Editing Greyhawk (section)

==The Fall and Rise of Greyhawk==
Post-Gygax TSR - meaning [[Lorraine Williams|You Know Who]] - came close to killing this golden goose.

She/they started modestly enough, with (for instance) the Greyhawk hardcover, a few middling WG modules - and the City of Greyhawk box, using the Brit [[Carl Lynwood Sargent]] to design the last. Then TSR had [[Skip Williams]] publish WG9 and [[WG10: Child's Play|WG10]]. These were the Dumb and Dumber in the module series, sinking the WG line in gamers' estimation. Meanwhile 1987 saw those [[Rose Estes]] novels, which ran off fans of the ''books''.

In the 1990s this incarnation of TSR then kicked over the gaming table by siccing Sargent on ''[[From The Ashes]]'', which turned Greyhawk into GRIMDARK. Although his version has its supporters, it divided the community and, of course, it was nothing like what the older gamers had imagined. It further got somewhat outshined by Forgotten Realms (due to over-publication of novels and other material), as well as the secondary lines/settings. But all the old neckbeards loved the homebrew feel of the ''original'' Greyhawk.

For the "Living Greyhawk" campaign and Gazetteer, WOTC decided to reverse TSR's horrific disrespect of Gary Gygax - and of Greyhawk's old flavor. They went further in Third edition, as to put Greyhawk front and center as the base setting of the game. This was how they got some neckbeards to stop frothing at the mouth about "muh THAC0!" and actually settle down enough to give it a chance. This culminated in the ''[[Expedition to Castle Greyhawk]]'' mega-adventure which was a pretty decent homage to the original dungeon crawl.  3e also sideways-canonized [[Spelljammer]] (not much, just enough to say the ships existed) and [[Planescape]], which was more or less fully supported, only it wasn't a separate thing: it was fully incorporated into baseline Greyhawk as-is, since FR got their own cosmology this edition.

4th edition apparently decided to not fuck with Greyhawk but ignored it completely, in favor of Forgotten Realms (need to sell more Drizzt novels, after all), Eberron (which as a "static" campaign needed little publication support), and oddly enough [[Dark Sun]] (which was cool, just an unusual choice all things considered).

5th edition hasn't had much to say on Greyhawk.  All of the printed material supports Forgotten Realms so far, but the word is that they intend to fully support the other campaign settings over time. For the most part, all this meant was a token side-note about how to adapt each of the various adventures and setting-stuffs over to other settings...and then 2019 finally gave us ''[[Ghosts of Saltmarsh]]'', a collection of various Greyhawk adventures of a more nautical bent.  And several characters from Greyhawk including [[Mordenkainen]] and [[Tasha]] have made appearances.