_________________________ The Official word _________________

'Grey' areas were made that way

by Lawrence Schick
Vice President, Product Development
TSR Hobbies, Inc.
 

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1st Edition AD&D	-	Dragon #46	-	Dragon magazine

The editors of Dragon magazine have
allotted some space for us to provide some
answers and clarifications to the points
raised in Mr. Seiken’s and Mr. Burke’s reviews
of The World of Greyhawk. We always
appreciate an opportunity to explain
what we do and why we do it.

I guess the full intent of WoG is not
completely clear from the information presented
in the Gazetteer. The idea was to
provide a setting for a fantasy campaign, a
coherent place where fantastic things could
happen. As Mr. Seiken points out, the burden
of creating the fantasy itself rests
squarely on the shoulders of the DM. Though The World of Greyhawk is
based on Gary Gygax’s own campaign, it
was made deliberately vague in many
areas so that individual DMs could impress
their own ideas and personalities upon it.

For example, there are no specific trails
and roads marked on the map. Who knows
exactly where a DM may wish to place his or
her trade routes? There are also no specific
leaders given for the individual states, enabling
DMs to use whatever personalities
they feel are most appropriate. There are
certainly no religions given, as this is an
area that almost all DMs handle differently
and individually. (However, for those interested,
the Deities of Greyhawk will appear
somewhere, sometime in the next 5
years.) (Gary—is that vague enough?)

World-building is very important, but
creating a coherent world is not easy. We
wanted to give DMs a push in the right
direction without doing everything for them.
We certainly don’t want to have everybody
playing on carbon-copy worlds, doing the
same things in every campaign. This imposes
too many restrictions on the DM’s
imagination. Our intent instead is to spur
that IMAGINATION(Uriah Heep) to its own creations.

To address a couple of minor, specific
points from the reviews: Yes, monks have
to be lawful, but they can be lawful good,
lawful neutral, or lawful evil, like the monks
who rule the Scarlet Brotherhood. It’s the
discipline of lawfulness that makes a monk,
not the ethical values of good or evil. As
regards the savages, nowhere in the text of
the Gazetteer is there any indication of
anybody’s skin color. Nobody here ever
gave it any thought, because it doesn’t matter.
On the subject of cannibalism: Anthropology
has as little to do with fantasy as any
of the other sciences. We’re dealing with
legends and archetypes. In fantasy literature,
cannibalism is a typical attribute of
nasty people who live in distant areas, and
no one should be surprised to find references
to it in a description of a fantasy
world. Only actual cannibals have cause to
be insulted for being referred to as savages.

We did make some mistakes. The settlement
symbols got left out of the book on
part of the first run. (This is typical of the bad
luck that surrounded the production of this
product.) In an error in the direction of
esthetics over accuracy, some of the port
and river settlement symbols got displaced
a bit. Rule of thumb: If it’s within a hex of the
shore, it’s a port. The same goes for river
towns. By the way, the dotted lines through
the mountains indicate passes.

The World of Greyhawk had a long and
painful gestation period, but it turned into a
child we’re all proud of. Yes, there will be
more Greyhawk-linked products in the future.
When? Oh, no, you don’t