Preface

Slowly the other regions of

Oerik were fleshed out, not in
a vacuum but rather as part of
a unified history of the entire
continent. The Suel backsto-
ry was further expanded and
lands merely hinted at in the
Gord the Rogue novels were
given life and linked to the
world in a natural and inte-
grated way.

On the Baklunish people and

their homeland... this region
was the least developed in the
original folio and boxed set.
There is very little detail pro-
vided for their nations and cul-
ture and out of the core human

sub-races (i.e. ethnicities), the Baklunish

have the lowest word count in the origi-
nal sources. They don’t even have a ful-
ly fleshed out pantheon of gods and god-
desses like the Oerdians, Flan, Suel and
even the Olman did later (in post-Gygax
development). The Living Greyhawk cam-
paign was the first time that the Baklun-
ish West was fleshed out. Unfortunate-
ly, the Living Greyhawk teams made the
Baklunish analogous to real world Islam-
ic culture, right down to the use of the
words mosque, mufti and imam. Whereas
the original Gygax-era Baklunish had a
vaguely pre-Islamic Arabian/Persian feel
to them in the vein of Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves, this new Living Greyhawk
treatment made them Oerth versions of
Muslims, even giving them their own Sun-
ni/Shia schism.
While I understand the attraction of
grounding them in real world tropes,
there is a religious and racial insensitivity
to it that did not sit well with me and this
change was never adopted into my home
campaign. So, in the rebooted version, the
Baklunish have been de-Islamified. They
have been returned to their Arabian, Per-
sian and Turkic analogs. We didn’t want
real world modern Arab stereotypes con-
fusing things so to solidify this, we dou-
bled down and made the Baklunish West a
land of wonder and intrigue, one populat-
ed by elementalist wizards and sorcerers,
one where genies walk among mortals and
their offspring, the Saab’Sirat (i.e. genasi,
are not uncommon. We re-imagined their
cultural development from the time of the
Twin Cataclysms forward and we expand-
ed them further west to the lands of Ri-
say and Komal which were mentioned in
passing in Gygax’s Gord the Rogue novels.
And then there is the map. There are two
“canon” maps of Oerik beyond the Fla-
naess. The one found on page 7 of the
original folio and then there is the map
published as the official setting from the
Chainmail miniatures game that WOTC
republished in the early 2000’s. This lat-
ter map radically expanded the landmass
of Oerik to, what I consider, a completely

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