Retrospective: Greyhawk Adventures

Although D&D's Bronze Age in the early to mid-1990s is quite rightly associated with the plethora of pre-packaged campaign settings TSR published for the game, this strategy had its origins in the dying days of the Silver Age. This was the period immediately prior to the release of David Cook's second edition of AD&D, when the company was throwing a lot of spaghetti against a lot of walls to see what might stick. The time was equal parts "experimental" and "desperate" and you can see that in the unevenness of the products TSR created.

Being the unrepentant TSR fanboy I was, I naturally picked up almost everything the company produced, even when it wasn't something out of which I thought I'd get much use. That's what led me to buy Dragonlance Adventures in 1987 and, the following year, Greyhawk Adventures. In 1988, I was no longer making use of Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk setting, having developed my own setting during my high school years. Even so, there was no way I wasn't going to grab a new hardcover AD&D book, especially one written by James M. Ward, creator of my beloved Gamma World. 

As it would turn out, Greyhawk Adventures is not the work of James M. Ward – or, rather, it's not solely his work. The volume is instead the work of many different writers, some of whose names I recognize and others completely unknown to me: Daniel Salas, Skip Williams, Nigel Findley, Thomas Kane, Stephen Innis, Len Carpenter, and Eric Oppen. The content of the book is itself a mixed bag, consisting of seven chapters and two appendices. The chapters describe (in order) the deities and clerics of Greyhawk, new monsters, significant named NPCs, magic spells, magic items, unusual locales, and a series of adventure outlines and random encounters. Meanwhile, one appendix enumerates the spells named after Greyhawk magic-users and the other introduces the concept of playable 0-level characters.

The section on deities and clerics was of great interest to me in my youth, in part because I had a lot of fondness for the gods of Greyhawk. Each god is described in some detail, along with the statistics for his "avatar" or physical manifestation in the realm of mortals. I suspect this concept was introduced here in order to obviate the problems that arose from the way the gods had been presented in Ward's earlier Deities & Demigods. Clerics, on the other hand, were presented in a way similar to Dragonlance Adventures, with each god's priesthoods operating according to their own unique rules, including weapon and spell restrictions. I thought then as I do now that this only makes sense and probably should have been introduced into Dungeons & Dragons sooner. If nothing else, it's an excellent example of game mechanics doubling as worldbuilding.

Sadly, after a strong first chapter, Greyhawk Adventures stumbles and never really recovers. The sections on monsters and magic items, for example, are fairly bland, with only the thinnest of Greyhawk veneers to justify their inclusion in this book. The section on named NPCs, many of whom are the rulers of the setting's city-states and countries, is a little better in that there's a stronger connection to the setting but most of these NPCs are so powerful and influential that the likelihood of a DM ever making use of them in play is small. The book's many new spells, like everything else in this book, vary in quality, their main characteristic being that all of them are associated with a famous Greyhawk spellcaster. If you ever wanted more Bigby's Hand spells, for example, Greyhawk Adventures has got you covered. 

After all these years, I still can't make up my mind as to whether the idea of playable 0-level characters is insanity or genius. The basic idea is that a 0-level character is an apprentice adventurer, one who hasn't yet decided on his character class. Through his choices, the 0-level character slowly determines his alignment, abilities, proficiencies, and so on. He can also seek out instructors to teach him more, thereby advancing along the road toward full membership in a traditional character class. It's a genuinely interesting idea, particularly since 0-level characters can and indeed will have a smattering of skills associated with multiple classes. It's almost an attempt to present a class-less AD&D, albeit one with lots of caveats and limitations in order to preserve one of the game's foundational design elements. (It's worth noting, too, that there are also rules for allowing characters of 1st level and above to pick up the abilities of other classes at the cost of an XP penalty.)

Compared to Dragonlance Adventures, Greyhawk Adventures is a letdown on multiple levels. The strength of Dragonlance Adventures lies in its integration of rules and setting so as to present a version of AD&D tailored to the world of Krynn. Greyhawk Adventures does nothing of the kind. It's a grab-bag of fairly generic – and often unimaginative – material released under the Greyhawk masthead but without any significant connection to Gygax's campaign setting. The most interesting stuff in the book, aside from the material on the gods and their clerics (which was simply an adaptation of what Dragonlance Adventures had already done), is the appendix on 0-level characters and even that is half-baked and tentative, as if its designer (whoever he was) didn't quite have the courage of his conviction to upend D&D's class system entirely.

The end result is a book that is by turns meandering, trite, and directionless – much like TSR before the publication of Second Edition gave the company a short-lived injection of energy and enthusiasm. As a well known hater of Dragonlance, I hope others will recognize the significance of my stating here that Dragonlance Adventures was a superior book to Greyhawk Adventures in almost every way. Indeed, it's possible that Greyhawk Adventures might well be the worst hardcover volume ever published for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which is saying something.