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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Gazeteer brings Greyhawk back into focus., 24 Sep 2000
By A Customer
The new Gazetteer for the Dungeons and Dragons game brings the focus of the game back to Greyhawk, the original AD&D gameworld. The 32 page booklet is tructured into five chapters1: The World of D&D - a single page descrbing the calendar, and the climate and seasons. 2: The Timetable of History - three pages providing a brief history of a thousand years of Greyhawk, ending in about 590 CY - placing the current Greyhawk campaign after the Greyhawk Wars and the civil war within the Scarlet Sign. 3: Gazetteer of the Flanaess - the meat in the pie - half the booklet is the detail - each state of the Flanaess, from Ahlissa to Zeif given a standard format header, plus two or three paragraphs of description. The header includes details of the cities of each state, categorised by size into 6 ranges, details of governemnt, population breakdown, resources, and law, together with friends and alies to each state. The following text describes the state as it is today, together with some background. Sidebars in this chapter give summary backgrounds of such notables as Iuz and Rao. 4: Geography - Eight pages describing the main geogrpahical features of Greyhawk in a paragraph or two each. 5: Power Groups - The remaining three pages describe such groups as the Circle of Eight, and the Knights of the Watch. Finally a colour map is supplied - disappointingly not as pretty as the one shown on the cover, but functional enough. It's all pretty low-key and scaled at 200 miles to an inch. So - is it any good? As a DM returning to Greyhawk after many years in the Forgotten Realms, it provides me with a decent background to the Flanaess. The layout is in the new 3rd edtion style - so the content is well packed in, without too many unnecessary illustrations. I would have to describe it though as more competent than inspiring.
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