Greyhawk Rebooted Gets the Boot

Perhaps not the most charitable of titles.

I came late to this party, and I haven’t listened to any of the interviews or read any of the Facebook posts (I’m not on Facebook), but anyone can see that K. Scott Agnew loves the vision of Greyhawk presented by E. Gary Gygax in the old-school Greyhawk materials.

Greyhawk Rebooted was an ambitious project to bring Greyhawk 576 [1]576 was the Common Year date for the first age of the Greyhawk setting. TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast, released updates to the setting that moved a meta-narrative and also moved the calendar … Continue reading into the modern age. While part of his focus was on the 5th Edition rules, he also wanted to give DMs and players access to the vaguely defined western part of the Oerik continent. His version of a map of Oerik is probably what first caught my attention.

One of the things that modern role-players seem to struggle with is that restrictions can make a game more fun. Greyhawk was a low-to-mid magic setting (as opposed to the Forgotten Realms, a high-magic setting), gunpowder didn’t work, and it had a feudal political structure with all of the ethnocentrism that entails. All of these limitations made the setting more interesting, and gave the players broader scope for imagination. After all, what’s the point of being a scarlet tiefling-tabaxi half-breed if there’s a whole village of them down the road?

Agnew followed in the footsteps of other incarnations of the Greyhawk setting, laying out the history of Oerik, including the western part, as a background for the campaign setting. While I question some of his narrative decisions, for the most part he avoided the wizard war trope of unbeatable individuals conquering vast kingdoms with only their own power. This permits wargaming in Oerth, and is part of the fun as far as I’m concerned.

So, where can you get a copy of this material? You probably can’t. Wizards of the Coast served up a cease-and-desist order and Patreon shut the project down. A Player’s Guide to Oerik was the only part of the project completed, and the Streisand effect doesn’t seem to be at play here.

Why did this project get shut down when so many other fan projects have done well? What was it about this project that specially earned the ire of the famously irritable Wizards? I think there are three major elements.

  1. The Player’s Guide is chock-full of stolen art. People of the Internet generation tend to play somewhat fast and loose with image copyright, but it still exists. For many of these images, Wizards of the Coast only has the rights to the initial publication format — they are forbidden by copyright from using these pictures in a new product. However, because they were the source for the pictures in the Player’s Guide, they could perhaps be held liable for Agnew’s use of these pictures. He should have employed some artists with the money from the Kickstarter (and should have raised the Kickstarter goal amount if this was a problem).
  2. Agnew also ventured into Wizards’ sacred ground in the spell lists. These are full of both legacy spells and new ones attributed to copyright-protected persons. Tasha’s Hideous Malformation is the only one that I can verify is not also a newer spell in canon, but Agnew’s use of these protected identities — Wizards’ trade dress — was a boundary that fan compilations had long wisely steered clear of. Rich Burlew’s excellent comic, Order of the Stick, makes fun of this limitation (although his work is exempted, being satire), but it’s something that has been taken seriously for a long time. If you examine other works in the OGL[2]Open Gaming License-space, you’ll notice a conspicuous absence of Mind Flayers and so on.
  3. Finally, Agnew sought to monetize this work. Joseph Bloch has done some excellent work creating fanon[3]fan-made canon for the World of Greyhawk, but as far as I know has released all of it for free. By seeking to sell the Greyhawk Rebooted setting, Agnew set himself up as a competitor of Wizards of the Coast, but one who was using their own copyrighted materials.

In short (tl/dr[4]too long/didn’t read) while I think Agnew did a very good job with a lot of his project, he made some significant errors in judgement that led to a shutdown of the project. I appreciate his efforts to compile a lot of the extant fanon into one resource (making use of Canonfire, Greyhawkery, Anna B. Meyer, the Grey League, Greyhawk Stories, Dragonsfoot, Greyhawk Online, Maldin’s Greyhawk, and others), making editorial decisions about how to reconcile competing stories. I appreciate his efforts to make a place for all of the new playable races in the 5e system, although I won’t be using them. I appreciate the degree to which I think he gets the old-school vision of a world bursting with possibilities without needing to be a soap-opera. On some level, I appreciate his willingness to take a stupid risk, taking on one of the most powerful forces in gaming to make his vision a reality for other players.

It’s too bad he was never able to get to his gazetteer and DM’s guide, etc., and I have some vain hope that he’ll decide to contribute his work to a fan site like one of those listed above. By uncoupling it from the Wizards trade dress and the stolen images and just saying, “Here’s how I would integrate Dragonborn into my campaign in Greyhawk,” I think he would contribute far more to the hobby than by going the way he did. On the other hand, perhaps someone at Hasbro or Wizards will see the quality of the work he was able to do and decide to bring him onboard to make it official canon. That would be a true happy ending.

References

References
1 576 was the Common Year date for the first age of the Greyhawk setting. TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast, released updates to the setting that moved a meta-narrative and also moved the calendar several decades forward
2 Open Gaming License
3 fan-made canon
4 too long/didn’t read