from the Introduction: Welcome to The Lands of Ara Compendium 2011. An alternate title for this publication could be The Lands of Ara Compendium 2009-2011, since it represents a condensation of the monsters, spells, NPCs, traps, magic items and similar gameable stuff that accumulated over The Lands of Ara blog’s first 28 months. When I started the blog in September 2009, my sole intent was to translate my Lands of Ara campaign setting into old-school D&D terms using Labyrinth Lord, and to use the blog to document that effort. However, even before that campaign got underway in January 2010, I engaged with the vibrant Old-School Renaissance blogging community, an activity which has had an overwhelmingly positive effect upon my refereeing skills and overall passion for the game. While there is no way for me to adequately repay my blogospheric companions for their invaluable advice, inspiration, and the vast amount of awesome gaming content I have read and downloaded over the past two and a half years, this Compendium is my own small way of attempting to “pay it forward” and to contribute something back into the collective.