What is "greyhawk"

Greyhawk, also known as the World of Greyhawk, is a fictional world designed as a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. Although not the first campaign world developed for Dungeons & Dragons— Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign predates it by a few months—the world of Greyhawk was the setting most closely identified with the development of the game from 1972 until 2008. The world itself started as a simple dungeon under a castle designed by Gary Gygax for the amusement of his children and friends, but it rapidly expanded to include not only a complex multi-layered dungeon environment, but also the nearby city of Greyhawk, and eventually an entire world. In addition to the campaign world, which was published in several editions over twenty years, Greyhawk was also used as the setting for many adventures published in support of the game, as well as for RPGA's massively shared Living Greyhawk campaign from 2000–2008.

Greyhawk can refer to:

• Grey Hawk, a smallish raptor found in open country and forest edges in the Americas.
• Greyhawk, a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) roleplaying game.
  • Greyhawk, a supplementary rulebook for the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.
  • Castle Greyhawk, one of the original locations in the setting.
  • Free City of Greyhawk, the city from which the Greyhawk setting takes its name.
  • Greyhawk dragon , a type of fictional dragon from the Greyhawk campaign setting, also called "Steel dragons" in other D&D settings.
  • Greyhawk was the original name for the Troika-developed video game The Temple of Elemental Evil (computer game).

Greyhawk is a supplementary rulebook written by Gary Gygax and Robert J. Kuntz for the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. It has been called "the first and most important supplement" to the original D&D rules. By adding a combat system, it severed all ties with Chainmail, making D&D a truly stand-alone game system. Although the name of the book was taken from the home campaign supervised by Gygax and Kuntz based on Gygax's imagined Castle Greyhawk and the lands surrounding it, Greyhawk did not give any details of the castle or the campaign world; instead, it explained the rules that Gygax and Kuntz used in their home campaign, and introduced a number of character classes, spells, concepts and monsters used in all subsequent editions of D&D.