the book and contained info is great. what let it down is, you must cut out the back pages of maps, then copy them. yet even then they dont even marry up, leaving large gaps in the maps so is upsetting. i think for the cost, the digital copy should have been given free,

The scan is ok, but it could be better. It is not difficult to read at the very least. The colours are also rather flat (thanks to the scan). Hopefully we will get a new scan in the future. But still worth the money!

Great book with loads of ideas. The only problem i have is with the soft cover which i purchased. The maps are not seperate, infact they are prrinted, A4, back to back in the rear of the book. No use to anybody, a seperate booklet or even single sided printing would be so much better. Cannot use the maps as they stand.

Excellent quality in PDF, and a great product if you are adding Greyhawk City to your campaings. There is enough content to fill out the city as-is, and the physical size of the place allows for plenty of homebrew and cusstomization as well. The NPC stat blocks are typical for the editions, and most are easily adaptable to later editions (I use the product for 5th edition). The map layout is a bit twisty based on the scanned order and it will make you miss the old poster maps, but these can easily be printed and oriented for tabletop use; editing will be required for ease of use in online formats. The Gem of the Flanaess contains plenty of redundant information (it serves as a source book for the world and region), yet it does contain plenty of detail on the City itself. The Friends, Foes and Factions sourcebook provides content worth the price of the package, detailing NPC's, factions, guilds and the like. Strongly reccommended if you are using the City of Greyhawk with any depth in a campaign.

I wore out my old copy of this amazing boxed set, so was extremely pleased to see it all presented here at DriveThru.

This was really the gold standard of world settings in the day - if you need an engaging setting for adventures in 2e I thoroughly recommend it.

The original came in two books, a series of 'adventure cards', and a number of amazing and inspiring maps.

The POD version available compiles the whole thing into one soft cover book, with perfect binding. The scan and print quality is excellent, and having everything in one book works well for the most part.

The PDFs are seperated, which makes them more manageable.

My only complaint is with the way the maps have been treated. In both thr PDF and POD versions they have been split into A4 or Letter size chunks - even if you have thr PDF you simply cannot print the maps in their original form! Very disappointing.

Aside from that one black mark, everything else - the original content and its presentation here - is, aside from the maps, excellent.

This edition of the Greyhawk boxed set translates remarkably well to book form, was very well scanned, and if you are buying this out of any motivation from nostalgia to practical and accesible use for play today, this book will serve you well.

Further, if your're DnD historically minded, or design oriented, Greyhawk provides a fantastic glimpse into the late 1st/early second edition world of DnD. A lot of campaign designs and world building can easily be gleemed from its approach to a large city and surrounding hinterlands, and just as much can be gained in understanding the focus and interest of TSRs design philosophy and content motivations in this work.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, the series of 2 page stand alone adventure cards (which read perfectly in book form) hold up as strong examples of one session adventures that shift tone and challange across the range of early to mid character progression.

Since my original review, the scannable/OCR version has come out, and they've done a fantastic job with it. As the Jewel of the Flaness, this is one of the most developed cities I've seen. Plenty of NPCs to interact with, plenty of adventure seeds...good stuff. Highly recommended.

Love it that they scanned this old Greyhawk product and made it available for purchase! While researching Greyhawk lore for my home campaign, there were a number of times that I would find myself needing to know something that was only found in this "City of Greyhawk" boxed set. Sadly, I had never picked up a hard copy in the past, and for a while it was even unavailable here at the DM's Guild. I got so desperate one time that I had to ask an acquaintance to scan a few pages for me. (The scan of those couple of pages was a 12 MB file!) All to say, I was overjoyed when the DM's Guild notified me that this product was now available for purchase. Have already referenced it a few times in my preparations. And as another reviewer pointed out, it's chalk full of campaign content. Some day, I hope to take full advantage of all the material! Thanks, DM's Guild! Keep supporting Greyhawk!!! :)

I just opened my mail to find this product was not treated very nicely during packing. The back cover, top, at spine was turned out alone with seven pages. This 'ding' to the book could have happened after packing as the box is beaten up. Darn you USPS.

Ok on to the product...

Since I am at the back cover now my second thought is why is the back cover yellow around blue? Why is this not all blue like the front cover and every book cover inside of it?

The product measures in at 8.5" x 11" x 3/4" and weighs in at 2+ pounds of Greyhawk goodness.

The color is sharp, the maps are crisp images, I see no pixilation in my images. The print quality is clean, sharp without shading. Honestly this looks as if it was originally intended to print in this format. If this was done from a scanned copy it does not show it to my eye. The poster maps are printed in full color as single page images. I don't mean to say the 2'x3' poster is on one page but it printed on 8 pages for each poster map.

IDEA/SUGGESTION: allow an option of saddle stapled map book as a separate buy. This way you could do your maps in four 11"x17" images where we could remove the staples and have our maps again. Ideally they would be printed so that the same poster map does not appear on the back or even have blank backs. Also please include the B&W hexed maps too. The only thing this product needs is a hard cover version. If you add this I'll buy one. Ok two.

Pros: clean printing, excellent image quality, and the new world smell...

Cons: no hard cover, no map booklet, no tabs/coloration to tell where each book starts.

My original quality complaint (and search/OCR) has been addressed and fixed.

This is the jewel of the Greyhawk setting. The amount of content within the City of Greyhawk is pretty substantial and I suspect players will play many years before they run out. This is an entire campaign if you want to use it as such. You'll not need to step out of this boxed set for your players to see many years of game play.

Two comments before the review: 1) REVIEWERS -- this isn't the place to complain about OCR recognition and technical problems. 2) Hasbro -- thanks for another Greyhawk-branded, print-on-demand product (#3 as of 1/11/18). Why is Greyhawk so far behind Dragonlance and only now tied with the unpopular Hollow World?

OK. The City of Greyhawk boxed set details the flagship city of the Greyhawk setting. Greyhawk is a fairly generic, free city of 58,000 souls on a river. The POD/PDF includes the original boxed set contents: sewer map surrounding territory map (forest, marsh, hills, lake bay, coast, plains) coded city map artistic aerial view map 23 two-page adventure cards and combined monster stats "Gem of the Flanaess" 96-page book detailing the city and surrounding lands *"Folk, Feuds, and Factions" 96-page book detailing NPC's, power groups, plots, and four more short adventures

Gary Gygax created the City of Greyhawk, but this boxed set was released after his time at TSR. As such, some die-hards dislike this interpretation of the city. This review aims to judge the work on its merits, not by imagining what it might have been.

The CoG boxed set is somewhat unusual because it was written by three authors: Douglas Niles (Gem of the Flanaess), Carl Sargent (Folk, Feuds, and Factions, the adventure cards), and Rik Rose (FFF).

The first book, GotF, is a nuts and bolts run down of a typical fantasy city. Chapters 5-13 cover eight different quarters, the primary fortress, and the sewers. Chapter 3 covers the territory of the city state and wilderness. Chapter 4 surveys the immediate walls and surroundings. The remainder is filler of little interest. Chapter 1 is preamble. Ch2 is a dry DM guide to urban campaigns. The appendix is an uninspired rumor table. I like Niles' delivery fairly well and he gets the job done here. My imagination doesn't drip with inspiration, but there's a good variety of locations, the layout is clear, and it makes me want to run a city campaign. Most chapters contain a basic map of some sort (a cairn, a gnome warren, the citadel, etc.) so there's plenty here that can be quickly pulled into a short session. Rating: a conservative 5 out of 10 = solid and utilitarian, but rather vanilla and 20% filler. The only big detraction is the sewers and undercity. The urban dungeons should have been awesome, instead they're short, linear, and perfunctory.

FFF contains the real meat. Primary author Carl Sargent was the only TSR writer to incorporate Gary Gygax's later Greyhawk work from the novel line and Dragon magazine and it shows. NPC's, coinage references, and locations from Saga of Old City have been dutifully incorporated. Events like the defeat of the Shield Lands are mentioned (unfortunately, David Zeb Cook missed this and invaded the Shield Lands again in the Wars boxed set the following year). Sargent has a knack for three-dimensional NPC's, tasty plot hooks, in-depth setting research. He also cleverly sneaks in some lore pertaining to the wider Flanaess, namely fleshing out Gygax's Circle of Eight. Originally called the Citadel of Eight in Gygax's home campaign and WG5, Gygax changed it to the Circle in WG6 and the novel line. Sargent picks up where Gygax left off and describes Mordenkainen, Bigby, and Tenser, loosely based on earlier works. Since the other wizards weren't officially listed in TSR canon, Sargent fills the membership out with the wizards named in 1988's Greyhawk Adventures hardcover, plus one new invention.

It's uncertain what exactly Rik Rose contributed to FFF, most of the work bears Sargent's prose. Rating: 8 of 10.

The adventure cards are excellent and similar to the Book of Lairs. Sargent's strong suits are deadly dungeon crawls, moral conundrums, and tricky role-playing opportunities. Thankfully, these scenarios are placed all across the Flanaess, giving readers a rare glimpse into locals like Hepmonaland and the Stark Mounds. They provide easter eggs and controversy galore: some Wolf Nomads worship the Oeridian god Telchur, Wastri is canonized as one of the "Nine Demigods" imprisoned beneath Castle Greyhawk, and a certain Greyhawk demon mentioned in the companion book to Expedition to the Barrier Peaks appears here, during the height of TSR's devil whitewashing to appease Christians. Rating:9 of 10.

The maps are easy to read and Valerie Valusek's aerial view is beautiful, but the city isn't dense enough (later works attempted to fix this, with limited success). The regional map is missing some locations. The undercity is, again, too small and uninspired. The binding on the POD version pulls the maps into the centerfold and needs to be fixed. The original maps unfortunately never had a scale. According to a TSR moderator forum post I printed off in 1998, it should 1 inch = 1500ft.

Overall, CoG is an above-average city soucebook. The strong points are the NPC's, the adventure shorts, the grab-and-go location maps, and the contributions to Greyhawk canon. Vestiges of Gygax's beggar/thief wars, Lankhmar flavor, and sandbox functionality can be found here, but DM's searching for a dark and dense city might want to find something less vanilla. Overall box: 7 of 10.

Further reading: Gary Gygax's Gord the Rogue novels by TSR and New Infinities, Carl Sargent's From the Ashes boxed set, The Adventure Begins by Roger Moore, The Living Greyhawk Journal issues #2,4,5, The Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, Nightwatch by Robin Wayne Bailey.