Living Greyhawk ("LG") was a massively shared Dungeons & 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 (later v3.5) rules. During the lifespan of the campaign, more than a thousand adventures were published, and these were played by tens of thousands of players^[1] 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 be 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,^[1] 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 (a special item discovered during the adventure was given to one of the players as a certificate or "cert") 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 ("AR"). This, and a rule change that immediately prohibited crafters of magic items from selling items to other players, caused some protest from players.^[1] However, in 2002, RPGA dropped its membership fee,^[2] 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.^[3]

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.^[4]

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, 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.

To try to avoid these problems, Living Greyhawk used Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition (later v3.5), but modified by a set of "house rules" set out in the Living Greyhawk Campaign Sourcebook.^[5] Some of these house rules included:

• Limits on starting character classes and races All new characters were required to start at 1st level. Originally only races and character classes found in the Players Handbook^[6] were allowed. This was later modified to include some new character classes such as favoured soul and hexblade. Occasionally access to new races was granted under particular circumstances. For example, if a player chose to play the first adventure of the "Bright Sands" story arc,^[7] centaur could be chosen as a race. In another instance, a special card issued by RPGA allowed the player holding the card to create a kobold character.
• Limits on levels gained. Although D&D 3.0/3.5 was designed for characters up to 20th level, LG required characters to retire from the campaign when they reached 18th level. (This was later modified to require retirement when 16th level was reached.)
• No evil Characters could not have an evil alignment, nor could they worship an evil deity. If a character committed an evil act, such as attacking another player character, the DM was required to report this to the local Triad. If the Triad decided this act indicated a change of character alignment to evil, then the character would be permanently removed from the campaign. For this reason, any character infected by lycanthropy was given a chance to remove the curse, but if unsuccessful, was removed from the campaign.
• One play opportunity only. Players were only allowed to play each adventure once. If a person had already run the adventure as a DM before playing it, then he or she was barred from playing the adventure afterward. (This was called "eating a module".)
• Certain things banned from LG. To try to maintain some balance between the characters and adventure encounters, and also some fairness in the powers and abilities of the characters, some character classes, prestige classes, magic items, weapons and spells were banned from play. Additionally only new items, spells and powers found in books published by Wizards of the Coast were allowed in the campaign.^[8]
• The use of Time Units to regulate number of adventures played per year See Time Units below.
• Campaign documentation. In addition to the standard character sheet used in Dungeons & Dragons, every player was required to keep complete campaign documentation for each character. Living Greyhawk was sometimes derisively called "Living Accounting",^[1] since the list of documents could include
  • an Adventure Record (AR) for each adventure played by the character, which tracked accumulated gold pieces, experience points and Time Units spent, as well as access to magic items and spells, and any favours or curses gained during the adventure;
  • a Master Item Logsheet (MIL), which described when each special or magical item had been bought or created by the character.
  • a Magic Item Creation sheet (MIC), which logged magic items created by the character
  • any campaign documentation or certificates earned during adventures
• Character Death If a character died and the player was unable or unwilling to pay for resurrection during or immediately following the adventure, the character was removed from the campaign. A dead character could not be resurrected or otherwise brought back to the campaign at a later date.

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 (campaign administrators), 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.

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 (three volunteers who lived in the region), who reported to their respective Circle member. The Triad was responsible for finding writers for regional adventures (or writing the regional adventures themselves), 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:

• Regional adventures
• Metaregional adventures
• Core adventures
• Adapted adventures
• Adaptable adventures.

Time units

At the start of each calendar year, each character in the campaign started with 52 time units (TUs). Most regional adventures cost 1 TU to play (double if the character was visiting from another region), 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 (although "in-game" activities such as crafting magic items still had a TU cost). The effect was to allow each character an unrestricted amount of play 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.^[5]

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 (belonging to Benelux) rather than Ekbir (belonging to France). 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.^[12]

See also

• Living Greyhawk Gazetteer

Notes

External links

• Wizards of the Coast's Official Living Greyhawk site.