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Originally posted by George Krashos

My brother-in-law is swedish and he reckons that the norwegians have sideways crude oil drilling pumps (ala Monty Burns in the Simpsons) and are stealing all of Sweden's oil! Not that the swedes are paranoid about Norway or anything ...

-- George Krashos

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Originally posted by simontrinity

Second, if you were chatting with a decent fellow who had met Sylune and wanted to date her - what advice would you give? :) Does romance still interest Sylune?

Regards,
- S

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Yes, I agree that this is a crucial event, and yes, I agree (hint hint) that there SHOULD be at least one novel published covering this.

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And of course we're paranoid about them. They're ...norwegian

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Excellent

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Dating a ghost? Now that's an interesting concept...

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Originally posted by The Hooded One



In like manner, Kentinal, NDA reasons keep me from identifying the father of Laeral’s daughter Maura: this isn’t my tale to tell (hint, hint). Sorry.

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

In like manner, Kentinal, NDA reasons keep me from identifying the father of Laeral’s daughter Maura: this isn’t my tale to tell (hint, hint). Sorry.

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

Kajehase, like the Lords Who Sleep used to be, in neighbouring Cormyr, Aencar will start to take on the role of a future “Faerûnian version of King Arthur (in a few hundred years FR-time that is) with legends and stories cropping up around him.” Giving DMs a wonderfully evocative ‘lever’ to use in many ways, I hope.

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

Lord Rad, the Monastery of the Yellow Rose was created by Bob Salvatore for his Cleric Quintet series (the Cadderly books), and written up (by him) in game form in FR9 The Bloodstone Lands.

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Originally posted by Elfinblade

And another question:
How many gods were there in you original campaing? Your very first fraft of the FR? Which god was the first to appear to you, and to the players? And how many gods came to be along the years. Were some gods created by the staff of TSR, or WotC?
And finally, a rather trivial query; Which one is your fave?
My personal favourite has to be Torm. Not because i agree with many of his principles, but rather his commanding presence (like when he walked into cyrics domain and chided him! ) and unrelenting persona. And on a close second, comes Bane.

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Well met again, all. Your Lady Hooded One returns (thank you for that naming, Wooly Rupert!), with Ed’s latest:


Hi, Wooly Rupert. Well, now: Nobanion and Lurue are, of course, the Lion and the Unicorn of British nursery rhyme fame (with all the meanings that go with that, too; they are among other things the supporters of the royal coat of arms for that country, and in many other coats of arms associated with England).
Yet they’re also MUCH more than that. For me, I have to be able to imagine a deity with some awe, and I often do it by attaching to them emotions evoked by other fiction. So, the Lion is also Aslan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (Christian allegorical fantasy classics soon to appear in a Disney movie that * might * turn out to be okay, and already on film in any number of BBC adaptations down the years, some of them superb). The Narnia books are hated by some, loved by others, but chock-full of little heart-wrenching scenes regardless, and are among the top-selling English-language fiction books of all time.
I didn’t mean my lion-god to BE Aslan, of course; as you saw in that DRAGON article, a lot of names were placeholders at the time, waiting for Mr. Gygax to round out the “official” (Greyhawk) pantheon. Aslan has that name because he has evoke that “awe” for me. The name “Aslan” is Indian in origin (India, not native North American), and the lion is of course a Christian symbol for ‘the King’ from way back, hence its lavish use in royal heraldry.
So “Aslan” went away the moment TSR decided to publish the Realms (mustn’t lift central characters from other authors, even in homage, though I did unwittingly [i.e. I’d forgotten] sneak one direct homage into the Realms [Aglarond, for Tolkien], and beat another well-known fantasy author to a name by coincidence, coining the name “Ashaba” for the river that runs through Shadowdale years before David Eddings used it in his Malloreon books).
Lurue is my own invented name, but it started almost as the deity’s ‘private’ name, with “Silverymoon” being her popular one (and, yes, the city of the same name was originally envisaged as the root and center of her faith). Not only is Lurue the Unicorn of “the Lion and the Unicorn,” she’s also the mysterious, eponymous unicorn from the children’s book THE LITTLE WHITE HORSE by Elizabeth Goudge, AND she’s also meant to evoke the Unicorn of Amber, in Roger Zelazny’s classic Amber books (where the Unicorn inspires awe even among the jaded royal family who use her as their badge). She was always meant to be mysterious, and there’s very little about her that didn’t go into POWERS & PANTHEONS that doesn’t now contradict the published Realms.
Originally, Lurue WAS magic—before Julia Martin added the name “Weave” to my GenCon explanations of ‘the great web of magic that’s everywhere in Toril, binds Toril together, and IS Toril,’ Lurue was the embodiment of the Weave. As such, she could teleport without error or limit, through all barriers and spells, was immune to all known magical [and psionic] effects, could raise dead, heal, regenerate and restore with the touch of her horn—and also spew silver fire from it—and so on. Her very proximity dispels illusions and curses, purifies and neutralizes poisons and taints, and purges diseases. And on and on. [To the usual chorus of “Look, yet another all-powerful Greenwood munchkin!” I reply: Yes. Of course. This is THE all-powerful goddess, and she’s also whimsical. We can’t understand why she does what she does, so she can’t be controlled, or act like any sort of tyrannical munchkin, any more than a mountain range or an ocean can be.] She tended to be as curious as a newborn babe, utterly fearless, and kind to injured creatures. And yes, I tucked in the “patron of virgins, but can also make barren wombs bear” folklore, too. Only virgins could ride her, and those who did got that silver hair the Chosen who are Mystra’s daughters all share, and ‘wild talent’ innate magical abilities, and were marked for special tasks and achievements all their lives.
The TSR designers quite rightly (given the humanocentric core of that version of AD&D, with its level and power limits on non-humans) wanted human gods to be front and center and of the greatest power and importance, so Mystra (most important to intelligent creatures trying to USE magic) became also the Guardian or Mother of the Weave, and Lurue sort of . . . danced sideways. To become the awe-inspiring mystery she is now.
Now, as for the Knights of the Unicorn, I do have more, but dare not pass it on right now for fear of trampling on something another creative person is already working on, in the Realms. That’s one rule I’m going to be very careful not to break, no matter how much we all want to delve into lore and secrets of the Realms. So: sorry, and I hope you’ll understand.


So saith Ed. Thy Hooded One can add this much: we Knights met Lurue once, in the High Forest, on the banks of the Unicorn Run. She was dancing on her hind legs on empty air, about forty feet off the ground, in full silvery moonlight -- and we all grovelled. She LOOKED into our eyes, each of us -- and Ed had written out long, detailed notes for each of us for the dream-visions we received then. When we awakened, we were all reinvigorated, healed of all hurts, had maximum charges in all of our magic items, and so on. The one virgin among us (no, I’m not going to name her, but it wasn’t my character, all you guessers) had been touched by Lurue’s horn, and her eyes were two flames of silver fire. Also, her hair had gone silver and moved constantly by itself, as if waves of wind were passing through it. She gained feather fall and water walk innate abilities on the spot, and ironguard as long as the silver fire was in her. It remained with her as we travelled, until we had to fight a certain archdevil in Myth Drannor.
In that encounter, we were overwhelmed by devils and were going down, just being buried in numbers. The archdevil saw the silver fire and went straight for the particular Knight, and after they’d started to fight and the character was being badly mauled, the player (thank whatever gods there be) REMEMBERED Ed’s notes of her dream-vision, and what she had to do. She fled onto the altar beside the devil (that was also a gate into the Nine Hells), and when the archdevil attacked her there, she embraced it and let it slay her.
And her silver fire went BLAM and took out altar, gate, archdevil, and all the other devils within a MILE, leaving all of us Knights lying dazed, unscathed, and alive . . . except she who’d sacrificed herself. She was gone forever.
And at that moment, far away in Shadowdale, Storm Silverhand was helping a farm wife give birth to her first child, a girl—and it came out stillborn. Storm raised the tiny body to make absolutely sure before she wrapped it and turned to comfort the mother . . . and its eyes opened, and they were silver and knowing, and the mind of our lost Knight was in the now-living child and wondering how by Lurue to tell Storm who she was.
Hmm. I’m crying again, just remembering it.
Another of Ed’s beautiful little moments, that will make me treasure our Realmsplay forever.

Ladies and gentlesirs, I give you: the Realms!
The Hooded One

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Kuje, please tell Monsoon that in the days when I rounded out my pantheon and then wrote that article, darn near every writer for DRAGON was trying to make everything fit the existing rules (which Gary Gygax, Jim Ward, and other staffers were expanding almost monthly in DRAGON articles of their own). There were no ‘competing worlds’ then, and everyone was trying to add little embellishments to the ever-growing castle of rules, not “fix” or challenge any part of it. Gary had used Tyr of the real-world deities, and my article was intended to show one DM’s underlying assumptions about the gods, and how that would inevitably shape the pantheon. As part of it, and drawing on the Deities & Demigods rulebook, I wanted to present other examples of incorporating real-world deities, such as Mielikki. To underscore the “multiple worlds linked by gates” concept that gives the Forgotten Realms its name (that we here in the real world used to travel back and forth between Earth and the Realms and other places, and that dragons and the like also made such trips, hence our legends of them, but that we have now “forgotten” the ways to get back and forth), I wanted deities from our world venerated in the Realms. Afraid of lawsuits if real people tried to do things from the game and got hurt, TSR downplayed the entire “close ties with the real world” aspect of the Realms, though the multiple worlds crept back in later, in both Planescape and Spelljammer: I postulated that the gates were forgotten because various power groups ended up controlling them (killing beings who used them without permission), and that a logical place for adventuring play for high-level, long-lasting campaigns to go would be to join in these battles for control of gates (3e: “portals”) and get involved in planar politics. The smattering of real-world deities was part of this.
The importation of Oriental and Egyptian pantheons into the Realms occurred later, and was done by TSR designers trying to make the Realms a welcome setting for all sorts of play (Wanna be a gladiator? A samurai? A pirate? A jungle explorer?) because the Realms was then intended to be THE host world for 2nd Edition AD&D.

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Well met again, thom. Ed says you’re very welcome, and here’s my reply (oooh! A question for ME!):
In the ‘home’ Realms campaign, we Knights did indeed have ‘patron’ deities, and all of us Knights carried a token, holy symbol, or remembrance of our primary god, whom we normally prayed to briefly in the morning (if we didn’t awaken under attack or in some emergency), at moments of crisis (such as healing a wounded friend, trying to keep a sick or poisoned person alive), and, in a more lengthy private prayer, just after our evening meal. We’d pray to our deities for guidance, which sometimes came in the form of dream-visions or even ‘waking’ mental visions (snapshot scene tinged with a feeling of favour or disapproval), and VERY rarely came in the form of a ‘manifestation’ (Lathander, for example, was a rosy glow, around a weapon, or one of us, or a keyhole or secret door, or moving along a route).
Upon arrival in a town or village with a formal shrine or temple to a patron deity, we would attend a service, and give an offering (if coin-less, trophies from fallen foes would suffice [for Tempus, of course, weapons from beings we’d defeated were considered the most valuable offerings], and if we had absolutely nothing, information about our doings and what we’d seen reported to a priest was accepted). Paltry or verbal-only offerings usually resulted in a priestly request to do a service, either something as simple as “help move this temple furniture” or “confess in full to the superior priest tomorrow” or “help guard the temple doors tonight.”
If we found an untended or desecrated shrine of a patron deity during our travels, the PCs venerating that deity would cleanse it and pray there (one of the elaborate prayers, sometimes involving a chanted or sung ritual), and Ed had provided us with some prayers, small couplets of creed-advice, and even approved oaths for invocation of the god (which we uttered in play, sometimes causing great amusement). If we found a hermit or travelling priest of a patron deity, we would expect to share food and drink, and would offer to encamp with the priest and offer our protection.
If we were staying in one locale with a temple, we would attend services at least once every two days. Priests in Ed’s campaign do a lot of “influencing the laity” work by dispensing news and gossip that’s been carefully slanted to promote the importance of their god and the creed and aims of the faith, and to motivate the people hearing it to do certain things that further the work of the god, and they customarily do this at the end of formal services, sometimes while ‘blessing’ worshippers (the old “priest stands at the door to speak to everyone leaving” tactic :}). From them we also learned temple or priestly sayings that weren’t part of the official creed (example, for Tempus: “We come in peace: smite to slay!”)
Other gods were to be prayed and offered to in appeasement (we’ve got to cross the Neck in a boat, so Umberlee, please don’t sink us, and Talos, send no storms . . . and if the body of water was large, we’d be praying for navigational aid, too), and NO gods were to be treated disrespectfully. Their worshippers and clergy, yes, and sometimes (for followers of good-aligned deities opposed to human sacrifice) their altars shattered, too, but the gods themselves were considered very real -- when thwarting their mortal servants, ’tis always best to NOT defame the god while you’re at it. Mocking their holy sayings is about as far as it goes (example, when slaying a priest of Talos: “Send a storm -- now REAP a storm!”).
In practical terms, except for the tasks set by priests for our cleric PCs at each level (and in one special case, given Florin personally by Mielikki!), once we were adhering to our faiths, this all faded into the background. Like driving a car, we no longer paid a lot of attention to: “Now I’m turning the key, with my foot on the brake pedal, and now I’m -- ” . . . we just did it. Torm, of course, endlessly teases the rest of us: “Now, would Lathander REALLY want you to do that?”
Yet we’ve learned to ignore Torm or give him back as good as he gets (“Well of course I upended you into the horsetrough! Lathander told me to so serve over-clever, mouthy servants of Mask!”)
I hope that helps, thom. The Hooded One, signing off.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
ints? Is this something we can expect to see in an uncoming novel about a city known for its many splendors?

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

And to The Sage, I regret to reply that current developments concerning life in the Abbey of the Just Hammer in Tasseldale is also NDA-silenced on my part.

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Originally posted by The Sage

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

And to The Sage, I regret to reply that current developments concerning life in the Abbey of the Just Hammer in Tasseldale is also NDA-silenced on my part.

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Wow ... First the Lady K, and now myself. If I didn't know better, I'd assume there's some type of conspiracy going on here at Candlekeep .

Luckily, I do know better. I hope... .

I appreciate the details regardless, Lady Hooded One . I would've likely plotted my own course with regard to the Abbey anyway . Still, I'm intrigued now by the possibility that the Abbey will feature in some future novel or source tome...

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Originally posted by Dargoth

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Originally posted by The Sage

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

And to The Sage, I regret to reply that current developments concerning life in the Abbey of the Just Hammer in Tasseldale is also NDA-silenced on my part.

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Wow ... First the Lady K, and now myself. If I didn't know better, I'd assume there's some type of conspiracy going on here at Candlekeep .

Luckily, I do know better. I hope... .

I appreciate the details regardless, Lady Hooded One . I would've likely plotted my own course with regard to the Abbey anyway . Still, I'm intrigued now by the possibility that the Abbey will feature in some future novel or source tome...

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I actually suspect we'll get a Dalelands source book next year although Wizards havent announced a FR book for the 3rd trimester yet...

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Originally posted by SiriusBlack

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
ints? Is this something we can expect to see in an uncoming novel about a city known for its many splendors?

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I don't expect any clear answer in any upcoming novel or tome. But, if I was a betting scribe and felt an answer might be on the horizon and since EG has said it's not his tale to tell, I think it might be shown in an upcoming anthology.

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Originally posted by Elfinblade

erm..this may sound rather stupid to some of you i wager, but you keep mentioning NDA all the time.. Can anyone indulge me, and tell me what NDA is?

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Originally posted by Ty

Sirius is correct regarding the NDA.

It's a powerful scroll written by the Barristers of Tyr (often considered lay clergy and affectionately, or derogatorily, referred to as 'Sharks') and enforced by their black-robed elders in wood paneled rooms. Very powerful stuff, requiring at least 15 ranks in the profession - hide knowledge. Woe to those who break the NDA for it results in serious monetary consequences.

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

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Originally posted by Dargoth
Lawyers are LE Hellspawn

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Originally posted by Dargoth
Lawyers are LE Hellspawn and NDAs are penned by Asmodeous himself!

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Originally posted by George Krashos

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Originally posted by Dargoth
Lawyers are LE Hellspawn and NDAs are penned by Asmodeous himself!

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Hey! I resemble that comment!

-- George Krashos

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Originally posted by Kentinal

There was some questions about current ebents in the Realms.
This leads me to ask how Realm time compares to RL time?

I suspect it varies where one book can handle years and another perhaps a month within the years. Perhaps Narnia time paradox applies, but am interested in finding out if there eexists any plan of how fast time will pass in the Realms.
Day for Day, Month for Day, Year for a week. I am not asking for future timeline (which most likely is NDA) just wondering if there is a general plan for how quick time will pass.

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Originally posted by George Krashos

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Originally posted by Dargoth
Lawyers are LE Hellspawn and NDAs are penned by Asmodeous himself!

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Hey! I resemble that comment!

-- George Krashos

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Originally posted by Dargoth

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Originally posted by George Krashos

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Originally posted by Dargoth
Lawyers are LE Hellspawn and NDAs are penned by Asmodeous himself!

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Hey! I resemble that comment!

-- George Krashos

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yeah but you even out as Lawful Neutral

True George is a Baatezu or as they are known in the real world, a lawyer, however George have also taken the "Exalted Forgotten Realms Developer Template" which along with prolonged exposure to the Divine Eric Boyd and the Saintly Schend has shifted Georges alignment to Lawful Neutral

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