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Greenwood's Realms

Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood looks back at the origins of D&D's most popular world.

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Can I Be In Your Secret Club?

I first heard that question voiced aloud when I was very young, in the schoolyard, by a girl...

Oct 9, 2020

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One Player One GM

Over the years and many, many conventions, I’ve met a lot of lonely gamers. Folks who don’t live...

Sep 24, 2020

#Greenwood's Realms

Ed Greenwood: In Memory Golden

It all started with taxes. Legally avoiding them, that is. The sort called “Customs duties,” to...

Aug 18, 2020

#Greenwood's Realms

Day Jobs For Adventurers

Many early game play forays into the Forgotten Realms were library “mini-campaigns.” That is...

May 29, 2020

#Greenwood's Realms

Putting The Awe Back In Magic

The burgher himself unlocked her shackles, making a grand show of producing the right key from...

May 8, 2020

#Greenwood's Realms

The Haunted Castle

These days, when running the Realms outside of a tournament, playtest, or one-shot convention...

Apr 17, 2020

#Greenwood's Realms

D&D General Not Another Cunning Plan

Writers sometimes plan things, when spinning fiction. And sometimes those plans even work out...

Apr 11, 2020

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Playing Nicely In The Sandbox

Whether we’re talking about real-world politics or playing in an ongoing fantasy roleplaying...

Mar 6, 2020

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Finishing Touches For Rethmar

We’ll bid adieu to Rethmar this time, by augmenting its recent events and what’s unfolding in...

Feb 21, 2020

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Tongues Wag In Rethmar

I’ve been adding depth and colour to the Realms for decades, and from 1986 on, have been joined...

Jan 30, 2020

#Greenwood's Realms

Settling Down And Making A Place Home

So we’ve spent two columns breathing life into Rethmar, which started as just another dot and...

Dec 28, 2019

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Making Rethmar Come Alive

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?” before I turned around and derived the bones (last column) from.

Dec 3, 2019

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RETHMAR, Rathole of the Shaar

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 hooks.”

Nov 4, 2019

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Getting A Realms Campaign Up And Running

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.

Oct 11, 2019

#Greenwood's Realms

Ed Greenwood: A World of a Thousand-Thousand Stories

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 happened next?” fashion.

Sep 2, 2019

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Ed Greenwood: The Origins of Mirt the Moneylender

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.