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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 3765908" data-attributes="member: 1757">Well put indeed!As a long-time Realms DM, I really do get the feeling that I'm the happier for having avoided the FR novels pretty much entirely ("Elminster at the Magefair" is pretty much the only FR tale I've ever read outside of the story bits in game materials). My own introduction in the Realms was back in the early days of Dragon, and I've never looked back. I happen to really, truly like Ed Greenwood's writing... although he may present a totally different character in the novels, and from what I've read on the boards he's got a sad penchant (shared, incidentally, by otherwise stellar writers like Leiber and Moorcock) for the...erm, ribald. IME, Elminster's sexual exploits have come across as *humanizing* rather than as Ed's "happy-time material." Ed's stated intention was to model him closer to Belgarath than Gandalf, and I think it comes off well in the game materials. It also seems quite convincing to me; old gruff sage aside, I've seen how charm works in the RW, and I can easily believe the exploits detailed in, say, Volo's Guide to Waterdeep given that most of the women involved are either paid company or apprentices. (Ever walk around a university campus and see some of those professor-student couples, people?)Where the novels go is another thing entirely. (I don't mind the whole "merging with the Goddess of Magic" thing coming off as sexual, incidentally, since it's a common mythic trope to anthropomorphize a grant of power as intercourse, but who knows how it's written.) In short, I *like* the character of the Realms NPCs as they're presented in the game materials; I like Ed's phraseology and naming conventions, and I do actually like the Chosen... to the extent that they're presented in the game materials, as itinerant, erratic demigods. I quite like Elminster, who AFAICT is there pretty much entirely to be a narrator. Now, changing him from narrator to protagonist sounds like a disaster (and I imagine it's been; I can't even begin to visualize what "Elminster in Myth Drannor" or "Elminster in Hell" were like as reads), but as a narrator, he is used IMO quite brilliantly.</blockquote>

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