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The City of Ravens Bluff (CoRB) is, in my opinion, the gold standard for what a campaign source should be. Just about every page is filled with useful information about the people, locations, and organizations of Ravens Bluff. It has a detailed account of each of the following: workable history of the city, recent events, mysterious secrets, a description of everyday stuff, more mysterious secrets, secret societies, the Wizards Guild, each of the deans, each temple, the fellowship of bards, the Silent Network, the various knightly orders, all the noble families, how the city government works, how law and order works, the laws, the merchant houses, all the other guilds, the game of masks, a massive 40 page walking tour of the city, and a description of notable places in the Vast. Each of these sections are absolutely amazing. There are so many interesting descriptions of NPCs. These pages excite the imagination! I have a sense of what is going on, why it is going on, and a suggestion for what could happen in the future. It is a place in transition. It feels alive! Whenever I was at a lack of an idea I'd just flip though CoRB and a new adventure idea would pop into my head!

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Originally posted by questing gm I haven't read City of Ravens Bluff yet, but from what I'm gathering what you liked about its content, I think the City of Splendor boxed set also has pretty much the same things to like about it.

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Originally posted by TomCosta Ed did an amazing job taking a lot of the crud from organized play of the day and making it more palatable, but I still have a hard time getting past all of the dross that got included (not Ed's fault).

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Originally posted by Kelcimer

Hello questing gm!

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Originally posted by questing gm I haven't read City of Ravens Bluff yet, but from what I'm gathering what you liked about its content, I think the City of Splendor boxed set also has pretty much the same things to like about it.

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I am skeptical. I know that in 3.x they kinda just took a bunch of 2e material and repackaged it. Which is fair because you don't want to ditch existing material, but I think they leaned into that too much, generating too many low calorie Realms books in 3.x. "City of Splendors: Waterdeep" was a horrible, horrible product. The natural question is, if there was that much good material in the "City of Splendor" boxed set, then, with how they repurposed 2e material, why did none of it make it into "City of Splendors: Waterdeep"?

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Originally posted by Kelcimer

Man, "City of Splendors: Waterdeep" was bad. Not just the worst Forgotten Realms product I ever bought, but the worst gaming product I ever purchased. In my third campaign I had my players on a quest going all across Forgotten Realms so that I would actually deal with various locations. One of the locations they were to go to was Waterdeep. Waterdeep had a big reputation and I was looking forward to dealing with the city. I already had my players on route to the Waterdeep when I purchased CoS:W, to work on the adventure. The book was billed as the be all end all to Waterdeep. Turns out it was such a useless product that I wound up capping the adventure by nuking Waterdeep in an Akira like explosion. A very round Bay of Waterdeep can be seen from space. Good times.

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• It starts with the wrap around cover art that I can show a player who is entering Waterdeep for the first time.


• It uses monsters from previous 3E products, Monster Manuals, other Realms Products. AND it has Substitutions for them in case you don't have them, nice touch that they didn't have to waste half a page on but they did. Plus they made use of other rules from other products, like guilds.*


• Listing city demographics, including NPC ethnicity. I don't know if it was the first book to list this for nearly all NPCs but it was prominent enough to really get me to think about it in my home campaign.


• Then there is a list of consolidated building locations/map from various previous products.**


• The sewer map that is overlaid onto an actual image of the city so it is easier to tell what everything ran under.***


• Lots of info not only on the Deep but also on Undermountain and the sewers and linkages, yes much was reprinted but there were also additions, elaborating on previous lore (one example see Minor Artifact "The Rod of Lathander"). Plus having it consolidated in one place was useful.


• The Web Enhancement with all the Noble Houses and a pronunciation guide, plus other great data!


• Then there is the other Web Enhancement that detailed the Environs around Waterdeep.

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Originally posted by Gelcur

I know many did not like how much crunch there was to fluff in 3.5E but personally I liked that there was an effort to balance it. It helps as a DM to not only have lore but to be able to pick up a book and grab a creature, spell or even an area like a sewer and just have all the rules I need right there on the page.

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Originally posted by George Krashos

You don’t say why you thought CoS:W was a steaming pile of ordure. Care to expand?

— George Krashos

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Originally posted by TomCosta

So Kelcimer, I have to take back some of what I said. There are still too many silly names, but I think I conflated my memory of the original Polyhedron articles with how it ended up in City of Ravens Bluff. Ed did a better job than I remembered culling the worst bits.

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Originally posted by Gelcur

I don't necessarily disagree with you Wooly. Likely the abbreviated stat block would done just fine for most minor NPCs, CoS:W is jam packed with these. Since I have CoS:W open right now, I see some great examples:

"Tammert Landral (LG male Illuskan human wizard 8, a magically brilliant youth)"
"Maresta Rhanbuck (CG female half-moon elf wizard 12, a “motherly whirlwind” who runs the Tower alongside Laeral)"

If you abbreviated gender and race or left it off, Illuskan would imply human, there would be room for alphabet soup of important stats.


Maybe something more elaborate for characters more likely to see use/combat but still "minimal", say roughly 1/4 of a page (half a column), listing important feats and magic items. Looks like, Sample Griffon Rider, City Guard, Watch Patrol with Captain, Sergeant and Watchman took up roughly 1 full page all together.


Then a full page for the Big Bad in an adventure campaign or for your "star" NPCs. Laeral Silverhand probably deserves every single bit of her explored Mistakes in these large blocks were very sad. Mistakes do happen though hopefully less often, what bugged me even more were the under spec'd NPCs. We often joke that El or whoever is supposed to be very powerful but often the NPCs just weren't built that way. Whether it was rules limitations, or that it was early days so all the neat things weren't out yet, or that designer did not specialize in making builds. A neat idea was all the Web Enhancements in 3.5E. Maybe full page NPCs could have been pushed only online and could have gotten re-stat'd over time as new material came out, obviously maintaining the right lore flavor for the character. The books could have the abridged versions.

I'm 100% with you on monsters needing more details. I personally like blurbs I can read word for word to my players that paints a nice picture. And obviously anatomy, motivation, culture all great too. Some of the later books in 3.5E added Skill Checks to gain info on creatures. But definitely needed more. I will also say monsters tended to get boring in 3.5E. I don't know if this was normal in 4E but one Dungeon adventure I read had a monster that stuck out. A Hill Giant Cook, who fought with a meat tenderizer, threw barrels on a cool down (like dragon's breath) that had a random chance to blind(flour), slow(honey), fall prone(oil), or do nothing(water). They also had a once per encounter action that was Scalding Cauldron which was them pushing over a pot of boiling food, basically minor fireball. They were just reskinned basic abilities but it did go a long way to paint a flavorful picture in my head and likely my players.


Part of my fun in D&D is building PCs and NPCs. Not to be broken but to be good and flavorful. And one of those tools to do this is PrCs. I tend to use classes and PrCs loosely if a player or I could make a valid argument that something like PrC X existed and would do this sort of thing in the Faerun, we'd relabel it and carry on. I had similar feeling for cross setting material, a player wanted a cool spell from Greyhawk in Faerun, roll me Knowledge (the planes). I agree there were likely too many PrCs, I honestly would have preferred they had tried to capture this uniqueness/variety through better feats. Feats were a great concept that really made 3.0E shine when it came out but quickly we realized there were just bad choices. *cough* Toughness +3 hp *cough* Which sort of brings me full circle to stat blocks. "Bahb Silvernoun (NG m Turami F7, DEX17 CHA16; Imp.Init, Imp.TWF)" is to the point and paints me a picture that we are probably talking about this guy.


3.5E is still my preferred rule set but I am willing to admit improvements could have been made.

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Originally posted by Kelcimer

Hello George Krashos!

So I'm looking at CoS:W and I see you, Eric Boyd, and Tom Costa all worked on it.

I am still not used to the whole "a bunch of the people who designed the stuff are on the forum" thing. I was not expecting that when I went looking for a Forgotten Realms forum.

Just to say, I don't want to offend, but I'm going to call it like I see it.

Eric mentioned on the another thread that often deadlines were ridiculously short during that period. I also assume that there were certain decisions about what to include that were out of the hands of the development team. I am sure those were significant factors to the quality of the product.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

See, I'm not convinced that even the major NPCs needed full write-ups. If someone is not meant to be fought, why waste time listing all their weapon skills and such? And if someone is meant to be fought, it doesn't matter than they're an excellent cook and an enthusiastic but mediocre poet.

Again, let the DM build what he or she needs.

As for the PrCs, I liked some of them -- but some were filler, and some were round pegs in square holes. I'd've rather seen fewer PrCs that were better written and that fit better, rather than the apparent approach of "Marketing says we need two more, you got anything handy?"

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Originally posted by Kelcimer

Hello George Krashos!

So I'm looking at CoS:W and I see you, Eric Boyd, and Tom Costa all worked on it.

I am still not used to the whole "a bunch of the people who designed the stuff are on the forum" thing. I was not expecting that when I went looking for a Forgotten Realms forum.

Just to say, I don't want to offend, but I'm going to call it like I see it.

Eric mentioned on the another thread that often deadlines were ridiculously short during that period. I also assume that there were certain decisions about what to include that were out of the hands of the development team. I am sure those were significant factors to the quality of the product.

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Originally posted by sleyvas

Hmmm, yeah, the multiple poster maps in color was a big thing, and I guess even though occasionally we'd see a poster map in a hardcover with some kind of weird glue... that was rare. I forget, did the 3e campaign set even have some maps in it? I want to say yes, but part of me thinks there was something sent with dragon magazine.

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