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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
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The Bible or the Axe

I realize I don’t have anything very quippy to add to the title of the book I’m reviewing, but there we are.

I met William Levi at the Father-Son camp in downstate Illinois when he was a featured speaker. I was attracted to him, as I am attracted to all African ex-pats, but his story was surprisingly moving. The Bible or the Axe is his memoir of an interesting childhood and a gripping escape from Sudan.

William’s education is as an engineer, and it shows in the writing. It can be dry and pedantic, and of course he’s dealing with multiple variables of racism and culture as he’s writing cross-culturally. Nevertheless, the further I got into the book, the tighter the prose became, and I was hooked into the narrative as things got personally interesting for him — particularly during his escape from Sudan.

This book is a great reminder for Christians that our citizenship is in heaven, and that every decision we take here will affect our witness for that Kingdom, whose King is the Prince of Peace. Levi had an opportunity to live that struggle in a very personal way, but not just under the jihadi rulers of Sudan. It played out differently among secularized Christians in Egypt, and with American college students who unwittingly mocked his “easy” life.

It’s also a good book for people who want to see the reality of life under jihad, especially for someone whose experience of it greatly precedes 9/11. I found it encouraging, considering some of the anti-theism and anti-Christianity that seems to be growing in parts of our society. While it seems far-fetched right now, the days may not be so far off before we are called upon to make some similar choices to those faced by William Levi.

In all, I think it’s a worthwhile read, although the early chapters dragged a bit, and he can be “preachy” at times. For this last element, it’s usually when he’s decided to tell, instead of show, his point. In other words, the point is valid, but it would be better for him to trust the reader to get it from his narrative.

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An Unexpected Gem

Many years ago, before the Internet and cell phones, it was often difficult to find games for the Mac at the stores where I normally shopped. As a result, I would sometimes impulse-buy things on the possibility that it might contain something that I would later enjoy. One of these things was the Mac Game Cube, a stack of CD Jewel Cases that was cubic, and that included quite a few games. I played with a few of them, but ignored most of them — shovel ware was more of a problem on Windows, but it did exist for the Mac (as indeed, it still does).

Years later, as I was going through my software, I found the installer for System Shock, installed it, and found myself blown away by the fantastic game. There was another Mechwarrior-like game whose name I don’t recall, whose premise was silly, but the gameplay and graphics were amazing (for the time).

This experience showed me that the first impression you have of something isn’t always deserved, and sometimes you can get something for nothing (or at least, thrown in with what you were looking for).

I don’t know which extravaganza of free books I was perusing when I stumbled upon Monster Hunter International, but I do know that it was quite a while ago, and I had put the ebook onto a virtual shelf and not thought much more about it.

The cover was a little overly dramatic, and I wasn’t sure that I was ready for a blood-and-guts monster romp. Finally, while I was overseas, I decided it was time for me to check it out. I synced it to the Kindle app on my phone and started reading.

The opening didn’t grab me, partly because the style was kind of flippant, and I have had some bad experiences with Indie authors, but by the time I finished the first chapter, I was intrigued.

Monster Hunter gets so many things right that it would be difficult for me to list them (especially without giving away too many spoilers). Principally, although the book is predictable in the sense that you’re pretty sure the good guys are going to win, Larry Correia managed to introduce plot twists again and again without doing crazy deus-ex-machina things to get there. Every time I started to roll my eyes and sigh and say, “I suppose he’s going to do this next,” he did something very different, and he pulled me through to the end of the story, and left me wanting more. (There are at least six books in the series, so I shouldn’t have any trouble sating that desire.)

Larry is a “gun-nut”, a competitor in multiple civilian gun competitions, and it showed in what he wrote. The main character is passionate about his guns, and the loving detail given about them throughout the book is a lot of fun. There’s some fun Libertarianism throughout, as well, which is a refreshing contrast to the socialism that infects so much Sci-Fi. Most of all, Larry’s style is engaging, his characters are flawed, but likable, and he doesn’t need an editor with the same desperation as many other lesser-known authors (or he’s used one).

Content warnings: quite a lot of anatomical violence, primarily against monsters, but occasionally against the protagonist. There is some sexual content, but it’s generally very discrete. Finally, the characters have a modern sense of foul language, and the book is full of obscenities. I would not recommend this book to a younger reader who needs to establish a moral framework, nor to someone who struggles with bad language, nor to someone squeamish about gore, but it’s otherwise a delightful read, and highly recommended to other readers interested in a modern fantasy/sci-fi urban fantasy action adventure.