back to the origins of this adventure path. It predates my FOREWORD work on the Lost Lands, it predates my time with Frog God Games, and in many ways it predates my time as a Welcome to the Aegis of Empires designer notes. This professional writer. It goes all the way back to 1988 when ungodly huge document was what I sent to the poor writers TSR released a hardback game book that blew my young that I hired to author the six adventures of the adventure mind: Greyhawk Adventures by Jim Ward. The book came out path… er, five adventures actually, but more on that later. during that weird quasi-transition from 1st Edition to 2nd Yes, it’s almost 30,000 words and 48 manuscript pages as I Edition and was rather scattered in its contents: some class type it here on a Word document, though I’m sure that will stuff, the concept of deities’ avatars, some new monsters, change in the layout process. But here it is in all its glory key NPCs of the Greyhawk setting, a bunch of new spells, for you to peruse at your leisure. And it leaves me with one but most importantly—for me at least—were descriptions burning question: Why? of legendary locations in the Greyhawk setting. I became hooked on those few paragraphs provided for each, reading and rereading them again and again. One place that I My poor authors certainly weren’t thrilled to receive a couldn’t get out of my head were the Pits of Azak-Zil… 40+ page outline to review before they could get started a haunted meteor crater, filled with the ghosts of dwarf on writing their adventures. Why would I do that to miners, and lost treasures, and a failed quest to find it them? And why would you, gentle reader, want to see that left behind a cryptic journal that could guide others. it? To address the second question first: I guess it really Almost immediately I set out to create the lost journal of doesn’t matter why you want it; we offered it as bonus Pont Sandmorg of Narwell—handwritten on plain copy content in the Kickstarter, and some of you brave souls paper. That sheaf of pages written in my teenage scrawl has jumped on board and demanded it. Maybe you are absolute been stuffed between the last page and back cover in my completionists and simply must have the entirety of any copy of that book for more than 30 years now. I imagine it’ll project you support. Maybe you just like seeing how the be there another 30 at least. sausage is made. Maybe you hope for a glimpse into my sick, depraved, sadistic, Type A soul. Maybe you’ve got a little of that sickness yourself… Regardless of the reason, Also around this time is when I began submitting you have spoken, and so it shall be! adventure proposals to Dungeon Magazine. I assumed if I could get a few published, then it was only a matter of time before I could write my own adventure about the Pits of As to the former question: Why would I do that to them? Azak-Zil. A mere 15 years later, my first adventure proposal Well, there’s a story to that. was accepted (“Tammeraut’s Fate” #104) and was followed quickly by the acceptance of a proposal for a trilogy (the But before we go any further, it is imperative that you Istivin trilogy in issues #117, 118, and 119). And they were all aware there will be… Greyhawk adventures! I had other submissions accepted, including one that was inspired directly from the material in Greyhawk Adventures when I visited the deadly valley of the Csipros Erd in issue #131’s “The Hateful Legacy”. As the submissions continued, I blew the dust off my Pont SPOILERS!!! Sandmorg journal as I began to plan how to do justice with These is a document about the design that went into the my ideas for Azak-Zil. creation of the Aegis of Empires adventure path, and it must therefore, necessarily, contain spoilers regarding said path. Then Dungeon Magazine came up with the idea for me. So I hope it goes without saying, but if you intend to be a They had begun doing adventure paths with Shackled City, player of the adventure path rather than the GM, you should Age of Worms, and Savage Tides... all set in Greyhawk even! I stop reading now. These notes will quite literally give away began to work up my idea for an AP with Azak-Zil and the everything about the adventures to follow… oftentimes in fallout of the Greyhawk Wars as its centerpiece. Eventually excruciatingly specific detail. You have been warned. I submitted the proposal for a 4-adventure Greyhawk adventure path called Ruins of Aerdy. I never really got an So first, as to my earlier comment of mentioning five answer on it; it was never accepted, but it was never really authors being sent the outline rather than six, well that’s rejected either. It just languished in the submission pile partSample of the story. And to understand it all we must go with no end in sight. Then Paizofile announced that Wizards 2 of the Coast was pulling the license for Dungeon Magazine, already had the concept of radioactive exposures in the D&D, Greyhawk, etc. The submission was dead, so I turned world from Tom Knauss’s metallurgic amber in Fields of my adventure writing to all things Golarion over the next Blood and Bill Webb’s mutant-infested wasteland in Sword of few years. Air. There was nothing in my Ruins of Aerdy AP that couldn’t be approached from a different angle specific to the Lost Lands, and so I set out to rework that outline into what was However, when Bill Webb approached me about at first known as the Ashes of Empire AP to complement the starting up Frog God Games, and incorporating all of the release of the forthcoming Lost Lands world book. Necromancer Games catalog of adventures, and ultimately into creating a cohesive campaign setting that could encompass it all, I set out to put together the Lost Lands. My first problem was that by this time, the 6-adventure Doing so allowed me revisit a great many ideas from my AP had more or less become the standard format. I realized home brew games and how I would develop a game world that with the greater scope and scale of the Lost Lands if it were up to me, along with the near-endless wealth of compared to the relatively small land mass covered in the already existing material through Necromancer Games and Greyhawk sub-continent, I could greatly expand on my the fledgling publications of Frog God. In doing so, I was meteor crater adventure and split it into two adventures: able to put together something of vast size and scope that one for the investigation and journey and one for the could accommodate almost any style of play or campaign exploration of the site itself. That brought me to five preference. The Lost Lands developed with iconic locations adventures, but I was at a loss for what to do for a sixth. like Bard’s Gate, and Rappan Athuk: The Dungeon of I had a hole available for a low/mid-level adventure but I Graves, the Stoneheart Mountains, the Wizard’s Wall, didn’t have any ideas of how to fill it. I needed something the temple-city of Tsar, the development of the Gulf of urban really, so fit the themes and different aspects of the Akados and Sinar Coast regions with their rich historical, central Lost Lands that I wanted to explore but didn’t have geographical, and cultural interplay. I had empires striving anything that was a good match. Then Jeff Swank sent me and falling and the successor states and the hidden drivers the unsolicited manuscript for his delightful The Ebon Soul, behind the scenes for more than 5,000 years of events. and I knew I had my sixth. We added exotic locales like Razor Coast, the Northlands, As a result of the reworking of the outlines for the the blighted city of Castorhage, and name-dropped different adventures I had previously intended to write, references of historical connections to places like Tircople, along with the inclusion of Jeff ’s adventure, I realized there and the Kingdoms of Foere, and the Haunted Steppe. And was no way I would have time to knock out the writing on finally as it all came together I remembered the Ruins of this six-adventure monstrosity. So almost 10 years of design Aerdy and realized I had the means to rebuild it from the notes coalesced into a single master document and I began ground up and make it serve as a perfect showcase for recruiting authors to join me on this project. The lucky many of the mentioned-but-never-seen locations of the few turned out to be Alistair Rigg, Jeffrey Swank, Matthew Lost Lands we had been teasing for nearly a decade. Goodall, Steven T. Helt, Tom Knauss, and Anthony Pryor. The shifts in the industry and at Frog God Games resulted in me bringing this to Legendary Games in mid-stream to The Greyhawk elements had to be removed, of course, allow it to reach fruition, but at long last here it is in all its but the universal themes and adventure concepts were glory.