I came in to D&D via 5th Ed. So I was completely unaware of Greyhawk until very recently. Before that though I want to make a few points: 1. I am not against Forgotten Realms, Ebberon or Tal'Dorei (I'm running a campaign with this setting), Sigil or any of the others. 2. 1st, 2nd and even 3rd edition are not really my style so I honestly don't know much about them beyond my cursory research. 3. I'm not against having a large variety of races in world. That being said, I have been drawn to Greyhawk for the very simply fact that it seems pretty grounded. More so than the aforementioned settings for sure. As such I have actually found a bit of your work and it has inspired me no doubt about that. Even in the creation of my own setting. So thanks for that, and thank you for this video.

Run a Greyhawk campaign in 5E for 2 years from level 1 - 13. To have proper AD&D feel, I sorted classes and races to common and uncommon category: Common races: - hill dwarf - mountain dwarf - high elf - wood elf - stout halfling - variant human - forest gnome Common classes: - bard - cleric - druid - fighter - paladin - ranger - rogue - wizard Rare races: - drow elf - lightfoot halfling - dragonborn - rock gnome - half-elf - half-orc - tiefling Rare classes: - barbarian - monk - sorcerer - warlock Feats were also limited, you could freely choose from the list below, but for any other feat, you had to find a master to teach you: - Athlete - Actor - Durable - Healer - Heavily armored - Keen mind - Lightly armored - Linguist - Lucky - Magic initiate - Moderately armored - Resilient - Ritual caster - Skilled - Tavern brawler - Tough - Weapon master For every 3 players, only 1 could have either a rare race of rare class. We ended up having: - variant human war cleric of Heironeous /w Resilient: Constitution (common) - mountin dwarf vengeance paladin (common) - variant human necromancer /w keen mind (common) - high elf eldritch knight fighter (common, joined later) - half-elf valor bard (rare, left mid-campaign) - drow hunter ranger (rare) I was quite satisfied with the party composition, looked AD&Dish enough. :) For background material, I used the From the Ashes book and the D&D3E Greyhawk Gazetter. When I needed more info, googled it up. For adventures, I used all kind: Keep on the Borderlands was the starting point, did a lot of homebrew, used 1 or 2 modules from EMDT/Melan (being Hungarian helped a lot in using his early materials available only in Hungarian) and even used the D&D4E Vor Rukoth. Didn't care much about lesser know gods, I remember Telchur being introduced through a multi-part magic weapon and the dwarf paladin has converted from Moradin to Telchur and went north at the end of the campaign to slay giants and find the last Shard of Telchur to have said magic weapon fully restored - never to be seen again... Only special rule we used other than the class/race limitations above was the 'Slow Natural Healing' from the DMG, so no fully restored HP on longrest (but that is the default at our table). The campaign was a blast, we really enjoyed it! :)

I think there're 5 important sourcebooks/boxes. #1 Gold Box to begin because it's set in 571 and, as GG said, everything is showed at first glance. #2 Wars because the Greyhawk's wars is an important event that will reshape the world's inner borders. Don't be affraid, several years separate these two supplements. So you have time to live a ton of adventures before playing that. #3 From the Ashes : If you still enjoy what Greyhawk becomes, go deeper and darker with this dark setting. #4 Adventure begins : describes of Oerth after the wars #5 Living Greyhawk Gazetteer : a presentation of the situation in 591 (if my memory is good). With that 5 sourcebooks/boxes you have 20 years of narative arc. Free to you to involve your players, it's up to them to participate or to make their own way without taking part in the major events that shake the world. Last words : take time to set the events and don't be afaid to think outside the (sand)box. .mY2cent$.

I was DMing a Greyhawk campaign with 5e for two years. In fact, the 5e Saltmarsh campaign book brought me back to Greyhawk. With all the 5e fan stuff you can get for free (Greyhawk feats, Greyhawk spells, Greyhawk subclasses), it works actually well. However, I am not a fan for 5e and my players were not enthusiastic too; so we returned to 3.5e in the middle of the campaign; and although I had most fun with 1e on Greyhawk, I believe that 3.5e is best suited. There are so many fantastic Greyhawk specific prestige classes in 3.5e and other great classes and prestige classed fitting well into the World of Greyhawk.

Look through the original gazetter, pick a country or region that looks interesting, and use available background to build up one's own little corner, to taste. And don't get hung up on getting every bit of 'canon' exactly right. RPG'ing is art, not science, eh? Most of the mechanical crunch of 5E can be pressed into the Greyhawk mold just fine; discard or alter what doesn't fit.

My step kids wanted to learn during the pandemic. I ran first edition Greyhawk on fifth edition rules. It was an absolute blast. As long as your DM is into the books and working a good story for the campaign, it works quite well actually.

I started with Known World when I was a kid and eventually we played in Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms. We've always made Greyhawk our own and sprinkled in the new races whenever we could. Tieflings fit perfectly in the Land of Iuz, obviously, but what about other places? Asimars: Rel Astra, Theocracy of the Pale Changlings: (anywhere really), Free City of Greyhawk, Valley of the Mage Dragonborn: Amedio, Fireland, Hepmonoland, Land of Black Ice Genasi: Ekbir, Ket, Tusmit Shifters: Menowood, Tiger and Wolf nomads, Rovers of the Barrens, Tieflings: Bandit Kingdoms, Great Kingdom, Ull Warforged: Blackmoor When it comes to new classes, we put Warlocks in places where dark dealings are made. In my own campaigns, I made Ull a land of Warlocks, brought in with the Brazen Horde, and Ogre spell casters. Warlocks with Fey Patrons are common to Elven forest lands, the Dim Forest is run by Warlock covens of the Unseelie Court. Greyhawk's focus on themes and history rather than minutia and rules makes it very easy to adapt. Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to run a Far Future Greyhawk Cyberpunk game like the one that appeared in Dragon Magazine years ago. Some day.

Good Info. Yes I agree the gold box is a good place to start. Greyhawk has always been may go to world setting for most of my games with either B2 Keep on the Border or T1 The Village of Hommlet or variants thereof being my starting points.

Old schooler here.. played d&d before 3rd ed came out. My group split up right as that version came out. Havent played since. Bought the 5th ed core books a few years ago. Now some friendscwant me to dm an inline campsign. Yrying to do Ebberon but would love to take them to Greyhawk.

The Gold Box is My go to as well. I tell all My Younger Players that start DMing to start small.

1 Ed. AD&D dinosaur, I’m getting into 5e. I’m learning it, I’m going to rebuild my Greyhawk campaign. Re-buying some of the stuff I had, making MY version of others. Don’t think I’ll use the Wars stuff, or use what I remember.

The age old rule still applies no matter what edition you play. Start small and grow from there. Completely agree about the overview, purchase the pdf of greyhawk, great starting point for anyone interested. If you really want to play the old modules go to DM's guild and purchase PDF's to print at home.

Yeah playing a tiefling in Greyhawk will take a lot of work. I SWEAR I never saw Iuz before in my LIFE! (He said to the 856th Innkeep)

I just got into DnD and Really like GoS. i dont want to change things about the factions and realm and what not so i am trying to figure out how to use it without changing things to put it in the forgotten realms....i appreciate all of the GH info you give, thank you.

loving the new intro!

I run two 5e Slaver campaigns, using modified Greyhawk Reborn character creations rules along with Greyhawk Rebooted patreon material, and Classic Modules Today Today series for the A0-A4 modules. All my players are required to be on my shared campaign through D&D Beyond which allows me to share homebrewed material and I find that a lot of the classic Greyhawk monsters and items have already been homebrewed into D&D Beyond so that is really great. Their characters get knocked down to zero often, they will take a level of exhaustion, they want to take a long rest, then that is a day, likely the monsters are now aware of your presence in the area and will take proper precautions. I find that people want to play D&D and if there is restrictions they adapt. I've ran past campaigns in the Forgotten Realms where they could play their Dragonborn and Tiefling characters.

It has a great religion and pantheon setup. I love the mythology of the suel and baklunish especially

I've been running a 5e Greyhawk campaign for just over a year now, the way I decided to handle Tieflings was to make them descendant from the first priests of Iuz a "blessed" bloodline sort of thing and most are found in or around his domain and worship him. So most people do hate and distrust them but if the players really want they can be a Tiefling so long as they understand basic things like getting a room to stay in being allowed into town with out being attacked by the militia etc will be hard.

I'd go the Castles & Crusades way to play in Greyhawk.

I personally want to experience this with my group over discord but I don't want to run it. I desperately want to join my players on a mini or major campaign using the mods but converted into 5th edition. To take my lawful neutral Half Orc Cleric with his 1d12 Kanabo taking the fight to the enemies of Humanity and rebuilding the towns/nations we help. Great video brotha! Loved it !

Wow did you see the prices Amazon is selling our old first edition stuff for now? Grey Hawk box set is through the roof! I wont sell mine because I love it too much....but I sure wish I'd bought a second copy back then that I could sell. lol

I've been running a 5E group in Greyhawk for 2 years now with no issues. I did severely limit racial options for PCs (my players were totally ok with this) to only playable races from the 1E PHB and UA (even then I didn't allow any of the Underdark races). I've been running old modules - the Goodman Games Original Adventure Reincarnated and the Classic Modules Today (from dmsguild).have been great. I actually prefer the Goodman Games updates over the CMT stuff as CMT updates try to rebalance for 5E uaing CR and the Goodman Games updates leave encounters as they were. So far the group has been thru U1, L1, A1, and S4. Couple of deaths and everyone is having a great time. Going to be running a separate 5E campaign with the Temple of Elemental Evil from GG this winter. I also run 2 AD&D 1E campaigns in Greyhawk as well, one of them with several players that started with 5E and now play 1E just as much.

You can obtain The Temple of Elemental Evil in 5e by Goodman Games. We need Scourge of the Slave Lords from Goodman Games. Then we need Queen of the Spiders from Goodman Games. Then you have everything you need for a complete campaign in 5e in Greyhawk.

Just stumbled across this video and as a result have picked up a PDF of the Gold Box, thanks for breaking down a good starting point for people new to the setting, even though I'm not as 5E player I found this really useful :)

Keoland and the area directly surrounding grewhawk are great places to zoom in on

I’m starting a greyhawk campaign using GURPS.

Lived experiences with D&D weigh heavily in trying Greyhawk in 5e. For me, with 30+ years in the hobby, I chose to leverage TOEE as the entry point (prior to the Goodman Games release!) and the Living Greyhawk Gazetter for all things history. Success is subjective, but we finished TOEE and I ran the characters though White Plume Mountain, this time from 5e’s own Tales from the Yawning Portal. This spawned some world altering narratives where I used the Gynosphinx to transport the party to the aftermath the Battle of Emridy Fields to confront Keraptis! Only unknown to the PCs Keraptis was an ancient Red Dragon running retreat “overwatch”! Good times! I used the aftermath of that to take the PCs directly into Iuz’s territory and confront the Bonehearts! Greyhawk is approachable with the right seeds. The gold box is an interesting entry. Curious about your thoughts on the Gazetteer? Too dense?

I've been doing Greyhawk in 5e coming up on my 3rd campaign since 2019. From in person to Discord when Covid hit, then Roll20 and now Foundry VTT all in the Greyhawk setting.

Concerning gnomes - their exclusion from the core rules book happened in 4th edition not 5th - however you did mention that you hadn't know for certain so understandable.

I'm now playing for almost 2 years in a 5e group (because they are my friends) and I find the 5e rules typical for high fantasy campaigns where the players are almost superheroes. Greyhawk is a low fantasy setting that is IMO much more fitted for 1e or most of the OSR-games. Would you have for example a Minotaur as a tavern keeper? Or a Half-Orc St-Cuthbert paladin of LN alignment? Or PCs that are able to recover from their broken bones and deep cuts in only 1 hour rest? It all sounds so contradictory. Moreover, if you want to start a Greyhawk campaign in 5e then you will have really a lot of work transforming good adventure modules to this system. That having said, I do fully agree with you that IF they want to use the Greyhawk setting as a 5e campaign that the Gold Box is the only thing they really need and of course they should start on a date around 576. Actually, I will lead a Greyhawk campaign for my 5e friends in a few months from now (using 1e rules) and they have ZERO knowledge of Greyhawk. I will introduce it to them step by step. Once they know their environment and the neighbouring cities and countries, at a certain moment they will find in the Great Library of Havenhill that a new map and encyclopaedia of the Flanaess has be made by the Greyhawk university and I will simply hand over to them the Grey box so they can use it continuously during their adventures. I'm very curious what they will think about this setting.

That is exactly what I did. Right now I have my party about to face The Slave Lords A1-A4

why not? It's just a location, sure some of the numbers might have to be changed on encounters but the actual wherewith all of the world is just as good as any other setting and vecna already has 5E Stats

Great video! Thanks!

So I posed a Greyhawk campaign to some people I play Star Wars FFG with and there was a lot of interest... and one of the players said “Oh, I’d like to play a Harengon Warlock” to which I said “what’s a Harengon?” To then be told it’s a rabbit person. How well can I integrate rabbit folk into Greyhawk?

Hurray! Music change;-)

Love volos guide to waterdeep and undermountain-- but the rest of the realms goes in the bin at mach 5

Hello there just found your chanel in fact looking for comments and reviews, anything related to greyhawk since im willing to prepare something to start mastering in 5e and i feel like its the kind of setring for me, specially having those political and races issues and the old light-darkness gritty low fantasy but strong epic stories. Like a lot your content and how you make it, reacheable lets say. :D

I had two Greyhawk campaigns running in 5th edition, but I converted over to 5 Torches Deep because well, I'm old school ok? lol.

I find myself here after the recent funeral announcement. Maybe back then, I would have considered this... But now? No. Hell, I stopped liking 5e even back then, but at least I could stomach it enough to form a table.

Any advice on St. Cuthbert and Pholtus cleric interactions?

To be fair, don't a lot of people in Forgotten Realms think that Tieflings are demons too? I mean, how the hell do you tell the difference? Any given human, elf, halfling, dwarf, etc. is going to look at a tiefling and think "Demon!" It is like if you are eating the midday meal at your campfire and you see a lion rustling in a bush are you going to say, "Lion!" and jump to arms or are you going to think "stuffed toy lion" and go back to eating lunch? Let's be real. There is no way that tieflings would ever be accepted or integrated into other humanoid societies either in Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, so you might as well just either have them or pretend that they never existed to begin with.

For someone who IS familiar with later additions, would you suggest the greyhawk Gazetteer from 3rd Edition as a good starting point?

What was the best tent pole dungeon, ruins of Greyhawk?

Gold box? Is this the ‘World of Greyhawk’ box set circa 1980?

easy way to deal with tiefling and dragon born is to just dont put them in

I my campaign tiefling and Dragonborn appear in 591 cy

@greyhawkgrognard What currently available 5e D&D adventures take place in Greyhawk setting or can easily be adjusted for Greyhawk? I know Ghosts of Saltmarsh and several of the Tales of Yawning Portal are in Greyhawk, but are there any others, or non-Greyhawk adventures you would still recommend to use in Greyhawk? Thanks

Gnomes were in 1E PHB

What is grayhawk wars? I've never heard of it. Is it the temple of elemental evil?

Why not just run Greyhawk in its original ruleset? its not like the rules are hard to learn?

I'm sure you could but why one would want to I do not know. You'll constantly have to convert original material, and honestly 5e is to me inferior... But everyone should enjoy the game their way. It's your world. Still rocking 2e here.

Greyhawk has too much information? As opposed to the literal piles and piles of Realms crap. If you can't take an hour or so to read the Gazeteer (which is incredibly entertaining), do you really need to be running a game?

Are there Aasimar in Greyhawk?

If you play grayhawk, drow, tieflings, and Dragonborn should be killed on sight

The real question is, *should* you? Edit: this is just a light-hearted jab at 5 e, not Greyhawk. And funnily enough, running 5e Greyhawk is what I'm doing right now, haha.

Honestly porting Greyhawk into 5E dungeons and superheroes you are going to have to drop a ton of the races. Honestly it wouldn't be worth it to run Greyhawk with 5E. I would have advised the person to just get the print on demand rules cyclopedia or advanced dungeons and dragons 1E/2E but I have a serious bias towards TSR and an utter hatred of wotc so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Greyhawk? "A ton of information?" Wait until he gets a look at Faerun. (face in palm)

Stop playing 5e, stop giving your money to WOTC.

5th edition is NEVER the best way to do anything.

I'm not going to watch the video as it is a waste of time. Really the question is why would you run anything in 5E it's a terrible system. If you want to run Greyhawk use AD&D or even B/X, also use either one of those systems in general because they're objectively better especially B/X.

Put greyhawk into some of the OSR settings. We're done with woke 5e.