The Lexicon, part 1: Overview

What drew me to the Lexicon when I was a dorky freshman exploring a cramped game shop tucked away in Boston's Back Bay wasn't the cover illustration. I was at that time firmly entrenched in the mindset that "fantasy RPG" only meant your standard vaguely-medieval-Europe-but-infinitely-more-tolerant sort of setting. Ideally, someplace where Bilbo Baggins, Elric of Melnibone, and the Grey Mouser could hang out and be buds. But here was a Middle Eastern bazaar with a tiger dude playing kissy-face with a cobra and some kind of dove boy hawking shrunken heads and shards of glass; on the back there's a pygmy tribesman and a guy who looks like Skeletor's cousin holding a lightsaber. There wasn't a proper suit of plate mail or a glaive-guisarme in sight. But the subtitle of the Lexicon was "Atlas of the Lost World of Atlantis." So, I had to crack it open.

You see, I was an archaeology major and this was the Golden Age of Indiana Jones. I was pretty much contractually obligated to check it out, you know, for academic purposes. It turned out, "World" was right. Within its 127 pages is detailed every country on this alternate Earth -- and it should be noted that every place mentioned is based on one that actually existed at one time, or was a place people actually thought existed at one time. What is a little strange is that within the Lexicon they all exist at the same time. A resurgent Atlantis can trade with an an Arthurian kingdom, while Mayanesque and Azteckish folk might find themselves doing battle on the high seas with pseudo-Egyptians.

Still, they managed to cram quite a bit of accurate historical nuggets inside the volume, many of which I encountered in my "Intro to..." classes, and which make for interesting reading to this day. Of course, given that it covers the entire world, most entries aren't super detailed and mainly serve to give DMs hopping off points for their own adventures with general descriptions of flora, fauna, landmarks, and the (mostly) human inhabitants. You won't find any NPCs in the Lexicon, nor any stats besides the costs of goods and services; of course, one of the beauties of the book is that you can use it for any RPG system. There are, however, fairly comprehensive guides to some of the major cities of the world, such as Atlantis, Tang, and Tartessos. I found the book pretty inspirational, such as imaging how a land might have been twisted by an ancient, epic clash between Atlantean sorcerers and Qaddani necromancers, and what treasures might remain to be rediscovered. If anyone's interested, I've found surviving examples of the Lexicon on the web from anywhere from $6 to $185.

I only ended up using a relatively small portion of the world in my own games -- which I did with tons and tons of revisions and unnecessarily meticulous additions of my own. The result was a campaign world I called Alta, and it survived through something like three and a half editions, in one form or another. I'm sure you'll hear more about it than you really wanted to at some point.

One gripe regarding cartography: There's a nice foldout map in the back, as well as more detailed maps of the individual regions at the front of each chapter. For whatever reason, mine had an error where the words and the landforms on the North Sea Region map were flipped 180º out from each other. I ended up making two copies of the offending map, whiting out the words on one and the land on the other, and turning the one with only words into a transparency. I then laid the words over the land the right way and made another copy. Ah, perfection at last. Okay, perhaps that was a little obsessive...