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D&D returns to its original world, where no legendary hero can save you
Wizards of the Coast has launched Legends of Greyhawk, its largest official Dungeons & Dragons organised play campaign in 40 years, returning the game to Oerth, the world created by co-founder Gary Gygax that hosted iconic early modules such as Against the Giants and The Temple of Elemental Evil. The move is intended to raise the profile of the Greyhawk setting, which has been overshadowed for decades by the Forgotten Realms despite becoming the default world in the 2024 "5.5e" core rulebooks, by offering a global shared-world campaign that lets players carry their characters between tables anywhere the campaign runs.
Polygon interviewed Wizards of the Coast's global play manager, Chris Tulach, and Baldman Games creative director Savannah Houston-McIntyre, about how the new campaign differs from existing programmes. Unlike Adventurers League, which uses 5e rules and community-made content via the DM's Guild, Legends of Greyhawk is built around 5.5e rules with adventures created by organiser partners and released monthly through D&D Beyond, including tools such as quickplay maps. It also features slower character progression and stricter magic item limits than Adventurers League, encouraging players to spend longer in each tier and rely on a more limited toolkit, distinguishing it from the shorter, release-focused D&D Encounters mini-campaigns.
In short
- D&D launches Legends of Greyhawk, its biggest organised play campaign in 40 years
- Global shared-world campaign lets characters move freely between game tables
- Uses 5.5e rules, slower levelling and stricter magic item limits than Adventurers League
Explained simply
Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game where groups of players control fantasy characters guided by someone called a dungeon master. The game has many fictional worlds serving as settings for these adventures, and Greyhawk is the original world created in the 1970s by D&D's co-founder Gary Gygax. Although Greyhawk was central to the game's early years, a competing setting called the Forgotten Realms has been the focus of official releases for decades.
Wizards of the Coast, which owns D&D, has launched Legends of Greyhawk, a large coordinated campaign that is the biggest of its kind in 40 years. The campaign connects game groups around the world under shared rules and monthly adventures, allowing players to use the same characters at different tables in different cities. Many D&D enthusiasts consider Greyhawk significant to the game's history, but the setting has been overshadowed by competitor settings in recent years, making this campaign a major effort to restore its place in D&D.
The new campaign uses D&D's latest ruleset and includes professionally designed adventures alongside tools to help dungeon masters run games. Unlike previous coordinated campaigns that allowed characters to advance quickly and receive powerful magical items regularly, Legends of Greyhawk restricts advancement and magical treasure. This encourages players to invest more time in each stage of their character's development and rely on a more limited set of resources.