Editing From The Ashes (section)

==The March to Fail==
The Greyhawk setting up through the 1980s was an organic process with many, many D&D gamers involved. Most of those gamers had grown up in 1950s-60s America. Whatever their personal differences they shared several traits: an optimistic view of human progress, a deep personal knowledge of European culture and history, an appreciation for post-Carolingian civilisation, and Protestantism in its Anglican / Lutheran form. Together the Greyhawk setting illustrated The Good in its central nations Veluna and Furyondy: quietly religious, militant against clear Eeevil, mostly tolerant. "Evil" included Vikings, Calvinism (The Pale), parodic Catholicism (Medegia), decadent Rome (the Great Kingdom), and of course the chaos in Iuz. For Greyhawk, Islam was something faraway - it wasn't exoticised or "Orientalised", so much as deemed not-a-problem. (Contrast, the [[Desert Nomad series]].) [[Maya|Equatorial rainforests absolutely ''were'' exoticised]]: this is where gamers got the Robert Howard out of their system.

As a result, adventurers in Greyhawk are active - they push forward the borders of civilisation - not reactive. Sometimes adventurers can screw up, and let loose a serious bane like Zuggtmoy in [[Temple of Elemental Evil]] or the chained god in that [[Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun]]; but this was considered a hazard of the job. Some other adventurer maybe could come by to clean up the mess.

When [[Lorraine Williams]] took over TSR, she did away with those old gamers, starting with Gary himself. With Second Edition, her TSR chose to upend the table, with the [[Greyhawk Wars]] [[metaplot]]. Sargent had come to the ground-floor helping with the ''City'' box and then kicked off the [[metaplot]] with ''[[WGS1: Five Shall Be One]]''; he got the nod to do the new boxed set, to "Build Back Better" as we'd put it.

Sargent built ''something'', all right. The good doctor of parapsychology, as noted in his biography, wasn't all right in the head. He also came with a British viewpoint, which hadn't been the American viewpoint in some generations. For Sargent, the struggle against evil was something visceral and real. It wasn't about taming the wilderness, for him; it was about ''the Second World War''. War itself was a horror; and at the end of the war, the good guys lose ground.