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 about a year—the world of Greyhawk closely identified with early development of the game beginning in 1972, and after being published it remained associated with Dungeons & Dragons publications until 2008.
The world itself started as simply a dungeon under a castle designed by Gary Gygax for the amusement of his children and friends, but it was 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 to 2008.
Setting The World of Greyhawk is located on a planet called Oerth.Brown, Anne. Player's Guide to Greyhawk. Renton, Washington: Wizards of the Coast, Inc., 1998. Page 5. Oerth has an axial tilt of 30 degrees, which causes greater seasonal temperature variation than on Earth and is controlled by wizardly and divine magic that shifts weather patterns to be more favorable to the populace. Castle Greyhawk was the most famous dungeon in Oerth, the home campaign world of Gary Gygax. Players in the earliest days of this campaign mostly stayed within Castle Greyhawk's dungeons, but Gygax envisioned the rest of his world as a sort of parallel Earth, and the original Oerth (pronounced 'Oith', as with a Brooklyn accent) looked much like the real-world Earth but filled with imaginary cities and countries. Several years later, when TSR produced the original World of Greyhawk folio (1980), Gygax was asked to produce a map of the world and decided to create something new which still featured many of the locales from his original world of Oerth but with new geography. Gygax also connected Dave Arneson's Blackmoor to his world by including a country by that name in Oerth. In his later novel Dance of Demons (1988), Gygax destroyed Greyhawk's Oerth and replaced it with a new fantasy world of Yarth.
The Flanaess is the eastern part of the continent of Oerik, one of the four continents of Oerth, acting as the setting of dozens of adventures published between the 1970s and 2000s. In late 1972, Dave Arneson demonstrated a new type of game to a group of gamers in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, including game designer Gygax. Gygax agreed to develop a set of rules with Arneson and get the game published; the game eventually became known as Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax designed a set of dungeons underneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk as a testing ground for new rules, character classes and spells. In those early days, there was no Flanaess; the world map of Oerth was developed by Gygax as circumstances dictated, the new cities and lands simply drawn over a map of North America. Gygax and Kuntz further developed this campaign setting, and by 1976, the lands within a radius of 50 miles had been mapped in depth, and the lands within a radius of approximately 500 miles were in outline form.
Following yet more work, in 1978 Gygax agreed to publish his world and decided to redevelop Oerth from scratch. Once he had sketched out the entire planet to his satisfaction,Q: "In Dragon 315, Jim Ward talks about the origins of the Greyhawk setting, and is quoted as having said: 'He [Gygax] had the whole world mapped out'. Does this mean you have material about the rest of Oerth hidden in your basement?" Gygax: "Yes, I had a sketch map of the remainder of the globe..." Gygax: "The exact form of the remainder of the globe was not settled upon. I wanted an Atlantis-like continent, and possibly a Lemurian-type one. Likely two large continents would have been added. The nearest would house cultures akin to the Indian, Burmese, Indonesian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Japanese. Another would likely have been the location of African-type cultures, including the Egyptian. A Lemurian culture would have been based on the Central and South American cultures of the Aztec-Mayay-Inca sort". one hemisphere of Oerth was dominated by a massive continent called Oerik. Gygax decided to concentrate his first efforts on the continent of Oerik and asked TSR's printing house about the maximum size of paper they could handle; the answer was 34 x 22 inches (86 cm x 56 cm). He found that, using the scale he desired, he could fit only the northeast corner of Oerik on two of the sheets.Gygax: "When I was asked to create a campaign setting for TSR to market, I did a new and compact "world"—that only in part, of course, as that was all I could fit onto the two maps allowed. So that became the World of Greyhawk". Gygax: "I found out the maximum map size TSR could produce, got the go-ahead for two maps of that size, then sat down for a couple of weeks and hand-drew the whole thing. After the maps were done and the features shown were named, I wrote up brief information of the features and states. Much of the information was drawn from my own personal world, but altered to fit the new one depicted on the maps". This corner of Oerik became known as "the Flanaess", so named in Gygax's mind because of the peaceful people known as the Flannae who had once lived there. Gygax also added many more new regions, countries and cities, bringing the number of political states to 60.
Needing original placenames for all of the geographical and political places on his map, Gygax sometimes resorted to wordplay based on the names of friends and acquaintances. For instance, Perrenland was named after Jeff Perren, who co-wrote the rules for Chainmail with Gygax; Urnst was a homophone of Ernst (his son Ernie); and Sunndi was a near-homophone of Cindy, another of Gygax's children.
From Gygax's prototype map, Darlene Pekul, a freelance artist in Lake Geneva, developed a full color map on a hex grid. Gygax was so pleased with the result that he quickly switched his home Greyhawk campaign over to the new world he had created.Gygax: "Of course as my campaign world was active, had many players, I did not wish to detail it [for the general public], so I created Oerth, the continent of Oerik, and all that went with it for general use by other DMs. I found I liked it so well that I switched my group's play to the World of Greyhawk soon after I had finished the maps and manuscript". Ultimately, the original Castle Greyhawk was never published for public play, instead with many of the elements of Gygax's original campaign becoming the seed for other adventures.
Development history Early development In the late 1960s, Gary Gygax, a military history buff and pulp fantasy fan, was a central, founding figure in the Castle & Crusade Society. The C&C Society, as it was known, served enthusiasts of miniature wargaming in the Middle Ages and published an occasional newsletter known as the Domesday Book.
Following up on a promise he made in Domesday Book #5, Gygax presented the "Great Kingdom" map c. June 1971 in Domesday #9, to be used as a game setting for the Society. Members thereafter began claiming territories, including member Dave Arneson, who was an officer of the organization, and frequent contributor to the newsletter. Arneson claimed a territory he named Blackmoor, a setting he had already begun developing in his home campaign, and Gygax reserved for himself a territory on lake Nyr Div.
In addition to historically-based medieval wargaming, both Gygax and Arneson were enthusiasts of adding fantasy elements to their games.Gygax: "As the members began to get tired of medieval games, and I wasn't, I decided to add fantasy elements to the mix, such as a dragon that had a fire-breath weapon, a 'hero' that was worth four normal warriors, a wizard who could cast fireballs (the range and hit diameter of a large catapult) and lightning bolts (the range and hit area of a cannon), and so forth. I converted a plastic stegosaurus into a pretty fair dragon, as there were no models of them around in those days".Gygax: "The reception of fantasy elements in the medieval tabletop wargame was incredibly enthusiastic by about 90% of the old group. Lee Tucker dismissed it, and me. Mike Reese and Jeff Perren were not captivated by giants hurling boulders and dragons breathing fire and lightning bolts, nor did wizards with spells, heroes and superheroes with magic armor and swords prove compelling to them".Gygax: "I would use my point buys to take a superhero in magic armor, with a magic sword, backed up by a wizard with fireball spells. The superhero would assail the mass of enemy troops, and when they gathered round to attack him the wizard would drop a fireball on the lot. The superhero was very likely to come out unscathed, much to the fury of my opponents". To this end, Gygax created a fantasy supplement for the Chainmail ruleset for medieval miniatures that he was co-writing with Jeff Perren. Released in the late spring of 1971, this booklet included rules for fantasy monsters, wizards and magical weapons.
Around the same time, in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dave Arneson, impressed by the "Braunstein" role-playing games of fellow wargamer David Wesely, developed the Barony of Blackmoor as a setting for Braunstein style games. Arneson based his game around the village, castle and dungeons of Blackmoor. The castle itself was represented on the table by an actual plastic kit model of a medieval castle.Arneson: "See, I had this neat German plastic kit [of a castle]. Oddly enough, even though it was actually a German kit, years later I learned that it was actually a model of a castle in Sicily. But when I started, I was thinking German". Arneson informed the players that instead of controlling regiments, they would each take one individual character into the castle of the Barony of Blackmoor to explore its dangerous dungeons.Arneson: "[The concept of a fantasy campaign] just grew and shortly [the plastic castle] was too small for the scale I wanted. But it was a neat kit and I didn't want to abandon it, so the only way to go was down [into the dungeons]. All this happened a few weeks before the first adventurers caught sight of it". Arneson drew from numerous sources but quickly incorporated the fantasy supplement of Chainmail into his games.Gygax: "Dave Arneson and I met at a Gen Con here in Lake Geneva around 1968, and with Mike Carr we authored the Don't Give Up the Ship naval miniatures rules for the Great Age of Sail around 1971-2".