One of the key aspects of my Greyhawk maps have been to try and include as much as possible of the wealth of geographical lore related to the setting, whether that is from published lore, the Living Greyhawk campaign or even fan created content, my goal have been to try and accommodate it.
With a setting now half a century old, its history of going in and out of being published to, and having had an active fan base who continuously have supporting it, the sheer amount of content are immense. This means the task of keep in track of it is a big task in itself and the learning curve for those who want to start using the setting is therefore also increasing.
When I started mapping Greyhawk over 25 years ago it was mainly for my own needs, so creating a comprehensive database of its sources was something I didn't pay too much attention too, I was too busy trying to create the maps themselves. Then the Internet came around, and I decided to share my maps. This have led to me being able to keep working on them and invest more time, money and innovation to improve my mapping.
To try and help all the users of my maps (including myself!), creating a geographical data base has been on my mind a long time. With the GIS conversion well under way, now is the time to get a Greyhawk Geographical Database set up. I've chosen to use Notion for this, it is easy to work with, powerful, it has sharing built in, and it can be combined with my other Greyhawk content also on Notion. It is also a reasonably priced service (for now), and has reasonable export options, for the time when they try to export their customers. My intention is to offer both an online and an downloadable version to make sure the data is safe and usable by all.
This is the setup I hope will do the job, feel free to comment and suggest improvements!
Name: the name as is it entered on the map
Alias: other names that it is being recognized by, or associated with. This can be nicknames, WotC's new names or names used by Fan projects that have "filed of the serial numbers".
Symbol: heraldry or other forms of symbols can be added here for to make a entry easier to find and relate to.
Type: what kind of entity it is. To not be too granular I suggest grouping them into three: Settlements, Political and Geographical. Settlements for everything from Keeps and Dragon Lairs to Metropolises. Political for names of countries provinces and the like. Geographical for names of oceans, lakes, highlands, plains and the like.
Position: Latitude Longitude in decimal degrees, for example N38.95, E0.16 for the Free City of Greyhawk. Position will only be added for things that are reasonably small in size, like settlements and dragon lairs.
Category: This covers the origin, in what circumstance was the place or name created. Categories I suggest are Published (created by TSR, WotC or in Dragon or Dungeon magazines), Living Greyhawk (from a module or triad sourcebook), 3rd Party (for content by other publishers), Fan Created (usually available in a fanzine, blog or other online source) and MeyerHawk (for things created by me). Hopefully these categories can be useful and help you filter out the stuff you are interested in.
References: Information, links to wikis, websites to guide to further information.
Maps: if I have a map, or other content detailing the place or area, links can be here.
Search
Notion has a number of search, filter and view options. You can search in all material at once.
You can organize things per category or type and see it in card form.
and filter using any of the data types.
This is a VERY early alpha version, and I will work on it a bit every day. Over time my goal is to make this a useful tool for the Greyhawk community.
Take a peak here: https://annabmeyer.notion.site/Sources-19e0da32cbe6807ba091dc4eb4129b4a
Remember this is a project under development, things can, and probably will, change so please keep that in mind. The start might be a bit slow, but give me a couple of months, and some advice, and I think it will be really useful.
Thank you all for making this possible!
