D&D 5E Ed Greenwood is Contributing to A Sourcebook About Thay

Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood, along with Alex Kammer and Alan Patrick, are writing a new sourcebook about the magrocracy of Thay, known for its Red Wizards. The book will be on the DMs Guild, although there's no release date yet.

They've shared some art -- a Thayan noble at the market with her two undead porters, by artist Hector Rodriguez Antunez.

"
Because I don't have enough to do, did you know that I am about to release a brand new sourcebook on Thay? Yep. I am writing it with my friends Ed Greenwood and Alan Patrick. It is shaping up to be a really great book. It will enable the reader to look past the veil and into what day to day life in Thay really looks like. It will have tons of lore and an adventure which I wrote. It will be a POD product on the DM's Guild. We are in layout now so I hope to announce a date in the next 30 days or so.

Oh, here is a sample of some of the awesome art. Check out this Thayan noble at the market with her two undead porters."

 

[Demetrios1453]

No, Osse was never mentioned in the TSR days. The two published mentions of "Osse" come from:

1) One of the characters in the 2004 novel Lady of Poison (Gunggari Ulmarra) claims to be from Osse, and has some similarities to an Aboriginal Australian.

2) A 2007 "Class Chronicles" article on the WotC webpage.

That latter said:

Which, of course, is self-contradicting ignorant nonsense, since Aboriginal Australian cultures and Polynesian cultures (including the Maori of New Zealand) have very little in common.

Not necessarily. Osse is huge, and therefore could have some regions that reflect one culture, and other sections that reflect the other (and potentially areas that might combine facets of both, or neither). Beyond that, "Australian Aboriginal" is greatly non-monolithic itself, with varying cultures that can be as different from each other as they are from Polynesian.

 

[teitan]

I was aware of that, but was that affected in some way, by the recent clarification around canon.

Unless they renegotiated his contract then no

 

[see]

Not necessarily. Osse is huge, and therefore could have some regions that reflect one culture, and other sections that reflect the other (and potentially areas that might combine facets of both, or neither).

Is Osse huge? Neither source for "Osse" had a map that designated the landmass; people just ran ahead and assumed that the huge continent in the lower right of the FR Interactive Atlas/3e FRCS map is "Osse", because it's kinda-sorta where Australia is on Earth (never mind that it does things like cross Toril's equator). There are several never-marked continents that could be "Osse" instead.

And that, of course, is all assuming you consider the declaration from the "Class Chronicles" web feature in the end days of 3.x to be enough to "canonically" establish that "Osse" is a continent and on Toril.

 

[humble minion]

And that, of course, is all assuming you consider the declaration from the "Class Chronicles" web feature in the end days of 3.x to be enough to "canonically" establish that "Osse" is a continent and on Toril.

Well, i think that its existence in the novel (which i haven't read) probably does that, but it's undeniable that when there's a setting element that has been detailed so incredibly scarcely as Osse has, talking about what it 'canonically' is like is pretty much an exercise in futility.

 

[JEB]

Unless they renegotiated his contract then no

Well, there's a bit of a caveat:

Anything I write about the Realms, by definition, is canon, unless or until contradicted/rendered out-of-date by Wizards-published writing.

So if Wizards decides that it's better for D&D to retcon out Greenwood's lore, they're perfectly capable of doing so (and considering their current stance on canon and almost certainly related intentions to expand the D&D brand, I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen at some point).

 

[Seramus]

Yeah, I don't consider the 5E announcement about canon overruling Ed's contract. Only when they publish specific things. Of course, I'm no lawyer and not privy to the specific details.of his contract, but the announcement did not strike me as "published writing" as opposed to a general statement of intent.

 

[EthanSental]

 

[EthanSental]

Just getting to these from the Rasheman pdf. The ranger is odd to me but maybe as I read more of the history of the area it make more sense….mainly since Minsc is only character I know other than just the witches in general.

 

[Seramus]

Isn't Praxis a synonym of Tradition?

 

[see]

Well, i think that its existence in the novel (which i haven't read) probably does that,

The novel establishes that there's a place called Osse that a specific character is from. We don't know how big it is (it could be a moderately-sized island), nor that it is for certain on Toril (since the character could have gone through a portal unknown to him; Osse could be on Abeir, or Oerth, or, for that matter, Earth in the past).

Taking an entire huge unmarked continent on the Toril map and transforming it into a precontact Australia-New Zealand hybrid over one character in one novel smacks of the same sort of epileptic trees over-reading into unvetted minor details that resulted in (for example) a one-product Maztica allusion to the real-world Pacific Northwest peoples into a whole medieval Viking culture with a Norse pantheon in a fan-authored DMs Guild product (because it mentioned that the people were seafaring and lived in longhouses, and the fan-author didn't know about Pacific Northwest peoples but did know Vikings were seafaring and had longhouses).