The Rise & Fall of Netheril (D&D's Ancient Empire): #Realmslore Ep9 (Extended Audio) (Patreon)

The ancient Netherese Empire is one of the most captivating civilizations in Forgotten Realms history.

Often used by GMs to justify giving players powerful magical items or strange dungeons to adventure in, Netheril has largely been shrouded by mystery... until now.

In this Realmslore video, Ed Greenwood discusses what the Netherese Empire may have looked like at its peak, talks about its fall, and reveals a handful of secrets that never made it to print.

@TheEdVerse @Papat0k Shop: https://edgreenwood.myshopify.com/

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Ed: Because the humans who became the powerful Netherese started as workers for the elves and the elves gave them this little bit of magic to help them do this job and that little bit of magic to help them do that job. And then over time they said, Hey, we can do this ourselves. We don't need the elves.

Ivan: There are a few things as captivating as the allure of long lost civilizations, and once great empires now in ruins. Especially if those empires were as magically imbued as Netheril was. I'm Ivan of Many Realms, and on this episode of Realms Lore, Ed Greenwood and I talk all about the Netherese. Lauded for their adeptness at the art or their ability to manipulate the magical weave.

The Netherese empire was once a superpower of Toril. What made the Netherese empire so special? What caused this eventual downfall? And most importantly, how can that help shape our games right now? Get exclusive answers to the Forgotten Realms most burning questions. Find Ed on Patreon, link in the description and become a protector of the Realms.

So you never have to miss out on what the Realms has to offer from the mind of its original creator.

Ed: So think of a ancient human em, uh, empire of powerful magic where all sorts of spells, magic items, and mighty artifacts came from. So if you're a dungeon master, creating them, And you want to have something lying around that's ancient, that's in the tomb of a king or down a dungeon.

It could have come from Ancient Netheril. And everybody knows, you know, the, in the sort of common received folklore is that this empire ultimately fell because of its arrogance and it's overreach. So that's sort of what people know about Netheril. They may not know where exactly it was. Um, most people have heard that it had flying cities that floated in the air but flew about.

So it could end up in different places from where they started or flew about regularly. But they don't really know anything much more about it than that. It's, it's this magical, um, place of long ago when magic was really power. There you go. That's sort of Netheril in a, in a nutshell,

Ivan: so many people that follow the Realms know that Netheril had a relatively strict hierarchy.

Can you tell us a little bit about what that hierarchy might have looked like?

Ed: Well, okay. It actually varied from city to city because whoever the big wigs were in, in one particular city, uh, not only, um, magically crafted the conditions in in the city. As in: What color the sky was, uh, did it have rain? Uh, uh, what temperature, the air around you was, stuff like that, you know, in the same way that, uh, the, these were early Mythallars

uh, but in the same way that within ward right now, a magical ward in the Realms of today approaching the 1500s DR. You can monkey with things within your ward. You can, uh, you could have, for instance, if you're, if you're in the habit of falling or somebody might fall off a parapet, you could set up a feather fall.

So if your kids are playing and they fall over the, off a tower, they're aren't gonna go splat and you need another kid, they're gonna float gently down. You know, you, you, you change the conditions. And, and so of course that applied in Netheril and the various rulers in Netheril changed things. But in general, so in the, the general stereotype

there was high Netheril and there was low Netheril, and what that meant was low Netheril was where all, uh, Netherese started, they became expert farmers. They became expert foragers for um, well, plants and herbs and so on. And they became expert at, um, harvesting the land as in, uh, trees from forests, um, vines and their SAPs from jungles and so on.

And those people um, some of them stayed that way when the flying cities started and they, the people who stayed that way became the low Netherese or what was referred to as the low Netherese, and they became the hewers of wood and drawers of water and farmers for the high Netherese in their flying cities.

So they would grow the stuff and the high Netherese. Who were the people in the cities who were magically powerful would get their food and so on from the low Netherese, and, um, in return would cast magic for them. I mean, it, it's tempting to view them all as the high Netherese enslaved the low Netherese, but that's true.

Literally in some cases mean for some cities, but not for most of them. So that's basically how things were back in the day, the high Netherese, and they called themselves arcanists but you can think of them if you're a modern Realms and Faerûnian, you can just think of them as, uh, powerful arch wizards. You know, the, the term arcanist

because the D and D game, uh, likes to sell people rule books. We, we, we endlessly get new character classes from time to time. So inevitably, any cool word or name gets used as the name of a character class later on. But when it started, That wasn't a character class, that was what the Netherese called themselves instead of Arch Wizard, I'm an arcanist.

Okay. So that's where that came from. Yeah. In the old days they, it was tempting to think of the powerful Netherese were those who had the gift as in the natural ability to wield the art. And they wandered all over, um, the world, the known world, exploring things. And moved their cities where they were, where they wanted to be, and the low Netherese, um, stayed down on the ground and grew stuff and harvested stuff and hunted for stuff, and generally gleaned stuff for the high Netherese.

So that's basically it. Um, and in some cases with some cities that meant a severe class system. What you might think of in the ancient Roman, in our, in our real world, citizens had one set of powers and non-citizens or barbarians, even though they might be in a large Roman city and wear the same sort of toga and so on and might not be slaves, uh, they were definitely not, didn't have the same rights as a citizen.

So there, there's that way of thinking of it. And, but in, in other Netherese cities, it was quite egalitarian. It's dangerous to, um, generalize, uh, unless you're just sort of, um, roleplaying a sage talking to modern adventures who come up and pay for. So tell us about Ancient Netheril. Well, that Sage is gonna use the best of their abilities and they may do a lot of generalization, but if you're actually bringing Netherese on stage

it, uh, as, as walking, talking, uh, non-player characters, it can be dangerous to generalize because it's just not accurate. It's always dangerous to generalize because the inaccuracies creep in. Because they don't apply across the board. But, but in general, if you're just sort of talking as a modern Realmsian about this weird ancient empire you've heard of, you can stick to the generalizations and they're generally true.

Ivan: That's, that's actually really informative for me because I was wondering how much of the, the terms High Netheril and Low Netheril. Really applied to whether it was just geography or if it was indicative of the class system. And

from what I'm hearing, what you're telling me is it's a little bit of both. It's ki it's kind of Yeah.

But more often than not, it was more the geography than it was the class system even.

Ed: Oh, sure. And there were powerful, uh, rulers arcanists, um, who didn't make their cities fly, and they said, what a waste of resources. Just, they just, no, they just weren't interested. No, I'm not, I'm not touring the world and taking vacations.

Um, I have a chance to do truly groundbreaking magics here to experiment. Why would I waste my, you know, that sort of thing. So it, it really did vary from place to place and people's attitudes. Um, so yeah, there, it, it's. To me is the most interesting thing about it is it gives you a chance to explore all sorts of things.

As long as you know that these people at their height and at their best are very magically powerful. It gives you carte blanche to try anything, and that's the cool thing. You can then put together almost anything you want from it, you know?

Ivan: Yeah. I think that there's kind of an analogy here between the Netherese and then our episode on Thay, how we were saying if you wanna do some kind of wild experimental magics, you can have a Thayan Red Wizard do that and just to test it out, uh, and see if it's, you know, balanced or fun or if it works.

And, and, uh, the Netherese kind of Netherese magics can be similar in that way. It'll give you an opportunity to explore.

Ed: Yes, and, and, uh, there are certain themes that I've explored in the Realms over the years, and that is that. You know, the, the old saw, uh, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It applies to everybody.

It's not just human nature and a human fallacy. I deliberately put it into Elminster and Myth Drannor cuz we're seeing el uh, Myth Drannor over Elminster's shoulder as he, an outsider, a magically gifted outsider, but not accepted by all the elves. You know, he has the Srinshee protection, but you know, a lot of the elves are going, who is this

unwashed dirty human amongst us. But I mean, I'm showing that the decadence and the, the, the, the flaws are not human flaws. They apply to the elves as well. Anybody who gets too magically powerful and therefore gets lazy and therefore starts counting on the magic to do things for them, and then starts thinking themselves of themselves as better than other people who don't have that magic.

In other words, yeah, we have the same fallacies rearing their heads. And I did that again with Netheril and, and that, and in the case of Netheril, everybody re remembers Karsus and I, and I just have to tell you upfront, that was not Karsus was not mine. That was a. TSR edition.

Ivan: Mm-hmm. Who is this unwashed crazy human among us?

I think you said a lot like my parents.

Ed: Well, you know, there's nothing wrong with being an unwashed crazy human because you are, you are challenging their ideas of what they thought you were and could be and should be. And every generation does that to their. Every generation, the first thing you reject is your parents' music.

Ivan: Usually you come back to it after the fact, like I did.

Ed: Yeah. You come back to thinking your parents actually liked some pretty cool music. Yeah, and, and I, uh, I didn't fit that mold just because I grew up in a musical household with, um, uh, choristers who sang professionally, you know, and then roped all of us kids into the church choir. So, you know, we, we grew up with taking piano lessons and listening to all the classical stuff.

And so of course we all said, yeah, but our rock music is much nicer. Um, but we got exposed to everything all the time. That was the delight of it. Um, You might think most of it was, uh, hilarious. I mean, I grew up thinking, boy, it's hilarious that someone in, in, you know, some fat lady comes on the stage in opera and goes for for 15 minutes, and you look at the libretto and she su she sang the, what she has sung to everybody is "yes".

You know, and, and you go, oh, for goodness sake, couldn't we get this over with? You know? Uh, but then, but then you, you watch something like much later on, they, they filmed that memorable scene in Apocalypse Now with the Ride of the Valkyries and the, the choppers, and although there are endless jokes about that, like, can we do it again without the choppers please?

You know, Um, you, you watch that scene and think, wow, that is music. Look at the power of that music. And you know, you can sit in the theater going and you may never have heard opera before. You may never have heard Ride of the Valkyries before. And you're sitting there in, in the theater going, what is this?

I'm listening to, oh my God, what am I listening to? Because it's so powerful. Yeah. And then of course you want to go out and find it, find out all about it, and yet another convert has been sucked in. You know? Yeah.

Ivan: I gotta say that's something that I think is undervalued in even just tabletop role playing games.

Is ambience and mood music. Um, music for me is so fundamental, like, so core to everything that I do. And it's, they, they, there's an old saying in, in film, 90% of what you see is actually something you're hearing. Um, yes. And to me it's, it's a lot late. Largely the same with tabletop role playing games. Like if I don't have something going on in the background, whether it's just like ambient whatever, or soundscapes or music, I feel like, like strange.

Like it feels like I'm not fully immersed as much as I should be.

Ed: Yeah. And, and. that is an interesting thing because it's something I have seen from both sides because, uh, when I first started gaming, uh, role playing gaming, not, not board gaming, um, it was in situations where you couldn't make noise. Oh. So you couldn't put on music, you know, like classrooms lunchtime in, um, so you couldn't, and, and therefore

um, people would talk about, yeah, let's do sound effects and put on music, and you'd think how corny? Um, or whatever. Or you'd say, yeah, I can't do that at my house because um, my mom won't like it, or whatever. You know? And, and I mean, literally there were places I. In the neighborhood I grew up in where no, you mustn't make noise when your father gets home.

He's very tired from a long day of firing missiles or whatever it is he is doing. Um, so, um, you don't want to disturb him. He doesn't want to be disturbed by a lot of noise and chatter. Um, If you're down in the basement and keep your voices down, that'll be okay. But no, you're not playing music, you know?

Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. A little bit of a digression. Um, yes.

Ivan: So speaking of magic, uh, the Netherese are known, I guess, as being incredibly magically powerful. I think that that's conception most people have of the Netherese. And I know that at one point all Netherese were low Netherese. Mm-hmm. So can you tell us a little bit about kind of the history of the art in, in the ancient Netheril empire and how they're, how that evolved into their culture?

Ed: We see it today in Halruaa, which is one survive, um, one surviving enclave of the di of the diaspora, of the scattered Netherese Empire. And the best way to think of Halruaa is, The land where the toasters are magical. Um, you know, it's like everything is done with magic and which is, which is unthinkable to place, uh, to many people elsewhere in the realms because they have to pay through the nose for anybody to cast anything for them.

So the concept of wasting, um, magic on something which isn't of course a waste, but from their point of view is why would you do that when magic costs so much? You know? And, and it's, it again, it's different. And so that's, that's the one way of thinking of ancient Netheril. And of course the other way of thinking of it is they were experimenting and Ioulaum, um, the, the who survives to this day.

Um, in, albeit in a no longer human form, undead and as an elder brain, um, created the first flying city created Mythallars, which are the forerunners of the wards and mantles of today. Um, so that's the, the key to understanding Netheril is it's experimental. So it, the magic varied from place to place. But there was a lot of it, and there was no way of over the long run, keeping it secret.

If somebody came up with something, people would beg, borow and steal. Um, whether the, the, the guy who came up with it, wanted them wanted to share or not, eventually, um, he would get out and everybody in the, in the society would be trying this or using that. So magic was advancing by leaps and bounds. That's the way to think of Netheril, um, and as a result, magical might starts to have an influence on who rules not formally.

There's never, they're never formally saying, oh, well let the magic users rule. No. What it meant was, in practical terms, over time, the guy who could cast the spell had the power to say, Nope, we're not gonna do that. Or Yep, I'll let you do that. Uh, I can control the weather so I can control whether you have crops that fail or not, that sort of stuff.

So over time the people with magical power, um, become the defacto rulers. And then once we have flying cities and so on, you actually have something who are out and out tyrants. You know who's who. Yeah. You know, like everywhere else, power corrupts. Absolutely. And then you have them like issuing orders and killing people who disagree with them.

And then all of a sudden you do have a magical empire in which people with magic rule. But it varies from city to city and place to place. Again, it's a stereotype, not, um, something you can count on being the same all the way across the empire.

Ivan: And is it accurate to say that the elves were the ones that originally kind of gifted the art to the Netherese?

Ed: Yeah, pretty much. Yes. Um, because the humans who became the powerful Netherese started as workers for the elves and the elves gave them this little bit of magic to help them do this job and that little bit of magic to help them do that job. And then over time they said, Hey, we can do this ourselves. We don't need the elves sort of thing now, which is not to say that there was necessarily a huge, we will rise up and slaughter the elves by night.

No. Um, because again, I wasn't telling that story in that time. It was it. Hey, we can actually do this ourselves. Um, magic is not something that is Elvish or Elvin, but not human humans can do it. Hey, wait a minute. Ha ha ha. You know? And so, yeah, so I, I was telling that story and it's, you know, fun to tell those sort of stories, but it was, yeah, I was trying to like, experiment with what a human empire would be like.

And of course, Originally when I started and created Netheril, it was a catchall term to have cool magic items. Where they came from. They came from ancient Netheril. Oh, okay. What's ancient Netheril? Well, this time belong, you know? You know, yeah. Long ago, blah, blah, blah, and far away. You know. You okay.

Got it. Got it.

Ivan: So, uh, I'm kind of curious about the, the visual aesthetic of ancient Netheril. If you had to, I guess, describe it briefly, how do you think people

could describe the Netherese in a visual way that would help 'em to, you know, role play that better or help them visualize that more?

Ed: Uh, a lot of them would be, uh, tall, slender, and snotty.

Um, and, uh, a lot of them would. Have all manner of crazy, um, fashions just because they're always experimenting. So let's try this. I think I look good like this, so let's put that on sort of thing. Um, so there's that. Uh, but beyond that, uh, there's just a motive. What you would not have seen is Netherese with lasting.

Uh, visual deformities, skin conditions, stuff like that because that they would use their magic to fix over time. So if they were born with it or developed it, they would fix it. Wow, that's interesting. Um, just because they didn't want to be in pain or disadvantaged, um, it wasn't. It wasn't, uh, a physical perfection cult or anything like that.

It's just that if you can do something about something and you, that you don't like, then you do something about it and they could.

Ivan: So as fans of the Realms know, uh, ancient Netheril is ancient. It is no more. And, uh, I was hoping you might be able to take us through a little bit of the step-by-step as far as the fall of Netheril, what caused it and kind of the, uh, the, the ripples that it, it caused throughout Toril.

Ed: Oh boy. Well, um, you see, this is the bit that I left as vague as possible and various designers. Who have been looking for a big dramatic scene, have started painting in the details. And I, I was writing it from the point of view always of if you're playing your campaign right now in the Realms. So I was having contradictory stories and long, long ago and far away, you know, that sort of stuff.

And. The general thing was that the Netherese grew so strong that they challenged the gods, the gods themselves, and that was their folley for the gods. Cast them down. And um, there was a great spell or bad thing happened. We don't really know the details. And all of the floating cities crashed and everyone died and that was the end, which of course is not true and is an oversimplification.

That's the sort of story that's come down because it gets wrapped up in a moral lesson as always happens, you know? Um, so it, it, we start having people say, so don't do what the Netherese, oh, here we go again. You know? Um, but, but, uh, all we know is that eventually all these floating cities crashed and some of them can be found to this day.

Nobody knows what became of this city or that city, but, you know, ex uh, adventures who wander around exploring can find crashed, floating cities if they're not careful. Mm-hmm. I mean, uh, sorry.

Ivan: So do you think that most of the ruins one would come upon in a D and D campaign would be of the high Netherese or the low Netherese?

Ed: Oh, uh, it, it depends the, the sort of, ruins you would find that would be low Netherese would be things like Dungeons Underground Subterranean, because they were storage cellars for food and they were refuges for when, uh, the weather got particularly bad. And we, I'm talking now about somebody's spells spun weather that turns into a horrendous gale.

Um, because stuff gets away from someone and you just need, like, um, the tornado, um, cellar that, that people know from much of the southern states where tornado alley is, you know, we, we have a seller to get down into, so we don't all get killed. Every single tornado that comes through, that sort of stuff.

Um, But, uh, so that would be low Netherese, whereas if you find what looks like a crashed city on a mountaintop, that's high Netherese, obviously. Um, but yeah, um, that's basically it. And I, I tried to leave it as mysterious as possible so that every dungeon master could do something different with each city or, because you gotta remember, um, there were games that came before D and D.

And there were games that developed alongside early D and D and one of them, um, Jim Ward was doing Metamorphosis Alpha, and where you would explore the Starship Warden, which is a multi-generational spaceship going through space that everybody's forgotten. Everybody on board may not know that they're on a spaceship.

And, uh, which, uh, you know, Bob Heinlein did in Orphans. Orphans from the Sky. And of course we all got to see on television if we were, um, unlucky enough, uh, The Starlost back in the um, which was, I found fascinating. You know, despite the fact bits of it weren't badly done, I was fascinated to see how they filmed this and that.

And I mean, I was thinking, okay, so you could put a Metamorphosis Alpha gate into the Realms, and we did that. You know, I wasn't the only one coming up that. Um, Gary did it with Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Right? Right. Um, so I mean, it was like, uh, one of your floating cities can be one of these, but another floating city can be something else.

So we were just having fun, so and I wanted it to be every dungeon master's toolbox of you can do anything because that means, because in the early days of gaming, everybody bought everything. Like all your players would buy the same stuff. The Dungeon Master bought so they, and they'd read it so they already knew where everything was and what everything was, and you're going, oh, no.

So you, you, you wanted things to still be, you know Yeah. A mystery at the gaming table. So you wanted to give the poor beleaguered, dungeon master. I'm being sarcastic here because of course the dungeon master could kill you at a whim at the table, you know, in play. But I mean, you were, you were trying to give, um, everybody maximum elbow room to do whatever they wanted to do.

Right, right. You know,

Ivan: because there's so much liberty there in, in kind of deciding what Ancient Netheril is, do you think it would be a fun campaign setting to run a game in? Or do you think it's kind of better left abstracted away as something that informs more recent games and, you know, we're close to 1500 DR

at this point.

Ed: Uh, okay. The easy way is to leave it, uh, in the, in the past and be the cool thing. It's perfectly ideal to use as a campaign setting as long as you realize the sort of things that are going on, and as long as that fits with the sort of role playing stories you want to tell. Um, for instance, if you choose a time right after the fall where there's a lot of misinformation, Racing around as to why cities are crashing.

But people are just getting out from under, like they're getting off a city. If they're a high Netherese or the low Netherese are saying, let's move because they know where we, you know, the people in that flying city. They know where to find us. Let's just move. Yes, they can find us from the air, but the point is they're coming back to.

To plunder our granaries to take what they want the way they've always done, let's just get out from under. So now they'll have to meet us on our terms. So then you could do an adventure where you're exploring the unknown world and racing out into the wilderness, and it's a world full of monsters that you've been able to largely avoid up until now, just by you, you send out the well armed and equipped hunting band.

And the rest of you don't go out there. Well, suddenly all willynilly, you're walking in the woods. You know, it's sort of, it's time to do a Gilligans Island.

Well, I mean that of all references, that's what makes, that's what makes for great roleplaying. When you take people outta their comfort zone and they're going, what is going on? Now, the thing is, you want to be not cruel. Sure. To your player characters who in the real world are real people who probably had a hard day at work.

They don't come to the gaming table to have some person, some sadist um, of a dungeon master ruin them and crush their souls. They want adventure. So, but I mean, still, um, that's what Netheril can be a. We really don't know what's going on. And if you want to put a tarasque in and throw a tarasque at them, and this would be the ideal time and place to do it because who knows what's out there Once you get out into the trackless jungle and you know, or you could be running into, um, rising other non-human races.

Who are the hobgoblins, for instance, or whatever, who the gnolls who are seeking their ch This is our chance. Finally, these humans have screwed up and their powers are on the wane. This is our time. You know? And then they rise. And then you suddenly realize, hey, we're being hunted for food by something, you know?

Uh, what do we do now? You know?

Ivan: So I guess this is the part of the episode where I ask: do you have secrets of the Netherese that maybe aren't widely known by, by the D and D or Realms community at large? And what do you think is something that you wish everybody knew about Netheril and the ancient Netherese?

Ed: Oh boy. I was always, um, a lot more interested in the people of Netheril than the, um, the devices, the magic items.

The devices and magic items and spells, it becomes this giant bucket you can put anything into. Oh, that's from ancient Netheril. Not that, um, but, but when it comes to the people, so I found Ioulaum's story fascinating. I found Karsus's story a bit less fascinating because we know how it ends and we know what he tried to do, you know, so it's sort of written and then he's trapped in this anyway, but Ioulaum because he's still around and could still be doing.

Or you could be insane, who knows? But, um, probably both. Yeah. But it's interesting whereas, okay, let me give you two, um, female Netherese who have been neglected in lore, it was very interesting as to why they were neglected. Um, so. There was one really powerful Netherese arcanist known as Hammardratha. Um, take the word hammer, change the the E at the end to an A and just write d r a t h A on the end.

Hammardratha. And her nickname was she who Crafts Tyrants. And what she did was magically modify many Beholders. Creating less than genius biddable hunting, Beholders with tentacles as well as eyestalks and custom eyestalk powers for specific tasks such as guardianship and mining. And of course, one of the reasons, um, I came up with Hammardratha was because I was creating in the early days in the pages of Dragon, all sorts of Beholder lookalikes because in the original monster manual

you see something with um, that's round with lots of eyestalks it's either a gas spore or a Beholder. So you fire something at it from long range. If it blows up, you're not caught in the blast, cuz it was long range. If it doesn't blow up, run unlike hell cause it's a Beholder. Um, so to get away from that meta gaming, ruining the role playing, and also to get away from some dungeon masters weren't up to the task of treating Beholders like geniuses.

And playing them that way. So they became pushovers in the same way that a dungeon master who doesn't set things upright when they're running a dragon, the dragon become, can become far more of a pushover than it should be. And later editions of the game, like the current one, actually have layer actions or legendary actions to try and.

Overcome that other cool things that the the critter can do. So your, your Band of Adventurers just can't overwhelm it. Anyway, so Hammardratha created, or maybe she created the goth or the Death Kiss slash Bleeder, or Ma or the Death Tyrant or many of the other Beholder lookalikes I created for the game.

Maybe she was the one who created them. And then we come to another. Um, in influential and really important at the time, but forgotten today. Netheril arcanist, a woman called Sardra, S A R D R A, Sardra, and she's best known for Sardra's sequences, which were chains of spells hung to go off one after another. In other words, you cast the spells, but they don't take effect because the way in which you're casting them.

They're, you're casting them, so you can now go and memorize other spells, and the spell just sort of hangs there invisible in mid-air roiling, but doesn't do anything until triggered. So a sequence is a chain of spells that are hung so that the first spell is triggered by a magic mouth, like set of conditions.

And then when the first spell goes off, it triggers the second. And so on and so on and so on. In chains or sequences of six or seven spells. Now the wild magic slash overkill effects of spells colliding or multiple spell areas of effect overlapping were the drawbacks that in game in setting in Netheril at a time.

Kept sequences or chain magic from becoming more popular, which explains why when you or I, um, think of playing a wizard now, it isn't the first school of magic or the first specialty Sure. Character class that we think of because otherwise it would be having a first level wizard who can, um, go away for a, a week before you go adventuring and cast all chains of spells.

And then he says, yep, I'm ready. And then you get into a fight and he unleashes his chain of 20 battle spells, but he's still only first level boy. Everybody want to play one of those. Okay? Why doesn't somebody play one of those? And therefore I have to come up with a, a reason, a drawback. So I built it into the game.

This is the drawback. Haha. So there you go. Sequences of stuff from Netheril that you may not hitherto have known, but I am now spilling the lore beans because that's what we do here. We spill lore beans.

Ivan: That's actually one thing that I really enjoy about doing this series is that. You, you fall on things that were decisions made about the Forgotten Realms, or made about D and D like a long time ago that people just might not have any idea why those decisions came about until you realize that this all has like lore explanations, this all has like secret

knowledge that has never been revealed, that informed those decisions forever ago, and it's like permanently impacted the game.

So, I mean, I just love learning about stuff like this.

Ed: Well, okay, just to play devil's advocate. Usually something happened because for an out of game reason, like it's deadline time, right? Or right or that, that product, we have to chop 40 pages out of it. So let's lose this section. And I, and I, I recall, um, a huge debate that erupted at TSR before I got there one year because, uh, a certain pair of designers

had put in a whole bunch of stuff in a dragon product, uh, a product about dragons. Mm-hmm. That is, that was all about how dragons mate and have sex and so on, um, and, and their eggs and so on, which mattered to the game. Mm-hmm. Because in those days, lots of things in game you sold dragon eggs, eh, like they were your dragon treasure.

If you couldn't defeat it and take its hoard and you couldn't carry its hoard out, maybe you could steal an egg and get it back and sell it in a big city to an alchemist or a wizard to do weird arcane things with that. Of course, nowadays people think about that, that there were ethical things, but yeah.

Yeah. In those days in the game there was no thought of that. That was, um, how much can you sell the egg for? Right, right. You know, it was literally was part of a lot of stuff and that in the Early Dragon Ecology articles, that's what they were for putting in that sort of stuff, Because sometimes it was neglected in the rules, and now it had come up at many hundreds of gaming tables and gamers wanted to know.

So sometimes the lore stuff is for a very, um, non insetting reason. But because it's the Realms and I'm trying to make it all hang together as a tapestry of lore, when somebody does something for an out of game reason, I am frantically trying to concoct an in-game reason. So that the, it makes sense in the Realms, so therefore you end up with something that Yeah.

Has been lost to time because, um, I mean, some things that changed, like infravision and so on, um, they changed from addition to addition of the game. So newer gamers who have not played the older editions may never know what it was that all the fuss was about, the, what we were trying to get rid of. You know, they don't even know what it is.

Ivan: I think about that. Yeah. With old copies of like, even just the Drizzt novels in the very beginning. It was during an era of infravision instead of the current conception of Dark Vision. It was definitely different.

Ed: Yes. Yeah. And, and I went through editions of the game where Dark Vision and infravision existed side by side.

They were two different powers that, and some critters had both, and those, that was the special power of that critter. And of course nowadays you go, what? But that was important at the time. And, and yeah. It's, it's, it's like things change so much over time and the reason for something may now be lost, but it wasn't, it was important at the time.

You know, God, I feel old. Get off my lawn. Oh.

Welcome back Realms Fans to another edition of Realms Speak, where we tackle a word, phrase, or name of the realms that you might stumble over. So we'll stumble over it for you. This time around. We're going to tackle this Zhentarim or Zhentarim. Either one is correct. Zhents are just general Zhentish and so on Zhentilar

are the soldiers, the military and Zhentarim or Zhentarim are the evil empire, the wizards.