Faraer's page

Erik, I'm much in agreement with your editorial about the importance of authors, and about the likely effect of TSR's stressing of brands over writers' names in blinding people to it (including some who from the way they speak they could never, of course, be so affected, and they don't pay attention to advertising, either). It's clear why a company might want to sideline creators as replaceable staff and freelancers, but all those brands were built and sustained by specific people's vision and work. I think this author-blindness is one of the bigger obstacles to the maturity of the RPG culture; there's also the factor of the developer's role, but that doesn't change the status of the author as the main determinant of how a book is, and the most reliable gauge of how you'll like it, more so than reviews or ad material or cursory inspection, or what the publisher happens to be.

Just as you're putting authors on the cover, it helps would-be subscribers when you can announce who's due to appear in Dungeon in the next six months. (It happens that my subscription is just lapsing...)

And I appreciate the Darlene calligraphy too: lends the adventures a lot of legitimacy.

Of course, any time you want to make GreyhawkUncial available that would be good.

Erik,

To continue that discussion on the wizards.com boards:

Sure, there's a difference in tone, though it's a qualitative thing and not a quantitative thing such as 'less subtle'. You see the subtlety in things whose wavelength you're on. The Realms is certainly a secondary world for its own sake and not a utilitarian place to set adventures. It has more non-S&S in it -- more Tolkien and Dunsany, for one -- than Greyhawk, but on the other hand Ed Greenwood is a working, productive part of the S&S tradition whereas Gary's setting hasn't been since 1988. So I don't deny the aspect you called 'history porn', and I'm kind of glad you're calling it how you see it, but the Realms is not 'the "history porn" setting' predominantly: it is, as I've said, a sword and sorcery setting. Now, I like both worlds and I have no interest in 'generic' adventures given Realms names; neither am I liable to use unmodified such adventures given Greyhawk names in a Greyhawk campaign, but that's a good plan for the sake of familiarizing that world. I'm also glad you realize that an adventure with Greyhawk names is no harder to convert to one's home campaign than a 'generic' one actually set in a stand-alone world the reader knows nothing about.

The god stuff you mention, though, is errant, exceptional stuff that was done to the Realms against its nature, mostly by the Avatar novels (one series out of many). (You can't characterize the Realms by its most ill-judged product any more than the WoG.) The point being that an authentically Realmsian adventure for Dungeon would not be historical, or superheroic, but along the lines of Haunted Halls of Eveningstar, Halls of the High King, "Irongard", or "The Haunted Well" (the second stonedelve that Ed submitted to Dungeon years past). It is partly true that this isn't the direction the published Realms has gone in, in which case, you get a chance to help it out while publishing modules more to your own taste.