Greyhawk Rebooted - 576CY

unrealistic scale Add to that this expand- Finally, a word on the post-Gygax ma-
ed map was also uninspired aesthetically terial. As mentioned previously, the de-
(it was a huge rectangle with triangle is- fault year for this reboot it 576 CY. That
lands at the corners) and the original fo- means things like the Greyhawk War,
lio map was the one Gygax worked from... which occurs after 576 CY on the time-
we went with the earlier map as our can- line, have not happened yet. That part
on geography. Since it was really only an is easy. What was more problematic was
outline map, we went to work building the the massive amount of detail the Living
major mountain ranges, rivers, forests Greyhawk campaign added to the setting.
cities, trade routes, etc. While some of it was time-stamped and
therefore easily ignored, other materi-
Similarly, the Olman and Touv, human al expanded upon history or added geo-
sub-races published after Gygax’s depar- graphic or demographic details. For these
ture form TSR are little more than vague we simply kept the stuff that worked with
stereotypes of essentially how western our newly re-imagined Greyhawk and ig-
popular culture stereotype meso-Ameri- nored the rest.
can and pre-colonial African cultures. In
the case of the Olman, real world Mayan So, these are the basic foundations of the
and Nahuatl deities were adopted whole process used to re-imagine and reboot the
cloth and the myth of the human-sacrific- setting. We hope you enjoy exploring it.
ing savages was continued. Use the stuff you like, ignore what you
don’t.
It was also in this way that the Suhfeng,
Zahind, Murians and Risayn were detailed That has always been the genius of the
and fleshed out. Careful consideration Greyhawk setting.
was given to making them unique cul-
tures that stand on their own and that are Its always been a sandbox.
not simply cookie-cutter reproductions of
real world cultures. So while the Celestial
Empire of western Oerik may have fea-
tures reminiscent of the lands of ancient
China and Japan, we make a conscious
decision to change the history and culture
enough to turn things on their head with
the use of fantasy elements. It seemed
like an obvious design choice to weave in
actual Celestials into a nation called the
Celestial Empire after all. So on the base
of a mythic ancient Chinese-like culture,
we overlaid core D&D tropes like demons
and dragons. We’ve taken a similar ap-
proach with the Rhenee and the negative
stereotypes associated with the real world
Roma people. In rebooting the setting we
have attempted to correct some of these
previous design decisions to make these
cultures more three dimensional.

12 Greyhawk Rebooted 576CY is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan WotC Content Policy.