Living Greyhawk Gazetteer [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The Good -- At 192 pages, this is a very comprehensive guide. It's organized in much the same way as the D&D Gazetteer, only in much greater detail. While a lot of this material (especially the history of the Flanaess) has been covered previously, the country descriptions make up the heart of the book. You get at least a full page for each country, breaking down the cities, religions, politics, economy and more. Want the stats for the head of one of the noble houses of Ahlissa? It's here. Wondering how many orcs live in the Pomarj? No problem. The section on Greyhawk's pantheon of gods is equally in-depth, expanding on the information in the Player's Handbook. I also thought including the color heraldry for each country was a nice touch. The world map is essentially a larger version of the D&D Gazetteer map, only with hexes and more cities indicated. Good, but not great.

The Bad -- There's more here on the organizations of the Flanaess than in the D&D Gazetteer, but nowhere near enough as far as I'm concerned. For example, I figured the Knights of the Hart would be treated like a prestige class. However, there are no guidelines or prerequisites for characters to join such groups. It simply says they're actively searching for new members. While this may be covered in an upcoming product, it should be here.

The Ugly -- I have mixed feelings about Wizards of the Coast turning over Greyhawk to the RPGA. Putting the campaign world in the hands of players is a good thing. (After all, players sustained Greyhawk while TSR was neglecting it.) At the same time, it seems like some details are being reserved for the Living Greyhawk campaign. And that's not for everyone. Greyhawk adventures once made up the heart of D&D. I'd hate to see such a rich product line dry up completely.

If you like campaigning in the world of Greyhawk, this is probably an essential buy. Taken as a whole, it's extremely well-done and deserves a strong recommendation. We'll just have to see if there's more to come.

If you want to DM a Greyhawk campaign, don't waste your time with the smaller D&D Gazetteer -- it has many grossly misleading errors in it and is merely a botched abridgment of this book -- get this one. And don't let the RPGA logo turn you off, this is quality material.

We are most fortunate that some of the most knowledgeable Greyhawk scholars put this thing together for us, people that really care about the Greyhawk setting; and their love of the world shows in the craftsmanship of this book. Erik, Gary, Fred, and Sean did a magnificent job given the time constraints and other challenges that they worked under! Pity they weren't given a greater word count allowance to pack even more in.

This is a world book detailing the setting -- that's why it's called a Gazetteer! It is not a book filled with monsters, magic items, and spells. Nor is it a book for power mongering players looking for new ways to munchkin-max their PCs. It doesn't really deal with D&D game mechanics, instead it largely focuses on detailing the world itself so that it can be used with any roleplaying system (e.g., I myself prefer the HERO SYSTEM over D&D now, but this book's value is not diminished for me because of this).

While it doesn't replace an entire library of old out-of-print Greyhawk books it does offer some new information and no other book gives so much information on the World of Greyhawk setting -- if that is what you're looking for, then this is definately the book for you!

That said, I don't think that the book is perfect. I only give it 4.5 stars instead of 5 because I have some minor quibbles with the interpretations and extrapolations made by the authors in a few places (but these are only minor complaints between fellow scholars). And I further reduce that to 4 stars because it wasn't what it could have, and should have, been -- 256 page hardcover with a map equal to the old Darlene map from the Folio/Boxed Set in terms of size and paper quality.

Still, I'm amazed that WotC let something this good get published without butchering it. I can only hope that a deluxe hardcover version with a greater page count, and text density will be published sometime in the future.

If you also like what you see in this book, I'd strongly recommend joining the RPGA just so that you can get the bi-monthly LIVING GREYHAWK JOURNAL which continues to provide quality material. These and the LIVING GREYHAWK GAZETTEER are the only sources of information that you'll see published on Greyhawk for some time.

In short, if you want to DM in Greyhawk, then do yourself, and your players, a favour: get this book and join the legions of Greyhawk fans..

Greyhawk is synonymus with FRPG in my mind. Thru major campaigns and story arcs, even conversion to another game system my love of the setting has continued to the present day.

So, suffice it to say Ive got an investment in the setting of both time and emotion, and thus am not exactly an unbiased reviewer.

With all of that said, as empirically and objectively as I can manage, I must give the LGG a full 5 stars. On a 1 to 10 scale it might be a 9, due primarily to overall lower quality intererior art, but such a nick isnt worth 20% on a 1 to 5 scale; thus on a scale of 1 to 5, the LGG goes the distance.

Why such a high rating? Because this is the book that Ive wanted so many times over the years, feverishly detailing campaigns and sessions with too little time and too many widely scattered sources of material, or worse a total lack of material period. This book manages to coalesce many of the crucial Greyhawk canonical works into one quality product while expanding material in many places, fabricating new material in others, and somehow managing to bridge the gap between the oftentimes widely different 'eras' of pre-Carl Sargent and post-Carl Sargent work (for the record, Im mostly pro-Carl Sargent).

While I have run & played in many Greyhawk campaigns, I persist the events of past campaigns in my version of Greyhawk; including material that I have had to make up over the years to fill gaps in the printed canon or altered canon to fit my purposes, and the actions of PCs from various groups. Therefore there are discrepencies between 'my version' and the official canon as Im sure is true of many other DMs Greyhawk campaigns, but that is hardly a fault on the part of the writers and thanx to the largely modular approach taken by the design team I can easily snap in replacement sections where needed without unduly skewing all other relevant material.

I remember Erik Mona and Gary Holian from the days of GreyTalk; in fact, I played in a play-by-email rendition of the classic Slavers module run by Gary Holian briefly many years ago. They both have grass roots-level history with Greyhawk, and it shows. Though I will likely never meet either, I feel indebted to them both for providing this book, which is obviously a labor of love, to the community in general and me specifically.

To sum up, all players and DMs who have an interest in Greyhawk should check this book out, and all Greyhawkers both old-school and those who prefer From the Ashes on owe it to themselves to buy this book. Let me say it again. ALL GREYHAWKERS SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK.

Now that's about as gushy of a review as Ive ever given, but I cant stress my appreciation of this product enough. Oerth lives in the shadow of its over-commercialized successor Faerun and there is likely little we can ever do about that. Nevertheless the setting has survived in the hearts and homes of its fans for a very long time even when excommunicated by its original publisher, and with a quality product like this new players and old alike can reap the benefit of what has come before while pressing on to forge new adventures in the FRPG world which started it all.