During the 1990s, a shared RPGA roleplaying campaign called Living City that used the Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition rules had been relatively successful.
With the introduction of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2000, RPGA conceived of a new and improved campaign called Living Greyhawk that would be more far-reaching in scope and played on a larger, continental scale.
The first introductory adventures of the campaign premiered at Gen Con in August 2000,[1] and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, which contained background material, was published in November 2000.
In 2005, the campaign saw the first of several direct tie-ins to new rule expansion books published by Wizards of the Coast, with the launch of a new story arc set in the Bright Lands desert that coincided with the publication of Sandstorm.
[4] The final adventures of the Living Greyhawk campaign premiered at the Origins convention in June 2008, and play ended on December 31, 2008.
RPGA already knew from their experience with Living City that an adventure in a shared campaign had to be run the same way by every DM, to be equitable for all players.
The LG campaign differed from previous shared-world campaigns in one important respect: thirty of the regions from World of Greyhawk were linked to real-world areas;[9] volunteers from these real-world locations then assumed responsibility for the storyline and administration of that particular region.
The responsibilities of the Circle included approval of all adventures that rewarded treasure, coordination of overall campaign and metaregional story arcs, approving story ideas for Core and metaregional adventures and editing same, producing campaign documentation and rules, ruling on reports of cheaters and unsportsmanlike conduct, and appointing and maintaining a Triad for each region.
Some commercially produced adventures published by Wizards of the Coast (such as Red Hand of Doom[11]) were selected by the Circle and adapted for play in Living Greyhawk.
TUs could also be spent for out-of-adventure reasons such as crafting a magical item or being a member of an organization or a guild.
[12] While 1 TU was ostensibly equal to one week of game time, in fact this was simply an arbitrary number designed to limit how many adventures one character could play in a calendar year, and therefore restrict how much wealth and power a single character could accumulate in a single year.
The effect was to allow each character an unrestricted amount of play to reach 16th level and "retire" by the end of the campaign.
[12] For example, Onnwal was assigned to the United Kingdom, Sunndi to the Benelux countries, and Ekbir to France.
In 2007, to recognize the growth of the internet and an abundance of cheap long-distance telephone rates, the physical location rule was relaxed somewhat: as long as the DM and more than 50% of the players were physically together, other players who lived in that region but were currently travelling out of region could teleconference into the game.