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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9078744" data-attributes="member: 27780">Living Greyhawk Journal 01: September 2000part 4/4Playing Pieces: Now here’s an attempt at a column that won’t make it to Dragon. One devoted to NPC’s, where that conceptual space is already taken by the Rogues Galleries. So here’s a profile of the Despotrix of Hardby, Ilena Norbelos and her “close personal friend”, the cleric/rogue Javka Gerneskir. Despite the title, both of them are firmly NG and trying to do their best for the town, which isn’t always easy when the political landscape is dominated by the much larger city of Greyhawk and the merchants guild is doing it’s best to dominate the area in practice regardless of who’s technically making the laws. So this is a fairly mundane bit of geopolitics, contrasting with the weirdness of the previous articles, but there’s still a decent amount of material here that could be turned into an adventure plot, plus one of the first opportunities to show off how you build PC’s in 3e. Unsurprisingly they don’t have nearly as many magic items as PC’s of the same level, but their skill & feat selections are still worth looking at as examples and it shows you how they’re building more general setting details that aren’t immediately connected to some big adventurable crisis.Dispatches: The individual entries remain just as compact, but now there are 18 of them over 3 pages, reminding us just how big Oerth is and the sheer scope of the Living campaign. Expansionist nobles in Ahlissa, disembodied hands pulling Iuz’s forces underground in the bandit kingdoms, tax rises il Bissel, stressed out merchants in Divers due to the closing of the Gnarley road, restless barbarians in the Gran March, a cult of Incabulos discovered in Greyhawk City, humanoid attacks in the Vesve forest, ancient stone tablets discovered in Irongate, adventurers sailing ships to raid Iuz’s territory and paying the price, an earthquake in keoland, a whole squadron being destroyed by monsters in Ket, apart from the commander, who’s now been drummed out of the army under a dark cloud for this incompetence, the setting up of formalised adventurers licences in Nyrond, ongoing rebellion in Onnwal, trouble from trolls in the Pale, feuding nobles in Ratik, Utavo the Wise consolidates his position amongst the Sea Princes, the new Critwall bridge is finally finished in the Shieldlands and the Marchioness of Sterich has dissolved a barony who’s potential heirs just couldn’t stop feuding, so now none of them can have it. Whew. Definitely no way a group of PC’s could be involved with all of these at once even if they were high level enough that teleportation is routine, but hopefully at least one of them could fit your campaign. Anyone actually get to use these and whatever adventures were connected to them?The Living Greyhawk Contact List update puts Gael Richard in charge of the Ekbir region and Pieter Slingen in the Sunndi one. Steve Hardinger takes the Nyrond position from Hohn Cho, while Matt Lau has gained Ratik from Jeff Meja. Finally, the Duchy and Principality of Ulek have merged, with Christopher Reed getting both jobs and ousting Shy Aberman from the former Duchy. Still a fair few vacant positions, but that’s definite progress. Lets hope whatever caused the three departures wasn’t too much of a real world crisis for them.Like the introductory issue, this is notable for being much more specific than their general gaming magazines, focussing entirely on doing Greyhawk and doing it well, although it’s still lighter on crunch than it could be as they’re still not quite fully converted over in their own heads. But there is still a very high ratio of game useful info in here despite the odd mathematical snafu. Let’s see if they go through the same phases of initial dungeonpunk stylings and then settling down to become more formulaic than ever that took place in Dragon.</blockquote>

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