Big Mac

I love Dungeons and Dragons (and its many campaign settings including Forgotten Realms), but there are times when I get really frustrated that I can't find something in a gamebook.

For some reason TSR and WotC have never really understood the need for someone to be able to look up some obscure weapon in the middle of a fight.

And when you get into a campaign setting (rather than playing generic D&D) you get the added complication of trying to search through both core material and campaign setting specific material to see what each thing says about the same sort of subject.

Having uber-nerdy friends who actually read all the novels makes the situation even worse. Keeping up with the Realms sometimes feels like more of a job than a hobby.

WotC's solution to this was to 'nuke' the Realms and start again. The fans solution was to create something called: Forgotten Realms Wiki.

I've had my eye on Forgotten Realms Wiki for a while now and it is a website that any Forgotten Realms fan should put into their bookmarks immediately.

Firstly, I'd better say what a "wiki" is for anyone who doesn't know. A wiki is a website that anyone can edit. It is a kind-of community website where everyone works together to make the pages. (ENWorld has a wiki too, and if you haven't already looked at that, you should check it out.)

Forgotten Realms Wiki is a canon wiki (that is it is a wiki of canon from Forgotten Realms). Because it is a canon wiki, that means that people can't upload non-canon things (like the character sheet of their FR PCs), but they can help to build up the information about all things from the Forgotten Realms universe.

There was a time in the distant past, when people complained that Forgotten Realms Wiki was mostly about a certain drow that fights with two weapons, but that time is long past. It is now, in my opinion, not only the best Forgotten Realms encyclopedia I've seen, but also the best* canon encyclopedia of any D&D campaign setting that I've seen.

* = Dragonlance Lexicon (a non-wiki encyclopedia for Dragonlance) is also great, but Forgotten Realms Wiki puts in page numbers, while Dragonlance Lexicon pulls them out. So on those grounds, the FR Wiki beats the Lexicon, because it helps me flip through my rulebooks faster than the Lexicon does.

And you don't need to accept my 'opinion' on that, because some nerdy guy over at WikiIndex has come up with a scientific way to proove how popular a wiki is. Surf over to the WikiIndex page for Forgotten Relams Wiki and you will see the wikiFactor, which as of today is 19**. A wikiFactor of 19, basically means that their 19th most popular page has had more than 19,000 hits! (Their 20th most popular page has had less that 20,000 hits.) So as you can see, fans are really benifitting from this wiki.

** = The next biggest canon wiki is The Great Library of Greyhawk (a GH Wiki). As of today that has a wikiFactor of 4. Now 4 is not unrespectable - I've seen wikis with a wikiFactor of zero. But it shows the extra effort that the FR Wiki volunteers are putting in.

FR Wiki is not finished yet, and there are always little tweaks that can help make individual pages better. But - hey - it is a wiki. If you see something you know is broken, sign up for an account and fix it. And if you don't see an article on your favorite part of FR, you can start it yourself.

This project really is something that I would love to see repeated for every other campaign setting.

I also think that each setting could benifit from a second wiki, that fans can fill up with fanon. (I think the two need to be kept separate, so that the encyclopedic information doesn't get jumbled in with fan material.) So far, I've not seen a Forgotten Realms fanon wiki (or a Greyhawk fanon wiki).

The Spelljammer Campaign Setting, isn't TSR's most popular campaign setting. But it has a small but loyal following of fans.

I sometimes wonder why I like Spelljammer, when many other D&D fans either:

• can't get their head around the concept or
• understand the concept, but dislike it.

I can't speak for other Spelljammer fans, but several things really make SJ attractive to me.

First there is the fact that I am a science fiction fan as well as a Dungeons & Dragons fan. The Wildspace of Spelljammer is fantasy space, rather than sci-fi space, but it gives me a D&D environment where players can go "out there" and explore.

Some of the SJ artwork, just blows me away. And in the fan community we have a talented 3D artist who is now able to bring a lot of these amazing space scenes to life.

Second there is the fact that I am a fan of multiple D&D campaign settings. SJ offeres a mechanism that allows a GM to take a party of players from Toril, send them up into Wildspace and then have them land on Oerth.

So I see Greyspace, Krynnspace and Realmspace as crossover campaign settings that allow people to mix and match SJ with their favorite "groundling" world. And I also see them as templates that can show a GM how to create new crystal spheres around any other world based campaign setting.

I actually prefer the 3rd edition D&D rules to 2nd edition AD&D. I especially love the way that the d20 System (and the SRD) allowed multiple publishers to create compatible worlds. If every one of those worlds was used as a groundling world within a SJ crystal sphere it would create a universe (multiverse?) where every gameworld ever created could be connected. The thought of that is mind blowing.

I've just discovered this blog thing. I don't know how often I'll post here, but I'll start off with my thoughts on the Grubbmeister.

I started playing D&D around the time when 2nd edition AD&D was coming out.

There were alredy a few campaign settings out before 2nd edition, but 2nd edition itself was a really active time for campaign settings. Many of these 2nd edition campaign settings have some sort of connection to Jeff Grubb.

I've seen some people who are big fans of Gary Gygax (Greyhawk), Ed Greenwood (Forgotten Realms) or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (Dragonlance). While I love all three of those campaign settings (and agree that these people are all D&D greats), I sometimes feel that Jeff Grubb doesn't get enough recognition for his valuable work.

The Grubbmeister has been involved in a ton of settings, including my favorite setting: Spelljammer. Not all of Jeff Grubb's settings were hits with the public. Jakandor didn't make it in a big way. But what I love about Jeff Grubb is that his campaign settings give a GM choice.

I do love 3rd edition D&D. I liked the rules enough to return to role playing and switch over from AD&D to the d20 System. But something was missing from 3rd edition and that was the wealth of campaign settings we had to choose from under AD&D. Living Greyhawk and Margaret Weis Productions brought back a little bit of the multi-setting feeling of D&D, but it wasn't enough for me. If it wasn't for the hard work of people doing conversions for the "official sites" (and places like ENWorld's own Creature Catalogue) I wouldn't have felt like 3rd edition was "proper" D&D.

I've seen people claim that the large number of AD&D campaign settings divided TSR's profits and killed it off. But I don't buy that. If that was true there wouldn't have been and third party publishers creating d20 System campaign settings. I think those third party publishers were filling a hole that 3rd edition left in the market.

So while I don't play AD&D anymore, I will dedicate my first post to Jeff Grubb - Master of the Multiverse - The Mighty Grubbmeister!

Thanks for the work Jeff. The many things that are still in the conversion queue prove you are a hard act for the fans of your work to follow.