Sutek
Mongoose
Azgulor said:Only in a lip-service kind of way. The D&D core books primarily use Greyhawk window dressing to provide examples of how D&D can be used/applied (such as deities, etc.). The setting doesn't receive anything close to the support that Forgotten Realms or Eberron receives, so it's very questionable to some whether Greyhawk is truly an actively supported setting. You do still see the occasional Greyhawk-specific aritcle or adventure in Dragon and Dungeon magazines.
Azgulor
That's true. Greyhawk is laid out as the generic example, but there's no map, no real gazeteer and no real description of the kingdoms except what appears in modules. There was a Greyhawk gazeteer some time back (early 3rd edition) but nothing has been followed up on.
There's nowhere near the thuroughness in D&D that exists with Conan unless you dealve into Forgotten Realms or, maybe, Ebberon. I personally think Ebberon is one of the weakest ideas I've ever seen for a "unique campaign world". I honestly have no idea how that guy won except that he must have just had a goodf pitch and noone else did. It's still humans, elves and dwarves with the few new, odd races tossed in, and it has no real unique feel to it. It's just a different D&D world with diferent spells and monsters to level up on. Boring.
FR at least has a rich social structure to it and a huge pantheon of gods which most of the world really feeds off of.
Conan just has that "grounded in reality" sensibility to it and offers a modicum of consistancy that soem player might find appealing. There's always that moment wher ethe players know they're powerful and so does the GM. Suddenly he whips out a dragon on them to teach them a lesson. That's because he can based soley on CR and appropriate threat level and encounter level. There's none of that to rely on in Conan, and that's on purpose. The result is that big, bad baddies will only show up for story reasons, and that's a lot more conducive for role -play. That's not to say that a good D&D GM can't pull off a really sweet role playing adventure that involves dragons; far from it. What I mean is that in Conan, that's about the only way to play: putting story ahead of hack/slash. And that's even though the hack/slash element is super high in Conan and super deadly.