Greyhawk is a "welcoming, non-threatening" D&D campaign setting jammed into the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide

The Greyhawk campaign setting is packed into the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. A campaign setting has never been in a DM's Guide before. Its inclusion honors the 50th anniversary of D&D because Greyhawk was the first published D&D campaign setting ever, back in 1980.

Greyhawk was conceived by Gary Gygax, one of the cofounders of D&D. It was a thin folder that held a 32-page guidebook to the World of Greyhawk, plus some foldout maps. This makes it conceivable to fit it into the new 384-page DM's Guide.

Designer Chris Perkins, who first fell in love with Greyhawk when he was a boy of 11 or 12, recognizes "How unburdened it was by detail. It deliberately left a lot for the Dungeon Master to make their own." He loved the leanness of it all. 

Gary Gygax first built the Greyhawk setting (for his friends, in the '70s) by thinking small. He started with the dungeons below Castle Greyhawk. 

The 2024 DM's Guide likewise starts small: with the city of Greyhawk. There are a few key locations highlighted on a foldout map that comes with the book. One side of the map is the city, on the other side are the surrounding nations. And as points of interest spiral further away from the city of Greyhawk, the descriptions become intentionally more vague. The designers want to give a Dungeon Master just enough to pick up and run with. They want you to make your mark on the map.

Character backgrounds can connect a player to different points of interest in the city. If you've got a character with the Soldier background, for instance, and you're using Greyhawk as your starting location, it's easy to imagine that former Soldier getting their start within the City Guard. The DM can then bake that into their campaign—giving a player deeper ties to the setting. 

Things in the Greyhawk section to keep you reading:

• Big Bads (e.g. the faceless Elemental Evil, or Iuz the evil cambion demigod)
• Gods of Greyhawk
• Living History sidebars that are ways to explore Greyhawk's depths
• Location descriptions
• Made-up days of the week
• More than one moon
• Neighborhood descriptions
• Political organizations
• Supernatural adventure hooks in the city
• Wargaming adventure hooks in the surrounding nations
• Seafaring adventure hooks in the massive bodies of water
• Three major conflicts iconic to D&D and/or Greyhawk:
  • secret nihilistic cults of Elemental Evil unleashing things meant to stay locked away
  • big bad Iuz planted on the map and ready to conquer everyone else
  • evil dragons—specifically drawn up for a game called "Dungeons & Dragons"
• Deep cuts into lore
  • Such as, why the name "Unearthed Arcana" is used by Wizards of the Coast to this day

What makes Greyhawk iconic? Greyhawk is not defined by tropes, but there are things that you can find in Greyhawk that you would expect to find in any fantasy setting. It's very "straight down the fairway" D&D. All the monsters in the Monster Manual and all the magic items in the DM's Guide have a home in Greyhawk. 

On the map, longtime Greyhawk fans—even if it's through more recent adventures found in Tales From the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and Quests From the Infinite Staircase—will find marked locations for the Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, the Tower of Inverness. This is even the home of powerful nonplayer characters that've made their way onto the covers of 5th Edition D&D books, like Tasha, Mordenkainen, and Bigby.

As a DM of the Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen adventure, I sometimes feel handcuffed by the number of Dragonlance novels I've read from Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman. It feels like I'm tiptoeing through a minefield of potential "errors" I could make in the setting's lore. But Greyhawk doesn't come with that weight. There's a ton of lore in that anything and everything D&D feels cozy there, without being so steeped in its own lore that it paralyzes you from making your own fun.

The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide launches November 12. The 2024 Player's Handbook launched in September—we reviewed it here.