I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since 1995, so the waning days of 2nd Editions just before TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast (a fact which was largely lost on me at the time). I received the core 2E rulebooks for my birthday and Christmas that year, and my local library in Mound MN had a collection of modules, including B2 In Search of the Unknown and a handful of others.

From this library module collection came my first exposure to the World of Greyhawk – WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun by Gary Gygax. I never ran the module (actually I never really grokked the layout or presentation of the contents to be honest), but there were tantalizing details inside, and like many modules it had a listing of other dungeon modules in the back with fantastically evocative names. The adventure itself – like I said, I never really hand a handle on it, and for good reason as the adventure makes some radical assumptions about the party and their actions that just didn’t set well with me (and the bold claim of “this module is capable of standing alone” was just utterly false!).

In looking at back at WG4 (I managed to actually buy the copy from the Mound library years later in a book sale), it doesn’t have any distinct links to the World of Greyhawk beyond the cover. It is linked intrinsically to S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (WG4 – S4???), and I know now that this must place it somewhere in the Yatil Mountains. But the module doesn’t seem to tell you that.

After Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR and got Dragon Magazine back up and running, they started to push a return to Greyhawk in advertisements in conjunction with the TSR Silver Anniversary boxed set. The ads in Dragon Magazine featured art and tag lines like “What the Hell is a Baatezu?” (a reference to the change in AD&D 2E which reclassified demons as tanar’ri and devils as baatezu). Those ads really caught my eye, and I managed to get my hands on the Silver Anniversary set somehow (Birthday? Christmas? High school job money? Blood sacrifices?) along with all of the updated products – Return to the Keep on the Borderlands, Return to White Plume Mountain, and Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff.

These were my first real steps into the Greyhawk setting, followed pretty closely by a pair of products meant to revitalize the Greyhawk line. The Adventure Begins and Greyhawk Player’s Guide. Suddenly a whole fantasy world was opened up to me with roots going back to the primordial, prehistory of the hobby itself. It spoke to me, I loved all of the products, and I was ecstatic when D&D 3E was announced with Greyhawk as the de facto default setting, gods and all.

Sometime around the year 2000 or so I managed to get my hands on the World of Greyhawk boxed set with the fantastic Darlene map, and after a short time I had it self mounted on a big piece of plexiglass. That map – wow. Wowie wow. Evocative, stunning, simple, elegant, wonderful. That map more than anything else has kept my interest in Greyhawk through the years.

I’ll save the rest of My History with Greyhawk for a future post, which will include my personal campaigns set in the Flanaess over the years (they started with 3E for the record). I never got into Living Greyhawk and more’s the same for me personally – I wonder what life would have been like if I had? Ah well, some other timeline’s story.