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I first heard that question voiced aloud when I was very young, in the schoolyard, by a girl speaking to other girls (if any of them had known I, a boy of the decidedly “uncool” bookish nerdy sort, was within earshot, the question would not have been asked). At the time, I sniggered. Not at the...

Over the years and many, many conventions, I’ve met a lot of lonely gamers. Folks who don’t live within easy reach of a gaming group that can assemble to battle dragons or the legions of evil or evil undying lich-kings every weekend, or as often as they’d like. If they’re lucky, they can scare...

It all started with taxes. Legally avoiding them, that is. The sort called “Customs duties,” to be precise. Back in those dear gone days, Canada (I’m Canadian, born and lifelong resident) let returning citizens legally import goods worth a paltry pittance (little more than a tank of gas in...

Many early game play forays into the Forgotten Realms were library “mini-campaigns.” That is, free programs provided to the public at the public libraries I worked at (first at the Don Mills regional branch, and later at the smaller Brookbanks community branch). Aimed at young adults, though I...

The burgher himself unlocked her shackles, making a grand show of producing the right key from the thick ring at his belt. The oldest, most ornate, and most worn of the bunch. He gave it to two of the younger men and waved at them to free the prisoner, taking himself well back and away to watch...

These days, when running the Realms outside of a tournament, playtest, or one-shot convention situation, I wing it. By now, I know the world through and through (or at least my version of it), and the players are driving the story with what they want their players to accomplish. However...

Writers sometimes plan things, when spinning fiction. And sometimes those plans even work out more or less as intended, but that’s another topic, for another day. Just now, let us consider merely the ways of planning—and they are many. One of those many ways is to ask, again and again as the...

Whether we’re talking about real-world politics or playing in an ongoing fantasy roleplaying campaign that uses an established shared setting (like the Realms or Golarion or Krynn), there are ways of “playing nice,” and there’s also behaviour that’s not considered nice. Breaking the rules, some...

We’ll bid adieu to Rethmar this time, by augmenting its recent events and what’s unfolding in town right now—that is, as the PCs tarry in Rethmar—and a little more of What’s Whispered About, locally (that is, behind-the-scenes intrigue and lawlessness beyond the remnants of the Claunkrar...

I’ve been adding depth and colour to the Realms for decades, and from 1986 on, have been joined by an army of talented folk making the Realms richer and deeper. Sometimes we’re guided by a big, overarching story or adventure we’re telling, and sometimes we’re filling in little spots on the map...

So we’ve spent two columns breathing life into Rethmar, which started as just another dot and name on the big, big map of the Realms. And, frankly, I did the bare minimum for anyone except flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants DMs. Yet the key to a great D&D campaign is player agency; through their...

So we have our bones for Rethmar, the basic “what’s the place look like, and who governs it, with what enforcement” stuff. Now, onto the lore that makes the place come alive. That I actually did first, surfing as far as I could on the ideas that came to me, the “what stories can I tell here?”...

So how to turn a name on a map of the Realms into a place that “feels real”? Well, I start with an idea in my head of what’s there—and regardless of whether I’m developing a locale for a story or for gaming adventures, from that base idea I leap straight into what gamers now call “adventure...

One-shot adventures, like binge-watching a great mini-series, can be fun, but sooner or later any FRP gamer will want to try a campaign, a sequence of interconnected adventures where the stakes—and hopefully achievements—can be higher. More time spent with friends, doing more and for longer...

I’ve worked on the Forgotten Realms every day of my life now for over fifty years, and for over forty of them have been joined by scores of fellow creators, all of us pumping our energies into the setting. So a lot has happened, in-world, and with so much going on, the place certainly seems...

So the Forgotten Realms began ten years before I first saw those initial three booklets of D&D, as an imaginary world for one young boy to explore by writing stories in. Stories written to entertain myself, that usually flowed from something I’d read written by someone else, in a “So what...

It’s the spring of 1965, and in an unassuming house in a back corner of the ritzy North York neighborhood of Don Mills, a tall, thin, shy geek of a boy is sitting in the dimly-lit den of the family home, scribbling tiny words in pencil all over a piece of paper. ALL over: when you’ve covered...

Begin at the beginning, saith the maxim. So here we go… Yes, I’m the guy who created The Forgotten Realms. Back in the spring of 1965. You read that right: 1965, about a decade before D&D, which came along in 1974, and wasn’t seen by most of the world (all the places that weren’t colleges in or...

Begin at the beginning, saith the maxim. So here we go… Yes, I’m the guy who created The Forgotten Realms. Back in the spring of 1965. You read that right: 1965, about a decade before D&D, which came along in 1974, and wasn’t seen by most of the world (all the places that weren’t colleges in or...