[Updated January 1, 2023—This article was originally published June 2019]
Downloads available at the end of the article.
The Encyclopedia Greyhakania is a project originally begun by Jason Zavoda.
Though Zavoda has since passed away, his work has always been a tremendous resource, and GreyhawkOnline.com is pleased to note that Jason was happy to work with us, and to ask that his work be archived here. The EGI is now integral to what became the research tables at the end of most every wiki page on the Great Library of Greyhawk wiki, forming the basis of how topics are looked up!
Jason is most well-known for creating the original ”Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index”, as he titled it, though his work was more than just that. It was meant to be an index to everything Greyhawk from a sort of imaginary encyclopedia of all the collected GH works. He worked diligently for years creating a catalog of every proper noun in all the published Greyhawk books at the time. He continued with some ”Dragon” magazine issues. When the ”Living Greyhawk Gazetteer” was published, it didn’t have an index—which was considered one of the few flaws of the book. Zavoda indexed it, and that index was published in ”Living Greyhawk Journal” #12, in June 2002.
Zavoda continued to compile information into his index through ’08, and his work was continued and updated by many other fans like: Eric Johnson, Richard DiIola, Jason “PupickDad” Jacobson, a French fan group, and numerous other fans over the years.
Though Zavoda left the fan community for about a decade, Bryan Blumklotz was instrumental in bringing him back to actively engaging in the fan community in 2018. When ”Ghosts of Saltmarsh” was published, Zavoda used Facebook, Discord, and other social media to put out a separate supplement to the EGI of the data he indexed from it.
In 2019, Eric Johnson, a member of the Greyhawk Resources group on Facebook, took up the project along with Zavoda, who’d begun working on it again. Johnson helped him convert the raw TXT file into an Excel spreadsheet, so that it could be used in a modern format and imported for various other uses. Zavoda continued to add to the project, contributing his ideas and thoughts on newer uses and appearance of the EGI in contemporary formats.
The result has now been published, with Johnson adding references from hundreds of other sources, and including Zavoda’s new addition to the index for Ghosts of Saltmarsh, as well as many 3e resources, Dragon and Dungeon magazines, Monstrous Compendiums, Spell Compendiums, and various TSR and WotC D&D products from various editions.
Zavoda passed away 22 December 2021, but his work continues to be his legacy and impact the GH fan community as long as there’s people who want to research the World of Greyhawk™.
[UPDATE] on Tuesday, 25 August, 2020, Johnson published another update to this useful and well-known tool. As it’s available in both a TXT and XML versions, all one has to do is click Ctrl+F in the document to search literally hundreds and hundreds of references Eric Johnson has personally added to the index yet again!
Another new contributor into the project recently is Rich DiIoia, whose many years of working professionally with databases mean that amazing and wonderful things can be done to make the XLS become an even more useful database tool!
GreyhawkOnline continues to use a special database for automatically populating tables in the Great Library of Greyhawk wiki, made directly from the work of Eric Johnson and, Sean Williams, and Rich DiIoia and the previous work of Zavoda.
[Previous UPDATE] on Wednesday, 15 April, 2020, another GHO member, Sean Williams, helped further the project by making the Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index a functional dB that can be queried by the Great Library of Greyhawk wiki , where entries are automatically appended to most pages where it populates as a table from the EGI!
An experienced software developer who has plied his trade with such notable companies as the US Air Force, Electronic Arts, Disney, Universal Studios, Seaworld, Planet Hollywood, and Hilton Grand Vacations, working with code and databases is second nature. Williams jumped in to help put the Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index into the Great Library of Greyhawk wiki, and though he does not have a lot of experience in this area, his Google-Fu is strong.
While there are still some bugs to work out, and some pages have difficulties with the query, it’s still being improved every single day.
[Previous UPDATE] on Tuesday, 7 April, 2020, Eric posted a new version. There’s been talk in the Discord chat servers for Greyhawk Online and Canonfire about using the Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index for making a database for things like the Great Library of Greyhawk wiki and forum citations to be able to draw from to use this amazing resource.
After a couple of members contacted him, Eric responded by posting v1.31 with literally hundreds of new data points from 186 sources.
Below, you can download v1.39 (released 25 Aug 2020) in either TXT or XLS format.
Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index v1.39 .xlsx (785 downloads )
Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index v1.39 .TXT (627 downloads )
Version Release Dates
v1.0 on 9 July, 2019
v1.25 on 19 Oct 2019
v 1.31 on 7 April, 2020
v 1.39 on 25 Aug, 2020
