Saturday, June 3, 2023

Jason Zavoda - Hall of the Mountain King

As I was writing up my Lost Dispatches of Feraso, encapsulating my AD&D campaigns of the early 90's, I was searching for various art to make things pretty.  I used a number of sources, but Hall of the Mountain King was a great repository of not only artwork, but scenarios and campaigns as well.  Moreso, the blog owner Jason Zavoda, loved to compile random information, be if spells in 15 different Greyhawk languages, statting out monsters from fiction, and labelling the ethnicity of all the characters in Conan novels.  

With the recent announcement that Google will remove inactive accounts and what they're attached to at the end of year  and my realization that Mr Zavoda passed away in 2021, his blog was immediately put on top of my project to mine the older blogs of whatever useful data I could before their potential demise. 

In the ten years he was active on Blogspot, Jason post almost 1,200 times.  There are plenty of bibliographical posts about authors that I don't personally find useful (yet!) but his Greyhawk work in Verbobonc made some dry correspondence in the Lost Dispatches seem a bit juicier.  In the first four years alone in his blog, he's providing me with two fleshed out dungeons,  and plenty of locations and art for the ever growing Georic Gazetteer.  

And he reminded me that there was a Xena CCG during the wild days of the 90's.

(Edit: Pushing further through the archives, I completely forgot that Hall wasn't where I first discovered him.   Jason set up Vault of the Mountain King simply as a picture repository, full of fantasy artwork and pictures of real castles, places, cosplayers... and a whole category for cats.)

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