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Originally posted by Weiser_Cain

What edition is FR? It seems to predate 3.5(as the CS is dated '91 and the 3.5 DM book says it was first out in '03). Are there multiple versions of FR for every edition or just one edition for FR? Will there be a 3.5 update for FR?
Thanks.

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Eventually, I hit upon the idea of doing what Fritz Leiber was doing with Fafhrd and the Mouser in the pages of FANTASTIC at the time (a magazine later merged with its sister sf publication AMAZING, which TSR acquired and published about two decades later): telling self-contained stories about his main characters that just happen to be episodes in the ongoing lives of these wandering heroes (occasionally featuring old friends or foes they’ve met before), and also just happen to be set in the same world, and add little details of that world, story by story, that a reader who knows about the other stories in the series can pounce on, and fit together with what’s already known, and build into a deeper understanding of the world.

So I start to write stories all set along the same coast (what you now know as the Sword Coast of the Realms), that share the same background. Most of them star the same main character: the fat, wheezing, sly Mirt the Moneylender (take Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and add a dash of Poul Anderson’s Nicolas van Rijn and a handful of Glencannon), who’s crafty as they come but too old and slow for great heroics. In some of the tales, he teams up with Durnan, a “thinking-man’s Conan” (strong silent type who isn’t a barbarian ignorant of the lands he’s journeying through, but who, although sensitive, believes laws and authority are usually oppressive, and to be ignored whenever they get in the way).

The first Realms tale is “One Comes, Unheralded, to Zirta” (Zirta is a city now part of Scornubel), and in it we see Elminster and a lady or two who will later become famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) as members of the Seven Sisters. This tale is written in 1967, and D&D isn’t released until 1974 (1975 to me and most of the wider world), so my fiction writing in the Realms predates the game.

As a result, I was piling details up far more deeply than most published game settings ever acquire, long before there WAS a D&D game (can’t do registered trademark symbols in this primitive e-mail, but please take it as written that they’re here, okay?).

I so admired the release of AD&D (specifically the Players Handbook, which put a Vancian magic system into specific game terms, just as the Monster Manual had already quantified monster specifics) that I turned the Realms into a matching-the-game setting. Regular Realmsplay started in 1978, and longtime Realms fans will notice that the greatest detail in the published Realms is found in places (Waterdeep, Cormyr, the Dales) where longtime adventuring companies (Player Characters) were based.

My players were and are superb actors/roleplayers, and demanded a world that felt real. They always wanted to know what was inside that caravan wagon passing by, and why (which of course forces some world design decisions on the DM, because the cargoes obviously mean that Place X produces an excess of cloth, but needs metals, and Place Y needs that cloth, and so on). As a result, the Realms got literally days (uh, when I was going to school, which would be my “study time”) of me puzzling out economics, trade routes, currents, prevailing winds, floods and droughts, mineral wealth locations, and so on. Again, others have worked in the Realms, so not all of this survives in a coherent manner, and of course it’s never been set forth in a “Trading & Traders” or “Merchants & Money” product, because many gamers would avoid such a product in droves. :}

So that’s the way I did it. DRAGON issue 54 contains my work-in-progress unfolding of a pantheon of gods, and a glance at that article will show you three things at work: like all D&D gamers at the time, I was trying to stay official, matching deities with what Gary Gygax had revealed of his (the Greyhawk setting); I wanted lots of gods (one aspect of the Realms that’s thus far been neglected is the extent to which Jonthun the baker next door worships Chauntea for a good harvest, Tymora for good luck in the baking, Talos for good weather so the grain crops won’t be ruined, and so on, all in the same day); and I wanted lots of small, evil cults so PCs would have lots of evil rituals to disrupt and maidens to rescue off of sinister altars. :} (Another element we haven’t yet properly addressed in print is clergy: exactly what prayers do they prey, what do they wear, what are their taboos, aims in life, and what are the hidden agendas or personal pursuits of the controlling clergy; all of that. We know entirely too much about the gods, and not enough about their churches.)

And yes, Josh, it takes time. Oodles and oodles of time. More than 35 years for me, thus far; the Realms has become my life, taken me all over the world, and changed everything for me.

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Originally posted by Weiser_Cain

What's LoD?

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I've heard a lot of complaints about things being taken out that were in earlier versions of the game. If this is true, (is it?)

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Originally posted by SirUrza

FRCS, MoF, F&P, RoF, LoD, and SilverMarches are all 3E.

Everything else is 3.5. Player's Guide to Faerun is the "update" book of anything 3E that need a "conversion."

I for one would have just prefered a FRCS 3.5, but obviously Wizards got away with milking us for more money by having 2 books that server 1 purpose, instead of a FRCS that might cost $5-10 more then the original. You might think that's crazy, but PGtF costs only $9 less then the FRCS and doesn't have a fraction of the Realmslore the FRCS had. Why they couldn't have just converted the FRCS to 3.5 with an additional 10-20 pages to cover the other 3E products is beyond me.

Oh wait, I know, it's so that people that already didn't have the FRCS would STILL have to buy the FRCS AND PGtF.. for a grand total of $75 (after tax,) instead of 1 $45-50 sourcebook for EVERYONE.

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Originally posted by warlockco

So you are saying I should buy a Second Copy of the FRCS that costs more and just reprints everything?!?!

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Originally posted by Kuje

Naughty, Naughty Sage. :)

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BTW that list was first created on the Boards that Must Not be Named. :)

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