I've been running a campaign called 'Sylvan Glades' since 1979, starting when I began playing AD&D. I incorporated each hardback book as they were released, including Dragonlance Adventures and Greyhawk Adventures, into the campaign. It's a gonzo mashup of everything I enjoy, and I've continued it by converting the setting to the Hero System 6th Edition RPG. It's been amazing to see the world evolve and grow over the years! Love your content, by the way-always insightful and entertaining!
Oh my goodness... your Sylvan Glades campaign sounds awesome! Wow! Thank you so much for watching and commenting, and for the kind words. I really appreciate it.
I'm glad to hear that! I keep trying to mix it up a bit, as I've found my last few history videos haven't performed all that well. I suspect it's due to the subject matter getting more and more niche as I've already covered the "bigger" topics. I've been toying with perhaps going back and revising some of my earlier history videos to correct any mistakes or oversights and bring the style more in line with my current aesthetics, but then I try to remember that my channel is fewer than two years old so remaking a video that soon might not be the best idea!
Thank you so much! I do sometimes feel a bit defeated when I look at other channels, but I know a huge part of what's holding me back is that my videos are way too long (by RU-vid standards) and they're not "scripted" and "professional" and a lot of folks these days won't bother with videos like that. Nonetheless, I appreciate having you here! Thank you so much for your support. Cheers!
Oh my goodness! I am, quite frankly, very embarrassed. I've been pronouncing it incorrectly all these years. Well, I'm not one for pride. That was a big mistake, and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I appreciate it. And, thank you for watching and commenting.
Thanks for taking me back in time. I remember I bought those two books at the same time around 1988. Funny thing, I also bought my 2nd copy of the World Of Greyhawk boxed set at Game Empire Pasadena back in 2002!! I have fun memories going through the entire "old stuff" that Chuck had on the wall. Awesome video!
My mother also bought me the dragonlance atlas. It’s good to have a wonderful mom, and I highly recommend it to all. Thanks for the great content! Maybe you’d consider doing a series on the Gord books? I recently reread them, and I’m increasingly certain that it’s Gary’s vision and voice that still attracts me to 1e. The mix of Lieber, Howard, and Vance is unique and darkly fascinating.
Wow -- you both had great Moms! -- some of these are very esoteric books like the atlas. My parents never bought me anything relating to TTRPGs -- my dad would always tell me that I was wasting my time. 😞 Had a paper route when I started middle school -- so unfortunately had to buy everything on my own -- but on the flip side because I worked was able to get a ton of stuff. 😂
I always saw Greyhawk Adventures as a book designed for DMs already very familiar with and using the setting. I would not have been pleased if it had included a lot of information that I already had access to in the boxed set, so I wasn’t unhappy with its format. Overall, the content wasn’t to my liking - I expected something which followed the boxed set format more closely but the tone was quite different (at the time I had no idea as to the politics at TSR and Gary’s removal - so I had expected something more akin to his style).
Your comment about not including stuff that had already been published totally makes sense. I can see that point of view. I really just felt that the contents didn't really reflect the "originality" of Greyhawk, but as folks have pointed out, Greyhawk is intended to be a little more generic or vanilla, so perhaps that was done on purpose. I do think the variety of writing styles and tone hurts the presentation of the information. Thanks for watching and commenting!
I came into the hobby right when 2ed came out, and read the Dragonlance book a ton over the years. I really wanted to like the Greyhawk book, but it just never clicked for me. I think this video really clarifies why that may have been.
i loved the video, 10/10 home run in my opinion. i got a reprint of the dragon lance book on drive through rpg and absolutely love it personally and plan to use it with other info from the dragon lance saga channel to run a campaign in that setting. as for the Grayhawk one, i don't have it but i have the main gold box book you showed and the gem of the Flanaesse book that i am thinking of using with Grayhawk grognards channel to do a campaign their as well one day, but then again i have a Dark sun campaign planned too lol. one last thing, keep this up, you're one of my go to channels when i have time to watch stuff on dnd/rpg history and i love your content and i want to thank you for giving us so much quality content to enjoy.
Thank you so much very much for taking the time to write this comment! I really appreciate it, and I truly appreciate your support of the channel! I wish I could gift my "home run" (as you say) to my local team! They need some help lately. 🙂 Seriously, thank you so much for your support and your compliments. It really helps lift one's spirits to know folks enjoy the things we put out there! Cheers to you!
The Dragonlance book was probably my favorite hardback, it just had so many new and fresh takes. That was probably my first experience with an RPG that didn't just emulate Lord of the Rings: Kender and Tinker Gnomes came out of left field, sure they had the traditional Elves and Dwarves, but they also had hunter gatherer elves and gully dwarves. The three tiered Knights of Solamnia classes were exciting, especially the Knights of the Sword that were combo Cleric/Fighters. Steam punk isn't my thing, but the tinker class, and all the rules around building things (and how they go wrong) blew my teenage mind. I never got the Greyhawk book. I felt like I should, that was the setting Temple of Elemental Evil was in, after all. But after leafing through it in Walden Books, the only thing that seemed really interesting to me at the time were the 0-level character rules. I thought it was a really cool idea to build your character up into something instead of just rolling stats. But it wasn't cool enough to drop $20 or whatever on the book.
Really great comments! It's been really interesting to hear folks' thoughts on these two books. Some really love Dragonlance, while others prefer Greyhawk. Many folks dislike both, and a few love both! I think your comments pretty much align with me, although I didn't come to this conclusion about Dragonlance until decades later. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts!
17:14 - I heard that Harold Johnson was also important early on in the conceptualization of the serie of adventures. I remember listening to an interview where he explain the seasons (alluded in the novel titles) and that each month, similar to the main 12 adventures, could have a dragon in it (5 Chromatic+ 5 metallic + Tiamat + Bahamut). How much the DL series maintained that concept, I don't know - But it seems like a cool idea! Thank you for the video!
It's wild because DLA Dragonlance Adventures was the third Dragonlance sourcebook. The first being DL5, and the second being included in DL14. This definitely seems to be intended as a progression of AD&D rather than a campaign setting necessity. I still love it though :) Great job as usual.
Thank you so much for that! I didn't ever check out DL14 so I had no idea it was another sourcebook similar to DL5. Thanks for letting me know! And, than you so much for watching and commenting! Glad you enjoyed the video. Cheers!
"It is my hope that you got what you wanted." - Talk about not being really convinced of your product's quality. When it came out, I had just started AD&D and was planning to use Greyhawk for my first campaign. I loved the cover (and the Greyhawk logo) - it was really evocative, and I had hoped to run a campaign in a world where griffon riders fighting evil lightning dragon overlords were 'a thing'. Imagine my disappointment when I read the contents. Almost nothing about the world itself (around 10 pages each for deities (with stats), locations (admittedly interesting) and NPCs (mostly movers and shakers above level 10). Apart from that lists of creatures, spells and items (cheaply localized) that felt like castoffs from Dragon magazine articles, adventure sketches that felt undeveloped sketches for Dungeon magazine adventures and a zero-level PC system I don't think anybody asked for (the fact that this was basically "2nd ed preview material" that never had any relevance for 2nd ed afterwarts speaks volumes). And while I liked most of the full-page interior art, most of the smaller pieces were obviously recycled and were not really connected with what was written in the text. There I was, sitting on my cobbled-together Adventures book, envious of the nice books my Dragonlance and (later) Forgotten Realms mastering friends hat gotten.
I feel much the same way! I bought the 3E Campaign Setting book with no intention of ever running a Dragonlance campaign (and I did the same thing with the 3E Forgotten Realms book, which I still maintain is one of the best campaign setting books ever).
Some of Dragonlance felt out of control compared to the rest of of AD&D. Greyhawk felt a little lack luster. The zero level section of GreyHawk was 2nd edition.
Thanks for the great video, a real nostalgia trip for me. I got the Dragonlance Adventures years before picking up the Greyhawk Adventures and I think I made the right choice. Dragonlance Adventures seems like a much more rounded introduction to its campaign setting, with its maps, overview of races, history, deities and the like. Greyhawk Adventures makes the mistake of assuming the purchaser already has the World of Greyhawk Boxed Set and therefore does not need to be told again about the nations or physical geography. If you treat GA as an oversized appendix to the World of Greyhawk Boxed set then it works well, but this is not made clear. From what I understand apart from DL5 there had not been a coherent overview of the Dragonlance setting, and at least with DA the writers assumed the readers did not already have DL5. This was a much more sensible assumption than the one for GA.
Oh my goodness, that does sound vaguely familiar now that you mention it, but I hadn't thought about that forever! Thanks for the memory jog, and for watching and commenting! Cheers!
I love me my Greyhawk, but I also really love DragonLance. I really liked both of these books, although the quality of the binding, especially on the DL one, wasn't great, but I very much appreciated the content of them.
Good video! although skimmed through this video due to repetition and length. 🙂 The reason they came out with these two campaign books is super simple. TSR still had that rough rule of only publishing 1 hardcover book per year, and hard cover books sold well. Campaign settings were just the next thing, which they went crazy with in 2nd Ed AD&D. What I'm kind of surprised about is that the Greyhawk hard cover book wasn't published earlier. And glad they didn't do any more of the survival books -- those were complete trash. Yes -- everyone counts differently. I count 13 unique books. I look at the other 5 as just, the one book that had content pulled out (the two mythos), i.e. Deities & Demigods -- and the four cover change/reprints. 13 unique books almost works out to 1 hard cover book a year starting in 1977 with the monster manual. btw: the cover reprints were smart you got some people (that already had the older version) to buy the reprint version just to get the new cover. I just wish that Lerry Elmore had done a few of the hard back covers. Jeff Easley is a great artist, but preferred Larry Elmore. And I prefer the Trampier cover of the PHB and Sutherland covers of the DMG and MM to the Easley versions. Although I do like the Easley Pegasi vs. dragon cover of the reprinted MM.
Funnily enough, I'm currently rereading my copy of Dragonlance Adventures and noticing some typos (uh, Reork's?!) and inconsistencies (High Guardian vs High Warrior for the Knights of Solamnia). But still, a great book in my collection that I cherish.
The stars aligned! So great to see you here! You were one of the first folks I began chatting with when I started my blog way back in February 2011! Thanks so much for watching and commenting. Cheers!
@@daddyrolleda1 glad to be seen! You've been putting out great content since 2011 (damn, where did the time go?!). Glad to be one of those you dubbed an "all around cool cat" 😎. Keep up the great work!
Thanks Martin! Didn’t own these books, real treat seeing them previewed. From Rick & Morty vs. D&D, “Now Morty, when you want to do something you roll this die; roll well, you succeed, roll low, blarf! There’s some more details in those books you’ve been reading but that’s pretty much the whole f$&@ing game.”
Thank you so much for your support of the channel. I know I thank you every time, but I never would want you to think I take your generosity for granted. It means a lot to me. And that is a huge compliment. I love introducing people to new things. I hope that, if you do pick it up, I didn't mislead or misrepresent the contents!
I got a fairly good copy of this book online a few years ago to complete my hard book collection of 1e books. This one is one of my favorites. Great book. I actually am playing a tinkerer gnome in an online game.
I was in 3.5 Dragonlance game exactly once, a kender player tried to steal weapons from party members. The DM was totally fine with that. I didn't go back. Kudos for playing a kender without being That Guy.
I remember seeing these shortly after they came out, and passed them by. Never did pick them up. But I love Greyhawk and bought the gold box set. The City of Greyhawk box set was also really good, and later the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.
Yes! I think I have that Living Greyhawk Gazetteer! Now I need to go check. I really enjoyed the Gold Box WoG setting and am so glad I picked up that box when I saw it. I had the books and maps separately that a friend had given me back in the 80's but having the box it quite cool. Thank you for watching and commenting. Cheers!
I guess technically "The Known World" was my first, but it was almost simultaneous with Greyhawk for me. I remember when the Forgotten Realms was coming out, but the Boxed Set and 2E Campaign Book were right around as I was shifting out of D&D and into Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I still regret not having picked those up. I do have the 3E Campaign Book, which I really enjoy despite not playing in or running the Realms.
@@daddyrolleda1 I am finally making my first 2nd edition campaign world right now. I stopped running AD&D almost twenty six years ago. I tried a little of 3rd and Pathfinder, though I enjoyed that edition it was just way to much work being a DM. Now because of you I am going back to my roots and doing something I have wanted to do for decades. Thanks for the inspiration.
Ha! Okay cool. Not sure if you are familiar with the account Redwyrm on Twitter, but he has a fun account where he talks about playing D&D with his 7 year-old sun, and they have a fantastic website full of really great random generators. Anyway, he also likes to do TTRPG raps. Here's his one for Shadowrun: wyrmden.com/track/3410657/shadowrun
I love reading the comments from folks and seeing their different opinions, but everybody is being cool about it. I really am glad that I picked it up finally after all these years, even though I really would have preferred if it had been presented differently and more organized. Thank you so much for watching and commenting!
huh, didn't know there even WAS an Indie TTRPG month, much less it being July. Coincidentally, this month this one built up the drive/hyperfixation to start on reworking an old forum RP system this one made for use as a TTRPG system. at least this one now knows which month to officially release it in when it's done
another great video! there are so many powerful items in the game I want to try a playthrough limited to one magic armor item per character. i think the rings and amulets are not so OP and provide plenty of choices.
And all this continues into 2nd Ed, with Forgotten Realms Adventures (1990) being equivalent to the two covered here. Also, Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures (1992) _could_ have just gone by the subtitle, as it's the same combo of rules for a different culture + setting seen in Oriental Adventures.
Fair enough! I am working on a Patreon with my graphic designer friend. My initial thinking is to offer maybe two things a month: a random table with some "designer thoughts" about why I made it and how you could use it for a game, and then also a brand new map (from my designer friend) with five keyed locations that would be presented similarly to the Guild Hall that's in my "Alchemy, Explosions & Inventions" supplement. And then I guess I'd set up a Discord, as that seems to be important to folks, even though I never use Discord and I'm not entirely sure what I would be doing with it!
@@daddyrolleda1 it'd be great to have a way to support you, regardless of what you "give out". I look at your videos as our reward. But if you need a Patreon reward, just give out a recipe for one of your drinks from the month.
My 1e AD&D hardback collection is complete right up to Dungeoneer’s Survival. I didn’t buy anything after that. The only one that I regret not getting at the time is the Manual of the Planes. (And I have a PDF of that now…) I’m really a Greyhawk Folio guy. I don’t want too much detail. Whenever I’ve tried to run a really fleshed out setting with tons of lore and every hex fleshed out in exacting detail I get overwhelmed trying to memorize it all, and I feel hemmed in. If I ever want to change the entire nature of a region or nation on the fly if it suits the game without breaking 50 years of established canon, I don’t want to feel bound by published content. And arguing with players who have every bit of that lore committed to memory when I want to change things to suit the campaign is not how I enjoy spending my limited and precious gaming time. Lately, I tend to just homebrew… but I can see running a very loose Greyhawk campaign again. But I don’t foresee ever getting either of these books… unless I get to the point where income becomes disposable enough to just build the collection to completion. But I doubt they’d ever see use at my table outside of a unique monster or spell or treasure item.
I resonate with this comment so very much! I've never run a published setting (except for a 1-shot), and one of the reasons you cite (having to memorize tons of lore to keep things straight) is one of the reasons. I had a ton of fun reading my World of Greyhawk boxed set, mostly to just get ideas for running my own campaign world, but with no intent of running the setting as presented. I, too, stopped my initial AD&D book acquisitions with the Survival Guides (although I also got the Wilderness one) and it was more than 30 years before I got the last three. One (Manual of the Planes) was a gift from a viewer who noticed I didn't have one, and the other two were "pandemic lockdown purchases" when I realized I was saving money from not buying new comics each week (since they stopped publishing for a while), nor was I visiting the pub or going out to eat. So I treated myself, mostly, as you say, to complete my collection but without thinking of using them at the table. Thank you so much for watching and commenting. I appreciate it!
@@edlib02169 Personally the only one from 1e I'm missing is orientals, for 2e I never bought anything, but my brother bought the 2e Players and DMs and I ended up with those, there are bits in it I do like, but thats pretty much just the NWPs and illusionist being folded back into the ordinary mage class with the other mage specialists, other than that I didn't and still don't really see any worthwhile changes and certainly not enough to have warranted a whole new rule book rather than a supplement at the time, so I considered it a bit of a cash grab rip off, but nowhere near as egregious as later ones, I have since picked up a few bits second hand in charity shops but I'm not really any more interested in anything past 1e than any other game system, if it was a choice with a limited budget I'd sooner take the original Traveler or Cthulhu core books than anything from 2e onwards, hell, if it was in good condition I might even take a spare copy of one of the 1e books I already have over anything from 2e I don't 🤔
I did buy these books as they came out, but the two featured here didn't excite me greatly. They were fine and fun to read, but I used pretty much nothing from them, to be honest. They sit on my shelf untouched again for many years now. ;-)
1st and 2nd edition are my favorites. The only gripe about 1st edition was the level limitations for non human characters. I think the move away from THAC0 was a terrible decision. The D20 system basically turned DnD back into a wargame, and that saddened me.
Oh, that's interesting! I never really thought of the D20 system being *more* wargame-like! But I can see that point-of-view. Thanks for watching and commenting!
Dragonlance, wonderful setting, great novels, horrid modules. Some liked them I guess, but guys like me could not stand such hardcore railroads. They are bar none the worst railroads ever published. No thanks. I did always want to run an open sandbox hex crawl based campaign in Krynn, but I never got the chance. Maybe some day. I never ran games in Greyhawk i played some games in it. I just never got into it like the Forgotten Realms. It looks and sounds great to be honest. I did read novels based in the setting. The Gord books are pretty cool.
Of those, I've only played CoC. I feel that I really missed the boat on Traveller, but none of the folks in my gaming group were playing it, and I usually only bought the games they ran (I was only a player in those days so I wouldn't have ever thought to buy a game to run it for others!).
Very cool! How do you like it? This is the one I played in: dragonlancenexus.com/authors/jon-christian/ I guess it's a "prequel" of sorts. I had fun, but I think it was mostly because the folks I was playing with were really cool. It's a group of folks I met on TTRPG Twitter and it's the only time I've ever played D&D online.
@@ImaginerImagines I am so embarrassed about that. Someone else corrected that as well and I realized I'd been saying and spelling it incorrectly. Thanks for catching that, and also for watching and commenting.
I played a Kender in a non-krynn home brew once by permission. I probably was a bit annoying (definitely touched some things I shouldn’t because they were there.. didn’t steal too much though)
As long as everyone had fun, it was probably all good, right? We were playing online (the first time I'd ever done that - I strongly prefer playing in person) and I was sending the DM notes on the side that the others couldn't see, to tell him what I was looking at or picking up, etc. So it kind of worked because I wasn't disrupting everybody, and the way we played it was that eventually I would pull something out of my pack that I'd "handled" like an hour before because it was useful at the time and I'd come up with some crazy story about how I ended up with it because it was new and I'd never seen anything like that and wanted to make sure to show it to the folks from my village because they'd never believe it, but I'd left a note that when I was done with it, I'd return it. That kind of thing. I really tried to play up the child-like sense of wonder and the others seemed to appreciate it. Thanks for watching and commenting!
Oh wow! Maybe I'm pronouncing it incorrectly?! Oops. That's another one of those words I've never heard pronounced out loud before. I remember many years ago one of my daughter's friends telling me, as we all walked to school in the morning, about this book she was reading in which the lead character collected "vinyl." But she pronounced it "VINN-uhl" because she'd never heard it said aloud. It gave me a smile!
Grayhawk is more of static setting, which is just one big playground and the book reflects that. Its the perfect Generic Setting for DnD. Dragonlance is just ridiculously steeped in lore, which weighs it down and current events. You can still do the traditional adventure in Dragonlance, but the setting book really doesn't offer much in that respect. Also, they screwed up the timeline in the 1st Ed of the Dragonlance setting.
I think that's an interesting way to look at it, and it makes sense. It's intended to be "generic" (not in a bad way but in a "broad" way to accept various influences) setting, so the setting book with therefore reflect that style. I hadn't thought of it that way. I still don't think it was necessarily organized and presented the best way, but that gives me a new perspective on how to view its contents at least. Thanks, and thanks for watching and commenting.
It has always been my understanding that the edged weapons rule for Clerics is owed to European history. At tourneys in the Middle Ages, when they held melees, members of the clergy were sometimes allowed to participate--but were forbidden from using swords and daggers, etc. They instead used maces and clubs.
That is for sure one of the more common reasons put forth as to the restriction on edged weapons. Mike Carr, who first played a Cleric in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign (pre-dating D&D) said that Dave just told him "blunt weapons only" and Mike Carr himself didn't know why he said that. Gary picked up this restriction and later said it was based on Bishop Odo in the famous Bayeux Tapestry, who appears to be wielding a club or mace instead of a sword. I put forth in my video on the Thief class (odd place to discuss clerics, I know) that mechanically it's related to the magic weapons a character might find. In the old days, the DM rolled on a table to see what magic items were found. If a weapon was indicated, you rolled on a sub-table. Swords and daggers are by far the most common weapons found on that table, much more so that maces. That was part of the "balance" behind the Fighter (or, at the time, "Fighting Man") class: they were much more likely to find a magical weapon they could use. Given that they don't really get any other "powers" compared to others classes, wielding magic weapons is a huge bonus for them. So, if you found a sword, the Fighter would be able to use it, but a Magic-User and Cleric would not. I suspect it's a mish-mash of a lot of ideas, both flavor-wise and mechanics-wise, that contributed to the decision.
Little brother man! When you respond to someone you really respond to someone! The amount of things I learn about the history of this game just from Reading comments is amazing. You're one of my best sources for knowledge here. @@daddyrolleda1
Personally I never liked any of the Dragonlance modules, they were all far to linear in a too forced rather than subtle fashion for me, the ones I did get would have been better as one of the novels (that I also thought were somewhat low quality as novels compared to most of the fantasy writing I consumed at the time, and I always suspected most of the writers had never really played the game the way they were written, far too much of the novels came across as some sort of mid quality fanfiction if it was written by non-fans who didn't really care about the IP or hobby beyond the paycheque) they put out than as a module to my mind .. I just didn't like them and didn't think they were good product.
I collected them up through #6 but upon reading them, I wasn't sure I wanted to run them, so to this day, I've never run them! I only "read" the books for the first time last summer while listening to audio versions on my morning walk. I know the novels were super popular but for whatever reason I just wasn't all that interested in reading them. I can't articulate why. When I started the channel, I felt for an historical reason, it would make sense to finally read them since they are, I think, the most famous example of "game fiction" (although one could argue some of the Drizz't books, which I also haven't read, share that title). Thank you for watching and commenting!
Imo, TSR never really could be accused of being stifled by quality control. It is too bad really. Still love the game - but often wonder what could have been if someone with an ounce of business acumen had been the lead of that organisation. For one thing, the Gygax Foundation would be greater than the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Not sure if you remember this, but back in the 80's there was an April issue of Dragon magazine (which was always a humor issue in honor of April Fool's Day) that including some song parodies, one of which was "Valley Elf" sung to the tune of Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl."
Great video again Martin. and lol... the spellcasters of Oerth known as what?? Yawn. Generic spellcasters set in a generic setting. It was common knowledge by real D&D fans they got nothing on a bunch of fully crazed red-headed hair triggered Glantrians throwing nukes around with a few quick words and a finger wag. I tell ya.. not only was Mystara underappreciated as the best setting D&D ever had.. even the Glantrians and the single best splat book D&D ever got get disrespected.
