Free City of Greyhawk - Early Development

Early Development

In 1972, after seeing a demonstration of Dave Arneson's Castle Blackmoor game, game designer Gary Gygax agreed with Arneson to co-develop a set of rules for a game that would eventually become known as Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax liked the idea of a castle and dungeon that players could explore, and created his own imaginary place called Castle Greyhawk, which he used to test and develop the game.

About a month after his first session, Gygax created the nearby city of Greyhawk, where the players' characters could sell their treasure and find a place to rest. The lands around Greyhawk gradually grew into an entire world as Gygax's players explored further and further afield.

In 1980, Gygax published details of his home campaign in a folio called The World of Greyhawk. This was the first published information about the City of Greyhawk.

The Free City of Greyhawk, Gem of the Flanaess, is the adventuring town that gives the World of Greyhawk setting its name. Game designer Ken Rolston comments: "The City of Greyhawk is an organism of systems within systems, with each system driven by its own motivations and personalities. External politics are intertwined in the city’s internal affairs. Rival guilds compete for power and influence, and dark conspiracies fester beneath the streets, while less-weighty adventures may arise from the lighter aspects of civilized personal and commercial rivalries."

Read more about this topic:  Free City Of Greyhawk

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or development:

    With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.
    Erma Bombeck (20th century)

    This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)