Gary Gygax’s Essential Places has undergone many changes. Several attempts have been made at bringing this manuscript to the public in a form that Gary approved. Though many of the manuscripts were turned over were excellent in their own right, they were not, in the end, the type of material Gary was seeking. Late last year he signed two of TLG’s best, Mike Stewart and Casey Canfield to work on this long suffering product. Gary took the time to go over several submitted sections and approved them. Under that approval we have moved forward and the product has made tremendous strides toward completion. It is our hope that we will see this out at Gencon.

Thank you all for the patience.

Like everyone who runs a role-playing game, whether you style yourself a Game Master, Storyteller, Lejend Master, or old school Dungeon Master, you have to weave a world of complex people and places for your players to explore. From dark alleys to dark dungeons, parties of wide-eyed adventurers will traipse freely from locale to locale, drinking deeply of your creation.

Whether your players want to plumb the depths of their character's deep rooted oedipal complex, or just break things, kill people, and take their stuff, they will invariable visit - often repeatedly - many of the same fundamental places. Essential Places as it were.

Is there a greater archetypical locale in role-playing than the local inn, where the bartender is a grizzled former adventurer and the wenches are both comely and easily charmed? If that innkeeper only had a gold sovereign for every pup of an adventurer who has been through those swinging doors (or even the oft broken windows)!

While some GMs are meticulous about detailing every shop, house, temple, inn, or wide-spot-in-the-road in their campaigns, the reality is that most of us wing it when it comes to what exactly the general store looks like, or exactly how many horses the local stable can house. Even if you carefully prepare for every contingency, your players will routinely confound you by insisting on heading across town, away from your painstakingly detailed dwarven armorer because they've heard that some obscure blacksmith has a sale on.

Essential Places is intended to provide GMs with a series of detailed locales, urban and rural, populated by interesting characters that can easily be set down in virtually any campaign. This is not a book of exotic places and peoples to be pillaged and burned (though nothing but your skill prevents players from that), but rather an easy reference library to bring life to some of the more regularly traveled places in the game world. Certainly the locales are not mundane or dull, but most are common locations that characters will grow familiar with.