The RPG Campaign Tour Challenge Day 5 prompt delves into campaign history.
Day 5 – Can you tell us about the campaign’s history? In the real world and within the universe.
Visit Nuketown’s RPG Campaign Tour Challenge 2026 Prompts page for the rest of our challenge posts.
A long time ago … in Pennsylvania
I’m lucky … and I know it. My gaming group began in 1996, playing Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition.
Thirty years later, we’re still playing.
The roster’s changed as people joined and left. We’ve seen marriages, divorces, kids born, kids learning D&D, kids going off to college, and kids venturing into the real world on their own (likely with a set of dice … or two). We’ve gamed in the real world; we’ve gone to GenCon and held our own mini-cons (the RPG-centric Nuke(m)Cons and the board game-centric LanceCons). The pandemic saw us go online, where we’ve mostly stayed as people moved to other states and even other countries.
For most of that time, we’ve called ourselves the Blackrazor Guild, named for the signature adventuring guild from the early-to-mid years of our group’s history. We’ve run a ton of campaigns in Greyhawk; I’m hesitant to try and list them all because I’m sure I’ll miss a few. Some notable ones that stand out are:
- The Blackrazor Guild Campaign: The original campaign, which kicked off in the Great Kingdom, led to the burning of a significant portion of the city of Innspa, some exceptionally large bounties, and the PCs deciding to head to Free City of Obsidian Bay on the Pomarj peninsula. Obsidian Bay was our city, and it grew with the campaign, which saw campaign-shifting wars, the awakening of ancient Suel archmages, doppelgänger betrayals, and profitable (and occasionally deadly) forays to the mega dungeons of the Obsidian Maze, Maure Castle, and the Castle Greyhawk ruins.
- Pirates of the Vohoun: Our D&D 3rd edition playtest campaign set on the islands in the southern reaches of the Flanaess.
- The Dark City Campaign: Our first urban fantasy campaign, Dark City, was set in Obsidian Bay. We started over with 1st level characters, and never ventured out into the Pomarj seeking adventure. Instead, all the action took place in the city. It remains one of my favorite campaigns.
- The Redshirts Campaign: The Blackrazor Guild had a tradition of recruiting newbie adventurers, who served as horse caretakers, torchbearers, and cannon fodder. They were called redshirts (hat tip to Star Trek) and if they survived an adventure, they got a name. The Redshirts Campaign saw us take on the role of the redshirts, earning our names and — eventually — taking on a resurgent Temple of Elemental Evil.
- The Dwarven Campaign: In this campaign, we all played dwarves seeking to reclaim an ancient stronghold (based on the Forge of Fury module) … and then deal with threats to the re-established community.
- The Liberation of Geoff Campaign: Taking place in the Grand Duchy of Geoff in the western reaches of the Flanaess, this campaign saw the Blackrazors taking the fight to the country’s giant invaders. It was loosely based on the TSR campaign book of the same name, released as a sequel to Against the Giants.
- The Blackrazor Baronies: The follow up to the Geoff campaign saw the Blackrazors granted the title of Barons in Geoff. This entitled them to lands of their own to govern … and to defend. In this campaign, we took on the role of henchmen of our older characters, dealing with various threats to the realm and the Baronies.
- Heart of Darkness: A Greyhawk campaign set decades after the original campaign, and featuring the occasional Blackrazor alumni as a guest NPC. It was a truly epic campaign that let us explore the northeastern reaches of the Flanaess.
- Obsidian Frontier: A flashback campaign taking place shortly after the founding of Obsidian Bay and taking place decades before the original Blackrazor Guild campaign. It focused on adventures in the even wilder Pomarj, with lots of wilderness treks and threats.
- Elemental Apocalypse: A campaign set in an alternative version of Oerth, where the Temple of Elemental Evil rose … and Greyhawk fell. Inspired by movies like Red Dawn, it saw the PCs fighting the good fight against omnipresent elemental evil. It also served to answer the question: what if the Keep in Keep of the Borderlands was the real dungeon the players should be tackling.
Thirty years is a long time to spend in one campaign setting, but every time I think it’s going to get old, we find some new thing to bring us back to Greyhawk.
Meanwhile … on Oeryth
“Well of course it was the Baklunish who attacked the Suel first,” Alain the Wanderer says, then takes a thoughtful draw on his hand-rolled cigarette. The steady rain pattering against the group’s communal dining tent reinforces the fact you’re not going anywhere soon. So why not listen to a Knight of Murlynd ramble on about a history you barely know?
“Two thousand years ago, the Suel Imperium was a paranoid, debauched realm whose rulers were utterly in thrall of their archmages. And those archmages sought to break the very rules of the universe, going even further than the ur-Flan millennium earlier. Combined with their racist, xenophobic natures, it was only a matter of time before the Suel struck the Baklunish, no doubt confident that their superior magics would devastate their enemies before they could unleash their own magical retribution.”
Alain smiles. “I know. I’ve seen those worlds. Some are better than this one. Most are worse. But never you mind those other worlds; this is the one you’re live’n in. And in this one, the Baklunish unleashed their Rain of Colorless Fire, erasing the Suel Imperium in one catastrophic cataclysm. The Suel struck back, though their own Invoked Devastation wasn’t as effective.”
“Badly wounded, but not fatally so, the Baklunish civilization recovered. Expanded. Changed the flow of history. Oh, you don’t see it much around here — though if you ever make it to the big city, you’ll definitely be seeing their touch in the tuliped roofed buildings and the city dragon that serves as its protector.”
“Dragons — and other beasts — as protectors of civilized lands,” is very much a Baklunish tradition, one forged in the aftermath of the Invoked Devastation as the survivors sought any advantage save themselves from the magically mutated horrors that the Suel spawned.”
“But I know, you like it here on the Plain, so don’t worry about that larger world. It’ll take care of itself,” he says, then smiles knowingly, “at least until it don’t.”
The Inadvertent Greyhawk Fork
I like that Wizards of the Coast used Greyhawk as their example setting for the Dungeon Masters Guide … I just wish they’d done a better job of honoring Greyhawk’s history. Or, failing that, embraced the changes that I strongly suspect were due to poor research and editing rather than a conscious decision to break from canon.
And let’s be clear: Greyhawk fans take canon very, very seriously. There’s a reason why the fan forums are called Canonfire. Millions of words have been spilled teasing out the finer points of Greyhawk history, and not always in the most cordial of terms.
So what are the errors? The single biggest one is who shot first during the Twin Cataclysms. On the Prime Material Plane, in the true timeline, the Suel struck first, and then their Imperium was destroyed by the Baklunish counterstrike. A handful of Suel survived, escaping to the east, where they eventually founded the Scarlet Brotherhood (a faction of evil, racist monks who played a major role in the Blackrazor Guild campaign).
There are many, many more, as detailed in Age of Great Sorrow’s “Entirely Unsolicited Grognard Opinions on the World of Greyhawk in the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide” which does an excellent job of pointing out the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and straight-up mistakes. Now some may view this as being overly specific, or perhaps sour grapes, and say something like, “Let the setting evolve! Let a new generation try their hand at Greyhawk”.
To which I’ll say, Fine, but can’t we do it … better? Greyhawkers love their canon because they can. Unlike the Forgotten Realms, which has been detailed down to the last blade of grass, official content for Greyhawk is limited. There have been long decades with no official content coming out for the setting. That led to grumbling about the lack of support, but it also led to awesome continuity and setting conversations on places like Canonfiire and the old Greytalk listserv.
A Golden (Missed) Opportunity
Given the history of the setting, there was a golden opportunity to use this Greyhawk as a model for making published materials your own. Imagine a gazetteer that got everything right, but then had sidebars or subsections that ask “what if?”
- What if … the Baklunish shot first? What impact does that have on the world?
- What if … the city-loving Greyhawk (aka “steel”) dragons didn’t exist? What if their subtle defense and support of their cities was replaced by the brazen influence of metallic dragons (a la the Forgotten Realms?)
- What if … you chose to ignore the inherent subtlety and “greyness” of Greyhawk in favor of stark black-and-white storylines?
- What if … Otto — well known human mage and member of the Circle of Eight — was actually a dwarf?
These are all changes introduced to the setting that may (ok, do) antagonize the Greyhawk base, but could provide excellent fodder for “make the world your own” exercises. After all, despite our love of canon, that is what Greyhawkers tend to do.
There is no city of Obsidian Bay in the World of Greyhawk boxed set, nor is there a black dragon named Woryx that once hoarded the sword Blackrazor in its lair on the Wild Coast. There’s no time-traveling wizard named Valeran, no sub-civilization of “High Orcs”, and Turrosh Mak (the despot who rules the Pomarj) was not killed by a band of high-level adventurers in a strike on his citadel in Stonehiem. These are all forks that we introduced into our campaign, some of which cause massive ripples through the continuity of the setting.
But that’s what dungeon masters and players do: we make the setting our own. So why not lean into that in the DMG, the very book meant to teach dungeon masters how to be dungeon masters?
## Resources
- DMs Guild: Classic Guide to Greyhawk – by Stuart Kerrigan, Paul Looby, Paul Jurdeczka – A fan-based publication meant to recenter the DMG’s gazetteer on canon.
- Anna B. Meyer: Fantasy Cartography – A tremendous repository of realistic-looking Greyhawk maps, broken down by region and era. Includes a ton of map information gleaned from official sources (e.g. lost ruins, towns, etc.)
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Ken Frank, AD&D 2e Greyhawk Adventures module WGA3: Flames of the Falcon, TSR, 1990