I'm glad the seeds of my blasphemy bought us another of your great Grayhawk posts! They're part of the reason why I'm excited about the Grayhawk reboot.
Aw....
Thank you! Seriously.
I wrote a lot (a LOT) about Greyhawk in my earlier essays. And over time, all that writing about why Greyhawk was so awesome and why we needed to have it back really changed the way I thought about Greyhawk.
Over time, I realized that what made Greyhawk so awesome for
me wasn't the way it had certain elements of "old school" play, or sword & sorcery, or "muscular neutrality," or ... a lot of the things that I assumed were hard-baked into the setting at the time.
It was that Greyhawk was so open-ended. That it was a campaign setting that people really made their own. That it was evocative (filled with empty spaces, and areas "off the map," and ancient destroyed civilizations) but not prescriptive.*
And that's what I want for everyone else. Don't play Greyhawk like I did. Make the Greyhawk that you want! If you find some of this stuff (like the pantheons, and the blurred like with divinity) helpful ... cool! If not, I know that you'll have something that you will find equally amazing and magical.
*As a reminder, the WoG 1983 boxed set was written by an "unreliable narrator." Which means that even though it is mostly rumors and adventure hooks, even the things within it can't be taken as absolutely true.
