The Land of Fate set described the setting of Zakhara at length. Land of Fate describes the maps, geography, routines of daily life, fashion, customs, organizations, class status, the legal system, magical items, languages, calendars, 12 different desert tribes, 17 deities or deity types, and 27 city writeups in the "Adventurer’s Guide to Zakhara," along with DM-only secrets for each city in the "Fortunes and Fates" book.
Publication history
Land of Fate was published by TSR, Inc. as a boxed set containing a 128-page locations guide, a 64-page campaign guide, 8 loose Monstrous Compendium sheets, 12 cardstock mapsheets, 3 large color maps, and a plastic hex scale. Design was by Jeff Grubb with Andria Hayday, the cover was by Fred Fields, and illustrations by Karl Waller.
Reception
reviewed Land of Fate for Dragon magazine #219. He began by saying: "It makes sense, unfortunately, that the Land of Fate box quickly followed the Al-Qadim rulebook as its first supplement. The rulebook briefly introduced the setting of Zakhara, but this set described it at length. A campaign needs this basic data", but with everything in Land of Fate, he said, "It's all very large." He went on to say: "In principle the jottings of a campaign set can be satisfying in themselves. In the Land of Fate set, they make for dry reading. We get a useful chapter on all aspects of daily life, and a couple of wonderful sidebar articles on the Zakharan coffee ceremony and pearl diving, the stuff of memorable scenes in an adventure. The rest is a sandstorm of little details, one-paragraph character outlines, societal tidbits, and jottings. With work you could assemble any dozen jottings into a free-wheeling adventure like the loose-jointed Arabian Nights tales, where one thing follows another without much logic. But not much of Land of Fate matches the screwy imagination of the best Nights tales. At times the designer's creativity clearly flags, such as in this candid beginning to an entry describing the secrets of Hilm: "The City of Kindness is boring." And, as with the rulebook, there is no hint in all these pages of how to develop these jottings into a memorable, characteristically Arabian campaign." Varney concluded the review by saying: "Parts of the Land of Fateboxed set enhance any Al-Qadim campaign, but its length is excessive and its inspiration uneven. Unless you plan to construct a long, ambitious campaign, you can probably get along without this box."
