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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Dungeon Nazi" data-source="post: 213989" data-attributes="member: 4520">I am, since I've played in it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />As a matter of fact, I'm heading out to Pittsburgh this weekend for his game, Codragon.So for what it's worth, I can attempt to answer some of the questions in Glamdring's absence.Unless something drastic and world-altering occurs in a new novel, there's no big deal as far as the game goes.  Famous characters rarely make an appearance, so we don't have instances where, say, the party deals with a Jarlaxle who possesses the Crystal Shard, and then Servant of the Shard comes out, so he all of a sudden doesn't have it anymore since he loses it (and his mercenaries) in the book.Having the books under your belt is just meant to really impress upon the DM and/or player the feel and flavor that really makes the Realms significantly different from Greyhawk or Dragonlance or Kalamar, things that you can't really pick up from the rulebooks.  Neat little flavor things like the aforementioned novel uses of infravision.  In addition to stuff like that, I think Greenwood's books are a great source of ideas for new and interesting spells, magic items and the like.  For instance, a part of The Making of a Mage features Elmara raiding a lich's tower/tomb with an adventuring party, and one of her colleagues is a priest of Tyche.  As the lich begins to claw its way out of its sarcophagas <sp?>, this priest of Tyche mutters an incantation and slashes his own throat.  As the rest of the party attempts to flee, the Tychean falls to the ground, his blood pooling around his head.  Elmara heads for the window and sees the priest's incoporeal form screaming at her to run as he holds the lid of the coffin in place.Or the scene from Elminster in Hell that features The Simbul's Blood Ring, where she dumps all of her magical energy into a pair of bracers hidden under the skin of her forearms, activating them.  It talks about how she'd spent decades building up this spell, secretly using subtle spells during battle to implant tiny amounts of her own blood into small cysts in the bodies of certain opponents.  So with this magic item/spell, she calls into being a beholder, a red dragon, a red wizard and a Cult wizard, and none of them see her or each other -- just legions of devils who had surrounded The Simbul and were about to slaughter her like a pig.  So they start going nuts, with the beholder firing off disintegrate - petrify - fear, the dragon scooping dozens of devils into its maw and chomping down, the wizards going bone-white with fear as they frantically try to loose spells and wands.  This is definitely the intricate kind of stuff I'd want my PC mages to start researching once they're high level.Anyway, another reason being familiar with the novels works for a game like Glamdring's is that the world's nuances, the politics, the motivations for a lot of villains, becomes familiar, so the DM can play off the intricate politics between the churches of Bane and Cyric, for example, or a player can make a reasonable assumption that if they slay a wizard and find a Ring of the Dragon on him, he's probably a Cultist and there just might be a dracolich in the vicinity.  If you set foot in Cormyr, you're going to have to register as adventurers, and you're going to have your weapon tied with a sash to your scabbard, or you'll be a criminal.  If you wander into Athkatla, you damn well better not start firing spells off within the city walls or you're going to be answering to their force of policing wizards.  It goes a lot deeper than all this, but you get the idea.Having all this material to draw from can really lend itself to bringing the whole place to life for the players.  I've been in a lot of games that didn't rely so heavily on anything except the core rulebooks and the DM's imagination, and those games just couldn't measure up.  Everything was all too simplistic.This is not to say that it's wrong to do things another way or anything of the sort -- this is just my explanation for why running a game with all of the novels as reference material works to create a really enjoyable game (again, at least for me).  It's not really about specific events or characters as it is about giving a solid impression about what it's like to live in and adventure in Faerun.</blockquote>

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