25 Years Ago...

The next article is 'How You Play the Game'. It's a player advice article about ways to keep the action moving. If you're a barbarian, don't sit around while the party meticulously examines every square inch of a room; just burst through the next door and let the dice fall where they may. DMs will like it because the action keeps moving, and hopefully the rest of the party will be okay with it, too. The idea, after all, is to play heroic characters, not, as they put it in the article, "the dungeoneering equivalent of forensic accountants". It's certainly a more exciting way to play, but it definitely has a different feel than the old-school style, where reckless play would almost certainly get you killed. 3rd edition characters are somewhat more durable than earlier editions, so this style can work here. Next is the monthly fiction story, "Another Name for Dawn" by Paul Kemp. It's set in the Forgotten Realms, in the city of Westgate. It...

Alright, let's get busy with Dragon #277. As you can see from the cover, this one is about futuristic fantasy, such as magical steampunk. There's plenty to go over, so let's not waste any time. We start off with ads, of course. Scale Mail is the first content we get, and I notice that there is a lot of commentary on the font choices for the new version of the magazine. Some of the things that irked me are getting other people just as irked. There's also stuff on the 'new' rules as the letters are now from people reading the Player's Handbook  and Dungeon Master's Guide . The Profiles article today is on an old-school editor, Kim Mohan. Kim was the editor of Dragon Magazine from issues 29 to 113, so 1979 to 1986. And there is an absolute ton  of great material in that run of Dragon, all of the D&D stuff of course for 1st edition (2nd edition wouldn't start until around issue 140) except for a smattering of BECMI material, plus tons of stuff for ot...

The Forge of Fury  is the second published adventure for 3rd edition, written by Richard Baker. It's for 3rd-level characters, who can probably get up to 5th level by the end of the adventure. It takes place in an old dwarven stronghold, which of course isn't inhabited by dwarves anymore. Shades of the Mines of Moria, wouldn't you agree? The adventure can be run as a straight treasure hunt; maybe the party found a map in the Sunless Citadel , for example. Or, a local lord hires the party to find the dwarven cache of magical weapons. Alternatively, the party can learn of the dungeon through a captured and charmed  orc prisoner that has been raiding the local area. The dungeon is set in the ruined stronghold of Khundrukar, built by the legendary dwarven smith Durgeddin the Black. There's some backstory included that the players can learn, but it's not essential; what matters is heading down into the dungeon to kill things and take their stuff, right? This adventure is...

Alright, this will finish off this volume, which took much longer than I had originally expected. And there's still a lot of stuff left to do, and only half a month left to cover it. So, let's go through the Greyhawk gods. One of the first things I noticed is that the gods are all listed alphabetically, full stop. It goes from Al'Akbar all the way to Zuoken. Why is this worth noticing? Because there's no separate pantheons; everyone is just lumped together. In the 1983 Greyhawk boxed set, the gods were listed with their racial affiliation so you could know that, for example, Kord and Wee Jas are Suel gods, while Heironeous and Pholtus are Oeridian. Some gods were held in common throughout the Flanaess, but you generally knew which racial group the gods focused their attention on. The way it's done here would be like if the Deities & Demigods  book lumped Horus, Kali, Thor and Zeus together without differentiating their cultural and racial backgrounds. I'm no...

Okay, we're in the home stretch, I think. Two more chapters to go. Tonight, it's the Power Groups in the Flanaess. We start with the most famous of these groups: The Circle of Eight. They get a column, which is a lot less than they got in the Living Greyhawk Journal #0  a couple of months ago. Since that was a much more thorough overview of the group, I'll send you there to refresh your memory. Next is the Horned Society. Unlike the Circle of Eight, these guys are not looking out for the interests of the Flanaess. Instead, they were basically a group of bandits that filled the void left when Iuz disappeared almost a century ago; when he returned, he wiped out the Hierarchs of the Horned Society and took over the country. Now, no one knows if they still exist at all, or if they might be an underground, hidden society like the Scarlet Brotherhood used to be, with agents hidden all over the Flanaess. It's left open-ended for the DM to figure out, which I approve of. The Kn...

This chapter is, thankfully, much shorter than the previous one. This covers the physical geography of the Flanaess, describing the physical features that make up the land. There are lots of forests, mountain ranges, some deserts, plenty of rivers, and even some swamps here and there. This will be a pretty quick overview, so let's get to it. I was going to do single-sentence overviews of each forest, but I didn't realize there were four pages of them. That's a lot. 33 of them, in fact. So we're not doing that. The most important forests and jungles in the Flanaess would include the Vesve between Furyondy and Iuz, the Burneal in the north that forms the southern border of Blackmoor, and the Adri, which used to be a lot bigger but has been subject to logging for a long, long time in the Great Kingdom. And of course, there is the Amedio Jungle which houses one of the all-time classic modules, C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan . Greyhawk's mountains are legendary, from ...