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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9077137" data-attributes="member: 27780">Living Greyhawk Journal 01: September 2000part 2/4Places of Mystery: Ed Greenwood has been filling the Realms with vast amounts of lore for many years now, appearing in nearly every issue of both Dragon and Polyhedron, sometimes more than once in the same issue. By contrast, Oerth still feels pretty sparse. But not if Erik has anything to do with it!  So this is the start of several columns that’ll appear in Dragon a little later when this stops working as a standalone thing and gets folded into the bigger magazine. They’ve got a lot of catching up to do and won’t quite make it,  but it’s not as if we can’t use ideas from either setting in our own one, so as long as some of them are good it’s all a net positive to our gaming experience.The Belching Vortex of Leuk-O is definitely one Ed wouldn’t have written, reminding us that Oerth has more crashed spaceships and general sci-fi influence than Toril. It’s a magical portal to another world where the air is poisonous, but the players at home will recognise that the key to open it is more of a keycard and the things on the other end are very clearly the products of advanced science. Whether they break the 4th wall or not in response is up to them. The kind of place you aren’t going to explore and come back from without serious protection, although that could be magical or big clunky spacesuits. You don’t need to go to another plane to have high level ultra-deadly adventures like that. The Fabled City of Dar-Kesh Anam is Oerth’s own bottled city of Kandor, currently owned by a very eccentric merchant in Dryleaves. For a small fee he’ll use a magic ring to shrink you down and send you into the place. Getting out alive and returning to your normal size on the other hand is up to you. Unsurprisingly, it’s a crumbling, dangerous place, filled with a motley collection of people from across the universe and their descendants. You’re less likely to die immediately if you enter this one unprepared, but it’ll still be the start of a long, tricky pulp style adventure without the ability to recharge your supplies in the middle so once again best aimed at high level parties.The Kingdom of Keoland: The centrepiece article doesn’t take up more than half the issue this time, but is still a good 12 pages. We’re off to the Throne of the Lion, which will particularly please anyone in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania since those are the real world states partnered with it. First they cover general stuff, the monarchy, the courts, their particular fondness for heraldry, their knightly order, the regulations they have on both clerical & arcane magic and the dominance of their merchants. Then they have individual entries on 13 of their major provinces and 7 shorter looks at a few of their smaller ones. This gives you substantially more info than the short country entries in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, but still nowhere near as much as all the sourcebooks for individual countries the Realms got in 2e. It feels like a precursor to the format they’ll use for the Demonomicon and Core Belief articles later on, being a similar size and following a similar formula. It does look like there’ll be plenty of stuff in these issues that’ll never appear anywhere else that people playing in Greyhawk would find useful.</blockquote>

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