Living Greyhawk - Regions of LG

Regions of LG

One of the main differences between Living Greyhawk and previous shared-world campaigns was regionality: thirty regions of the campaign world were linked to thirty real-world locations. These real-world locations were then given responsibility for developing the storylines and adventures for the campaign region. In return, the campaign region became the "property" of its real-world "owner"--only players who were physically in the real-world location could play the adventures of that location's campaign region.

For example, Onnwal was assigned to the United Kingdom, Sunndi to the Benelux countries, and Ekbir to France. A player sitting at a table in Manchester, England could play an Onnwal adventure, but could not play an adventure set in Ekbir or Sunndi, since those adventures could only be played in France and Benelux respectively. However, if that player travelled to France or Benelux, the player could play Ekbir or Sunndi adventures respectively.

The only exception to this rule was made at large conventions such as Gen Con, when a late-night world-wide "Fiesta" play opportunity was granted to DMs from any region of the world so they could present an adventure from their home region.

In 2007, to recognize the growth of the internet and an abundance of cheap long-distance telephone rates, the physical location rule was relaxed somewhat: as long as the DM and more than 50% of the players were physically together, other players who lived in that region but were currently travelling out of region could teleconference into the game.

When creating a character, the player had to choose a "home region" for it, which could be any one of the thirty regions linked to a real-world location. However to promote an esprit de corps within each region, Living Greyhawk rules made it more costly in terms of Time Units for a character to participate in adventures outside of its "home region".

For instance, nothing in the rules prevented a player living in France from making the character's home region Sunndi (belonging to Benelux) rather than Ekbir (belonging to France). However, any time the player used that character to play Ekbir adventures in France, it cost the Sunndi character double the number of Time Units, since the character was effectively playing out of region. If done regularly, this would halve the number of adventures this character could play each year. For this reason, most players simply made their characters' home region the region that they physically lived in.

The thirty regions linked to real-world locations were in turn grouped into one of five metaregions. The table below shows the real-world areas that were linked to each region, grouped by metaregion. Any region not listed below—such as the Free City of Greyhawk, the Duchy of Tenh or the Amedio Jungle—was a "Core" region, and could not be used by characters as a home region.