Well! It's nice to be back in familiar territory once again. Greyhawk Adventures was the first place many of us ever explored, and I must say it's the setting for D&D that's most familiar to me. Sure, I had my love affairs with Dragonlance and Ravenloft, and even a little Forgotten Realms on the side. I cultivated a secret love for Dark Sun, but to me Greyhawk is the ridiculously impossible "vanilla" D&D coolness. You know, the one with all the tropes and gamer nerd paraphrenalia?
Our Greyhawk campaign will take us through the forgotten editions of Dungeonland. We're doing this is AD&D 1st Edition (hence referred to as 1e) and all the orange spine items. We've got a huge collection of stuff here, and I plan on using all of it! All the stuff from the basic, printed rulebooks are in use, and of course all the new stuff from Unearthed Arcana. Well, it's not new now...but you know what I mean.
We're about to embark on a quest. That is, the club. We're going to play huge, published campaigns in every edition of D&D over the next few years. Now, we've been playing a lot of Pathfinder and 3e but now it's high time we ran some of these old-school published adventures, and played them how they were written with the rulesets they were written for. That's why there's no Edition War here.
We're starting out with T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil, but I have a lot of material from that same era and we'll be showing how it progresses in the Campaign Log. We've got the entire classic campaign together, and to avoid any more spoilers than I've already given (though you can pretty much predict the course of the campaign, if you were so inclined) I'll not be giving the exact list of modules here on the site until the 1e romp is finished.
The group had a blast at the first real session of the game, and even though we didn't have big turnout it was sorta an off day for the club. Next week however, we'll most likely have 50% more players...and it should be noted that 1e was written for a much larger group than 3e's assumption of 4 players.
For my own opinions, I'd just like to leave you with these nuggets.
I believe magic items are bought and sold on Oerth, but it's shops of magic that are rare, rather than magic items themselves. Oerth is completely saturated with magic.
We will be using the printed works as best we can, RAW (Rules as Written).
There is some contention on the intent of certain passages in the old Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. 1st Edition is a completely different beast when used on it's own. I'm pretty sure I have all the pertinent information nailed down for reference, though we're sure to encounter some more strange obfuscation at some point.
Then again, we are prepared for a different sort of game now.
We can only hope the Player Characters are ready for that game.