Greyhawk expands in interesting ways on the Original D&D.
Most notably it introduces the Thief with all of that classes abilities. Also Paladins are added as a sub-class of Fighter.
Races get a bit more of a description and half-elves are introduced.
Next up are modifiers for Ability scores. For Strength – to hit and damage modifiers are now given and the percentile dice for those with 18 strength. People with Dexterity 14 get -1 AC but it’s just couched as the attacker getting -1 on their roll. And high Constitution grants you pluses on your hit dice.
We finally get different amounts of damage according to the weapon! Likewise, a table for monsters showing number of attacks and damage per attack.
There are a whole bunch of new spells, some for existing levels but also whole new spell levels. Some of them seem very unbalanced. There’s a Strength spell which grants a Fighter a big increase in their Strength ability for 8 hours! Also there are spells that multiply the effects of other spells – eg Permanence.
A whole bunch of well-know monsters are also introduced – I won’t list them all because every one of them is a classic so I’d be listing all of them – suffice to say Beholder is one of them. Basically they’re pretty much all high level monsters.
The list of extra treasures is extensive and contains a lot of dodgy ones – it seems every third item runs something like “this looks like the previous (good) item but when used the player … [is attacked][becomes weakened][dies immediately with no saving throw][something else nasty]”. And my favourite name goes to the “Spade of Colossal Excavation”!
One other odd thing – in most cases, time is talked about in terms of turns but just occasionally there’s a mention of melee rounds – it seems things weren’t thoroughly bedded down to the new ‘alternative’ combat system.
Lastly I can only assume the supplement is called Greyhawk because it has a bunch of the things Gygax had been using in his Greyhawk campaign. Otherwise, there’s no actual information about the Greyhawk setting or dungeon apart from two or three throwaway references.
Date Information
The Foreword has a date of February 1st. Enworld says February. The Acaeum says March. Tome of Treasures has June with a question mark. Shannon Applecline on DriveThruRPG says it was published in March (although here he says April!) The Strategic Review 1.2 (Summer) says it should be available when you read the magazine. Without being able to definitely nail down the dates of the Strategic Review issues, and knowing Shannon knows a heck of a lot more than me, I’m going with a date of March.