Unfocused Thoughts on Greyhawk Folio

I've been sitting on these half-hatched ideas for over a week and I thought I needed to get them out in some form, so here they are.  Some of them will be elaborated on in more coherent and better formated posts as I continue to develop this project.

• Based on the names on the map and a cursory skim of the book itself I've picked out a few places I may want to focus on.
• The Shield Lands immediately jumps out at me due to its name, the fact that it neighbors the similarly awesomely named Bandit Kingdoms, and the description itself.  The Horned society sounds kinda lame, but I like anybody whose religion is described as "deviltry."
• I also like the Hold of the Sea Princes, which I imagine as a combination of Venice and King's Landing as portrayed in the Game of Thrones HBO series.
• On that note, I essentially want this setting to be one part Hyboria, one part Newhon, and one part Westeros, with some middle ages thrown in for flavor.
• My other choice for the focal point of the setting is Greyhawk itself.  One thing I've been missing in my current campaign is urban adventures, which I'm a big fan of.    I'll likely be using Zak's urbancrawl system to flesh it (or any other city I have to detail) out.  Not sure yet what to do about the infamous ruined pile if I pick this location, but we'll see.
• The Sword Lands is the one that is most obviously in my wheelhouse (knights fighting Satan), but that may be the best reason not to do it.  Still, I like knights... a lot.
• Religion is proving to be an issue.  The original folio lacks any details on the Greyhawk pantheon that I know through the 3e core books.  I don't want to use those because that strikes me as lazy, but when reading the folio I get a very clear image of a society with a pseudo-Christian dynamic.  Theocracies, intolerant of old religions, sacred orders of knights who oppose the Adversaries, and so on populate the folio.  Unfortunately, I already have that setting.  I want something with paganism.
• Maybe I could do some kind of old gods vs new gods thing a la Game of Thrones, where it's much less confrontational than the pseudo-Christian idea.
• I also want to use some of the Newhon stuff from DDG in my campaign.  Kos, God of Dooms, is awesome.
• Right now my rough equivalents for the different ethnic groups are as follows: Suloise = Phoenicians, Oeridians = Indo-Europeans (particularly Latins and Greeks but the farther from Aerdy you get the more they look like Germans), Baklunish = Turkic peoples, and the Flanae = Finno-Ugric peoples.  This breaks down in certain areas, particularly the Yeomanry, and I probably need to think about it a bit more.
• I imagine The Great Kingdom as being rather like 6th century Byzantium, but more evil.
• I may steal some ideas from my Might & Magic project, including making Oerth really be some kinda spaceship.  Not 100% on that, or really anything else on this list, though.

Well that's about it.

Sorry about the light posting recently, but I kinda went into a coma after the semester was over.  It should pick up more in the coming days before returning to normal.  

Next week I'll be in Hattiesburg running another quick side game.  Not sure what it's going to be yet, but I need to figure it out shortly.