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Originally posted by Kentinal

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

Goodness, no, Sage, bring the Lady K along! The more the merrier!

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I rather thought you would reply with something like this, *wink*

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

Goodness, no, Sage, bring the Lady K along! The more the merrier!

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

(yes, I’ve expanded the notes and updated them to 3.5e).

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Originally posted by Jindael

I spend almost all of my time detailing MARC 21 records to ensure that even the most unskilled computer user can find that elusive copy of Tanzra Swippersnap’s Guide to Lace Doilies and Tea Cozies, fourth edition.

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Originally posted by Jindael

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

(yes, I’ve expanded the notes and updated them to 3.5e).

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I am a cataloging librarian. I spend almost all of my time detailing MARC 21 records to ensure that even the most unskilled computer user can find that elusive copy of Tanzra Swippersnap’s Guide to Lace Doilies and Tea Cozies, fourth edition. It’s a thankless task and with nearly painful levels of minutia. But I shudder at the mere idea of the workload involved in updating all of Ed’s notes to 3.5. I would think he would need a full time staff.

Which I would happy to apply for. ^_^

EDIT: Of course, by the time I was a fraction of my way through the workload, I’m sure there would be a new edition. Hooray for Job Security! :p

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Originally posted by Steven Schend



It's a beyond thankless task (speaking as someone who's seen Ed's basement and some of Ed's notes), mainly because most of the notes haven't been brought into 1st Edition D&D, let alone 2nd, 3rd, or 3.5 edition....

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Originally posted by Jindael

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Originally posted by Steven Schend



It's a beyond thankless task (speaking as someone who's seen Ed's basement and some of Ed's notes), mainly because most of the notes haven't been brought into 1st Edition D&D, let alone 2nd, 3rd, or 3.5 edition....

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Just imagine a job �updating� Ed�s basement. Trying to file stuff in the right place, updating statistics to be compliant with current rules, and the occasional �Holy %$#@!!! So that�s why!�. Perhaps my idea of Mr. Greenwood�s basement is a touch overblown, but I get a strong mental image of a single naked bulb over a tiny desk, surrounded by heaps of overflowing boxes, ala Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Then there are the perks; �Why, Hello Lady Hooded. That�s a lovely skirt you�re wearing. Oops, I seemed to have dropped my pen.� )

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Originally posted by Steven Schend

It'd be a better bet that you might choose a task completeable in one lifetime, like cataloguing the fictional books of the Realms (a task I started but it's lapsed some since I gave that initial list from 2000 to WotC).

Steven

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Originally posted by rweston

Questions: It was alluded (way way back in a post somewhere last year) that in your home game Lurue(sp?)/Silverymoon was essentially the goddess of magic. The post whent on to explain TSR wanted a more "human" face to magic for the published Realms thus Mystra was elevated/emphasised and Silverymoon danced off to the side.
In your home game was Mystra always a goddess of magic, or was she something you added as a result publishing with TSR?
Did you always use the elven & dwarven pantheons?
I suppose I'm asking if the gods you listed in the article way back in Dragon #50-something the actual list you were using in your game, or your list + offical add-ons for the article?

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Well met again, all. Your Lady Hooded One returns (thank you for that naming, Wooly Rupert!), with Ed’s latest:


Hi, Wooly Rupert. Well, now: Nobanion and Lurue are, of course, the Lion and the Unicorn of British nursery rhyme fame (with all the meanings that go with that, too; they are among other things the supporters of the royal coat of arms for that country, and in many other coats of arms associated with England).
Yet they’re also MUCH more than that. For me, I have to be able to imagine a deity with some awe, and I often do it by attaching to them emotions evoked by other fiction. So, the Lion is also Aslan the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (Christian allegorical fantasy classics soon to appear in a Disney movie that * might * turn out to be okay, and already on film in any number of BBC adaptations down the years, some of them superb). The Narnia books are hated by some, loved by others, but chock-full of little heart-wrenching scenes regardless, and are among the top-selling English-language fiction books of all time.
I didn’t mean my lion-god to BE Aslan, of course; as you saw in that DRAGON article, a lot of names were placeholders at the time, waiting for Mr. Gygax to round out the “official” (Greyhawk) pantheon. Aslan has that name because he has evoke that “awe” for me. The name “Aslan” is Indian in origin (India, not native North American), and the lion is of course a Christian symbol for ‘the King’ from way back, hence its lavish use in royal heraldry.
So “Aslan” went away the moment TSR decided to publish the Realms (mustn’t lift central characters from other authors, even in homage, though I did unwittingly [i.e. I’d forgotten] sneak one direct homage into the Realms [Aglarond, for Tolkien], and beat another well-known fantasy author to a name by coincidence, coining the name “Ashaba” for the river that runs through Shadowdale years before David Eddings used it in his Malloreon books).
Lurue is my own invented name, but it started almost as the deity’s ‘private’ name, with “Silverymoon” being her popular one (and, yes, the city of the same name was originally envisaged as the root and center of her faith). Not only is Lurue the Unicorn of “the Lion and the Unicorn,” she’s also the mysterious, eponymous unicorn from the children’s book THE LITTLE WHITE HORSE by Elizabeth Goudge, AND she’s also meant to evoke the Unicorn of Amber, in Roger Zelazny’s classic Amber books (where the Unicorn inspires awe even among the jaded royal family who use her as their badge). She was always meant to be mysterious, and there’s very little about her that didn’t go into POWERS & PANTHEONS that doesn’t now contradict the published Realms.
Originally, Lurue WAS magic—before Julia Martin added the name “Weave” to my GenCon explanations of ‘the great web of magic that’s everywhere in Toril, binds Toril together, and IS Toril,’ Lurue was the embodiment of the Weave. As such, she could teleport without error or limit, through all barriers and spells, was immune to all known magical [and psionic] effects, could raise dead, heal, regenerate and restore with the touch of her horn—and also spew silver fire from it—and so on. Her very proximity dispels illusions and curses, purifies and neutralizes poisons and taints, and purges diseases. And on and on. [To the usual chorus of “Look, yet another all-powerful Greenwood munchkin!” I reply: Yes. Of course. This is THE all-powerful goddess, and she’s also whimsical. We can’t understand why she does what she does, so she can’t be controlled, or act like any sort of tyrannical munchkin, any more than a mountain range or an ocean can be.] She tended to be as curious as a newborn babe, utterly fearless, and kind to injured creatures. And yes, I tucked in the “patron of virgins, but can also make barren wombs bear” folklore, too. Only virgins could ride her, and those who did got that silver hair the Chosen who are Mystra’s daughters all share, and ‘wild talent’ innate magical abilities, and were marked for special tasks and achievements all their lives.
The TSR designers quite rightly (given the humanocentric core of that version of AD&D, with its level and power limits on non-humans) wanted human gods to be front and center and of the greatest power and importance, so Mystra (most important to intelligent creatures trying to USE magic) became also the Guardian or Mother of the Weave, and Lurue sort of . . . danced sideways. To become the awe-inspiring mystery she is now.
Now, as for the Knights of the Unicorn, I do have more, but dare not pass it on right now for fear of trampling on something another creative person is already working on, in the Realms. That’s one rule I’m going to be very careful not to break, no matter how much we all want to delve into lore and secrets of the Realms. So: sorry, and I hope you’ll understand.


So saith Ed. Thy Hooded One can add this much: we Knights met Lurue once, in the High Forest, on the banks of the Unicorn Run. She was dancing on her hind legs on empty air, about forty feet off the ground, in full silvery moonlight -- and we all grovelled. She LOOKED into our eyes, each of us -- and Ed had written out long, detailed notes for each of us for the dream-visions we received then. When we awakened, we were all reinvigorated, healed of all hurts, had maximum charges in all of our magic items, and so on. The one virgin among us (no, I’m not going to name her, but it wasn’t my character, all you guessers) had been touched by Lurue’s horn, and her eyes were two flames of silver fire. Also, her hair had gone silver and moved constantly by itself, as if waves of wind were passing through it. She gained feather fall and water walk innate abilities on the spot, and ironguard as long as the silver fire was in her. It remained with her as we travelled, until we had to fight a certain archdevil in Myth Drannor.
In that encounter, we were overwhelmed by devils and were going down, just being buried in numbers. The archdevil saw the silver fire and went straight for the particular Knight, and after they’d started to fight and the character was being badly mauled, the player (thank whatever gods there be) REMEMBERED Ed’s notes of her dream-vision, and what she had to do. She fled onto the altar beside the devil (that was also a gate into the Nine Hells), and when the archdevil attacked her there, she embraced it and let it slay her.
And her silver fire went BLAM and took out altar, gate, archdevil, and all the other devils within a MILE, leaving all of us Knights lying dazed, unscathed, and alive . . . except she who’d sacrificed herself. She was gone forever.
And at that moment, far away in Shadowdale, Storm Silverhand was helping a farm wife give birth to her first child, a girl—and it came out stillborn. Storm raised the tiny body to make absolutely sure before she wrapped it and turned to comfort the mother . . . and its eyes opened, and they were silver and knowing, and the mind of our lost Knight was in the now-living child and wondering how by Lurue to tell Storm who she was.
Hmm. I’m crying again, just remembering it.
Another of Ed’s beautiful little moments, that will make me treasure our Realmsplay forever.

Ladies and gentlesirs, I give you: the Realms!
The Hooded One

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Ah, shrewdly spoken, Melfius! Well said!
Hello, all. Herewith, Ed replies to darling Woolpert:



Wooly Rupert, Elminster and the Seven Sisters were ALWAYS Chosen of Mystra as they came into personal focus (in other words, by about 1972 I knew what a Chosen of Mystra was, some of the identities of the Chosen, and a lot about Mystra herself; I hadn’t figured out who the Seventh Sister was, and in fact left that for Steven Schend to deal with, much later, but before there ever was a D&D game, I knew that a select circle of powerful folk, many of the ladies being sisters who had silver hair and were ‘almost’ daughters to Mystra, were ‘special’ servants of hers, called the Chosen).
When TSR first purchased the Realms, this matter was informally discussed VERY briefly and then kept for my home campaign rather than being championed into print (I believe the thinking on the TSR end was that Dragonlance had used gods masquerading as mortal characters or developing from mortals before the readers’ eyes, so this Dragonlance-specific element had to be omitted from the Realms, but this is just a personal guess).
I dropped plenty of hints as to a ‘special relationship’ between Khelben, El, the Sisters, and Mystra and Azuth, and particularly between El and Mystra, during my 1986 turnover packages to Jeff Grubb at TSR, but you have to peer very carefully at the Old Gray Box to see hints of them.
The formal relationship was properly introduced to TSR later on for the same reasons I’d created it originally: they wanted to know why in tarnation certain characters could do, or had accomplished, what they did (and the status of Chosen was the explanation).
I know some TSR folks thought this was a mistake, and others welcomed the ‘superhero’ flavor the Chosen might be able to inject into the Realms (this being a currently-enticing design philosophy, at the time), but for me, it was merely revealing the explanation for why the Zhents hadn’t swept away Shadowdale long ago, the bad guys weren’t ALREADY ruling the known Realms, and so on: there had to be vigorous Forces For Good or Stability or the Status Quo ‘on the ground’ in the Realms, working against the jackbooted hurl-all-walls-down-ers.
Please note that this was part of limiting Mystra’s dominant divine power, and that only she was to have Chosen. Continuing the superhero vein, other creators working in the Realms invented Chosen of X and Chosen of Y, but it was never intended that other deities have Chosen who were more than mortal champions or individuals marked with the deity’s favor: Mystra was and is ‘special.’ As the goddess of magic in a high-magic world, she has to be.
So yes, “El and Storm and Khelben and the rest” WERE “Chosen from the beginning,” but the decision to feature them as such WAS “decided later on.”



So saith Ed. I’ve read longhand pencil manuscripts of Ed stories that bear dates in the early 1970s (before there was a D&D game) that refer to various characters being Chosen (one passage I recall was: “So it comes to this, Chosen of Mystra. Think you your fancy titles impress me, or will avail you one finger’s-worth in deciding this fray?”).
love to all,
THO

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Originally posted by RodOdom

At the bookstore I was leafing through a copy of The Hobbit, which reminded me that the Shire (and perhaps other parts of Middle Earth) had a postal service.

Do areas in Faerun have something akin to a postal service?

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Originally posted by The Hooded One

Ed replies:

.... Of course, over the years, we stopped saying “player to player” and “player to DM” and replaced them with a gesture (hand waved over one’s own head; take whichever hand is free, raise it until the back of your own wrist is touching the top of your own head, twist the hand upright, and wave hello to the world).

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Originally posted by Kuje

I swear, Ed, someday I will manage to get the rest of those rituals out of you. :) Even if it is through private buggings and replies.... hehehe.

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