World of Greyhawk
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| Designer(s) | Gary Gygax |
|---|---|
| Publisher(s) |
TSR, Inc. Wizards of the Coast |
| Publication date | 1980 |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy |
| System(s) | Dungeons & Dragons |
Greyhawk, also known as the World of Greyhawk, is a fictional world designed as a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. Although not the first campaign world developed for Dungeons & Dragons—Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign predated it by over a year — the world of Greyhawk was the setting most closely identified with the development of the game from 1972 until 2008. The world itself started as a simple dungeon under a castle designed by Gary Gygax for the amusement of his children and friends, but it rapidly expanded to include not only a complex multi-layered dungeon environment, but also the nearby city of Greyhawk, and eventually an entire world. In addition to the campaign world, which was published in several editions over twenty years, Greyhawk was also used as the setting for many adventures published in support of the game, as well as for RPGA's massively shared Living Greyhawk campaign from 2000–2008.
In the late 1960s, Gary Gygax, a military history buff and pulp fantasy fan, started to add elements of fantasy into traditional tabletop medieval miniatures wargames at his games club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He sometimes replaced typical medieval weapons with magical spells, or used dragons and other fantastical monsters in place of soldiers. In 1971, as part of a rule set for tabletop battles called Chainmail that he was co-writing, he created supplementary rules for magical spells and monsters as well as one-on-one combat.
Around the same time, in Minneapolis–St. Paul, another tabletop wargamer, Dave Arneson, was also developing a new type of game. Arneson had been impressed by the Napoleonic tabletop "Braunstein" campaigns of fellow wargamer David Wesely that developed elements of what is now called role-playing, such as using a neutral referee or judge and having the players take on the roles of imaginary characters to resolve challenges. However, Arneson soon grew tired of the Napoleonic setting, and one night when the gaming group assembled, he presented a plastic model of a castle in place of the usual battlefield, and told the players that instead of controlling regiments that night, they would each take one individual character into the castle of the Barony of Blackmoor to explore its dangerous dungeons. For combat resolution, he started by using rock-paper-scissors, but quickly moved to a combination of rules that combined Chainmail and a nautical wargame he had co-written with Gary Gygax and Mike Carr called Don't Give Up the Ship! What set Arneson's game apart from Wesely's tabletop wargaming was that the players could keep the same characters from session to session, and that the characters advanced by developing better abilities or powers over time.
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