Yes, the basic principe behind these sites is that a few are automatically discovered (very few though) while most of them need a character having one or two books in a given school of Magic. Some other sites requires no less than three or even four books, making them much harder to discover. The frequency of these sites can be changed at the beginning of the game. It is a very good idea IMO.
I didn't know about the spells and items you mentioned in your post. I guess I will have to play again Dominions, this game is so rich that it is very hard to know everything.
I wish I could buy the full Version, even if the demo offers more content than any other demo in history or so. If anyone is interested by a summary of Dominions, I could cut and paste one I wrote on another forum a few months ago.
As for AOW, the aspect of the game is much better than its gameplay, which is quite annoying obviously. I love to watch AOW or to listen to the musics, but when it comes to actually playing the game...
I could not find the interest of this game in PBEM, but maybe that's just me. (While Dominions has been designed with PBEM in mind)
PvK, strange that the link isn't working. Here is the link to the Progress Page:
http://www.illwinter.com/dom2progress.html (The beginning of the page isn't in English though, but the history is)
And a few screenshots:
http://www.illwinter.com/dom2/dom2preview.html
These links are from the official site so they *should* be working fine.