Retrospective: From the Ashes

At the end of last week's Retrospective on Greyhawk Wars , I promised I'd devote my next post in this series to taking a closer look at TSR's early 1990s attempt to reinvent Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk setting for AD&D Second Edition. While Greyhawk Wars kicked off that reinvention by plunging the Flanaess into a fantastical "world war," the heavy lifting of teasing out just what that war actually meant for the venerable campaign milieu fell to another product, From the Ashes, released in 1992 and written by Carl Sargent. 
Like the 1983 revision of the original World of Greyhawk folio, From the Ashes comes in the form of a boxed set containing a pair of softcover books (both 96 pages in length this time) and an updated version of Darlene's incomparable maps. However, it also contains an additional map (depicting the regions around the City of Greyhawk), as well as new Monstrous Compendium sheets, and twenty cardstock reference sheets. All in all, it's impressively jam-packed in the way that TSR boxed sets almost always were during the late '80s and early '90s. Depending on one's preference, that's either a good thing or a bad thing – but we'll tackle that question soon enough.
The first of the two 96-page books is the Atlas of the Flanaess. This is largely a rewrite of material found in the 1983 boxed set, updated to take into account the consequences of the Greyhawk Wars on the setting. There's an overview of the setting's history, with an emphasis on recent events. Then, we're given looks at the peoples of the Flanaess, their lands, important geographical features, and the gods (or "powers," according to 2e's bowdlerized terminology) and their priesthoods. The Atlas also includes sections on "Places of Mystery" and "Tales of the Year of Peace." The first are unusual, often magical, locales that hold special interest to adventures, similar to those presented in the earlier Greyhawk Adventures. Meanwhile, the latter are adventure seeds for the Dungeon Master to flesh out.
The second 96-page book is the Campaign Book. This volume consists of entirely new information, focused primarily on the City of Greyhawk, its surrounding lands, and its important NPCs. During the Greyhawk Wars, the City suffered much damage. Now, it is being rebuilt and serves as neutral ground between all the previously warring kingdoms and factions. This turns the City into a Casablanca-esque den of espionage and intrigue, as well as a convenient home base for adventurers trying to make their way in this changed Flanaess. There is a ton of information here, providing the DM with lots of fodder for an ongoing campaign. I'd wager that the Campaign Book alone probably contains more new details about the World of Greyhawk setting than had been revealed in many years, perhaps ever.
And that is one of the aspects of From the Ashes that makes it controversial in some quarters – the detail. For many, the appeal of the World of Greyhawk has always been its sketchy, open-ended nature. The original folio was, at best, an outline of a setting, one each referee could use as a foundation on which to build his own version of Greyhawk. While the later boxed set included more details, most notably about the gods, it was still quite vague in its descriptions about many aspects of the setting. This aspect of the World of Greyhawk made it a good choice for DMs who weren't quite ready to create their own settings from whole cloth but who also still wanted lots of freedom to introduce his own ideas.
From the Ashes changed this aspect of the setting, bringing more in line with TSR's growing library of AD&D campaign settings, many of which came to be exhaustively detailed. This is precisely what started to happen with Greyhawk, too. Over the course of the next few years, From the Ashes was followed up by a number of lengthy expansion modules that filled in other parts of the Flanaess. In addition, some of these modules further advanced the unfolding "story" of From the Ashes in a way that was very much in keeping with the growing interest in "metaplot" that suffused RPGs during the 1990s, most famously in White Wolf's World of Darkness games, but by no means limited to them.
The second aspect of From Ashes that makes it controversial is its perceived changes to the tone of the Greyhawk setting. As originally presented, the World of Greyhawk had a tone that I can only describe as wargaming-meets-sword-and-sorcery. On the macro-level, it seems apparent to me that Gary Gygax liked the idea of a crazy quilt of rival nations, each jockeying for land, influence, and power – the perfect backdrop for a medieval wargames campaign of the sort that gave birth to Dungeons & Dragons in the first place. However, on the personal level, Greyhawk seems very much indebted to pulp fantasy of the Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber variety, as evidenced by his own forays into fiction writing.
The tone of From the Ashes and its expansions focused too much, I think, on the former at the expense of the latter. The battles of kingdoms and machinations of powerful NPCs overshadowed everything else. The Flanaess became their world; your player characters were just living in it. This is a problem that came to afflict the Forgotten Realms as well, much to the chagrin of its own creator. It was certainly a poor choice for Greyhawk, which, as I said, had long been more of a blank canvas on which the Dungeon Master could paint whatever he wanted while taking inspiration from the loose ideas Gygax provided. From the Ashes transformed the setting into a much more detailed place, driven by NPCs and Big Events dictated by TSR's desire to sell more product.
My own feelings about From the Ashes are decidedly mixed. I recognize and largely agree with many of the criticisms of the boxed set, especially regarding its introduction of a metaplot into Greyhawk, At the same time, Carl Sargent put a lot of solid work into this and many of the details he provided are eminently gameable, from small dungeons and adventure locales to interesting factions and conflicts. It's true that the Big Picture of the post-Wars setting takes precedence, but there's still some room for smaller, more personal scenarios and Sargent put effort into highlighting some of them. From the Ashes isn't, therefore, a complete disaster, but neither is it an unqualified success. Instead, it's a well-presented muddle and I think both positive and negative feelings toward are justified, depending on one's preferences.