Make the world your own!
At gaming tables everywhere, the future of the Greyhawk setting turns on the rolls of dice and the actions of thousands of Dungeons & Dragons players.
This comprehensive sourcebook contains everything you need to get started in the RPGA Network's exciting Living Greyhawk shared world campaign.
Inside you'll find descriptions of dozens of nations and scores of deities, as well as hundreds of adventure hooks to get heores immersed in the dangers of the world. In the Living Greyhawk campaign, you determine the fate of the Flanaess. It's your world!
Product History
Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, by Gary Holian, Erik Mona, Sean Reynolds, and Frederick Weining, is a sourcebook for the World of Greyhawk. It was published in November 2000.
Origins (I): The Living Update. By 2000, the RPGA was running a variety of "Living" campaigns that gave players the ability to be part of an ongoing organized-play campaign with other fans from across the world. The most successful of these was the Living City (1987-2004) campaign, which grew out of Polyhedron magazine (1981-2002).
With the advent of D&D 3e (2000) the RPGA membership decided to convert Living City over to 3e, but the massive conversion effort soon got to be too much for the RPGA, and so the campaign was handed off to Ryan Dancey's Organized Play, who ran it from 2001-2003. But it wasn't just time that was an issue: RPGA was also working on a new campaign for 3e, Living Greyhawk.
Living Greyhawk gave the RPGA the chance to start afresh, rather than having to support nearly 15 years worth of campaign history. And it made sense to set the new Organized Play campaign in the new default setting for D&D 3e: Greyhawk.
Origins (II): The Two Gazetteers. The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is a massive book that overviews Oerth, the world of Greyhawk — laying the foundation of the massive Living Greyhawk campaign. However, it was just one of two books that Wizards produced in late 2000 to do so. The other was the 32-page Dungeons & Dragons Gazetteer (2000), which came out two months earlier at the 2000 Gen Con Game Fair. The shorter Gazetteer was mostly a cut-down version of the important portions of the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.
Origins (III): The Missing Third. The origins of the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer went back two years. In 1998, Wizards of the Coast published The Adventure Begins (1998) and Greyhawk Player's Guide (1998), a pair of supplements intended to revive the classic world of Greyhawk. There was meant to be a third book, a 200+ page hardcover written primarily by Roger E. Moore that would have been the setting's core sourcebook. Moore produced an outline for the book and freelancers Erik Mona and Steve Wilson wrote some material to go with Moore's text … but Wizards dropped the book from their schedule before it went anywhere. The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is sort of that missing book. It roughly follows Moore's outline, and since it's still set in 591 CY, it forms a nice trilogy with the previous two releases.
About the Book. Somewhat surprisingly the 192-page Living Greyhawk Gazetteer was produced as a softcover book, a trend that Wizards would follow with some of their setting books in the early years of D&D 3e. The heart of the book is an extensive gazetteer of Oerth's Flanaess.
The Living Rollout. So what exactly was this "Living Greyhawk" that was replacing the Living City, and that was generating the creation of not one but two Gazetteer?
Fans first started hearing about the new organized-play campaign in 1999 when the RPGA began seeking volunteer organizers. Some of these volunteers then offered the first sneak peak of Living Greyhawk at Patriot Games on July 13-16, 2000 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The group known as the "MidAtlantic Living World Triad" ran a large event called "Legacy of Valor: The Invasion of Geoff", which players could use to seed their Living Greyhawk characters.
However the real rollout of Living Greyhawk came at the 2000 Gen Con Game Game Fair on August 10-13. That's when Wizards released the smaller D&D Gazetteer and when they fully revealed Living Greyhawk. Three Living Greyhawk adventures appeared for play, "Dragon Scales at Morningtide" by Sean K. Reynolds, "The Reckoning" by Sean Flaherty and John Richardson, and "River Of Blood" by Erik Mona.
These first "core" adventures, focused on the City of Greyhawk, were just the tip of the Living Iceberg.
The Living Regions. Living Greyhawk was designed as a massive, worldwide phenomenon — the largest Organized Play game to date. Six RPGA members formed a Council, which oversaw the game, but they delegated responsibility to thirty Triads — each of which was a group of three volunteers who oversaw one of the game's regions.
These regions corresponded both to parts of the world and to areas in Greyhawk. Thus, the Bandit Kingdoms covered Oklahoma and Texas, while D&D's home in Wisconsin got Highfolk all to itself. Italy was linked to the Sea Barons and the United Kingdom and Ireland shared Onnwal.
The adventures for each region were approved by its Triad — and rather uniquely a player could only play a region's adventures if he was currently located in that region! So, if you wanted your character to explore Perrenland, you had to travel to Australia (or later to other Pacific states like Korea and Singapore).
Living Greyhawk's regions were also linked into metaregions, each of which was overseen by one of the RPGA Council members — and each of which had metaregional adventures! The sixth and final RPGA Council member then worked on Core adventures, which were available to all players.
The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer was thus important not just as the setting book for Living Greyhawk, but also as its core organizational map!
The Living Years. After the publication of the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, Living Greyhawk disappears from the publication record of Wizards of the Coast for several years. Nonetheless, it was a vibrant and evolving program from 2000-2008. Over that period, the thirty regions produced approximately 2,000 adventures, an immense amount of content that's approximately double the count of every mass-market book that TSR and Wizards ever produced for D&D. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of players played the adventures regularly.
As the years went by, changed occurred in the program.
In 2001, the RPGA did away with the old certificate program from Living City, which had long caused players to squabble over loot. Then in 2002, they got rid of the RPGA's membership fee, opening the game up to additional players. In the years that followed, the core adventures pushed forward the metastory of Greyhawk, running a year at a time from 591 to 598. Non-RPGA members got some hints at the material being generated through The Living Greyhawk Journal (2000-2004), a standalone magazine that was later made into a section of first Dragon, then Dungeon.
At Gen Con Indy 2007, Wizards announced that Living Greyhawk would die with 3e. Play ended on December 31, 2008.
Exploring Greyhawk. The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is a massive overview of the Flanaess — the area of Eastern Oerik that had been the heart of all previous Greyhawk books. It's thus a replacement for older releases like World of Greyhawk (1980, 1983) and From the Ashes (1992). Because it's set in 591 CY, Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is a nice complement to The Adventure Begins (1998) and Greyhawk Player's Guide (1998), though the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer has a wider scope.
Living Greyhawk Gazetteer details the races of Greyhawk, its history, its realms, its geography, its power groups, and its gods. There's even some groundbreaking exploration that goes beyond previous overviews because this new tome covers everything. If there's an area in Eastern Oerik that was mainly a "blank land" in previous Greyhawk sourcebooks, it's covered here. Similarly, the 27 pages on the deities of Greyhawk are extremely comprehensive — though the Living Greyhawk players would do even better over the years, eventually producing a "Official Listing of Deities" (2005) that numbered 200!
At 192 pages the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is arguably the densest mass-market tome of Greyhawk lore out there.
About the Creators. Sean Reynolda was Wizards' lead designer for "Team Greyhawk" starting in 1998. Holian, Mona, and Weining are all veterans of the GreyTalk mailing list — fans who moved into professional publishing. Holian also runs Greytalk and the Canonfire web site, while Mona was briefly the editor of the Oerth Journal.
About the Product Historian
The history of this product was researched and written by Shannon Appelcline, the editor-in-chief of RPGnet and the author of Designers & Dragons - a history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time. Please feel free to mail corrections, comments, and additions to shannon.appelcline@gmail.com.
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