How is this for a fun blast from the past!
Wizards Of The Coast has just (re)released 1983’s World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting for AD&D 1st Edition in PDF format as part of there DND Classics line.
- Enter the WORLD OF GREYHAWK…
…A world where bandit kings raid from their remote stronghold;
…A world where noble elves fight savage invaders and where bold knights wage war on the terror of Iuz;
…A world scarred by a vast Sea of Dust, across which drift lost memories from the awful forgotten past.
Enter a World of Wonder & Intrigue…
Fantasy Game Setting for a panoramic view of this fantastic place.More than a collection of maps and names, it is an active world filled with decaying empires and dark forests. Game elements include the gods of Greyhawk, the clash of political factions, and encounters in this wild land.
Head over to DNDClassics To pick up your own copy for 9.99
Some brief history of Greyhawk :
World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting (1983), by Gary Gygax, is the core sourcebook for Oerth, the world of Greyhawk. It was published in October 1983.
The world of Greyhawk began as Gary Gygax’s setting for his house D&D game. This primordial Oerth was centered on Castle Greyhawk, an infamous series of dungeons created by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. The wider world got some attention too … and it was rather different from what TSR eventually published. Gygax’s original world of Oerth (pronounced “OITH”) looked a lot like the Mid-West that Gygax lived in, with the Nyr Dyv taking the place of the Great Lakes. You can still see this Earthly basis for D&D in early products like Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975) and the Monster Manual (1977), each of which references Earthly locales.
When Gygax was asked to create the World of Greyhawk product, he was somewhat surprised that other GMs weren’t interested in creating their own worlds. Nonetheless Gygax was game … except he didn’t want to spoil his world for his own players, so he decided to move the officially published Greyhawk away from its Earthly origins.
Gygax started out with a new map. He filled two large sheets of paper after learning that was the biggest map that TSR could print. (The maps were later finalized in full color by Darlene, with the result being one of the most famous and beautiful maps in gaming.) Afterward, Gygax wrote up descriptions of the countries and locales that were found on that map, drawing from his own campaign, but adjusting facts as appropriate for the new map.
The World of Greyhawk that TSR produced was thus something old and something new. Greyhawk was originally published as a folio called The World of Greyhawk Fantasy World Setting (1980) and then was reprinted a few years later as a box called The World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting (1983). This second edition was vastly expanded. Though the first edition of World of Greyhawk had all of the geographic information — as well as short articles on calendars, history, languages, and even runes and glyphs — the second edition added scattered information on topics like trees and races, but also made two big expansions. The first was a set of encounter tables for Greyhawk, while the second was a listing and description of the gods of the world.
Much of the new material found in the second edition World of Greyhawk box had premiered in Dragon magazine, a work process that Gygax used frequently at the time. Greyhawk’s new weather system had originally been authored by David Axler for Dragon #68 (December 1982). Gygax himself had been writing about the politics and shape of the world since 1980 (with some help from Len Lakofka and Rob Kuntz); more recently he’d detailed the deities of Greyhawk in a series of articles that ran from Dragon #67 (November 1982) through Dragon #71 (March 1983).
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