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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition
Greyhawk Adventures
Become part of the oldest continuous fantasy campaign as you explore parts of Oerth never seen before. Learn about Greyhawk's deities, heroes, monsters, arcane items, magical spells, and much, much more. A book for lovers of Greyhawk and players of all fantasy role-playing games.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1988
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About the author
James M. Ward
116 books56 followersJames M. Ward (b. 1951) is an American game designer and fantasy author.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 22, 2019
Great campaign reference book. Tons of ideas and plot hooks to torture (I mean test) your players with. Nicely laid out. Recommended
October 22, 2019
Back in the day campaign settings were kind of hit-and-miss. You basically had writers throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks, with very little idea of greater context or exactly what they were looking to do: this created many weird and interesting fantasy realms that maybe slightly lacked in internal consistency, but had a lot to do wherever you went and whatever you wanted. It's up to you how much you'd enjoy the precise stuff each of these settings had stuck on the wall, as well as how much you like internal consistency and things making sense.
Greyhawk, Mystara, and Wilderlands of High Fantasy all basically swelled out of a single city or small map, gradually expanding into a whole continent full of thrills and excitement. Out of the three, Greyhawk was the main setting of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for a while, and had some of the best adventure modules ever written put to it, but even so it's my least favourite of the three: it lacks both the great political intrigue of Mystara, and the really weird well-established hexcrawl of Wilderlands.
Personally I just like to grab all those modules and stick them to a setting I like even more, but on the whole Greyhawk isn't bad. It's just not great either.
Greyhawk, Mystara, and Wilderlands of High Fantasy all basically swelled out of a single city or small map, gradually expanding into a whole continent full of thrills and excitement. Out of the three, Greyhawk was the main setting of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for a while, and had some of the best adventure modules ever written put to it, but even so it's my least favourite of the three: it lacks both the great political intrigue of Mystara, and the really weird well-established hexcrawl of Wilderlands.
Personally I just like to grab all those modules and stick them to a setting I like even more, but on the whole Greyhawk isn't bad. It's just not great either.
October 23, 2023
If you are looking for some good info on the world of Greyhawk. This is a good place to start.
October 11, 2020
This book straddles the first and second editions of Dungeons & Dragons a bit uncomfortably. It was probably meant to be playable by gamers with either edition, although it winds up being a bit confusing to 1st ed players in its technical details, and probably to 2nd ed players by including things like Assassins that were eliminated in those rules. This is all by-the-by, because what really sinks this campaign supplement is the lack of any maps of Greyhawk or any of its environs. There aren’t even small maps provided of the areas which are detailed in the text. At a time before the Internet, this meant that the whole thing was useless as a stand-alone, only of interest to people who were already running adventures in the Greyhawk setting, and who had “The World of Greyhawk” or some other supplement that included a solid Greyhawk map. (Today, of course, a DM could just do a Google image search for a map online).
With that in mind, the contents overall are somewhat mixed. I rather liked the details of Greyhawk deities and some of the more powerful NPCs who exert political influence over the region. There are a good number of new magic spells, some quite creative, each attributed to one of the famous Magic Users of Greyhawk’s past (Mordenkainen, Bigby, etc) and magic items which are attached to Greyhawk lore. Weaker sections include those on geography, where the lack of maps becomes painful, and the brief adventure hooks, which really don’t provide enough to work with. There’s also a tendency, which I think was a running thread in gaming at the time, to try to set up betrayals, secrecy, and backstabbing in the party – something which at best slows down adventures as the DM has to confer frequently with individual players outside of the earshot of the rest of the group, and which at worst ruins the fun and makes everyone go home mad.
The worst part of the book comes in the appendix on running “Zero-Level Characters.” Today, a number of innovative and free-wheeling game designs have come up with creative ideas for “sharing narratives” between the GM and his players, in which vaguely-defined non-entities come to understand their place in the world in a collaborative manner. This was far beyond Jim Ward’s conception at the time, although the bare bones of it had been explored in Chaosium’s “Basic Role-Playing” rules. Instead of following its simple model, however, Ward has imposed a complicated and frustrating set of rules over narrative character creation, with a correspondingly large amount of bookkeeping for GM and players to track. I wonder if anyone ever used these rules as written. They would be especially discouraging, because as characters “graduate” to first level, they must give up hard-won skills and hit points, something that no player has ever been happy to accept.
In short, then, more than thirty years after the fact, this is pretty much a book for collectors of AD&D material, not even a high priority for the grognards who continue to play by the old rules, and certainly of minimal interest for the legions playing by the new ones.
With that in mind, the contents overall are somewhat mixed. I rather liked the details of Greyhawk deities and some of the more powerful NPCs who exert political influence over the region. There are a good number of new magic spells, some quite creative, each attributed to one of the famous Magic Users of Greyhawk’s past (Mordenkainen, Bigby, etc) and magic items which are attached to Greyhawk lore. Weaker sections include those on geography, where the lack of maps becomes painful, and the brief adventure hooks, which really don’t provide enough to work with. There’s also a tendency, which I think was a running thread in gaming at the time, to try to set up betrayals, secrecy, and backstabbing in the party – something which at best slows down adventures as the DM has to confer frequently with individual players outside of the earshot of the rest of the group, and which at worst ruins the fun and makes everyone go home mad.
The worst part of the book comes in the appendix on running “Zero-Level Characters.” Today, a number of innovative and free-wheeling game designs have come up with creative ideas for “sharing narratives” between the GM and his players, in which vaguely-defined non-entities come to understand their place in the world in a collaborative manner. This was far beyond Jim Ward’s conception at the time, although the bare bones of it had been explored in Chaosium’s “Basic Role-Playing” rules. Instead of following its simple model, however, Ward has imposed a complicated and frustrating set of rules over narrative character creation, with a correspondingly large amount of bookkeeping for GM and players to track. I wonder if anyone ever used these rules as written. They would be especially discouraging, because as characters “graduate” to first level, they must give up hard-won skills and hit points, something that no player has ever been happy to accept.
In short, then, more than thirty years after the fact, this is pretty much a book for collectors of AD&D material, not even a high priority for the grognards who continue to play by the old rules, and certainly of minimal interest for the legions playing by the new ones.
September 12, 2017
This is a book about Greyhawk, but written without Gary Gygax or Rob Kuntz (the original Greyhawk DMs) being available for consultation. As a result, while it is closer to canon than most things written about Greyhawk after his departure from TSR, it is basically Jim Ward's take on things. Ward was one of the original players (Drawmij...Jim Ward spelt backwards). However, Jim ended up writing a compendium of potential adventure locations and some magic items and monsters. None of this feels entirely correct in a world composed of Gygax' creations, and some sections appear to be driven entirely by word count rather than playtesting. It certainly wasn't the canon Greyhawk campaign in any way, shape or form.
Jim Ward's writing style is rather dry and he doesn't excite much with his description of adventure areas. I have referred to it infrequently in my campaign spanning over 35 years. I have lifted an item or two, but never any of the monsters.
Jim Ward's writing style is rather dry and he doesn't excite much with his description of adventure areas. I have referred to it infrequently in my campaign spanning over 35 years. I have lifted an item or two, but never any of the monsters.
May 12, 2019
Rereading this in light of an old school campaign I am running. Feels like an outlier to the rest of the Greyhawk milieu. None of the energy of Gygax’s original gazetteer or of the Wars follow up. The magic weapons and adventures are also a bit lame. Unsurprisingly, Drawmij (a character once played by the author) has most of the interesting development.
An artifact of the publish or perish late eighties period at TSR, this is really filler. The illustrations are recycled from older modules, there are no maps, even for the geographical section. The NPCs lack key stats and the adventures just kind of fizzle. I remember liking it a ton as a kid, but I’m older now...
An artifact of the publish or perish late eighties period at TSR, this is really filler. The illustrations are recycled from older modules, there are no maps, even for the geographical section. The NPCs lack key stats and the adventures just kind of fizzle. I remember liking it a ton as a kid, but I’m older now...
July 23, 2017
I never found Greyhawk to be an interesting world and the names were all so strange. It was the full world I campaigned in, but would not return to it once I played in the Forgotten Realms world.
April 10, 2022
You can tell this book dates back to older versions of Dungeons and Dragons, long before the current popularity of the game.
I acquired the book to be able to expand my background knowledge of the area of Greyhawk, thinking the book would be like Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, but the information given is a little vague compared to the structuring of the more modern D&D compendiums. It is written with great enthusiasm and passion by a team that struggles to get on paper everything they know but without the structure that has since evolved in these books.
I think there is a fantastic opportunity for WotC to release a modern update or compendium on the land of Greyhawk for the current generation to relive the high fantasy adventures in the setting where it all began!
I acquired the book to be able to expand my background knowledge of the area of Greyhawk, thinking the book would be like Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, but the information given is a little vague compared to the structuring of the more modern D&D compendiums. It is written with great enthusiasm and passion by a team that struggles to get on paper everything they know but without the structure that has since evolved in these books.
I think there is a fantastic opportunity for WotC to release a modern update or compendium on the land of Greyhawk for the current generation to relive the high fantasy adventures in the setting where it all began!
May 21, 2015
Apparently helps you run a Greyhawk campaign
26 August 2013
I believe that this book was sort the beginning of the transition from first to second edition, however it is now, like most of the other books released around this time, pretty much obsolete. Mind you those old books, if you toss away the rule components, or at least attempt to upgrade them, can still be useful for source materials, however some of them, like this book, are pretty much useless. Mind you, unless you are running a game set in Greyhawk, this book is pretty much useless anyway (and I suspect that even if you are running a Greyhawk adventure you will still find it pretty useless).
Dungeons and Dragons is a funny game, and there are still churches out there that call it the tool of the devil and that we should have nothing whatsoever to do with it. I think that is a little narrow minded, but then again a lot of these churches are fundamentalist to the extreme and teach that if you do not believe in a literal seven day creation, or a pre-millenialist view of the end times, them you are watering down the gospel. However, I have also heard it used where the speaker clearly does not actually understand anything about the game in and of itself, and this is worse because their attacks are based on ignorance.
My problem with Dungeons and Dragons is more on the aspect that it can, and does, take up an awful lot of your time. I would spend lots of time finely crafting an adventure hat would only be played once, if ever. I would also spend bucket loads of money on books that I would probably never use and are now sitting in plastic crates. Hey, even as a teenager, my obsession with Dungeons and Dragons was so great that I would fly into fits of rage if I could not play it, and I even resorted to shoplifting to get the books I wanted (and also proceeded to get caught and punished).
These days though, I still like it, and have even played it recently, but really have no desire to sacrifice the time that is required to play the game properly. With the internet it is much easier to find groups (through websites like Meetup) and easier to bring together groups. However, that was always problematic because it was hard to ever find a good group, and sometimes one bad player will join the group which ends up ruining the game for everybody.
26 August 2013
I believe that this book was sort the beginning of the transition from first to second edition, however it is now, like most of the other books released around this time, pretty much obsolete. Mind you those old books, if you toss away the rule components, or at least attempt to upgrade them, can still be useful for source materials, however some of them, like this book, are pretty much useless. Mind you, unless you are running a game set in Greyhawk, this book is pretty much useless anyway (and I suspect that even if you are running a Greyhawk adventure you will still find it pretty useless).
Dungeons and Dragons is a funny game, and there are still churches out there that call it the tool of the devil and that we should have nothing whatsoever to do with it. I think that is a little narrow minded, but then again a lot of these churches are fundamentalist to the extreme and teach that if you do not believe in a literal seven day creation, or a pre-millenialist view of the end times, them you are watering down the gospel. However, I have also heard it used where the speaker clearly does not actually understand anything about the game in and of itself, and this is worse because their attacks are based on ignorance.
My problem with Dungeons and Dragons is more on the aspect that it can, and does, take up an awful lot of your time. I would spend lots of time finely crafting an adventure hat would only be played once, if ever. I would also spend bucket loads of money on books that I would probably never use and are now sitting in plastic crates. Hey, even as a teenager, my obsession with Dungeons and Dragons was so great that I would fly into fits of rage if I could not play it, and I even resorted to shoplifting to get the books I wanted (and also proceeded to get caught and punished).
These days though, I still like it, and have even played it recently, but really have no desire to sacrifice the time that is required to play the game properly. With the internet it is much easier to find groups (through websites like Meetup) and easier to bring together groups. However, that was always problematic because it was hard to ever find a good group, and sometimes one bad player will join the group which ends up ruining the game for everybody.
March 30, 2010
Never had much call for Greyhawk material since my campaign over the years has rarely visited there. This work seems well composed and informative.
October 11, 2007
Much more detail needed.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews