The Ultimate Forgotten Realms

A while back I read a blog post (I can't recall the blog just now ) that hoped that “The Sundering”, the relaunch of 5e Realms, would basically shatter the Realms into an infinite number of alternate Realms. This would allow Wizards of the Coast to have their own official version, and each DM to have his own version in which events would play out in their own unique way. The idea would be akin to Marvel's infinite alternate universes.

I love this idea. It feels liberating to me. For a while now I've had this idea percolating in the back of my mind of starting with the the Grey Box, City of Splendours, and maybe a few other supplements and running an Ultimate Forgotten Realms campaign using D&D 5e.

The idea would be to run a campaign set in Waterdeep with a fresh take on things. The players wouldn’t be able to trust anything they previously knew about FR canon. Old villains, heroes, and history would be rewritten with new takes or twists and thus allowing the DM to have complete control over the campaign. I also think it would let many players sit back and enjoy playing knowing that they are the stars of the show and that they aren’t going to be shown up by Mary Sues or break the setting by doing some sort of crazy thing that might have an important realms shaking event. It would also allow the players and DM to learn about the world through play as opposed to having to earn a bachelors degree in FR history.

I suppose that for many groups out there this isn’t a new idea. Personally though I know this has been the case for the few groups I been with. Typically theres that guy that knows more than the DM and another that has no clue whatsoever. As a DM I can see this offering a happy medium solution. In the future I think I might begin a series of posts dedicated to my own personal Ultimate Forgotten Realms. If I suddenly fall off the face of the internet you know that Ed Greenwood has sent his Realms Lore Canon Ninja hit squad after me.

Just Dropping In!

It was either in the Ruins of Undermountain or the City of Splendors box set that Ed wrote about how his players would go on merry chases across the roof tops in the city of Waterdeep. These chases would invariably lead to the PCs crashing through a skylight or roof to land in the precarious position of interrupting some sort of activity in the room below unexpectdly. This in turn might lead to a new adventure or just a fun encounter to break things up for a bit. So I thought it would be fun to create a random table you could use to create some unexpected twists and turns in your own game. Thus I present the Random Crashing Through The Roof Table. 

Random Crashing Through The Roof Table
Roll 1d12 or choose one:
1. A group of thieves are in the middle of planning a robbery.
2. A group of nobles masked and having an orgy.
3. A midnight tryst with a couple of important people having a secret scandalous affair.
4. A bizarre cult in the middle of a dark ritual or roll 1d4 below:
(1. summoning a demon 2. scarificing a virgin 3. opening a gate 4. rasing a dead comrade) 
5. A bunch of young drunk bravos looking for a fight.
6. A wizard in the middle of a very sensitive magical experiment.
7. The resting place of a monster.
8. The room contains a glowing gate to another place of the DMs choice.
9. A group of bandit counting their loot an a recent job.
10. A giant attic spider nest full of cobwebs and baby spider swarms.
11. The house is haunted and now the PC's are trapped inside until they can figure out how to get the spirit(s) in the house to rest in peace.
12. The PC's crash into a store or other place of business thats just been robbed. The city watch has just arrived and its looks like they are the ones that did the breaking in! Roll 1d6 below for type of shop:
(1. Book Store 2. Bank 3. Jewellery Shop 4. Antique Store 5. Magic Shop 6. Weapons Shop)

Thanks for dropping in!

The Ruins Of Myth Drannor

So today I wrap up my week of talking about some of my favorite Ed Greenwood, Forgotten Realms stuff. You might have missed Monday's, and Tuesday's posts on my old, and now defunct blog Zombie World, due to me switching over to this new blog halfway during the week.

Today's post features the Ruins of Myth Drannor box set. Here's what you get inside this slim box:



4 Poster maps
8 cardsheets, featuring important locations in the ruins, and random tables
8 MONSTROUS COMPENDIUM sheets
A 128-page Campaign Guide
A 32-page Adventure BookletWhy does this box kick more ass than Chuck Norris after drinking a 4 pack of Red Bulls? It's because it's a mega-dungeon in disguise. At least it took me a little time to figure that out. It's essentially a giant above ground dungeon that collects a series of what some people today would call lairs, or mini-dungeons into one location.


I sort of imagine Myth Drannor as what Rivendell from Lord of the Rings might have been like if Sauron managed to infest it with his evilness and monsters. Minus that big silly flaming eye. I'm mean really? A flaming eye? Really?

So you have this awesome ancient elven city, long ago it embraces all the other cool races, like humans, dwarves, halfling, and gnomes. They live in harmony and do all sorts of cool and awesome things, and then the shit hits the fan. Boom. Myth Drannor gets a serious case of evil invaders syndrome. Orcs and goblin kind are everywhere. Evil Dudes 1, Good Guys 0.

So today you have a Myth Drannor full of a variety of evil factions all seeking to rape and plunder the once glorious elven city for everything it ever had. Wealth, magic, and all sorts of cool magical nick-knacks like awesome rings of totally rad wishes, wands of yo-momma, magic 8-balls, and that really rare 1977, July issue of Playboy magazine (really, I just read it for the articles).

Basically it provides the DM with an awesome framework from which to build his own campaign. But even if your not into pre-made stuff, there's more than enough material here that you can rip off for your own game.

One of my favorite quotes from the box is found on page 3 of the Adventure Book:

On the Other hand, many AD&D game adventures begin with the warning that random encounters should be used with caution, so as not to ruin a party's chances by overwhelming them before they get anywhere. Apply no such caution here! If your PCs start to feel like rocks bouncing down a mountainside during an avalanche, you're doing it right!

What I dig about this is that it basically states that Myth Drannor is a deadly place. Just trying to reach a location in the ruins is tough, never mind the location itself. Of course the rewards for such danger are just as equal. Not only that, but the satisfaction of having accomplished something in an environment so tough is also just as rewarding as cool treasure and new magical doodads.

Final thoughts. This seems like a pretty original module, and well executed to boot. Defiantly an important piece of Realms lore, and a must have for any DM that really wants to have a feel for what the Forgotten Realms is really like.

The City Of Splendors

Today I'm continuing on with the theme of chatting up some of my favorite Forgotten Realms and Ed Greenwood products from back in the day.

Yesterday I wrote about my love for the first Undermountain box set. The city of Waterdeep and Undermountain go hand in hand. It's like Batman and Robin, milk and Oreo cookies, or me and your mom...Annnyway, today I follow up with The City of Splendors box set.

This is what you get in the box:

A 128-page Campaign Guide with expanded city map keys and new information on every part of the city

A 96-page Who's Who, giving you details on the nobles and other NPCs of Waterdeep (over 100 new characters in this book alone!)

A 64-page Adventurer's Guide for players, with the Adventurers' Quarter, a new area of Waterdeep complete with over 50 new NPCs

A 16-page Secrets book, hiding the secrets of the NPCs and adventures of the Adventurers' Quarter

6 poster maps, including new maps of the city and two photo maps of the Adventurers' Quarter

16 MONSTROUS COMPENDIUM Appendix pages, with 13 never-before-seen monsters to haunt the shadows of the city

Dude, that's a lot of stuff.

When it comes down to it that's what the beauty of box sets is in my opinion. Hardcover books have their place, but when you want to disseminate a metric shit ton of information on an imaginary fantasy city this is the only way to go in my opinion. For example, I own the wicked awesome Ptolus campaign setting by one of my heroes Monte Cook. Ptolus is probably one of my most prized RPG books. The problem is it's so fricken huge. I have a hard time lugging the 700 page full colour hardcover behemoth around to read in my free time, and it can be really unwieldy to flip through when your looking for specific things. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love that book, and it sets the bar at an all new level, but sometimes size does matter.

To be honest I haven't read through the entirety of all of the books included in the City of Splendors box. From the good portion I have read, there's a lot of excellent information here that a DM needs to know if you wants to actually run this thing. Probably more information than you really need, or could actually use in an entire campaign of your own. Combine this with the Ruins of Undermountain box and you've got enough stuff to play for years and years and not need to purchase anything else...Right...Because us gamer types are known for only buying shit were actually going to use.

So what are my final tthoughts on this thing? While this box might not be as good as the Ruins of Undermountain box,  it's still full of some ass kicking, grade A gaming material. And as I said before if you plan on running a true Forgotten Realms campaign with Undermountain, it's really hard to go wrong with this. Even if your version of the Realms is 3e this box really puts the 3e version of the Waterdeep source book to shame. Yeah, OK, it might be a little bit shiny with it's alluring full colour art work and the flip out centerfold of your mom in the middle, but really I found there was very little meat to it. So if your going to play in Waterdeep, I feel like you own it to yourself to scrounge the back alleys of the inter-webs and pick this up. You can thank WotC/Hasbro for making that job harder than it really had to be since they stopped selling PDFs a while back.

Oh, one last thing. Fuck that 4e version of the Realms. I'm sure even Ed Greenwood thinks it's bullshit. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if in some grand conspiracy they have the real Ed Greenwood locked up in the dungeon under the WotC headquarters, and have replaced him with a 4e loving robot under their control. Of course now that I've revealed that I'm going to have to go into hiding in order to evade the assassin robots that they will be sending to kill my ass.

I'm on to you WotC!

The Ruins Of Undermountain

Undermountain, the largest known mass grave in Faerun.

I don't own the actual boxed set, but I do have a PDF version that I was able to print out and bind. And because a friend of my does own the real thing, I was able to get the four poster maps copied in black and white by a friend of mine in the printing business.

This sucker came out in 1991, and I feel as if it's another one of those essential Realms products. This is probably the first so called mega-dungeon to ever be actually published. at the very least it was probably one of the better produced ones at the time. In a lot of ways I feel as if it still holds it's own today against a lot of modern products.

So whats in this thing anyway?

The set includes:

• A 128-page book describing Undermountain, its history, its horrors, and details of the first three levels of the dungeon;
• A 32-page adventure book for use exclusively with Undermountain and Waterdeep;
• Four full-color maps of the vast and dangerous dungeon;
• Eight Monstrous Compendium pages of new monsters; and
• Eight durable cards loaded with traps, treasures, and trinkets to fill your dungeons.

So here's the deal. I think that when a lot of people first see Undermountain they they think they're getting a fully fleshed out mega-dungeon. When they find out that it appears to be incomplete they leave disappointed. But you know what? With the exception of a few things, I think it's pretty much perfect.

Starting with the 128 guide book. We get all the important basic information we need to understand and run this behemoth of a dungeon, all in the first 15 pages. Think about it after reading those 15 pages you can master what it takes to run this thing, and most importantly make it your Undermountain.  The next hundred pages cover the key locations spread out over the first 3 levels presented. This gives you an idea of what you can do in Undermountain and help you create your own adventures. The last section covers important NPCs, new magic items and spells, as well as some advice on running and expanding this thing.

The second book covers adventures. For the most part these adventures are really just a frame work for the DM to flesh out and customize for his players. Having cut my teeth during the 3e days the first time I saw the format I kinda balked at it. Today I've gained an appreciation for this kind of presentation. Like the key room encounters in the Undermountain guide book, I feel like less is more, and really allows the DM to better mold his adventures to his own style and preferences. Then there's a section on older monsters and their variants, with an explanation on how they fit into the dungeon.

Of course as it seems was common back in the day you get 8 Monstrous Compendium pages. In a way I kinda wish they still made monster books like this. Perhaps that could be an OSR project I could get on at some time in the future. But the real gems here are the 8 cards loaded with traps, treasures, and other random tables to run things on the fly and add something special during a game session. I mean holy shit, there's a Snares and Lures card! How great is that?! Theres also a Dungeon Dressing table that includes sounds, smells, and things. Pure gold if you ask me.

Lastly the poster maps. So I have mixed feeling on these, and if I have any complaints about the box it's here. I find that the maps might be cool to put on the wall, their just too big to be practical in an actual game session. In addition, they have the random encounter tables on them, which I also feel was not the best place for them. Better to have made additional stock cards for them in addition to the one with traps and what not. On a cool not there are two kinds. There are the traditional Wandering Monster Encounters, and then the Attracted Monster Encounter tables to roll on anytime the PCs are in a fight or make other loud noise. This is in order to highlight just how deadly this dungeon really is, and I think it's brilliant!

Finally the maps themselves. Personally I just feel they're not the most interesting to explore. I do like how the keyed areas are highlighted on the maps. But over all the rooms and halls just seem for the most part to be too open, and perhaps too random. By that I mean I feel like little thought was put into the creation of the dungeon itself. OK so it was created by a Mad Wizard, but even then, I feel like the dungeon needs to be a little more modular with discreet sections to it that could be made into little lairs spread across the whole thing. Who knows, I've never actually used them myself so perhaps I'm just talking shit. At any rate this this the thing about the box I like least.

Final thoughts. Another home run. You could do a lot worse than buy and use pieces of it in your campaign. As a tool for teaching new DMs I think it's invaluable, and i highly recommend the use of the collection of random traps, and dungeon dressing, and other cards to be used at the game table. Every time I see my copy of Undermountain on the shelf, My heart aches to run it. There's just something powerful about this piece of gaming history. Of course if you disagree with me feel free to let me know in the comments.