at random, and just read the entry for that nation, the ones surrounding it, any geographical features mentioned, and come up with the kind of summary you want. You could also check out various LG Triad websites and pick one that is appropriate.
I guess you lose, then.
And I guess you're just being a prick then.
Pick up Greyhawk: The Adventure Begins and just refer to the short summaries of the history and various areas. The whole book is more than 6 pages, but that section is about that long.
I'll have to look for that.
If you want something that is just 6 pages or so long, your options are significantly more limited, especially since you haven't noted what region of Greyhawk you are interested in, or any real guidelines for what you would consider the relevant areas to focus on.
But see, I dont know enough about Greyhawk to tell you that. I guess if had to pick somewhere, I'd say the general focus of the game would work around the City of Greyhawk itself. Seems as good as any place to base the game.
The point of this is to have something I can hand to players, or read out loud to give them a fairly good overview of the world without taking an hour to read.
No one has published a six page summary of GH, sorry. They couldn't make enough money to cover the printing costs. The D&D Gazetteer is the most cut down source there is. It takes another 'basic summary text' (The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer) and cuts it down even further.
The Adventure Begins is actually longer than the D&D Gaz. Both of them and the LGG have short synopses of the history as well as longer stretches of detail on specific regions.
It seems you don't want a product that does this, but want one of us to sit down and write you an introduction to the setting for your game. If that is what you want, then ask for it directly, just don't expect to get it. You had a bunch of products named for you. You can pick one up and do the cutting yourself, or go searching for a specific website.
As for suggesting where to begin, that's near impossible. Every place in Greyhawk is a great place to start a limited area campaign. Without knowing what kind of campaign you want to run, it would be a waste of effort to go through the effort of describing one only to have you say you wanted to use a different theme.
So you are going to have to meet us halfway here.
But ripvanwormer's response was unnecessary and seemed to be trying to provoke me.
I'd be happy to assemble what I need myself, but all of these products include dozens of areas, if someone could suggest a list of important areas, and geographical features, I'll put it together. I just need help figuring out what to include. I said in my first post, that I'd be happy with suggestions of which areas to include.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=lg/region/regionsystem (right column). They may not be the most perfect division of the Flanaess into separate-yet-linked geographical areas but they do the job.
Basically,
West: MR1 (Sheldomar Valley)
Northwest: MR2 (Trade Route)
North: MR3 (Iuz's borders)
Northeast: MR4 (Nyrond & Cie)
East & Southeast: MR5 (Splintered Suns)
Biggest nations of "good": Keoland, Furyondy, and Nyrond
Biggest nations of "evil": Iuz's lands, Bandit Kingdoms, North Kingdom, Pomarj, and Scarlet Brotherhood
Biggest pain in the *** nations: Bright Lands, Theocracy of the Pale, and United Kingdom of Ahlissa
Best known "free" cities: City of Greyhawk and Irongate
Nations having gone utterly down the drain: Hold of the Sea Princes and Tenh
Beyond that, as Samwise pointed out, you'll have to do your own research. I'm not going to go further into details (if only for copyright issues).
Good luck!
The easiest way, to my mind, would be to pick up a copy of The Temple of Elemental Evil. Even if you don't run the whole dungeon, this will give you a couple of towns to base the adventurers in, and an exciting region to expand outward from. I think it has ample information of all the powers at play to start with.
As an introductory handout to your players, I would photograph pp. 8-11 from A Guide to the World of Greyhawk from the old boxed set or pp. 5-6,8 of The World of Greyhawk Gazetteer from the even older folio. That's the chronology and brief history section. It's essentially setup for ToEE. It starts confusing with all the migratory bands, but just skim it. It eventually focuses down on the decline of the Great Kingdom, and on the lands local to the ToEE area.
Giving the players a copy of the last four pages of the folio--the Portentious Runes and Glyphs--has proven endlessly handy in my campaign, as well. Note, I wouldn't use the boxed set version.
I would also include in the Players' packet the "Player's Background" section of pp. 4-5 of the ToEE. As far as gods, it's easiest and most fitting to the campaign if your cleric chooses St. Cuthbert, in which case you need only include p. 122 from ToEE in the Players' packet. Druids should be followers of the "Old Faith", over all revering Beory the Oerth Mother. If they (or you) want more choices, I would photocopy info on Boccob, St. Cuthbert, Ehlonna, Fharlanghn, Incabulos, Istus, Nerull, Pholtus, Ulaa, Xan Yae, and any others of your choice, from the Guide (or the Dragon magazine archive, even better, if you have it).
As a DM, the next thing you'll want to get a hold of is Fate of Istus for its section on Verbobonc. That's the nearest city to the ToEE and you'll want to expand your campaign to include it pretty soon. And that's probably enough advice for now.
Regards.I'm going to be going through the beginning of that this weekend and I havent decided if this going to be the start of a longer campaign, or just a self-contained game.
Yeah, what's overwhelming about Greyhawk at first is the geography. I'm here to tell you (and definitely your players) to ignore it!
Unfortunately, what I was looking for was specifically the geography. The other details of setting itself I'm just going to make up myself and use tid bits from the core books and such.
Mortepierre's suggestion works well for me, I copied those into a word document and printed that out, it's two pages long and suffices for what I needed.
But thanks for the suggestions.
But ripvanwormer's response was unnecessary and seemed to be trying to provoke me.
I think it's just a misunderstanding.
Maps of the World of Greyhawk (ENWorld thread)
Where is Ravenloft in Greyhawk? (ENWorld thread)
I think it's just a misunderstanding.
Maps of the World of Greyhawk (ENWorld thread)
Where is Ravenloft in Greyhawk? (ENWorld thread)
Well I'm sorry if I over-reacted to your comment then. Thanks for the links I found a map I really like on there and I think I know what I'm doing with my Ravenloft placement too.
I'm not really sure what the point of grabbing a couple random names and locales from GH for your campaign is. Wouldn't you be able to just make that stuff up faster than it would be to try to find a write up of the places and modify them to suit your particular game. Which is, by your own admission, not going to actually use much if any of the GH material anyway?
Well its more that I intend on changing alot, so I'd rather keep the pre-existing setting info to a minimum. And I've tried making my own maps/world and its harder than it looks. Also 95% of the prestige classes are designed with Greyhawk in mind and sometimes it would be nice to tell players "oh yeah, you trained over here to learn those particular skills, etc"
OB, what happened to using Ptolus?
I decided I liked the setting better for my Arcana Evolved games, and I thought it'd be too confusing to use it for both.
Another one
Annotated History of the Greyhawk Wars
And another excellent introductory page, courtesy of the waybackmachine