Related to my last post, and a fun topic in itself, it is something of an open secret that the recent and ongoing "Chentoufi" series of adventures co-authored by Luke Gygax take place in a setting not unlike that his father Gary created in the western Flanaess. Like the Arabian flavored Baklunish Empire of Greyhawk, the Arabian flavored empire of Luke Gygax's World of Okkorim was decimated centuries previously by a great magical devastation.
In both settings, the heart of the ancient empire was basically fried by a magical cataclysim, leaving behind a wasteland with a few outposts of struggling civilization at the edges. In Greyhawk, the barren lands are known as "The Dry Steps". In Okkorim, its called the "Blighted Lands".
While I don't for a minute think Luke Gygax is trying to be sneaky here and give us Greyhawk with the serial numbers filed off, I do think it is not unreasonable to suppose Mr. Gygax is designing the Okkorim setting in a way that will (and does) make it easy for those who may wish to transplant his adventures into the Greyhawk setting.
So how might we do that? Chentoufi is the city around which the various adventures take place. It rests on a north-south coastline with ocean to the west and the Blighted lands to the east.
Thus we need to find a portion of the Flanaess of the right size with a north-south coastline, just west of the Dry Steppes which is the Greyhawk equivalent of the Blighted Lands. There is one place, and only one place, that fits - maybe you guessed it - The Gulf of Ghayar. Any further west on the Greyhawk map and you will leave the Dry Steppes behind, not to mention there is not really a suitable coastline.
Remarkably, the eastern coast of the Gulf of Ghayar is mostly undeveloped in Greyhawk lore. The Chentoufi coast can be plopped right in without much fuss. Below is my attempt at doing just that.
(Note I did rotate the Chentoufi map about 25 degrees NE in order to make the curving coastline on the bottom of the older line drawn map from the original release fit better to the Gulf of Ghayar coast. I don't think the slight shift affects the geography very much, The newer color maps of the Chentoufi coast don't go quite as far south and thus lack the coastal curve that necessitated the compass shift and it would be possible to re-align to North and still make the new color map fit if that were important to your game. YMMV)
0 comments:
Post a Comment