In a nice bit of Christmas news for the OSR, the 1983 boxed set of the World of Greyhawk is avaliable on PDF again. You can get it here from DnD Classics website, RPGNow, or DrivethruRPG.
While I known for promoting the Wilderlands and hexcrawls, I started with the World of Greyhawk for the first couple of campaigns I ran after getting the DMG. As a fan of Tolkien appendices in the a Return of the King, I was impressed with the epic sweep of history in Greyhawk. The fact the Gygax had barbarian migrations as a major component alongside elves, dwarves, orcs, etc was impressive to me back then.
The only downside was that I never thought that religion got the same type of detail. Instead we got a hodgepodge focused on the deities not the religions. Well I fixed that for myself with this article on Greyhawk Gods.
I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas and I hope you all have a Happy New Year.
3 comments:
You have some really neat ideas about Oerth religion in there. I will have to adopt some of it into my own take on religion in the World of Greyhawk.
I tend to see Istus as less cold and uncaring, and more like Allah in Islam. Things are "written", and happen by "the will of Istus". The lesser Baklunish gods, in my conception, are more like saints, so that my Baklunish religion is a sort of hybrid of Islam and Catholicism.
Pholtus, to my way of thinking, started off as one of many Oeridian gods, but some of his followers came to the conclusion that all gods other than Pholtus were demons in disguise. I've always had a hard time with Saint Cuthbert, but your take gives me some great ideas. Rather than being a loyal Pholtus priest who was adopted as a means of resistance after his death, though, I think that he'll be the dissenting prophet during the time when Pholtus became a monotheistic faith (and, of course, most Oeridians still worship Pholtus as one god among many).
Sorry to babble, but I wanted to share some other ideas.
I'd love to read this article but for some reason the link isn't working. I've tried Safari and Firefox butt both come back with "wilderlands.batintheattic.com/greyhawkgods.html" server can't be found.
Of course I can go to the main page on "batintheattic.blogspot"
@Kent Taylor
Try
http://www.batintheattic.com/wilderlands/greyhawkgods.html
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