Living Greyhawk


Living Greyhawk was a massively shared Dungeons and Dragons living campaign administered by RPGA that ran from 2000 to 2008. The campaign setting and storyline were based on Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk setting, and used the Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition rules. During the lifespan of the campaign, more than a thousand adventures were published, and these were played by tens of thousands of players around the world.

Chronology of the campaign

During the 1990s, a shared RPGA roleplaying campaign called Living City that used the Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition rules had been relatively successful. With the introduction of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000, RPGA conceived of a new and improved campaign called Living Greyhawk that would more far-reaching in scope and played on a larger, continental scale. Instead of one city and its environs, this campaign would cover 30 in-game regions of Oerth, each linked to a real-world area, as well as "core" in-game regions that were not assigned to any specific real-world area.
The first introductory adventures of the campaign premiered at Gen Con in August 2000, and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, which contained background material, was published in November 2000. Volunteers were recruited to handle regional storylines, and regional play began in 2001.
At the end of 2001, campaign administrators changed the treasure rewards from a certificate-based system to an equal-access system in which a special item could be purchased at the end of the adventure by any player and recorded on an adventure record. This, and a rule change that immediately prohibited crafters of magic items from selling items to other players, caused some protest from players. However, in 2002, RPGA dropped its membership fee, and the number of players who had dropped out of the campaign was more than made up for by new RPGA members, and interest in Living Greyhawk increased substantially.
In 2003, the campaign was converted to the revised Dungeon and Dragon v3.5 rules.
In 2005, the campaign saw the first of several direct tie-ins to new rule expansion books published by Wizards of the Coast, with the launch of a new story arc set in the Bright Lands desert that coincided with the publication of Sandstorm.
In 2007 at Gen Con Indy, concurrent with the announcement that the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons would be published the following year, RPGA announced that the Living Greyhawk campaign would not be converted to 4th edition, but would instead be brought to a close.
The final adventures of the Living Greyhawk campaign premiered at the Origins convention in June 2008, and play ended on December 31, 2008.

Design of the campaign

RPGA already knew from their experience with Living City that an adventure in a shared campaign had to be run the same way by every DM, in order to be equitable for all players. This created problems with some of the rules, which could be adjudicated several different ways according to circumstance. There was also the problem of certain character classes and items that could unbalance the campaign by providing one character with too much power.
In order to try to avoid these problems, Living Greyhawk used Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, but modified by a set of "house rules" set out in the Living Greyhawk Campaign Sourcebook. Some of these house rules included:
The various adventures themselves were loosely tied together and storylines were developed based on general successes or failures from previous adventures. To enable the Circle to monitor this, at the conclusion of some adventures, the DM was required to submit the results to the Circle, which then planned future plotlines based on these results. This interactivity was what inspired the word "Living" in the title of this type of shared campaign.

Regionality of campaign

The LG campaign differed from previous shared-world campaigns in one important respect: thirty of the regions from World of Greyhawk were linked to real-world areas; volunteers from these real-world locations then assumed responsibility for the storyline and administration of that particular region. In return, the real-world location was the only place where one could play adventures belonging to that region. Any adventures set outside these thirty regions were "core" adventures that could be played by anyone anywhere. See Regions of LG below.

Metaregions

In order to present story arcs with larger themes than the local concerns presented in regional adventures, the Circle gathered the thirty regions into five larger metaregions.
This provided a level of storyline that fell between the strictly local interests of regional adventures and the continent-wide story arcs of "core" adventures.

Administration

The campaign was overseen by the Circle, a group of six RPGA staff. Five of the members had individual oversight for one of the five metaregions; the sixth Circle member had responsibility for Core adventures. The responsibilities of the Circle included approval of all adventures that rewarded treasure, coordination of overall campaign and metaregional story arcs, approving story ideas for Core and metaregional adventures and editing same, producing campaign documentation and rules, ruling on reports of cheaters and unsportsmanlike conduct, and appointing and maintaining a Triad for each region.
Due to the workload, some metaregions also added a metaregional coordinator volunteer to assist with metaregional storylines and adventures.
Each region was overseen by its Triad, who reported to their respective Circle member. The Triad was responsible for finding writers for regional adventures, approving story ideas, editing adventures and submitting finished adventures to the Circle for approval, writing special missions for individual players, answering questions from players, arbitrating disputes regarding play, auditing players' documents, and maintaining a regional website.

Adventures Types

Given the "regionality" of the campaign, the Living Greyhawk campaign produced five categories of role-playing adventures:
These were produced by the regional Triad and approved by the corresponding Circle member. The adventures could only be played within the borders of the corresponding real world Region, although players from other Regions could, while visiting the Region, play them at double the cost of Time Units.
These adventures had to be played within the borders of the corresponding real world Metaregion and dealt with events set within that portion of the World of Greyhawk corresponding to the Metaregion. Production of Metaregional adventures was overseen by the Circle member or Metaregional Coordinator.

Core

Core adventures dealt with events in regions that had not been assigned to a real-world counterpart. This included the Free City of Greyhawk, the Amedio Jungle and the Northern Wastes, among others. Because these regions did not belong to a real world area, they could be played by players living anywhere in the real world. Production of Core adventures was overseen by the Circle member with special responsibility for the Core regions.
The table below is a list of Core regions that have been used in core modules.

Adapted

Some commercially produced adventures published by Wizards of the Coast were selected by the Circle and adapted for play in Living Greyhawk. These adventures counted as Core adventures, although they had not been published by the Circle.

Adaptable

Only produced in the first two years of the campaign, these adventures were published by the Circle and sent to each regional Triad, which could then modify aspects of the adventure to fit the story arc and characteristics of their region.

Time units

At the start of each calendar year, each character in the campaign started with 52 time units. Most regional adventures cost 1 TU to play, and most Core adventures cost 2 TUs. TUs could also be spent for out-of-adventure reasons such as crafting a magical item or being a member of an organization or a guild. Once a character spent 52 TUs, that character could no longer be played until the start of the following calendar year. This was ameliorated by the fact that each player could have as many characters in play at the same time as desired. Once one character had run out of TUs, the player could simply switch to playing another character until the start of the new year reset TUs back to 52.
While 1 TU was ostensibly equal to one week of game time, in fact this was simply an arbitrary number designed to limit how many adventures one character could play in a calendar year, and therefore restrict how much wealth and power a single character could accumulate in a single year.
After the end of the campaign was announced in August 2007, the rules concerning TUs were relaxed. From November 1, 2007 until the end of the campaign, adventures no longer cost any TUs. The effect was to allow each character an unrestricted amount of play in order to reach 16th level and "retire" by the end of the campaign.

Regions of LG

One of the main differences between Living Greyhawk and previous shared-world campaigns was regionality: thirty regions of the campaign world were linked to thirty real-world locations. These real-world locations were then given responsibility for developing the storylines and adventures for the campaign region. In return, the campaign region became the "property" of its real-world "owner"—only players who were physically in the real-world location could play the adventures of that location's campaign region.
For example, Onnwal was assigned to the United Kingdom, Sunndi to the Benelux countries, and Ekbir to France. A player sitting at a table in Manchester, England could play an Onnwal adventure, but could not play an adventure set in Ekbir or Sunndi, since those adventures could only be played in France and Benelux respectively. However, if that player travelled to France or Benelux, the player could play Ekbir or Sunndi adventures respectively.
The only exception to this rule was made at large conventions such as Gen Con, when a late-night world-wide "Fiesta" play opportunity was granted to DMs from any region of the world so they could present an adventure from their home region.
In 2007, to recognize the growth of the internet and an abundance of cheap long-distance telephone rates, the physical location rule was relaxed somewhat: as long as the DM and more than 50% of the players were physically together, other players who lived in that region but were currently travelling out of region could teleconference into the game.
When creating a character, the player had to choose a "home region" for it, which could be any one of the thirty regions linked to a real-world location. However to promote an esprit de corps within each region, Living Greyhawk rules made it more costly in terms of Time Units for a character to participate in adventures outside of its "home region".
For instance, nothing in the rules prevented a player living in France from making the character's home region Sunndi rather than Ekbir. However, any time the player used that character to play Ekbir adventures in France, it cost the Sunndi character double the number of Time Units, since the character was effectively playing out of region. If done regularly, this would halve the number of adventures this character could play each year. For this reason, most players simply made their characters' home region the region that they physically lived in.
The thirty regions linked to real-world locations were in turn grouped into one of five metaregions. The table below shows the real-world areas that were linked to each region, grouped by metaregion. Any region not listed below—such as the Free City of Greyhawk, the Duchy of Tenh or the Amedio Jungle—was a "Core" region, and could not be used by characters as a home region.