Free Greyhawk Advanced Playbook for D&D 5.5 — Rules, House Rules, Player Guidance & DM Tools

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a free fan-made playbook I created for my D&D 5.5 / 2024 Greyhawk campaign:

Greyhawk Advanced Playbook for D&D 5.5

https://www.scribd.com/document/1044202628/Greyhawk-Advanced-Playbook

OR

https://limewire.com/d/N7tDQ#G3riEjIYGF

The book focuses mostly on rules clarity, player guidance, character creation, house rules, and DM tools. It is built around Greyhawk, but most of the material can be used in any D&D setting.

It includes session zero guidance, rules clarifications, a few house rules, character creation advice, party role analysis, a player campaign reference, and a DM reference.

My goal was to keep the strengths of D&D 2024 / 5.5 — simple rules, faster combat, and strong class balance — while addressing a few issues, especially tier 1 fragility, high-level durability, subclass imbalance, and the game becoming too easy.

The document is free to download and share. It is not official and does not replace the official books. Dungeons & Dragons, Greyhawk, and related material belong to Wizards of the Coast and their rights holders. 

Comments, corrections, and feedback are very welcome.

So, you've made some assumptions throughout the document that make it functionally less useful to GMs who aren't you. 

For example, you've assumed that all tables will work as yours do. This simply isn't practical as it doesn't given consideration to the way other people play. 'No electronics' may seem reasonable for your table, however for other tables it simply is impractical. Likewise notetaking will highly depend on the group of people playing the game. The assumptions you made in the first chapter almost immediately had me switching off from what followed. If you were narrow in your focus and made assumptions for the basics, what other assumptions did you make? I don't say this to be mean, but rather to be constructive. If ever you revise this, or create new ones in future you might wish to take a larger view. Safety tools for example are the standard in most public game store games now. Same with much of event play I've come across. A lack of mention of those tools around session zero is not a great look.

Chapter 2 is, I'm afraid to say almost entirely pointless to DMs or even players who don't sit at your tables. This is a fantastic chapter for showing players how you run D&D at your tables, but it next to useless for a GM looking to run their own games beyond getting an idea of how one random person runs their games. And you can get the same thing from going to a FLGS and participating in games with different DMs. Similarly the entirety of Chapter 3 would just be thrown out by me. It's unhelpful and doesn't reflect the way I'd run D&D. It might be useful to the new GM looking for some ideas, but says more about your tables and the way you DM the game than offering anything of practical help in my opinion.

Chapter 4 and 5 are basically the important stuff and (mostly) very well done. If I'm honest as a GM looking for a summary guide to Greyhawk (or a version thereof) I'd only really want or have use for these chapters. They're great. I'd suggest redeveloping this into 2 documents. One which is just Chapters 4 & 5 and is Teg Miles' summary of Greyhawk. Keep Chapters 1-3 and have that be a separate document primarily designed for your players 'Teg Miles' Greyhawk Players Guide'

Good points !  It's 100% for my table, i just share theses ideas for any DM that want to take what they need.

This said, most of chapter 1 and 2 are just resume of things already in some rule books; any DM pick what they want :) 

Clarifications can also be ''interpretations'', but i took a lot from forums ideas, and few elements got 100% conscensus.

Ty for the comments !  I have post this in others forums and also starting to receive some comments by mail.  I'll rework all of it in a few months; not bad to split in 2 docs !