Legends Q&A: #2 (Patreon)

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Legends of the Realms Q&A. Are there any sign languages that have come to prominence in the realms? Are there communities where it's become the predominant language? Alex The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is the game gave us two from the beginning. Thieves Can't has always had a sign language component because there are many times in which thieves wanted to communicate in a heist situation or a crowded urban situation without going, hey, you know, and alerting somebody so they would give signals.

And also the illusionist secret language. In the earliest editions of the game, there was a silent language in the realms. There have been two things, shorthand gestures. And I've and I'll be recording one of those tonight when we get to lower the Shining South and the elves also, so that I built into all my languages over the years as the languages are ongoing, George Crabbe shows, who is in on this call, heroically started assembling lexicons, which was a very good way of drawing together all the tossed into the void baffled glad that every single designer and editor said Oh, this new word, this word means fire to the arts.

And then it just they just tossed it into the void. So George, wanting a little reality inconsistency in the setting, started compiling all the lists, and George and his cohort in realms, Laura Lordship Eric Boyd have been peppering me for years with questions like, So how would the elves say, Open the door, You know? And we, we type in little things and they've been building lexicons.

Part of the things that goes with every lexicon is how all the racial languages like, say, the gnomes don't talk whatever how they count. And that doesn't just mean how they count with the clay tablets or in advocacy or something, how they count when they're licked. They count on their fingers. What base is it? How do they do it?

What's the gesture for tens and ones? Do they, you know, all that stuff. So you start getting into that. And one of the things that's in both the Elvish lore for tonight and The Shining so for is gestures, as in rude gestures, because we all have those and there are differences in our own real world as, as you know from watching, say, cheesed off soccer players or football players, if you're English, give it to fans, other players in the rest in a different way than Americans would make the same gesture, you know, So you start noticing cultural differences.

And the the old the very old difference of the way the British give the finger as opposed to, say, the Americans give the finger with the the V and all of the rest of it. And so because of that, I was building gestures into the languages, too, because they were part of the communication. And there are at least three realms based adventurers I know of over the years.

And one of them was an earlier adventures league adventure that was played competitively at GenCoin, because in those days, the forerunner of the Adventurers League was the RPG. And there were the RPG had an open tournament just as the A.D. and had an open and they ran at Gen Con and they conflicted. When you got to the final round, you couldn't advance in both because they were at the same time.

But one of the early adventurers involved an assault on a fortress and it was very loosely based on that scene in The Wizard of Oz movie, The Wizard of Oz movie that we all remember out of the Wizard of Oz movies, the one with Judy Garland that we all remember when they they get into the Wicked Witch of the West's Citadel.

They see Craig, some of the guards put on their their costumes and you see the cowardly lion's tail twitching as they marched into the castle at the end of the line. Okay, They did one of those. And, of course, the way to assault the Citadel was to be able to communicate with hand gestures. And they weren't just standard hand gestures.

They were a special code that had been worked up for the adventure. And then we got into, as we detailed the realms, I was adding sign languages that the undersea creatures used to look at, that in particular versus Hogwood wouldn't, and so on. That became part of various adventure modules. We called them all modules in those days because again there was the getting past the door guards and getting into an area where you, as the intruders weren't supposed to be and doing it silently.

And not only does speech carry underwater in weird ways, not the ways you want it to, but it creates vibrations. The blows create vibrations, which is why, you know, it's always hilarious when somebody goes fishing, when they stand up in a in a boat and they kick things and they open their lunch box with a crash and then they throw something into the water and then they say, don't disturb the fish.

Well, it's a bit late by then because the fish are hearing by vibrations. So and in the same way we were putting all that stuff into the realms. And there are also entire codes that happened within guilds, particularly theming guilds, but all guilds, merchants communicate with each other in two ways Static symbols, as in the classical thing is you find a weird rune like an American tramp symbol, you know, scratched on something.

Oh, they'll give out food here or they don't like us here. You'll get attacked. Or if you talk sweet, you can get a bed for the night in the barn sort of thing. And it would just be a symbol left. And there are trail markers of the realms and they were in the original rooms. Turn over, and some of them made it into the old gray box.

But of course, the ones that made it into the old gray box were most adventure related because in the old days of publishing, there was no digital. So word count ruled and they were ruthlessly cutting out all sorts of things. That added to the realism of the setting but weren't germane to the actual action of the adventure because they just didn't have the word count.

So sign language is one of those things that gets left out. All it comes down to is a guard will signal to another guard if you do this, and then you move on because you have no more word count. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there that is the hardest thing to put into a written product.

Only slightly less hard is full heraldry because something that you can look at with your eyeball and go, Oh, it's a white tree on a green field. Got it. When you're describing it in words of six branches, one of them goes northeast and then splits twice. Then, you know, and then you filled two pages to describe the same image and you're hoping the person who reads it ends up drawing something that's vaguely like what you were looking at when you wrote it.

So, I mean, yeah, that's the problem. They're in there, but they get left out a lot. That's right. The original campaign set with Keith Parkinson's horse and Rider on the cover and Far zero. We call it Far Zero or the old gray box at TSR. There were there were there were colloquial terms we had to use because it also has a four digit SKU number, which nobody ever remembers.

Yeah, you see, George saves everything. George saves our behinds because, yeah, I'm just typing it and I'm running, I'm running. I'm like the guy running through the burning house, grabbing the precious things, knowing that, okay, the fire flames are right behind me. That's my life and has been for, what, the last 40 years. And George is the guy going, you know, we're going to need that someday.

Thank goodness for George. Why are there walls around water deep, even where there are cliffs to protect the city, RPG match. The walls are there for two reasons. One, the higher up you are, the better sightlines you have. If you're on the walls watching somebody arrive. And that was of crucial importance to all settlements in the north because ORC hordes that devoured and despoiled everything in their past used to be a feature of living in the solid coast north.

We are overdue for another or caught. Why it hasn't happened. Plot armor because czar death control and then later wasI controlled the setting. But that was one of the things in the North. The orcs breed like rabbits that breed like rabbits in the northern caverns of the cold mountains. They out breed their food supply. So what happens is the the clan elders of the orcs who do not want to be killed by all these young, vigorous, strong and belligerent orcs, say, Oh, time to prove yourself, just as I had to.

The Paradise is that way. Endless food and it's warm and it's verdant, just head in that direction. So of course they boil up out of the mountains and head south, grabbing everything in the past. So having a taller walls meant that you could see them coming from farther away or anybody else coming from farther away. And it also meant if you were using catapults, trebuchet is, etc. And in the case of water deep, if you wanted any accuracy, it was ballistic giant crossbows.

They fire a lot farther the higher up they are because as the missile falls, it's falling from a greater height, so it actually reaches farther before it thuds doors. Those are the real reasons that you spend the money. The daily reasons are drunken citizens going over the edge at night and you think, oh, well, so what? Who cares?

You know, sort of like, oh, I guess Mr. Segway won't be with us tomorrow morning or whatever. But when it's a merchant with a wagon full of goods, then the guilds start to get annoyed and they say, What exactly are we paying our taxes for? And they said, Well, well, what do you mean? Wall Oh, you want a wall?

Sure, no problem. And so on. On the practical daily level, that also happened. Well, that happened in the Home Rails campaign on two occasions, because you'll note there are little places where the walls in the in my original maps don't go all the way through by the time we were getting city system and so on, they were like drawing fortifications like Mad Men because, hey, this was cool.

They could make it look like a giant castle. But in my original pencil things, there are bits gaps in the walls where one set was started the next and people were still falling through them. And in one memorable occasion, one of the members of the company of Crazed Ventures was doing a Weekend at Bernie's thing. He'd killed this merchant and he realized that he was going to get seen by the street patrols because he could see their lanterns.

There were multiple patrols, so he propped the guy up with an arm around his shoulders and he's he's saying, Oh, my friend here is just drunk. I'm just getting him home. And then he went over near the city, the dead. And one of the gaps in the walls was right where the city, the dead's walls ended. And this and he just pushed him over the edge in the middle of the night, just disposed of the bodies.

And and in in the real world, you can find out really cool things, particularly if you live in a large city, because if you have to park your car in some rubble strewn lot that used to be a building, if you do it in the wrong place, you'll find yourself walking across uneven asphalt. You'll think, why is this so?

And oh, there's asphalt over top of a railway line. And then you go, Where did this come from? Why was this here? And of course, most of us just say, Oh, okay, after I finish, stop stumbling over it, I'll forget about it, I'll go on. But, you know, sometimes you can find out fascinating history about, you know, why the railway was there and what they did with it and what they were mining under the like.

For instance, I work in a library in Port Hope or Port Hope is where they discovered Radium Marie Curie. And all those people walked around with lumps of radium in their white lab coats and showed them to kids and they all died of cancer and they didn't know any better. Well, they were dumping all the tailings from the mined all over port.

Hope. So If you go to Port Hope today, you'll see these beautiful mansions of the Victorian era, you know, with the widow's walk and the cupola and huge mature trees. And then you'll see a little yellow sign because they're going to have to dig the whole thing up and lock down because it's so radioactive. That's and so there's things like that everywhere.

And I tried to build stuff like that into the realms because once you build in a little history and George Crassus and Eric Boyd are masters of this, they come across something, some little history tag and they go, Wait a minute, that I can tie that this Elven kingdom over here. So now we know that in pre-history this happens and then it sets up a new adventure.

Can you explain more about True Named Magic, some of its practitioners, and how true names bear such importance to be considered magically powerful? Gustavo HURTADO True name Magic is something that was in the realms before Dante, and it's something that got downplayed at the beginning because it wasn't in the game. And then at a certain part of third edition got officially put into the game in a slightly clunky way, as in they didn't go far enough.

So there are gaps that make it open to abuse in the same way that when the wish spell was first added to the game was like, wait a minute, it's and we very quickly had to sort of put in restrictions and to how this could be used and so on or true name was the same way. And this is a very old idea in real world folklore and in fantasy words of power capitalized w p words of power were around Ursula Le Guin used them in Earthsea, Jack Vance used them, many other fantasy writers had them and they will say things like a spoke a name and the word name will be capitalized.

And the other thing is when you're fighting a dragon or something and Le Guin had this a human who can utter the right name at the right time, the dragon just recoils. Not because the dragon is necessarily going to be hurt on the spot, but it's like, Oh, this human has enough power that I have to be careful.

Because if you're portraying dragons as these arrogant long beings with long life who consider humans to be ephemeral cattle because the humans are, you know, dime a dozen and their life spans are so short and they're such idiots and they run around breeding and multiplying all over the place and and messing their own nest. And they don't understand the cycles of life and how things work in the world and that they're just to be avoided.

And the dragon goes to crush somebody and it's somebody who is being a wizard and has a beard and a staff and they say the right name and the dragon sort of goes, Whoa, you are worthy of my attention. You're worthy of my regard if you know that you're not just one of these cattle. And I had true names in the realms like that.

And I, I was using the older idea of, if you know somebody's true name, you have power over them. So you can compel them to do things like a super powerful, charmed person spell or you can bind them out of an area or into an area by weaving their true name into an incantation that is a boundary. So if you could trap them in your house, so say you say you get them in their home, in their own home, their own building and water deep, and you throw a cloak over their head and then you punch them really hard in the head and they fall under their own bed and you run out of the

bedchamber and you slam the door and then you put a chair against it. So they're not going to be easily be able to open it. The saying it's door opens outwards. Then you run out of the house and then you cast a careful incantation on the outside of the house that uses their true name. Well, they might get out of the bedroom the moment they're under dazed and can force down the door.

But then they find themselves a prisoner in their own home because you bound the entire building with their true name. So even if they smash open the shutters and try and get out a window, they have a choice. Either there's going to be a barrier that is so powerful, like a wall of force blocking the window opening, because that's the incantation you did.

Or they're going to fall with gravity or hurl themselves out the window, but they're going to take whatever damage you built into that barrier with their true name. And it could be that they're dead before they hit the ground because you built something in. So I was basing the true name on that very narrow thing. If you knew somebody drew name.

But also monsters have true names and certain substances that are natural, have true names. So not an alloy, not misrule. It doesn't have a true name because that's something that has to be made out of various component metals. But if somebody smelted a pure ingot of silver and you knew the true name of silver, there were things you could do with silver if you held it in your hand because you knew the true name, like, No, no, no, go ahead.

Yes. Yeah. So you can use it in two ways in avoidance thing, like a Faraday cage, a modern day Faraday cage. So for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, I won't go into who Faraday was or anything like that. Just if you have one of these modern cars that has a keyless fob and you press the button and it's lights come on and the engine starts and it opens its doors, and then you rapidly discover that it will do that when you didn't want it to, because the key is so sensitive or because there's only eight frequencies, everybody else in the same parking lot at the same football game or movie can

open your doors. A Faraday cage is a metal box or a thing that blocks radio frequencies. Well, in the same way, you can use a true name that way to block transmissions, and you could block incoming spells, or you can use it to empower you to do something. And the difficulty was that it got put into the game as a simple spell to name and not developed and not hedged.

So later on, later, designers looked at that and said, Oh, this is no good. Take it out again, because the difference between needing content as in Jeff Grubb and I carefully put wild magic in, is unpredictable as a plot device. But then they needed a new book. So Sam Cooke designed the World Magic Sourcebook and then it went into the game.

We said, Oh, no. And then, of course, on the next set of designers came along and said, Well, magic that breaks the game, let it go to print. We'll never mentioned it again. We'll take it out of the you know, so this has been going on but and true name had that fate but yes true name magic. The idea is if you know the true names of things, if you know certain words of power and they survive in the Jack fancy and magic system of the core rulebook, power words, stun power word blind power word kill.

Those were the words of power. That was that whole thing. But you linked that with a true name. For instance, if properly presented in the rules, you could link a power word kill with a true name of a being. You know, put the true name in the incantation of the power word kill. Then you utter the power word kill will facing the army, and you don't kill anybody except the person whose true name you ordered.

So the king's there with 80 nights between you and him, they are in full armor and he's cowering behind them and going, Yeah, yeah, you can't get me. You've got to go through all my nights. There's just one of you and you under the power word kill. And there's this thump and the lights all turn around and the king's just died.

You didn't have to go through anybody. That's how you combine the two. And because of that, various designers realizing the abuse to which it would be put without the full caveats written into the rules, took it back out of the game. But it's there as a alternate form of magic. Just like table magic, just like the magic of the moon wells.

Just like all the other magic I was alluding to. That is, aside from the weave, it's we've adjacent. Who was Jared before he killed a burning Jay? Is there some sort of nobility in the hara kiko There is nobility, yes. No, he was not part of it. That's one of those things where you kill the king, you become the king.

I'm king now. And of course, which all of this brings to mind that hilarious Monty Python skit, you know, where everybody keeps killing somebody else on the stage and saying, I'm the king is No, I'm that, you know, and the crown just keeps changing hands. That would be a case of that. There is a nobility. And the the thing that is always neglected in realms lore, because we've only really explored it in detail.

George has done it in impulse or we've done it in Cormier and we've done it in water deep and we've done it by omission in suburbia, by talking how talking about how Cynthia doesn't really have a nobility. It has a self-styled self-proclaimed nobility who try and reserve unto themselves the powers they have seen other nobles accorded in other places.

So it's sort of like a tool to be analogous to the United States of America in the real world. You know, they will say, we don't have kings. We don't have. But but if you're according to the really super wealthy special treatment that you don't give to somebody who lives in a slum, you're already building in a class into your society, even if you claim to have a classless society.

So we work that into the realms. By nobility means different things in different countries. In the realms, they actually have different powers and privileges, but they all sort of tend to get lumped together as nobility. And again, to go back to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you know, when the two peasants are talking about who's got to be a king, he hasn't got shit all over sort of thing.

They're sort of trying to figure out who's special and why. And one of the things we have neglected so far, again, because word count is precious and stuff that isn't directly germane to the adventure tends to get cut out or short shrift. We haven't really addressed, you know, if you become a noble, what does it mean in this particular spot in the realms, you know, do do you get to enter the room first?

Do you always get given gold plates to eat off of in a restaurant? What you know, and the problem with that is it takes pages and pages to list all that stuff. And you usually want to give the Dungeon Master maximum some freedom to tailor things to the adventure that they're playing at their table without having to try and memorize five pages of rights and privileges of the nobility.

So we tend to do one or two fictional examples, and that's it. What is the state of geopolitics In tomorrow, after the death of King Yara and Frost? Mantel, John Foster Oh, that is indeed something that Bob and I haven't talked about that for almost a year. The last time I talked to Bob was like two weeks ago, but we didn't talk anything at all about that particular spot in the realms.

And I my sense from the way he left it last time is because it's not as much a war footing as it was every everybody is a little more relaxed about things. But in terms of, you know, social change can happen and people are just living their lives. They're not stabbing anybody who's a stranger who comes into town because, oh, we're at war.

You know, they're not thinking that way at the moment. But what it means is that area is in flux again, because people are wondering what life is going to be like under you know, and they're some of them are daring to change the way they do certain things, as in more merchants are coming along the roads so new things can happen.

And that's sort of what my sense was for the moment. It's not it might be a building powder keg again, but for the moment, it's not an open war zone. And you're not worrying about the witch King and you're not worried, You know, at the moment the burners are off on the stove as opposed to things are exploding because you left them on the burners and walked away with the burners on.

Are there any particular chromatic dragons that have been, quote, corrected or at least urged to curb their behavior by the towns of justice? John Foster Yeah, exactly. And it's usually it's usually put that way, carrot as well as stick and one of the things they've been doing is in the same way that a a real world government would provide a tax incentive as well as a penalty.

Like we'll give you a write off if you invest in our film industry is instead of just saying we're going to tax you double if you invested in the film industry, you know, the the they you give the dragon an incentive. You give the dragon a possible benefit. And the dragon may resent your meddling in its affairs, as in you're trying to tell me what to do, how to live my life.

Yep. And then the dragon sort of stares eyeball to eyeball with, you know, four or 5000 members and goes, Yeah, I don't think I want to fight today because they're thinking I can't win this. So it's really do it or die. But they sweetening the pot by giving the dragon a possible benefit. Like if you do this, we'll ignore it when you do that, you know the sort of thing like and my aunt used to do this to my, my sisters.

I know who took the cookies out of the cookie jar. I'm prepared to forget that. I know who took the cookies out of the cookie jar if you do this. And suddenly she got a change in behaviors and cooperation she wouldn't otherwise have gotten by placing the threat and then removing it and offering a carrot and the Talons do a lot of that.

The other thing that talents are really good at is making pacts and agreements that restrict everybody's behavior with a hard and fast, clear rule to avoid violence in the future. Rather than the classic Dragons clash in midair, there can be only one victor or survivor. Instead, it's sort of like, you know, it's the old passive aggressive thing, you know, beautiful tavern you've got here.

Be a pity if something happened to it, you know, that sort of thing. So the Talons do a good job, a good line in that too, which is really good because you can use them as adventure movers and shakers without having to have them in the adventure. And that power scale, the violence going on, you just have the implied threat.

Detente, I think is the is the cool term that that the cool the cool countries in our real world use India because at least at least two of them are, in the words of the Norse and one of them will say, okay, there is one I will let on. If you've ever wondered why cloth or clothes, depending on where in the realms are from, hasn't fought with more dragons, that would be the reason he he came to certain agreements.

And you might say why would he do that? And I will remind you of the fate of Napoleon and then Hitler and everybody else who tried to fight a war on too many fronts at the same time, after they've been burned a couple times, they go, wait a minute, I can't afford to fight on this many fronts. Okay, I'll cut a deal here, because as long as and this is what the Italians are very good at, you have to give the Dragon a way to save face.

The dragon that you are chastising cannot feel like they're being punished and belittled and mocked. They have to feel like, come on, you know, this will be the for the best of all of us. And hey, you know, you are the most ferocious one south of the mountains. But, you know, if you'll just do this one thing for us, you can probably live to see another morning.

Just say it. But you have to give them a way to sort of. Oh, okay, fine. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But you gave it. You gave in too. Yeah. Just. Just look at John Rhys-Davies playing Gimli all the way through The Lord of the Rings. He was constantly getting his behind handed to him, and he was constantly, gruffly writing himself and moving on.

You know, that's still all that counts as one, you know. But and the his companions just let him do it because they understood that's how he dealt with the world. So That's how talents, justice, work. They're masters of dragon psychology. What is the most common ground flower in the realms? Wheat Rye barley Since corn is an import from Azteca, when did corn become commonly available to everybody?

G Brady E Commonly available for everybody still isn't because of climate, but on the Sword Coast on test here in Kalamazoo, Shand But now we're looking at several centuries. It's still not widespread. The most prevalent flower is barley. Because barley takes the most abuse in growing conditions, it can grow in the in the widest tolerance of growing conditions.

And it doesn't require, say, as much water as wild rice and other things. Do we think of wheat as the easy thing? And it is largely because we in the real world have terraformed so much of our environment to become a good growing thing for wheat. The problem with wheat is all of the wild grasses enjoy the exact same growing conditions.

So unless farmers are fighting back the grasses by burning the off constantly and doing other things, the we can lose battle or as barley doesn't. So barley is the most prevalent. I would say that corn is and corn meal as a result is widely available up and down the sword coast. Now from the I would say the tassels are up to about port last or so it's still a rarer and more highly priced in neverwinter and the shoulder places but corn is not huge crop the way it is in our North American temperate zone.

So in the same way I'm and you also have to think that almost all farms are subsistence farms that sell their excess. So a farm, a steading is a smallholding and it has chickens in order to get eggs, it has one or two oxen or mules as beast of to pull the plow. And it's growing food to support the family and to sell extra to either the miller in whatever the community is or your neighbors.

And it's only we don't have giant farms. What you do instead, if you are wealthy, is you rent somebody else's land or you hire somebody else to plant a specific crop for you on their land. So large, Symbion farm owners don't own huge farms. They own lots and lots and lots and lots of little ones in a patchwork.

Or they rent hire from lots and lots and lots of little ones. So again, everybody is growing things. But I will say this with the assistance of the LS, the sort of advice, assistance of the LS most farmers in the Dales Cormier suburbia, the heartland straight across and the temperate southern parts of the Sword Coast almonds further south.

They are experts on their own microclimate. They know what will grow best in their particular land and they understand crop rotation and not exhausting things because that's one of the things that's been shown to them over and over again, not by scientists, not by government officials, but by large monsters like dragons and wyverns losing battles and their corpses falling on to a field and devastating it.

And then it rots down. And that field is really verdant, about three or four years afterwards, and for about a stretch of four or five, you know, so it's like and by the way, in our real world, this used to be recognized in other ways. And you can even see it in pioneer cemeteries where you bury at Gertrude in the years, in the years before embalming and all of that stuff that in effect, poisons the soul sort of soil or lead coffins or anything, that if you just bury it, Gertrude, six feet down, the grass will grow higher over Gertrude.

And you could actually see if you wanted a slightly less grisly thing. Just look at a pasture in which the same horses or the same ponies or the same cows graze. And every place they drop a turd, the grass grows higher over that because it's being fertilized in that microclimate area. Same way. The farmers are really good at knowing how they can maximize the yield out of their the land they have and when they should rotate things they haven't yet done, the exhaust, the land saying, Oh well, barley is the one that is cheapest and most widely available.

However, water deep is the big port, so you can get it from everywhere. That's it will have the best selection in the Sword Coast north. It is the supply center. So if you particularly if you need thing in bulk, this is where water deep would be the place you could go and say, I need red faith rye. And instead of saying somebody saying, what was that, they'll say, Oh, you need to go see so-and-so.

He he's he, he has a warehouse full of red life right over there. Yeah, yeah. No, not a specific you are. But now, because Realms time now is at least okay if you're following the official products, it's really 1499 D.R. Because the most recent official adventure was arguably 1497, arguably later. But if you read between the lines of the last novels that I did and Aaron did and how much time is elapsed, we're at 40, 99, so we're knocking on the door of 1500 D.R. And if you look at when Baldwin was bringing stuff back and the ships were coming back, we're talking around 1300.

So you've got about two centuries there. That doesn't mean two centuries of unbroken peace and nice harvests. And because we had this thing called the spell plague, and then we had this other thing called the sundering, and then we had whatever else realm shaking event that certain crazy copyright holders could add to the realms too, to disrupt things because, hey, may you be cursed to live in interesting times, but that is still two centuries.

Because one of the things that farmers are really good at doing in the realms is putting grains by and putting seeds by for later. They get it because life is just precarious enough, particularly if you're within reach of an accord in the sword quartz north. And you also have the priests, Ashanti and Golden Fields, who have a seed bank and who preach that sort of stuff, as in they actually tell farm farmers and farm wives, you know, that are you should be putting seed buy and here is exactly how to put it by so it will not spoil it will not get to damp, it will not grow mold.

It will not do this. And you can keep the rodents out of it. Here's the the sort of way you guard it so that you don't discover that your precious pouch of seeds in the spring consists of nibbled stuff, scraps and some very fat dead rats in Rhyme of the Frost Maiden were presented with the Weavers, a secret society using black obelisks to reverse a cataclysmic event that also apparently has been using these to trace himself out of history.

Can you tell us more? MARTIN Belinda, I hate to do this to somebody, but yes, indeed, I am indeed on that. I know that certain people on this call, cough George cough, have have speculated on things we could do with that. But yeah, that's one of the the in-house designers sort of loose ends. They left and then when they left it I got word that the don't, don't run with it said don't develop it, don't talk about it, just leave it lie.

And of course, usually that means it's nothing's going to be done with it ever again. It's going to sit there as a loose end, but the end is applied and does apply to me so that I wouldn't make up something glib and cool and therefore cut off something might do in the future. Most of these things never get picked up and used.

That's the nature of the realms. We leave loose ends and what they're supposed to be left for Dungeon Masters. But occasionally a loose end can be used for an outside licensed product or for someone in the house on staff to write a later thing that follows on. And when they label it to us as indeed that means we're reserving this one for us.

And what that means is there might be something they develop with it. So I can't say anything about it. All I what do I think? I think there should be some way that you get to the bottom of all these black obelisks, for one thing. Where do they come from? The actual obelisks themselves. Why? And you should at least even if you don't get answers right away, it should be something that you can underpin a campaign with for years.

But and I'm hoping that something is coming through. I'm let's see. Okay. NDAs are a blunt, blunt instrument for those who don't know what we're talking about. I'll very quickly say NDA means non-disclosure agreement and it applies to certain things and they can either be very broadly like don't talk about the new daddy movie or they can be or they can be very specific.

And it's the difference between somebody who is a fan of the realms asking a question saying, Hey, Ed, do orcs cook their meals or they eat them all raw as opposed to somebody saying, Hey, Ed, tell me all about orcs in the realms? It's like those are two different broadness of questions. And unfortunately, it's always easier to write broad in these and not think about them.

They just leave them there forever. So that's why I said about Blunt instrument. But in this particular case, yes, the copyright holder TSR and now later wizards of the coast quite often in the as from talking about certain things there are legal limits on NDAs. For instance, if you say you can't talk about your involvement in this project, that does not mean you cannot tell a policeman or government official that you are involved in the project.

You can. That's a specific limitation on an NDA, even a personal service agreement, NDA to anybody else. Maybe you can't. So in this particular case, that was a thing in the book that I asked Chris Perkins about because, hey, he sent me the text of the book, so I read through it. He says, What do you think? And I and I, George is coming in on the chat to say that the thing that we we can say about them.

But I was specifically enjoined not to say anything about them, even though I'd been putting them myself into the realms from the old gray Books onward. They were in the current clerk and following on and yes, yes. Martin We do need a policeman. There used to be a realms traffic cop in the early days of TSR, Jeff Grubb was the first one, and that was literally to stop people using the same character at the same time for different purposes, which happened with Princess Lussier of Cormier, Alistair Nicosia, who at one point had three fates simultaneously crusade the novel Curse of the as your bonds with the fire Knives and Jeff's and Kate's novel.

As for Bonds three, Yes. So yeah, that's what these are for. And they're frustrating as all heck, because it means it's like trying to tell somebody precisely how to turn their supermarket sales around. So say you're you're talking to the manager of your local supermarket in a small town who is facing possibly having the the big bosses somewhere else close the store because it's not making enough money.

And you say, can I go in and give him advice? And head office says, Certainly, But you can't talk about the vegetables and you can't talk about meat and you can't talk about fruit As long as you don't say one word about those three things, talk to your heart's content. And then they go and tell him the manager the same thing.

So now you're discussing how to fix the store and punch up the sales and serve the community. Whether you're talking about fruit, vegetables or meat, you can do it. But boy, has somebody handcuffed you on specific things because you'll start talking about how to ship things in, how to display them, what the prices should be, where things should be found in the store.

And you'll keep running into I can't I can't mention the meat. So you'll say, well, you know, you should put the nuts in front of the in front of the things I can't talk about. No, not those things. Those other things that I can't talk about. And that's what NDAs do to all of us. It sort of put it it smashes frustrating holes in how we can weave together to make things sound realistic and sounds interesting and generate for future adventures in the realms.

Because you have this big picture of the unfolding realms and trends where things are heading and you suddenly can't talk about all the important stuff which is why I'm endlessly frustrated with NDAs. I know sometimes when people ask me questions, they think it's too Ed just doesn't want to talk about this. So he just goes into A and gets out of it.

No, it's not. Whenever I say NDA, it's like I. Can you tell us more about Chrono Mansi? Martin Berland, a Yeah, it is Mr. Acting as the mouthpiece of various designers, including me, but also all the staff designers. Fiona Mansi is a complete can of worms. The old paradox What Spider Robinson used to say, the paradox, the time machine.

I don't know how that paradox got in the time machine. I did not see the docks myself. But there's a paradox in there anyway, where you go back in time and kill your own grandfather or your own father, and therefore you never existed. So could you have gone back in time? And of course the, the, the glib quantum mechanics explanations that, oh, you just split the time stream and you created a new reality right beside the existing reality, which is what we call in scientific terms, empty BS, as in there's nothing to back it up.

It's just like, Oh, you've introduced a logic problem like Schrödinger's cat, you know, the famous one where the flask of prosecco acid and the cat is mathematically on the blackboard, both alive and dead at the same time. You can prove it either way because you don't know enough, because the act of observation affects what is observed. So therefore, you can never anyway, that's the same problem we have of current events, and it will become postulating that we have a setting where people are powerful in magic and we have like the ancient nether necessaries and some of them are still around like cars.

This, although he's trapped in a loop, an AI alarm and others, they are still around. And we also have the eldest be the obelisk that's been around for a very long time. And it's sort of like why didn't this start an arms race of going back in time and killing your grandmother before you could kill my grandmother and then I'll leapfrog and kill the great grandfather before you killed it.

And then and of course, the logical endgame of this is and suddenly you all disappear because somebody went back in time and killed the first humans. So suddenly there are no humans. So suddenly all that stuff went away and the elves say, Oh, thank heaven they've gone. We could go back. But yeah, but we don't want to ruin the entire culture in detail and all the, all those products you spent good money on buying that described the world as it is.

And we now have a logical fallacy, a logical a gap in the armor thing. Thank you. Walking. It's like being slapped by czar and or slapped by. Let's see, It's like, yeah, yeah. Here we go again. And you see, when I spoke of the spell Plague originally, it was Now all the wizards have to run scared because their spells are now unreliable.

Not that they don't work. Not that they necessarily go mad. Although there is a escalating danger of going mad, the more spells you use. So suddenly it's like I only have six bullets in this revolver in the Wild West, and I know that one of them will cause the revolver to explode in my hand and probably hurt me.

So it's Russian roulette. I do. I want to take that shot. So you then you then get very careful and specific in your use of magic, meaning you don't around saying, well, you know, I got 42 magic missiles so I can just walk up to the king through his entire court killing, right, left and center. And then, you know, I was like, wait a minute, here I am with no armor on and look at all these big hunky guys and gals in armor with swords between me and the king.

And I can't trust my magic anymore. So it just immediately changes the roleplaying situation. That's what I wanted to do. They wanted it as a big reset button. There's a danger whenever you take something that part of its attraction is the history. Part of its attraction is the deep lore. And you say, We're just going to shake the box and change everything.

You're giving people a chance to jump off the bandwagon as well as jump on, and you are trampling the dreams of the people who've invested a lot of time and creativity and gaming table time in the setting. And you are threatening something that people love. And in the same way as if take away a television program that you may be tuned in to once a month, you go, Oh, darn, I don't seem to be able to find it anymore.

But if someone attacks one of your children, you fight because that's somebody precious to you. Same thing. Which is why I hate realm shaking events and I hate things that give us that thing in Chrono Mansi Circle Back is one of the things that endangers the root thing of everything. So the way the game originally handled it, which was just Gary Gygax copying what was already in Jack Vance's thing, temporal stasis and time.

Stop those two original things. They worked because they were a cool visual effect of everybody stops like a statue and the wizard walks among them, being very careful not to touch them and break the asses and just walks through them and says, Oh, I can leave the room now. So all these guards were about to lay hands on me and I'll just step around them and walk to the door, step outside, close the door and walk away, and they'll run like hell.

But. And yeah, yeah. Oh, yes, but I mean, but I mean those minor uses didn't upset game balance too much, but the moment you allow travel back in time, you can let travel forward in time. As long as you strand the person there you know the but the guy from the past who suddenly finds himself in the future.

And you know, he's sort of Shakespeare's time and he squats to poo in the street. And, you know, some people say you can't do that or why not? Isn't that what we always do? Why is everybody just so funny? You know? But you see, as long as the person is stuck in the new thing, he just becomes the fish out of water.

The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, you know, And you can have fun with the concept, but the moment you allow him to jump back, you've created a can of worms that will defeat most Dungeon Masters. When players who are as clever as role players are, are trying to get what they want at the gaming table. If they can jump back in time.

Dungeon Masters, you are doomed. Campaign stability also doomed as well. So it can be a fun way of ending a campaign. But can you explain more about how the Crown viewed and. Ferrara Andrea, after receiving her writ, after her run in with the Fire and IVs and Cormier, Melody Seeger's know, I will tell you it is my gleeful pleasure to tell you the crown of Cormier when run by the right people.

Vanguard Cast Phil Farrell, Liz Spira, People like that. They are cunning, they are really competent. And what they did with him, Sarah, was they recruited her as a high knight. They made her a James Bond working for the Crown and part of that was they sent her off on missions. You might remember that the various depictions of James Bond in the various movies, as opposed to the books, they were quite happy to have Bond off British soil, not killing people at home, not quenching his way through the entire division that he worked for.

It was always more comfortable having him somewhere far away across the world doing something unless he started freelancing, which you also saw in the movies when M would be furious because he went and killed somebody he was not supposed to kill, or he decided he was going to disrupt something major because he was getting even with somebody for something or he was cheesed off.

Well, in the same way it was, you keep the old saying about you, keep your enemies closer, keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer, keep them busy. So that's what they did with them. So they kept her busy on missions. And some of those missions meant she was outside Cormier for extended periods of time, which was just fine with them.

And yeah, that's how you keep a crown strong. You co-opt people. Yes. Yes. Oh, indeed. It's all about the play opportunities and what you can do with these. Yes. So yeah, and I feel a small amount of regret here because one of the things that happened when the TSR book department went away and someone who felt this even more severely than me was Erin Evans, because her last novel, she had to telescope into one novel what she wanted to take two or three novels to tell.

But in the way I was cut off from telling a lot of stories I wanted to finish, and some of them were the ones in Cormier. Cormier is one of the so-called special places to a lot of us who are writing in the realms because we've managed to detail it enough that you can see how we're getting on for it.

We're setting up stories and then to suddenly not get the chance to tell them, But that would be one of them because, you know, I would love to have a bunch of secret agents as we follow over their shoulders, as they zip around the realms doing stuff, and then come back to report like report to whoever is high up in the war wizards or report to whoever is part of the royal family and paying attention to this.

And of course, the juiciest part for me was Vanguard. Fast was running the High Knights and the War Wizards and a zoo and had a few of his own personal spies. And Queen Phee was running all of her personal spies on it with their left hand and running the Harpers with the local Harpers with the right hand, and the Harpers are running her as well.

And everybody was like falling over each other in the back corridors of the palace and climbing in and out of windows. And it was like I was like one of those British bedroom farces, you know, where somebody is hiding under the bed all the time that somebody is talking to somebody else. And when they leave, they stick their head out and say, Have they gone?

Can I come out now? And then the door clicks open and they get back under the bed in a hurry? No, not yet. You know, all that fun stuff. And I would love to have done more and more of that. And we we didn't get to see what we should have gotten to see. And we also had Death of the Dragon try and cover too much military stuff and too much major stuff.

So you didn't get to see things like you were asking yourself or in an earlier call where the Devil Dragon's Body fell, stuff like that. And we also didn't get to see Rowan and his end game. Tanner Last of all of that stuff, we just didn't have the word count. Everything got pushed over and then we didn't get to go back.

Yes. Backdropped Cormier Yes, but those were like attempts by those of us who cared about the realms to say things that we didn't otherwise have another venue to see them in. It would have been marvelous to have a whole run of novels that covered all that stuff. I mean, one of the things that I see over and over.

Yeah, that's okay. That's fine, Melody, ask away. But I mean, those of those of you who work in libraries or who pay attention to what's in the bookstore, there are endless novels about Cromwell, about Henry the Eights, about all of the wives of Henry, the Eights, all that court intrigue. They go back to that well over and over and over again.

And they do that because we all want to read about that sort of stuff. The court intrigue. We could do that with Cormier for 40 novels in a row, written by about six people just taking turns. And yes, I agree, George definitely rolling in would definitely survive because, hey, Bob Salvatore and I spent a pleasant afternoon making various drinks disappear, discussing all the various ways that we would make sure that characters survive the time jump one way or the other, whether it got to be reborn or whether they went in stashes or the blue flame items that I just came up with from my behind because I had to literally.

That's why they had blue flames, untold stories of the realms year to year first. But I mean, the whole thing was to find ways to keep the characters that we still wanted to tell stories about on stage when somebody was just willy nilly moving things ahead a century and lifespans, you know, because we wanted to go on telling those tales.

Bob Salvatore, when that when that that secret summit of Gen Con said, okay, we're jumping the timeline hundred years. He wrote them a letter saying you're the goose that laid the golden eggs, you know, killing. And after all of you guys have been fired, I will have to rescue this and put the realms back to the way it is.

So I'm going to start laying the groundwork now. And yes, to Mr. Brady. Eerie Aber is indeed like that because it's a crossword thing. So it was produced to a lesser extent, lesser extent because the Harpers are stronger there. There are many Cold War Berlin type spies falling over. Spies looking at spies. Oh, by the way, you're made who just picked up after you is also a spy and knows what you're all doing.

That happens in many places. Score New Bell is another one that gets neglected because it's Corner Bell is sort of rough and ready Star Wars cantina. And what that means is unless I go there in realms fiction, nobody else does because officially they didn't want to go there because, oh, that's one of those places where it's going to have naked people on every corner, so we won't go there.

I'm curious about some of the centralizing forces that keep it as a unified country with strong borders versus warring city states. Is Serbia a reforming following the defeat of the Netherlands and other factors? Fire race me. So the short answer is big, wealthy, moneyed families meeting behind closed doors. So for those of you who, you know, do the real world conspiracy theory stuff, the building burger group.

Okay, the largest, wealthiest semi and families don't want it to become a bunch of warring city states. So they take great care that it doesn't. And there's something that hasn't been emphasized enough in the published realms that I should probably emphasize right now. And that is semblance at the bottom of the societal totem pole are tied to a spot because their jobs are if they work on the docks and sell gone there, it's sell gone.

If they work in a shop, in saloon, they're in saloon. But if they're really wealthy, they have houses in both those cities and they have a country place in the north and buy a country place. It could be like a hunting lodge and a huge farm and a hunting preserve. Or it could be a party place. We go and get drunk with our friends and debauchery ensues, or both.

And what that means is a lot of the important political decisions for the countries get made on those country estates where everybody invites everybody else and they pick the weakest person's country estate as neutral ground and they all show up and they decide things. And one of the things they decided was how they would survive being ruled by the nether is who would go to ground, how they would hide things, what would happen later.

And you're seeing that being put in into action now when they're trying to put the country back together. But that's why it never fell apart into warring city states. It had been that in the past before unification and the institutional memory amongst the foremost wealthiest families is we don't want that again, this to put this in in terms of modern real world history.

If you're a big, rich, wealthy banker and you remember the American Civil War, you don't want to go back to those times because you can make a lot more money when it's peacetime and prosperous. Everybody can get ahead rather than when the country is being torn apart by war. And you can also, on a purely selfish level, you can get ahead if there's one common currency, one set of banks, and that everybody and a post office and a Secret Service, one of each rather than warring one's competing, which we just talked about in Crimea so that the two biggest, oldest, most wealthy families, Serbia, don't want it to be a bunch of warring city states.

And that's why it isn't. So there. There you go. There's the fast answer. Around the time of the fall and nether rule, several enclaves were spared. Was there any particular reason or rationale why certain ones were selected over others? Laurie G. Out of game metagame. The answer to that is what I was trying to show with the real was the complete variety of people doing their own thing with their magically powerful.

So some people tried to live in harmony with the land low, natural. Some people were utterly crazy when it came to power castles. Everybody was trying their own thing and some people did different things with their enclaves, as in what kept them aloft or what bound them together, or what protected the climate within them. Different spells, different types of things, wards and mantles.

And some people didn't have their cities aloft. They they grounded them and they had prepared places for them to be grounded or that had lots of fresh water and forests and lots of resources nearby. So they weren't just grounding them in the middle of a glacier or a desert just to keep them from crashing, you know, sort of like, oh my goodness, my plane is stalling.

I glide down and hopefully not hit this mountain. There were some people who who there were some people who deliberately put it down where they wanted to. And I have to tread carefully here because there are indeed was because one of the design requirements that was placed upon me is that certain people said, we want certain enclaves to survive because we want to have the chance of bringing one back in the future.

And I said, Oh, thanks. And sure enough, they did it with salt tensor, otherwise known as Shade. But there are other enclaves that survived intact and not just just overgrown forgotten ruins. There are some that survived survived because of the way the nether East behaved at the time. So yes, there are others that have survived and I can't identify them.

That's where the Indians come in. And again, that leaves it for your dungeon master, because they can invent any ones they want and if much later wizards of the coast comes along with a different story about a different enclave that you championed while they just missed yours and did theirs. Yes, Yes. Well, well, well said. Fire, right? Yes, there are there are quite a few that were alluded to over the time.

And there's there's actually some hints in my novel Spell Storm that without saying it right out because I had people talking to each other and you don't really grok what they're talking about in the novel because they don't stop and say, as you know, Reginald, there were six princes, so let's discuss them. You know they were talking like people normally do.

So they're they're dropping a word or a name and they just move on. They know what it means. You don't necessarily. And we do that all the time because it sets up stuff for the future and other rules. Peak Magic must have played a pretty significant role in the lives of at least the high. Now the threes, were there, parts of society that magic did not factor into what did life look like for the least magically privileged?

Alex Okay. The way to view the role at its height is the high near threes or literally up in the air, usually in their cities and the low net threes who are on the ground and farming and they're also hunting, hunting, gathering in the jungles, hunting and gathering in the forests. They are procuring supplies for the floating city up above and most nether east floating cities in most nether east communities, or wise enough that they kept those lifestyles of the low nether regions and the transportation of the goods entirely mechanical or hand labor, not magical at all.

Meaning if anything went wrong with the magic, it couldn't disrupt them because we had physical hoists, pulleys, platforms and stuff to bring the food up to. And that was all done because the nether regions at the highest levels, the are contests who are the most powerful in the cities, were experimenting with magic all the time. It was like an ongoing it's like you have a factory downtown that at 2:00 every afternoon somebody blasts and the whole town shakes.

You know, there's a lot of places like that in the real world. Well, if you're thinking to yourself at any one of these things could go wrong, either a giant explosion or what I was talking about in that last YouTube video, the collision of spells and an unpredictable world magic effect, because somebody was casting an experimental spell, not realizing that somebody else's spell had left a residue that had drifted and was now impinging on where there and then something happens.

Well, you didn't want some unforced scene. Minor disaster become a major disaster and disrupt the flow of food and water or the flow of wastes away because you know, being high muckety muck wizards, you don't want to sit there in your own dung because the room is filling up with it, because suddenly a magical conduit to take the dung away has relocated itself to your favorite room.

So. So you keep everything mechanical. So hopefully it can't be disrupted. And I mean. Yes. Isn't that how you define isn't that how you define higher culture? Yeah. Well, okay, well, okay. Let let us take us to a real, real world Second World War example. Allied troops going up Italy from the boot. They're surrounded by all these vineyards.

The vineyards have grapes on the vines because, hey, people are fighting. Nobody's been harvesting them. The soldiers start eating them. They get walloping dysentery because what do you fertilize the vines with human manure? It's the local villagers manure. They've been they don't get the just because they've been eating those grapes for years. They're used to their own local parasites.

The guys from away are not the same thing. You want to keep things uncontaminated and you see finding out all this trivia. But the real world, all these interesting little factoids, which is part of working in a library. It's amazing what hits you in the side of the head that you didn't think of. You put them all into the realms because you want the realms to be as hyper realistic as you can in some ways because you're building in stuff we all know is make believe the magic and its consequences.

And to counterbalance that, you want a rooted in feeling real. Yeah, it is. Yes, it is. Mm hmm. World War Two. World War two. But yes, it was a while ago. Yeah, but. But yeah, that's what it is. They were deliberately trying, so not everything got so low. Near the trees were basically subsistence farmers and subsistence hunter gatherers, foragers who were being given the best of tools because what they say is sorry, the yield of kumquats is low today, boss.

But we broke our shovel and the boss goes and you shall have a new shovel. And because he doesn't care about you, but he does care about his kumquats, he wants the flow to be so you get a new shovel. So it was this lovely symbiotic relationship. And when you think about it, the the reason we're living the healthier lives and the safer lives because they were having some nit decide, I'm going to turn everybody's hair blue with the spell.

But it's, you know, to what degree do the witch, Laurens and Roscommon rely on their martial abilities versus their magic? Stephen is he okay? This is one of these famous. It depends answers. And in this case, it depends on the local the which learn. It also depends on the community in which they're living. They do they have opportunities for practice and training.

But AG LaRonde and Rashomon both been on a war footing in one way because of the of say, nearby by Alex. And if you, if you put that in real world historical terms and you go back to the the yeomen the yeoman of the Bowman the long bowmen of rural England where everybody had to practice at the butts, which is why you have local village greens until idiot starting and closing them.

You had the village green because you could set up the butts, which were usually just bales of hay, and everybody had to practice. With the Longbow in the same way which Lauren are supposed to practice. But in practice they may have other jobs in the community like farming or hunter gathering jobs that keep them busy. Or they may be given special tasks individually because of their other skills by whoever is running that community and they may have less time to practice.

So that's why the answer is it depends is it depends on the individual person and how much time to practice they get. And it also depends on their personal inclination. If were born lame or you have a withered arm or leg or you're weaker than everybody else, or you're just uncoordinated, not very good at it, you are naturally going to try and duck chances to play in all the reindeer games, if you know what I mean.

Whereas The jock wants every opportunity to get out there, so they will vary in that way. But I saw most of the which learn is doing the minimum combat they could get away with because it doesn't really thrilled that it's repetitive and sweaty and stuff like that. They will do what they have to do and say yeah, I know how to do this.

I know how to hit somebody. I know how to get out of somebody's way. I'd rather put my time into my magic because that's more cool. And I know that the magic is me. I know that I could stumble over a rock and have a and have a ball my ankle ankle immediately, or somebody could hit me and suddenly my right arm is broken and I can't use it, but I can trust in my spells because they're they're innate.

They're a part of me. And and they will grow as I use them more and learn how to use them more. So that's, you know, I feel more powerful with spells. Besides, if I get more powerful and somebody breaks my arm, I can fix it, you know? So. So their natural inclination will be to go towards the magic.

And I always think it's that way because that fits with how I set up the realms to be high magic and to have Mr. Wanting everybody do this magic. Now We I immediately made sure that there were examples in the realms of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And magic is A is power. So we get to see people who are corrupted by their magic.

But at the same time we see Mr. pushing people towards using magic by making sure it's available and working against tyrants who try and restrict the use of magic. But we have two examples in front of us nether ill and hell rur of where magic is widespread. And how well does that go for people? Yeah, and as you get older, see, as time becomes more important, but you start to realize it's running out, whereas when you're a teenager, you never think of that.

And the other thing is opportunity cost. If you get that lesson rammed down your throat early enough in school or by your parents, grandparents or whatever, or the world around you, if you spend your time doing this, you can't use the same time to do that. Everybody who multitask does a lousy job. Of all the things they're multitasking.

It's just a question of how lousy it is. I mean, but I mean, you then realize I can do this or I can do that. I can't do both. And when that is factored in, it changes everything. And you start thinking differently. And of course, you can do that at the gaming table. If you're the Dungeon Master and you haven't prepared the dungeon and your players on head for the dungeon, you are now trying to waste their time for 3 hours until they all have to go home and you can prepare the dungeon before the next game.

So it's what kind of mushrooms would be typically grown in a rock gnome community? Gee, Brady e There are these mushrooms called brown frill, and they're called that because they look like frills or ruffles on a on a petticoat and they grow on rocks in, in sort of overlapping shells. And by overlapping shells, you know, the old rule for laying stone walls or bricks two over one.

So you don't have joints that run all the way down the wall where the ends of all the bricks are together, the wall falls apart, you have a brick and then you have two bricks underneath it. Half of each brick is underneath the brick, you know. So you're same way the brown frills do that they grow in, in, in frills like, like the layers of a petticoat.

And they are they taste very they taste sort of like roast almonds, a cross between roasts, roast almonds and roast beef. Okay. And they can be in raw like that or they can be cooked and they can be stood down into like almost a a thick soup or they can be stir fried and it's just like a side vegetable.

And they are very nourishing. And rock domes thrive on them. You can fatten up no babies on them. Whereas and by the way, whereas most mushrooms in our real world, particularly the white button mushrooms, stuffer mushrooms that you buy in a North American supermarket, you know, in a little punnet with a cellophane over them, they have no nutritional value at all.

They're literally filler, they're nice. And particularly you fry them with butter and so on, and they're taking on the flavor what you cook them with. But nutritionally they are totally empty. They're just filler.

Who has more children? A Zune, The Fourth or Ilminster Melody Singers Ilminster. He has had more centuries of sowing his wild oats. A Zune. A Zune just ran out of time. Although will tell you before. Before we get to Watkins question, which we will get to, I will tell you the I will tell you the Cormier the joke story the it's the sort of the debutantes are being brought before the court.

It's the coming out each year. And as soon the fourth is sitting on his throne and they're all going to be brought in and introduced to him and they're all in their most beautiful gowns and finery. And Vanguard has is standing behind the throne and girl after girl, the flower of the her noble family is being brought in and introduced to a Zune and aside the obvious male touches about every third.

One of them looks like a Zune. And after about 10 minutes of this, Vanguard aghast leans in and murmurs In a Zune zero moderation Eilish What kind of magic did Ancient Na fella use? Was it true name magic RPG match? No in ancient Na fell they were. It was okay in ancient Na fell the the na themselves the na tribes.

They made much use of magic that was sympathetic magic. And what I mean by that is if you could get some of your your enemies hair or blood or tissue, you could cast spells to effect the enemy. So if you if you got some of these high because they were dead, it didn't do much good other than to raise them as a boneless undead because they were dead.

If they were still alive, dead, you had a hunk of their hair and you then started working Particular spells. You could affected the living person at a long range. Why is the desk called the desk? George crashes? Yeah. Apparently in the past, somebody from that area answered a question. Where are you from? Who are you? And out of whatever answer they gave that syllable desk stuck in the minds of somebody who spoke comment on this at all.

Thirsk. And and if you want to see a hilarious example of that, watch the movie John Carter, where the thoughts keep calling John Carter Virginia because he said he was from Virginia. Oh, Virginia. Okay. So the same thing, that's where it came from or what it meant. And whether that was somebody's clan or tribe or family surname or the of their village, we don't know.

It's been lost in the mists of time. What would you say is the most often overlooked or underrated threat to face room fire race doppelgangers who live in every large human city just like half lings live and gnomes do and they get overlooked and or just consider part of the furniture doppelgangers who selectively murder humans and impersonate them everywhere in large settlements and the extent to which, if those doppelgangers ever decide to work, as opposed to just living symbiotically off the humans and taking what they want, if they ever decide to do something like take their settlement to war or rise up and butcher all the half elves or all the gnomes or all the

half orcs overnight, they probably could. So yeah, that is the it's overlooked because it stays off the radar, but potentially it could be really powerful. We know about them in in the water deep because Steven Shand has picked up my reference to the unseen and mentioned them over and over again. And I have also fallen into the habit of mentioning them over and over again.

So you'll remember they're there, but we haven't really used them yet because they are most interested in living parasitic off humans. So they don't want to rock the boat. If the human city is numerous, prosperous, doing well, that's great. They don't want to change that. But if they ever decide that they do, don't want to.

How often do mages and they associate with clerics? Do thane clerics play any role in politics Kiko? Yeah, yes and no. And the reason I'm giving this chilly Schelling answer is they do they they do play a large role in politics, but it's an undercover role because what they want to do is never crossed swords publicly was asked him or any sulk here and never crossed swords with any authority or marchioness.

Instead what they want to do is influence everybody and influence the common people. You know, for instance, if you're a priest of Kossuth, you it might be a good idea if you you all need food. Bye. For this next week. Just just saying, you know and so you sort of steer that way. You steer and manipulate and therefore you're never, ever seen as grabbing after power yourself.

You're never, ever saying anything publicly about governance or against a policy of asked him. You just sort of nudging the people into and a perfect example of this fictionally is in Doctor who the television series and this is at a time when I believe David Tennant was stepping into the role and the Prime Minister, though the female prime minister of Great Britain in the thing he destroyed an alien using Torchwood weapons and he wanted to punish her for this.

And he just said, Don't you think she looks tired and spread that word and it cooked her political future and and it would end in the same way the clergy does stuff like that. They just try and change the attitude of all the laborers and workers and soldiers and households underneath. So you change the way the general population is looking at things and what they'll support.

And the smart way of doing the thing. Reason why this is so smart is asked. Ham is increasingly aware because he keeps screwing up. He keeps having these grand plans for world domination and they don't work over and over again. And I didn't do that. Czar was just the coast did that by writing all these super adventures that have this end game in which says Thames Plan doesn't doesn't come to fruition.

He's now started paying attention to his own living populace because he's starting. He doesn't think the failures are his. It must be that he miscalculated on these frail mortals that are supposed to obey him. They must. You know, he's got to find out more about them because obviously there earth he overestimated their capabilities. So he has to understand exactly what they can and can't do.

So the next time he comes up with a plan, they won't fail him in their role. And to do that, he's paying attention to what they think of the world, what their attitudes are. So if the priest can change those attitudes from the other side, then zest time will go, Oh, so the people think this. Okay then. So are steering the government from behind or trying to keep their hands clean and not be seen to be steering the government.

So instead, you see, that's okay to put it in small town, real world American terms. It's the difference between standing up in the pulpit and delivering a hellfire and brimstone sermon saying you shall not commit adultery. And the same priest talking to individual members of the congregation personally, one on one in their back gardens, saying, you know, you really shouldn't commit adultery.

You see one on one. You mentioned that there's a new way of Libertas clergy since 1470. There are things between them in the elementary still volatile or have things changed? John Foster Yes. When the gods were all restored, first of all, the both out of game metagame and in game, the idea was that the gods would step back and mortals would have a lot more freedom, and gods wouldn't meddle personally, and there would be fewer avatars walking around.

To which I said, Hallelujah. Oh, sorry. To which I because they overdid the idea, and particularly at the end of the Sundering trilogy, where everybody in their maiden and had chosen and chosen, chosen and chosen the chosen, chosen and little children could be chosen. They, they, they couldn't walk, talk or feed themselves yet, but they were chosen, you know and and well, I understood the the idea of vesting your power in many, many mortals so you could gain more power.

So when you came back you would be a more deity. They had run the idea into a ground. It's the old it's the old comment. You only gets one idea and he beats to death with a stick. That was the problem with the. So when all the gods come back, they are all lessened. They all back from daily direct influence on mortals.

And a lot of the deities who had been furiously heart in enmity towards each other were no longer they were far most philosophical about it. There are exceptions to that, like Shah and Syriac, but a lot of these others, like La Vie ATAR and Mm. It's far more live and let live where two sides to the same coin.

We are another part of the same experience. There's room for both at the table of every mortal. If you want to receive the flesh, I'll give it this sort of thing. So there's a lot more. Okay, we'll fight each other. We'll just be wary of each other. We both have our rules. Don't. Don't overstep sort of thing. As opposed to I kill you on sight, you know, So we've stepped back from that.

And that actually makes a pleases me because it it makes the roleplaying opportunities far greater as opposed to oh no, they're going to kill each other. It's the old thing in our modern real world, What do you do with the Nazi? You punch the Nazi. Well, okay, if you if you take that you've now written the script, nothing else can happen.

But if we cling back to what was in the chat, questions about Uri Aber and postwar Berlin and the sort of spies and spies, if you move it back to that, you have a wealth of role playing opportunities as opposed to you punch the Nazi. You've now opened the table, the Dungeon Master and the players have far more freedom to do different things, in this case spin subplots.

So I'm for it. And yes, as you realize, there's a lot of theater has always been downplayed because there have always been people at the various official publishers of the realms who are a little uncomfortable with BDSM and exposed flesh qualities of the goddess. They don't really know. Do we just ignore it? Do we? Let's just not talk about it.

So as a result, you get to a deity who just doesn't get talked about it. And of course, when they look at old media and go, Wait a minute, that's even worse. You know, from a certain viewpoint or viewpoint. So they again, don't want to talk about it. So you then get deities you don't talk about. And it's like the India problem we were alluding to earlier.

When you're discussing how to fix the supermarket, but you can't talk about these important things, it then makes it stunts the discussion and it stunts the role playing opportunities. Can you tell us a little more about Silence Fest? G Brady They they keep moving because their layers keep getting co-opted by other groups and other critters who want the layer.

It's one of those things where if you have a cavern, everybody wants it, which is, by the way, if you're if you're walking in the in the Rockies and you find a nice cavern. Yeah, a bear is probably already found it first. And if they're not there when you arrive, they'll be there when they want to come back and they'll be between you and the entrance.

Just saying. So that happened to the first over and over again. So the solution was they started caching food and tools and weapons in various places and they move around a bit. And they've also learned back to our water deep walls. And so they've learned that the utility of being high up so they have an advantage points they can look down on anybody approaching.

So they are thinking of relocating to the highest point. But again, you don't want to be on a bare hilltop so the next hungry Dragon or whisper into Columbus goes, Oh, neat. Look at all those meals camped on the hilltop. Me So again, he what other substance rather than alcohol do people in the realms use to get into an altered state of mind?

Kiko Me Okay, so to alter consciousness. Okay, one of the things that lots of priests of lots of faith use is incense, as in they burn. And we're most of us in the real world are used to the joss sticks, the scented sticks that you light on fire and so on. Well, in the realms, it's usually a lump of something, a mix that the priests are prepared, which has a particular scent and has things in it.

And it's supposed to be to get you closer to the deity. But yes, it all works from inhaling it of the the the ma this in some of their preparation rituals which are in a tent. So you have hides hung to restrict the flow of air so that the smoke from what you're burning is building up in intensity and your usually it's to bring on visions, dream visions, hallucinations.

And that's also what they do in almost all of the temple rituals that you are, you're moving a novice to higher in the temple hierarchy. A priest, just me was, you know. So there's a lot of that that goes on. There's also among half things in particular chewing weed. And I don't mean our real world weed. I mean cultivated weeds are not pipe weed that's smoked chewing like a chewing tobacco, a bug, most half slings and gnomes.

There are particular sorts of cheese. And Jeff Grubb put this in in the D&D comics there is cheese and then there's cheese. And there's actually one whole comic where somebody has too much cheese and it starts to affect their their break. And yeah, there are other things I'll several artists have put hookahs into the realms in the art, so of course that means they're there and they get used for various things and yeah there's all sorts of altered consciousness substances.

HE Well, one of my players long and long ago was intrigued by the old scene of Cleopatra allowing the ASP to bite her breast, you know, which is in Antony and Cleopatra, the Shakespeare play and so on. And it was like, okay, what if people allow themselves to be bitten or stung by various insects that have venom in combination with something when they're already drinking something or have already smoked something else or have already eaten something, or they're fasting to make sure that their their blood is, you know, looking for for sustenance.

And so it's going to take in his venom fast and hard. And that affected them in some. So that was an idea that we played with. And like many other things, the the code of conduct, the code of ethics that the various publishers applied to the realms meant that we didn't really discuss it. You may have noticed, if you're a long time fan of the game and have played various editions, Insanity and Poisons keep dropping out of the rule books and then being brought back differently and then brought but taken out and brought back.

And each time we bring them back, I am encouraged if I'm involved at all, to make them more fantasy and less real world because they don't want lawsuits from little kids trying stuff at home in the same way that they didn't. They were worry of lawsuits from, you know, a kid goes down tunnels like a sewer and gets drowned.

It's a storm sewer. And there's a sign, oh, Dungeons Dragons inspired that. Here's your lawsuit. So you wanted to move things away from real world things, which is? Which is why the politics in hell, when I did the talismans and so on, that was never published and drag and that bit of that article because they, as Gary said, I don't want these painted on churches all across America.

Good point. I mean, he he had a point. So yeah, yeah, just where is Dent are the knight serpent really. And how can she communicate with her warlocks or priests? They keep trying to release her to invoke war locked up and told stuck in the fugue plain Martin Verlander, sir. India. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let let me let me let me explain.

I cannot tell you exactly where Dan DA is and what Dinda is up to, because that is a reserved plot thread that the I think wants to now put out to license. But I think originally they wanted to put it in one of these five adventures, you know, the big glossy books. However, I can't answer the second part of your question without offending the NDA.

And the answer is there are serpent people who can shapeshift or pass as human want abominations and they some of them act as submitters up for tender envoys, messengers between tender and mortals in the realms communicating disorders wants. So if you venerate tender in the right sort of ritual, a one of these emissaries may pay you a visit one night and in his at your door what you should do and hiss at your door.

What tender wants and what tender needs and what tender shall have and what you shall provide. I suppose an avatar of Sunni appeared in the wind market and l as she was in the time of another will of all that she might experience. What would intrigue her and what would repulse her? Jeremy G. Okay. Yeah, she would. She would immediately be most interested in the fashion not just clothing, but personal adornments.

You know, the the anklets with bells on them, braces, cosmetics, dangly earrings, things like that. Anything to do that body adornments she would be interested in looking at because she'd be okay where am I? As in where and when, and what is going on? What are the trends here and now? And that would interest her the most because it's it's a there's two sorts of beauty, too.

And Suni recognizes them, the innate beauty of anything and and the beauty that we cannot control, like the beauty of lighting, natural lighting or artificial lighting, but and situation and juxtaposition so that, you know, if you're backlit by a beautiful wall, it's different than if you're backlit by a pile of dead bodies. And then there's the the adornment that you take on, as in, do you do your hair?

Do you put on cosmetic makeup? How do you dress? Are you how you carrying yourself and acting? And and so from the innate to the added the artificial and she's interested in seeing what all, all the artificial things are and what people are doing. And the second most thing she'd be interested in is the people her in the market.

And Suni sees beauty in all things. It is a mistake to think of Suni is only interested in the unmarred beauty. What what Suni is interested in is beauty. And there can be beauty in movement. There can be beauty in sound like someone singing or humming and you think, Oh, so you have to be a good singer. No, there are people who can belch a tune and if they do it well, Suni may be interested.

She's interested in the finding the beauty in all things, but she would start with the fashion stuff and she would immediately be arrested by all the human stuff around her. And then she would be most interested after that. And she would be most struck by and repelled by to get to the second half of the question. Bad smells, what to her or bad smells and what is tolerated in this area.

You know, for instance, if you live by the sea and it's a seashore in which lots of stuff is brought ashore by the currents. So you have lots of rotting seaweed, lots of rotting dead fish and organisms and or it's a fishing port. So fish are getting cut up and dead fish are being tossed aside all the time.

So you have that ever present stench of dead fish. It may be terrible reek, but it may also be something that you're used to because you live and work there. So you just sort of put up with it and stop worrying about it. It's the old thing of if you spend a night in a hotel that's right. By the railway tracks and the trains thunder past all night and blow their whistles, like how can anybody ever sleep in this.

But there's a whole row houses right beside the railway tracks and people live in them, so they're obviously used to it. Okay, same thing soon is going to be struck by things that that might not strike the people that are there. But that's the immediate attraction and the immediate repulsion. It's the it's the unpleasant smells and the things that she can find beauty in.

And she's most interested in people trying to increase beauty in the world. So again, by what you wear, what you put on, what you how you carry yourself, are you interested in looking attractive as opposed to not caring like me because you give it up because you because you look like this. So what's the point? Is what is something that you've written and regretted after it's been published or wished that you could have changed to do it better?

Bob, I okay. The double Diamond Triangle series book number three I wrote in 2 hours and it was okay. It's just, you know, pretty darned good for 2 hours. The last one, the one I co-wrote with Rob King, had to wrap up the series and Rob sent it to me by FedEx and said, good luck. I need it back by tomorrow.

And of course, I cheated because FedEx did not pick on Saturdays in Canada in that at that time they do now because now they have competition. But back then they didn't. So I said, you can have it back like Tuesday because. I can't put it back in FedEx until Monday. So I, I got myself the weekend deal haha.

But, but the other part of Rob King's thing is it has to be this word counter no longer because you've got to remember those are nice little thin books. They were very strict on word count and Rob King had already written his half of the book, which was twice as long as our total and word count, which means to put in the things that he wanted me to add and that I wanted to add to the book, I would have to cut stuff out of the book, which takes a lot longer and is a lot harder.

So I hated doing it and I wish we'd had more time because if we had more time, I could have overwritten everything. Rob gave me to keep as much of his and we've what I needed to do into it and then send it back to him to have him overwrite me. And then he could send it back to me a second time to overwrite it, and then I'd send it back to him as the ultimate editor and say, Are we happy with this end result?

So if we'd had a month's than a couple of days, we really only had one day. But I, I took advantage of real world considerations to buy myself an extra day. I would have I think the end result would have been much better. So I regretted doing it that way. I had no choice, but I regretted doing it that smoke powder is rare and often illegal, depending on where you are in the rooms for the places where it's legally sold.

What kind of systems do they have in place to make sure it's handled responsibly and not sold to the nefarious? Bob Yeah, well, the answer is none, usually unless they restrict it completely because. They don't want smoke powder to be around. They usually it's one of those things where you learn that you should have regulated it too late.

And to use a real world example, the Customs House in Dublin, England, in medieval times think the tax the Kings tax house on the docks was known as the the crane house. The crane house was destroyed, along with most of the docks in. A huge explosion that happened because we think sparks from a horse's hooves on cobbles ignited the huge piles of gunpowder that were just piled on the docks waiting to be shoveled in order to and from ships.

And so after that obliteration, they changed the rules. And this is usually what happens with all explosives, because people don't realize that, oh, they poo poo the true power of something until they see it, and then they pass laws and regulations to stop that ever happening again. And it usually doesn't, as we know. But they do pass the regulations and so many of them ban it completely.

A lot of them haven't even heard of it or don't believe in it. Oh, surely, you know. No, it must have been some wizard doing something and trying to get out of being blamed for it. So he and he invented this thing called smoke powder. The the joke that Jeff Grubb used to tell it, Gone Wood fired 21 gun salutes.

And if you objected, you would be fired in the next salute. No, dear. And you see how the realm starts to affect us and we get silly. And I believe silly was mentioned earlier. What happened to the shades after the conclave fell and myth or are they scattered everywhere trying to survive or do they have a plan to rebuild the conclave Gustavo?

HURTADO Oh, yes. So have you read The Herald My my novel in which that that particular event happened? And do you recall, if you did, do you recall a certain small group of young Sultana sons who were not part of the main power structure and got out because they and they survive and they are they are watching this disaster unfold.

So they have all survived and they are pursuing a completely different policy, which is low profile, as in they thought that the arrogance, the hubris, the we can take anything of the leaders of Sultan. Sir John was the direct Achilles heel that ended that that led to the end of Sultan Air as we know it. So they're determined not to repeat the sort of mistakes, but also to succeed in this new world.

And they don't think that lording it over everybody is success. They they found that thing abhorrent, but neither did they think that they were inferior to anybody. They think they deserve to rule and have the best of all things. They just it's a difference in style. It's the usual teenagers difference, everything parents stood for and everything their parents do is wrong.

I'm going to do it right and it isn't all. Much later you realize you become your parents. Your kids think of you the same way. But I mean, they are doing the thing. They they want to do things differently. Now, what they will do that's in the future. But I put them in the novel and I put that scene in where they watch what's happening and you know that they're continuing on.

But the vast majority, the air canisters in the city and the people underneath them were destroyed when the city was Ilminster was quite thorough. He'd said enough is enough. Even rampaging over multiple countries. You're treating people like cattle, you're slaughtering indiscriminately. Time for this to happen. You so you know how it feels, number one. And number two, you're just removed from the equation because we can't have you going around and he had the full support of Mr. in this because what were the tensions doing?

They were using magic to oppress others. What does Mr. not want people to do? Use magic to oppress others today? So final question answered. Yeah, I just want to say thank you guys for coming. Thank you for hanging out and thank you. Most of for loving the realms and bringing your questions and doing a deep dive into the realms with us because this is what we do it for, for people who love the realms.

All of you Who love the realms. Thank you. Because, hey, the more you love the realms, the longer the realms will survive as more than just random names slapped into the background of a movie.