D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[Chaosmancer]

We get it, you don't like the GH setting, it sure seems like you are hating on the setting just for the heck of it. No matter what anyone says you just repeat the same thing regardless, over and over, not even taking into account what is being said when it counters what your criticism. That's just trolling at this point... you kinda lose any credibility.

My man, no one is hating on Greyhawk. The worst thing that has been said about it is that it is a kitchen sink style setting. And considering it includes fun-house dungeons, a literal cowboy turned God, and spaceships with moss aliens and laser guns... I think that is a fair cop, not hatred.

Heck, I think an adventure I played in once was supposed to be set in Greyhawk, where we traveled into the home of an old explorer, and found a yuan-ti laboratory in the basement where they were cloning people to make giant man-monsters. This is a setting where two near-sentient automata fight a battle, destroying each other and reforming to do so again, in a very steampunk science sort of way.

You are interpreting this as hatred, but I don't think it is.

 

[tsadkiel]

My man, no one is hating on Greyhawk. The worst thing that has been said about it is that it is a kitchen sink style setting. And considering it includes fun-house dungeons, a literal cowboy turned God, and spaceships with moss aliens and laser guns... I think that is a fair cop, not hatred.

Also King Kong and the Cheshire Cat. (Okay, attached demiplanes, but still.) I love Greyhawk. I spent much of my teenage years adventuring there, and the setting is vast and has room for many different tones. It is absolutely not all gritty all the time.

 

[Yaarel]

When they literally have completely different and non-overlapping magical powers, different lifespans, and visibly different physiology (e.g. Eladrin eyes glow, some Elves can grow facial hair, etc.), it's rather more obviously distinct than "these are elves who come from the west and those are elves who come from the south."

Every Elf innately casts three spells: cantrip, slot 1, and slot 2. Different cultures tend toward different magical preferences. (The player should choose these three spells, but the culture that the character is from will have statistical tendencies.)

The different physiologies are ethnicities. Elves generally lack facial hair. A few individuals have beards because of some Human ancestor. Drow cultures have individuals with solid eyes, wolf eyes with large irises, and human eyes. Elves are shapeshifters, and continue to have shifting appearances, including the possibility of glowing eyes. The same Elf individual can appear differently at different times, such as Eladrin culture shifting seasonally. But all Elves shift in ambient ways, including to appear hyper clean, groomed, and polished.

All Elves are eternally youthful. They age at a human rate until 20, then remain apparently 20 ever after. Elves can die of non-age-related causes, thus on average live for various numbers of centuries, depending on environment. But individuals are still around since the dawn of time. Some Elves might use magic to appear differently.

There is a single simple Elf species. There are over a hundred different known Elf cultures.

Now that 5e makes the Ability improvement part of background. The Elf species can feature individuals with any Ability being exceptional. Possibly a prevalence of certain backgrounds tend to promote certain Abilities on average within a particular culture. But any individual can heighten any Ability.

 

[Yaarel]

In GH, orcs were commonly used by some nations as mercenaries both currently and in the past. Some of orcs never left the nations that hired them and have settled there.

This mercenarism and cultural integration testifies to the Greyhawk Orc being Humanoid with free will, rather than a kind of Fiend.

There can be and is an Evil faction, a religious Gruumsh cult. But even here, the members of this faction are only "typically" Evil. Other factions can be Good. Orc cultures can be any alignment.

 

[Yaarel]

I agree. I just think the name "warforged" is too specific to be effective outside of the context it was invented for, even though the species itself is perfectly acceptable.

Warforged can be called "Armor Golem", Metal Golem, or Wood Golem. Various species are known by more than one name, such as Drow or Dark Elf.

Even the term Warforged can make sense since many regions are at war, and the wizards of a particular place might have made them. Actually, the Valley of the Mage is a mage culture comprising Elf, Gnome, and Human mages. It tends to be isolationist, and can plausibly have Warforged as security personnel.

 

[Azzy]

This mercenarism and cultural integration testifies to the Greyhawk Orc being Humanoid with free will, rather than a kind of Fiend.

There can be and is an Evil faction, a religious Gruumsh cult. But even here, the members of this faction are only "typically" Evil. Other factions can be Good. Orc cultures can be any alignment.

Oh, absolutely. And being around different cultures could influence their own in a religious and/or cultural syncretism.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Every Elf innately casts three spells: cantrip, slot 1, and slot 2. Different cultures tend toward different magical preferences. (The player should choose these three spells, but the culture that the character is from will have statistical tendencies.)

I was referring to 4e, since we were talking about 4e, and "eladrin" effectively don't exist in it (the DMG/MPMM option is effectively forgotten these days). Where no Feywild-origin species got "cantrips" of any kind, eladrin could teleport, elves could reroll-and-keep attack rolls once per encounter, shadar-kai could become insubstantial shadows, and drow could pull an octopus trick and make a cloud of impenetrable darkness (to everyone but the drow who made it) for a full round.

When you actually do make them different, so they don't use the same baseline stats (as was the case for every edition before 5e that recognized any difference at all), so they don't all invoke exactly the same magic in exactly the same ways...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Warforged can be called "Armor Golem", Metal Golem, or Wood Golem. Various species are known by more than one name, such as Drow or Dark Elf.

Even the term Warforged can make sense since many regions are at war, and the wizards of a particular place might have made them. Actually, the Valley of the Mage is a mage culture comprising Elf, Gnome, and Human mages. It tends to be isolationist, and can plausibly have Warforged as security personnel.

Agreed. Being "forged for war" does not mean being forged for a war currently in progress. It can also mean being forged to wage a potential war--or as a porcupine policy, to get aggressive neighbors to look elsewhere when considering conquest. Like what Finland and Sweden have done for decades, having some of the better European militaries despite maintaining decades or even centuries of neutrality (until very recently).

 

[pemerton]

News Flash!* Raxivort was eaten by the Elder Elder Brain of the Mind Flayers, who then hunted down and ate their followers.








*(in my campaign)

Poor Raxivort.

 

[pemerton]

I was actually talking about the psychic goblins. 5e does have Xvarts

Tell me more of these psychic goblins. I know goblins, nilbogs, kobolds, svarts (White Dwarf), xvarts (Fiend Folio), hobgoblins and norkers. But I don't think I know these psychic goblins.

Are they from a GH product?