Greyhawk Facts: the Howling Emptiness of the Flanaess

 As has been eloquently been put forth before by, among others, Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons fame and Joeseph Bloch the Greyhawk Grognard, the lands of the Flanaess are maddeningly uninhabited. As part of a series exploring the implied setting of AD&D 1st Edition, Kutalik wrote an enlightening blogpost on the empty land as presented in the Greyhawk Folio: 

"If you actually sit down take all the distances and stated populations at face value and start crunching numbers, your immediate impression will be that the lands of Flanaess aren't just stable, if embattled faux medieval nations, but far more like the edge-of-oblivion points of light societies of a post-apocalyptic world."

And further on:

"In other words, even the wildest places of Europe at the time are orders of magnitude more settled and prosperous than Veluna. Those wide light green clearings on the Darlene map turn out not to be dull vast tracts of farmland peopled by plump, happy yeoman, but barely held little bastions.

It's hard not to conjure up images of isolated little hamlets clustered around a grim watchtower or small castle with miles of wasteland and bramble-grown lost settlements filling the miles between. Even inside these “settled” lands armed-to-the-teeth patrols are making the rounds and a monster or two is not an uncommon daily nuisance."

At Greyhawk Grognard, Joe ties the emptiness of the land to the implied endgame of AD&D:

"In that game system, there are two tensions at work. The first is the need for the players to have room in which to expand to play the famed “end game” of AD&D; clearing land, building keeps and towers, and eventually attracting settlers and taxing them. This, I think, is the reason that most of the small villages that are portrayed in the game are shown outside of the normal feudal system of government; who was ruling over Hommlet before Burne and Rufus decided to set up their fortress? By having hexes that are mostly empty, there is plenty of space for players to set themselves up as described in the DMG.

The second, I believe, is the need of the DM to not be overwhelmed by needless detail. Why are Hommlet and Nulb the only villages in their respective 30-mile-across hexes?

Because from the standpoint of the DM, that’s where all the action is! If there were a historically-accurate density of villages and farms on those hexes, the player characters would be overwhelmed with choice. “Which village with an inn is the one that we should concentrate on? Let’s pick this one! I think the name’s neat!” That requires the DM to then have exacting detail on all those villages or be willing and able to make up such detail on the fly."

So there we have it, the Flanaess is a continent where civilization is confined to heavily armed camps, threatened by bandits, outlaws, humanoid hordes and monsters, providing player characters with opportunities to clear the wilderness and set up domains for themselves.

What does it all mean?

As an exercise, I took the From the Ashes material with which I am most familiar and building of Longetalos work in this thread on EN World, calculated the population density of the various states and principalities of the Flanaess. Only a few realms have a density of more than 1 person per square kilometer. In a vain effort to provide some insight, I photoshopped this map (not my best work). 

Some highlights:

• Irongate and Dyvers are positively urbanized with 8.5 and 3.9 humans per square kilometer respectively. I never imagined Irongate as such a center of civilization. This certainly paints a new picture of Irongate as political, military and economic center of the Iron League. Dyvers, of course, is the old capital of the Viceroyalty of Ferrond and as can be derived, the Kingdom of Aerdy's main colony outside of the old Aerdy heartlands.
• The most heavily populated lands are all east and directly south of the Nyr Dyv. The Great Kingdom (including Almor, Medegia and North and South Province) has a population density of 2.8 humans per square kilometer. Nyrond, the Duchy of Urnst and the lands of Greyhawk follow with a density of 1.8, 1.7 and 1.8 respectively. These settlement patterns are still extremely sparse (and not accounting for the numbers of demihumans, humanoids, roving bandits and leaderless armies traipsing around the wilderness), but they paint a band of relative cultivation on the southeastern Nyr Dyv.
• Ekbir is a stronghold of cultivation in the Baklunish basin, and Veluna is more settled than Furyondy. This provokes an interesting idea, that Zeif (for the Baklunish) and Furyondy (in the western Nyr Dyv lands) are dependent on those two states for their wellbeing. Suddenly, the abduction of Thrommel to prevent a Veluna-Furyondy union makes even more sense, as Furyondy without support from the Theocracy would be weakened considerably economically speaking. One wonders what the dynamic between Ekbir and Zeif is.
• Perrenland is a bastion of civilization in the northwestern Flanaess. One wonders what Iggwilv's contribution to this state of affairs was. Did she build Perrenland up to its current state? Or was Perrenland even more civilized before the reign of the Witch-Queen, on par with the Aerdy heartlands?
• The Sheldomar Valley is the domain of scattered humans living in alliance with the native demihumans.

In play, this map provides a guideline on describing the lands of the Flanaess through which the PCs travel. It is also an interesting aid in chronicling the civilizing influence of the Great Kingdom. For all its current wickedness, the Overkings of yore have actually done a great job in kingdom-building, with great rival Keoland paling in comparison. 

For the campaign I am preparing, I am imagining the Flanaess as a wild land with bastions of order surrounded by a sea of chaos. The lands to the east are more cultivated than the wild west, and Flanaess society, economy and religion is still heavily influenced by the Aerdy powerhouse built by the Overkings. Within these points of light, heavy armor and steel weaponry is available. In the wilderness, a level of technology and organization akin to the European Dark Ages prevails. Travel is dangerous, with monsters, brigands and humanoids on the rise and prowling on trade routes and farmsteads alike. It is a land in need of adventurers to safely guide food, weapons and trade goods between the civilized lands, and to clear out the wilderness and establish new bastions of order.

Greyhawk Facts: Humankind is fragmented and besieged

"Humankind is fragmented into isolationist realms, indifferent nations, evil lands and states striving for good. The Baklunish countries in the northwest have grown in power. Nomads, bandits and barbarians rais southward every spring and summer. Humanoid enclaves are strongly established and scattered throughout the continent, and wicked insanity rules in the Great Kingdom. The eventual result of all this cannot be foretold."

- excerpted from the A Guide to the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Setting, World of Greyhawk Boxed Set

As I am preparing for my next D&D campaign - which will be set in the World of Greyhawk - I am considering which materials I will use for that campagin. A common question in preparing for Greyhawk is "Which era will I set my campaign in, Gygax original, From the Ashes-reboot or Living Greyhawk-era?" My answer to that question will be: All of the above (and none).

Marvel, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and numerous cartoon adaptations before that, and even the Ultimate Marvel comic book imprint), and movies drawing from either modern or ancient myth do all the time, I will pull inspiration from the primary sources to create my own version of the setting - as Gary Gygax intended when he wrote the original Folio-edition in the first place. As part of this exercise, I will distill my vision of the Flanaess in a few "Things You Need To Know", or Greyhawk Facts, in a number of posts, each post detailing another fact. Today: the degeneration of civilization and the rise of savage humanoids.

Art by Jeff Easley

The Realm of Mankind is beset on all sides by savage enemies, and civilization's light is dying.

The World of Greyhawk is first and foremost a realm of Man. It was envisioned as a humanocentric setting by Gygax, further supported by the passage in the original DMG that D&D was envisioned as a humanocentric game. The Guide to the World of Greyhawk reinforces this fact by summing the human population of a particular state/land and only providing sketchy details on demihuman or humanoid populations. In the original publication, the Elven and Dwarven realms are considered to be fading. It is the Great Kingdom, a human-ruled power, that rose to dominate the Flanaess in recent centuries. Yet that same Great Kingdom has been in decline for the past few decades, being ruled by the aforementioned "wicked insanity".

Overall, the Flanaess is painted as a land of petty human kingdoms and principalities, striving against each other, struggling for survival and even dominance. It is thoroughly medieval in that regard, reminding me of Dark Age Britain, with thinly populated kingdoms fighting each other and the invading Vikings. It also reminds me of the mood of Lord of the Rings, sometimes called "nobledark", where Middle-earth's kingdoms have been frayed and beaten by centuries of onslaughts by orcs and Ringwraiths and are barely holding on. Evil and Chaos are on the rise in the Flanaess, with only a few, battered states, such as Furyondy and Nyrond, trying to combat that rise.

For reasons I will go into in my next post in this series, the Flanaess feels terribly desolate and under-populated. But what if we treat that as a feature instead of a bug? We know that humanoid power is on the rise, with increasing numbers being recruited by states to fight as mercenaries and others raiding and rampaging the countryside. What if the states of the Flanaess not only fight each other, but humanoid incursions as well? The nations of Man are not only divided amongst themselves, they are also, year by year, losing ground to Orcs, Gnolls, Ogres and Trolls. Sterich and Geoff have already been conquered by giants. The Pomarj, Bone March, Lands of Iuz and large parts of the Bone March are already Orc-territory, as are many enclaves in hill, mountains and forests. 

An apocalyptic image, and a world in need of heroes.