Ed Greenwood

That's my one for this session.

Anyway, Greenwood, Ed Greenwood, there we go.

Big famous, you know, FR authors.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about you? So, well, my favorite panel that I went to during Gen Con is they actually had a DMing panel with Ed Greenwood.

And for those not familiar with Ed Greenwood, you probably are familiar with his work as Ed Greenwood is the creator of the Forgotten Realms.

So if you're someone that loves Baldur's Gate 3 or any of the rest of that stuff, that's the world that he built.

I mean, mind you, a lot of people have now contributed and expanded and all that stuff.

Almost 30 years of GMing.

But what initially brought me in to TTRPGs, even though I was a kid back in the 90s, and so, of course, it was a lot of World of Darkness and things like that.

But it really was the... old i've got it up on my shelf back behind me you know the gray forgotten realms uh starter box and did a lot of like a lot of the stuff that i started reading early i've actually got every uh before they did the fourth edition switch for the forgotten realms and did the time jump because i just didn't really like the stuff after the time jump uh i actually own every forgotten realms uh novel with the exception of i think about 12 books from the harper series because that series was massive so you know i absolutely love the work that ed greenwood put in and It was great sitting in a room and he was joking about things and commiserating in an entire room full of nothing but dungeon masters and game masters and stuff like that.

So Let's see here.

It was Ed Greenwood's home campaign, the Forgotten Realms.

Ed Greenwood is the creator of the Forgotten Realms, and he was running games.

He was creating material for the realms by the 60s.

So before he even existed, the Forgotten Realms existed, and Greenwood was working on it and developing it.

This was peddled off of eventually for various reasons.

Well, so a lot of the ways that guys like men of a certain age like myself who were growing up in the 80s and wanting to know more about Dungeons & Dragons, one of the places we turned was Dragon Magazine, which was a very A monthly publication by TSR that lasted for several, several years.

And in Dragon Magazine, Ed Greenwood started writing all these articles.

Right.

You go to the Forgotten Realms and you just like since that is like this cosmopolitan big world, like the whole thing of the Forgotten Realms, it's this incredible world that Ed Greenwood and his collaborators created.

Right.

It's all these like beautiful, unique, distinct cultures and places.

Again, wonderful mix of like socialization and combat and exploration and really fun, uh, choice points and like things like that and discoveries.

If you are actually playing in the forgotten realms, like Daggerdale and, uh, where, which is where Randall Morn is from, where this all takes place and the Dale lands in general is like an amazing area of adventure.

It's clearly like Ed Greenwood's sort of most favoritist part of the realms or whatever, like where he invested a lot of his attention into and, and, you know, sort of the, It feels like the core of the world from which everything else emanated.

It wasn't always the Sword Coast.

There were a lot of things created for Shards of the Stone that ended up going to different places.

Um, Ed Greenwood had a setting that went to Margaret Weis, for example.

And anyways, I, I'm getting off topic.

[laughs] So what was the Cyber Games scandal? So Cyber Games, they bought, um, they bought...

Correct.

And also, I don't run forgotten realms like Ed Greenwood, because I can't.

There's no way, because I'm me, and Ed is Ed, and I didn't learn how to run... you know, D&D or incorporate things from the Forgotten Realms from Ed.

I kind of did because I read his words, but it wasn't like one-on-one mentoring or anything.

The other side of it too is there's other people out there who I want to bring back in as well.

I love Ed Greenwood.

I have amazing talks with Ed.

I love Ed.

Uh, if you, if you-- That's a tremendous source book.

You can get it on DriveThruRPG or on DMsGuild, the, the, The Five Shires set in the, it's in the Gazetteer of the Known World, written by Ed Greenwood, who is, you know, primarily a developer of Forgotten Realms, but he wrote this.

And, and some of that really, in his original iteration of the Forgotten Realms really conform...

The halflings there were a lot like this, too, uh, I think.

The apprentices and institutional forms that allow Aglaeron to continue after her presence no longer carries the border.

Ed Greenwood's later accounts add a stranger layer, the symbol, after sacrificing herself to restore Elminster, persisting as a kind of sentience within the weave, able to warn and advise her former apprentices.

The archive marks this as realm's law of high authority and metaphysical difficulty.

The Weave has held odder things than a furious queen, though few have complained as effectively about the accommodations.