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Originally posted by Gary Dallison

I've found that having pdf versions of everything is great (as long as they are ocr). Then if the pdf are all in the same folder you can do a pdf search on every file in that folder, so search on Baldur and it will find you every reference.

Then there are all the web pages from word, all the dragon and dungeon and polyhedron mags, all Ed's replies on candlekeep and Twitter.

After all that you should have a large library of references to flesh out never winter. The 4e stuff Is also usable, just try to imagine an origin for that lore in the 3e era and you've got another plot point to develop.

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Originally posted by Tigon

quote:

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Originally posted by Gary Dallison

I've found that having pdf versions of everything is great (as long as they are ocr). Then if the pdf are all in the same folder you can do a pdf search on every file in that folder, so search on Baldur and it will find you every reference.

Then there are all the web pages from word, all the dragon and dungeon and polyhedron mags, all Ed's replies on candlekeep and Twitter.

After all that you should have a large library of references to flesh out never winter. The 4e stuff Is also usable, just try to imagine an origin for that lore in the 3e era and you've got another plot point to develop.

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Seriously? For one, many of the pdfs I've been able to acquire are not OCR and as such, not searchable.

What do you mean "web pages from word"?

I'm actually running my game in 1492 DR, so we're post second sundering. There's not much, if anything, on Neverwinter after the chasm was sealed up.

While I understand that you think you're helping, essentially what you just told me to do was:

Go download every Forgotten Realms product in existence in OCR pdf format, (which surely would be piracy), go download every issue of Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron magazines (again likely piracy to get them all, otherwise a small fortune), scour all of ed's posts on twitter AND pull essentially the entire archive of Candlekeep.

Yah, clearly if i went and downloaded the entire internet of everything Forgotten Realms and searched it all for Neverwinter and/or Baldur's Gate I'd find everything I'm looking for... but that seems just a tad excessive, time consuming and, for someone who only downloads PDFs of items they have purchased/own, pretty costly. Your answer/suggestion was not helpful in the least when my question was:

"Can anyone point me in the direction of MUST HAVE information about these two locations."

And I asked it so I can make a TARGETED search rather than try and catch everything on the entire damn internet.

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Originally posted by Demzer

Well, ok, everyone take a deep breath and chill out.

For "must haves" you are covered by whatever is in the Volo's guides and then the latest updates (5E stuff) and you seem to own everything.

For additional information which is nice to have, you can probably take a (quite long) tour around the fandom wikis around the internet related to all the computer games set in both cities and get a vibe and more visuals for their layout, maps, landmarks and get interesting (even if only pseudo-canonical) ideas about NPC's and shops/taverns/buildings/whatever (if your players have played the games and remember they'll probably like the references even if they're not 100% canon).

For other random bits of lore on Baldur's Gate I know that Dragon 426 has an article detailing some influential NPCs (4E era I think, so maybe still alive in 5E) by Ed Greenwood, Dungeon 217 has a low level adventure (still for 4E I think).

For other random bits of lore on Neverwinter I know that Dungeon 193 has an in depth description of a tavern and two (more like one-and-an-half) adventures in the city.

Additionally, you can try to delve into the Questions for Ed Greenwood scrolls but it will be extremely time consuming. The lore answers that I pulled (which are only stuff I might use or have used, not everything) make up a word file of 392 pages ... so yeah (also I didn't save the timestamps of the answers so that makes referencing them to someone else quite difficult ...)

Anyway, searching that file for "Baldur" gave me 40 hits, most of those are stray mentions of noble/merchant families having some kind of tie to the city, something more important might be if you narrow down the search to Stormkeep (oldest fortification still standing in the city), a reply comparing Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, another on merchant and guilds of Baldur's Gate and a final one on important buildings.

Neverwinter gave me only 27 hits, mostly the same kind of stray mention, maybe you are interested in a small bits about the "city newspaper" called Neverwinter Nights, the Starshine Academy and Borlwynd Hall.

If you want to go in more depth I can send you little text snippets and maybe with an "exact match" search you can find these lore nuggets more easily in the vault.

As a general comment on the topic of researching areas I will just say that it's a tradeoff: using only must-haves is quick and reduces the amount of sources you have to research while being thorough and checking every possible reference make for a more complete vision of the topic researched but of course takes time, sometimes an awful lot of time. Both are fine and legitimate approaches but you cannot have them at the same time (like with many other things in life).

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