New Dungeon Master’s Guide: The Greyhawk Gazetteer is a Blast From D&D’s Past
Greyhawk is right smack dab in the middle of the new Dungeon Master’s Guide. A gazetteer that models making your own world.
One of the big features of the new Dungeon Master’s Guide is a Greyhawk Gazetteer. It’s technically there to model what a campaign world can look like. But over the course of 29 pages, it dives deep into what that specific world is all about.
I don’t know if it’s actually that helpful for folks looking to build their own campaign world. But it sure is informative. And it is packed full of names that will make anyone feel a pang for 3rd Edition.
Greyhawk Gazetteer in the New Dungeon Master’s Guide – Can You Really Make This World Your Own?
The whole premise of the chapter is that you can either use it as a model for your own campaign world. Or you can use it as inspiration to flesh out your own version of Greyhawk. To quote page 143:
“Greyhawk is a D&D setting you can use as the ackdrop for your campaign or as a model you can reference while creating your own setting. Important aspects of Greyhawk are described herein so that you can make it your own, expanding or altering it however you wish.”
But how does that actually hold up? I want to highlight some of the things the chapter does well. It starts by defining the big Premise and Conflicts in the land. The premise sets the stage for the kinds of adventures you might have in Greyhawk, and it boils down to, “evil is on the rise, if no one does anything, Eastern Oerik will fall to dark powers.”
It then sets up three big conflicts in Greyhawk. Now, your mileage may vary when it comes to useful worldbuilding info. But it does help to know what “active” forces are in the world. And in this case, there are three villainous groups, Chromatic Dragons, the Cult of Elemental Evil, and the evil demigod Iuz and his followers.
Each conflict has a “sample arc” of what you might expect adventures to look like from levels 1-20. But then we get into the nitty gritty details of the world. And here’s what WotC lists, so that you can see what kind of components they think go into making your own world:
- A Calendar
- Factions and Organizations
- How magic is viewed
- Mysteries of the Region (I like this one a lot)
- The gods of Greyhawk
- The Free City of Greyhawk (a starting hub for your campaign)
- Greyhawk City itself gets a lot of attention and is broken down into city districts
- And local rumors
- Plus a few conflicts
- The surrounding regions of Eastern Oerik
All in all, I think this is good as a model. But I think that it’s missing out on a lot of the “why’s.” Which is an interesting miss, considering that the chapters on Campaigns and Encounters talk more about why you want to use certain things in building either.
Maybe there’s a whole other book that could explore what pieces of worldbuilding you might want, and why. But ultimately, this is more a “hey here’s a Greyhawk Setting Guide” than a “template for building your own campaign world.” It’s much more effective as the former. Even so, you’re bound to find some inspiration. And if not, don’t worry, the Cosmology chapter is right around the corner.
It is nice to see a return to Greyhawk, however brief!
