How D&D Completely Changed the Original Unther: #Realmslore Ep13 (Extended Video) (Patreon)

Plus 3 incredible secrets, that are ready for your next game, about this lesser-known part of the Realms! 

Looking at the Unther of today, it is completely different from Ed Greenwood's original concept. We discuss the long history of Unther, some of the behind-the-scenes reasons for its frequent metamorphoses, and how you can best incorporate it into your D&D campaign.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Ed: In other words, they are "different"undead to those seen elsewhere in the realms. Liches, wraiths, specters, and vampires that have strange powers and capabilities.

Ivan: Hail and well met Realms Fans! I am Ivan of Many Realms and on this episode of Realms Lore, I have a confession to make, and it's that I don't really know that much about Unther. That being said, I don't feel so bad admitting that to you because honestly, it seems like not a lot of people do. One of the less explored regions of the Realms, have often used as an analog for Mesopotamia,

Unther is a Realms location with a rich history that looks very different today than its original concept. Ed Greenwood will explain it in better detail for you, but this video contains everything that you would need in order to run Unther as a location in your next campaign. And be sure to join Ed at patreon.com/EdGreenwood, where you can find bonus content for our entire Realms Lore series,

plus tons more exclusive perks, all by joining the coolest group of adventurers anywhere. Or if you wanna support Ed another way, visit our shop to get adventuring gear just like this! Link in the description.

Ed: Unther is one of the two mystery sisters. Unther and Mulhorand, the the two. We know all about them, but we know nothing about them. So let, let, let me take you back to your childhood.

Childhood, childhood. No, uh, to, to the beginning of the Realms. Um, So Unther is the first big change that TSR made in the Realms when they bought the Realms. The Moonshaes was the first change, but it was smaller ar arguably it's replacing a bunch of islands with another bunch of islands, so that arguably didn't affect the mainland as much as now.

There were people who will argue the other way, but that's because of the focus we had on the Sword Coast at the beginning, whereas Unther and Mulhorand were these two names on a map way over there off to the East, but Okay. Unther, why got did Unther get changed? Well, Unther got changed from my original because TSR had already published the Desert of Desolation modules.

Which they were published before TSR bought the Realms, but TSR wanted to put them in the Realms because the whole reason they bought the Realms, well, the whole reason they bought the Realms is because big fight with Gary, they didn't wanna put more money in his pocket. So Greyhawk stops getting used.

Sure. They then come up with their own world Dragonlance that takes all of the company's resources for two years. Everybody works on it and it tells a big epic story. Like Lord of the Rings a quest. So what do you do for an encore? Oops. So Jeff Grubb comes up with a position paper called the A Proposal for a Unified Game World for the Second Edition of D and D.

So they go for this position paper, and they task Jeff with finding the world and he calls me and the rest is quote, history. But the point is they needed a kitchen sink world, so they needed to put the Desert of Desolation into the Realms, which is fine, except the Desert of Desolation has Egyptian pyramids.

So they take one of the old empires, and I already had Unther and Mulhorand in the Realms. One of them becomes Egypt, and that's the other one, the one we're not talking about right now, Mulhorand. And one of them becomes Mesopotamia. So, uh, with, because you know, if you look at Gilgeam, the god king of Unther. Awful lot like Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Uh, anyway, okay, so they want to put these real world cultures into the Realms. This is no surprise because you have two senior designers on staff at TSR, Zeb Cook and Doug Niles, who are both history teachers or former history teachers. They're now working for a game company, but they know history. They love history.

They are at home in history. So why not do it in history? Because for one thing, history is the shortcut that gets you all of these real world trappings way people dress, how they eat, how they live. You get it for free, you just sort of port it into the realms. You know my opinions on this and how it leads to bad role playing and Sure.

Bad assumptions and, and mitigating and all the rest of it because people use their real world knowledge, or even worse, their Hollywood knowledge. Uh uh, but okay, they decide to do this the easy way so they really can use Egyptian this and mesopotamian Babylonian and whatever Sumerian THAT that they want to use.

They say that the Imaskar Empire of the time wanted slaves, wanted workers. So they literally open magical gates or portals as the game now calls them, and they drag humans from earth into the Realms to serve as their slaves. So the Untherans, and again, we, we talk about mispronunciations in the Realms that aren't, um, you can, you can say Untherans, you can say Untherans, yeah.

Et cetera, et cetera. Went to Unther on the west coast of the Alamber Sea. And the Alamber Sea is a very grand name for a little southern leg of the Inner Sea, or the Sea of Fallen Stars. Um, by the way, Pathfinder fans, when I say the Inner Sea, I headed first by about. By about 30 years before there was such a thing as um, uh, Paizo.

Ivan: I think a big supplement actually just came out about the Inner Sea like a few months ago, maybe, maybe a year ago.

Doing a lot with the Inner Sea.

Ed: Okay, well picture the Inner Sea is this large blob with lots of little legs sticking out on either side of it because I designed it that way cuz it's a cool thing to use seas as boundaries between countries. So the Dragonmere sticks all the way out and gives us a southern coast for Cormyr and

Sembia and right around the other side, way over on the east, if the Alamber Sea has this little leg at the bottom right, that leg, which doesn't have a foot on the end of it, just a leg has on the west side of it, and Mulhorand on the east side of it and the Mulhorandi tribe went to the east of Alamber Sea. And the Untherans went to the west of the Alamber Sea and they would become the long-running, um, lands of Unther and Mulhorand, both of whom are now referred to as the old empires because they both built empires.

Unther conquered a lot of things and occupied them, and so did Mulhorand. In fact, later on there's gonna be a time in history when Mulhorand conquers all of Unther and takes it over and rules it for a bit. But back to Egyptian pyramids being ported into the Realms. So, uh, at the time they kept a lot of my feature names.

And my city names. Although I have to tell you, Methwood is not mine. I have to think someone at TSR was acquainted with crystal meth. Uh, anyway,

that's the only explanation. Uh, yeah, exactly. I, I read that and I went, okay. Anyway, uh, so, so Unther is Mesopotamia ported to the Realms drawing on the epic of Gilgamesh and Mulhorand was Egypt. Now my original concepts for these decadent old empires. Did have decadence, did have long standing, did have worn out.

But I did not have slavery and I did not have god kings. And of course I did not have pyramids. What I had was giant serpents and serpent worship, which we later covered in the Serpent Kingdom Source book. But we necessarily move that to other lands in the Realms. So the revised now official Realms Lore, was that the Untherans or Untherans worshiped the Untheric

Pantheon: Enlil, Gilgeam, Ishtar, Marduk, who in D and D lore is actually the dragon deity Bahamut. Oh! Nergal and so on. And the Mulhorandi worshiped the Mulhorandi Pantheon: Osiris, Set, Isis, Horus-Re, and so on. With Ao's aid, these deities were able to extend their influence into the Realms, bypassing the Imaskar wor barrier by sending physical avatars to Toril through the astral plane so their worshipers could actually overthrow the Imaskari and rule themselves, or rather be ruled by the avatars who became God kings. The Untherans, or Untheri,

if you prefer, led by Enlil settled west of the Alamber Sea and Enlil found pearls at the mouth of the River Alamber. And at that fa spot he founded the city of Unthalass, which became the capital of the nation of Unther. The Untherans forced out the Turami who were the human natives of the area into Mulhorand to the east and set about growing strong and prosperous under the guidance of the God kings growing in magical mastery and prosper and developing irrigation and so larger and larger harvests so they could feed themselves, they could feed everybody else.

They were rich. And after a time, the God kings of both Unther and Mulhorand realize that peace time is better than war time when it comes to prosperity and better lives for all of your worshipers. So they curbed the wars between them. They agreed on a border, the River of Swords, and both sides turned their attention to expanding in other directions.

For Unther, that was north and West and into Threskel, west Chessenta and South, where they encountered their first really fierce resistance: the Gold Dwarves of the Great Rift, and as we're told that the armies of Unther, uh, developed a reputation for being fierce and ruthless. And once there were conquerors, cruel tyrants, and that is what we now call looking back the First Untheric Empire.

It ended when the wizard Thayd, and where does that name ring a bell? Well, the later country of Thay is named for him. Thayd led rebellion starting in -1087 DR. He succeeded in conquering the northernmost lands of both Unther and Mulhorand, but in, you know, he was up against god kings, so he was eventually defeated and executed in -1081 DR. Thayd was known as the last surviving apprentice of the Imaskari, because he'd learned so much of their magic. Thayd wanted to conquer Unther and Mulhorand because he was a nice guy. No, because he wanted to rule his own empire. So Thayd fails. However, Thayd unintentionally left a nasty little trap that outlived him.

He needed troops. So he opened a gate to, he secretly opened his own magical gate, connecting the realms, connecting Toril with a world of orcs. And they quietly invaded unnoticed at first until there were too many of them to, to ignore any longer as they started conquering and they rolled over Unther and Mulhorand in this

long drawn, um, conflict now known cleverly as the Orcgate Wars. Um, and they are eventually defeated, but not before the battle of the gods, which kills most of the gods of Unther and Unther is left weakened and its soon loses its southernmost and Western most lands as all the lands that get c that were conquered

rebel successfully and get their own independence back. So Enlil, who is sort of the senior God king, he leaves the Realms in -731, leaving Gilgeam as the supreme God king of Unther. And this time, beginning with Gilgeam's rule, is now thought of as the beginning of the Second Untheric Empire. In which the Untheric calendar was founded, year one in its counting is the same as -734 DR.

And unless you're a sage combing records or tomb inscriptions, you can now safely forget all about the Untheric calendar.

So, uh, Unther under the increasingly tyrannical Gilgeam, he was a perfect example of absolute power corrupts absolutely. He got, he, he started out as a nice guy, but he was a god and he got more and more of a tyrant and more and more whimsical, random, crazy as time went by. So, um, it was the country he was ruling largely because of his whims was far less powerful than it had been as the first empire, and it suffered reverse after reverse.

As more and more distant conquered territory successfully rebelled until Chessenta which Unther had rolled over with ease much earlier, conquered Unther and ruled it as a vassal state, leaching it of crops and goods for almost a century, only after the death of the Chessentan hero Tchazzar, or Tchazzar. Again, we get into the Realm stuff.

Um, Tchazzar is usually. Most sages, because I learned it from Elminster, pronounce it Tchazzar. The T is silent as in Venezuela, Tchazzar. Only after the death of the Chessentan hero Tchazzar was Unther able to free itself, but its days of expansion and ruling a far flung empire were over. Unther turned insular, and focused on renewal, but

this was a renewal that was hampered by the increasingly erratic tyranny of Gilgeam and the so along come the Time of Troubles. The time of, you know, the gods war, the Avatar Trilogy time. Mm-hmm. Um, and Tiamat, the dragon goddess of greed, kills Gilgeam. Uh, she fights him, he kills her. She's prepared for this. So she comes back in the second body and surprised attacks him and gets him.

After having like, um, almost killed him in the first fight. And he goes, wow, there we go. Whew. I can sit down on my throne and relax now. And she appears a second time and kills him. So, um, uh, Unther then falls into civil, civil war. And in 1371,Mulhorand invades, they conquer most of Unther. The few remaining northern lands are ruled by the northern wizards trying to hang on to Unther.

But they fall nine, um, eight years later in 1379 DR. So Unther becomes an occupied province of Mulhorand. But in 1384, the Second Sundering begins the Spellplague rages, and most of Unther passes into the world of Abeir. And part of the Dragonborn land of Tymanchebar passes from Abeir into what had been Unther.

Where the Dragonborn who now find themselves in this strange new place, found the realm of Tymanther, uh, really clever there. Tymanchebar plus Unther. Squeeze them together ? Tymanther. So in 1479 we have the realm of Tymanther. So the Untherans and the Mulhorandi occupiers who had been in Unther as the Second Sundering began.

They get put into Abeir. They pass into Abeir and they get enslaved by the Shyran genasi who are there in Abeir, but they go on praying to their gods, and the prayers of the Untherans bring a second incarnation of Gilgeam into Abeir to lead them. And he realizes he doesn't have enough military strength to, to, um, overthrow the genasi.

So he makes a pact with the demon lord Graz'zt for a demon army. Wow. And they're just about to, um, fight off the genasi and get, gain their independence when the Second Sundering, which has been continuing all this time, fades to an end. And demons, Untherans, and Mulhorandi abruptly pass back in, into Toril before they can fight.

Um, but Tymanther is prevented from returning to Abeir because Enlil... remember Enlil? He took off well. Hmm. Uh, he doesn't want the, the big hole and all this stuff. So he stops Tymanther going back to Abeir. So, Gilgeam Has Dragonborn to fight instead of genasi. So he leads the demons and his worshipers against the Dragonborn.

And so begins the First Tymanther-Unther War. The Untherites were able to reclaim most of their old northern territory and besiege the Dragonborn city of Djerad Kethendi. But when they sought to reclaim the land south of the River Alamber, they were hurled back by the Tymantherans because you got a demon army there.

Well, the devils don't like that. So the devils send an army from Malbolge, an army of devils, and they destroy Gilgeam's demon allies or try to. So there's a lot of fighting going on, which brings us to today. War is still raging on. In 1489, the Untherite army is trying and failing to defeat a dragon turtle that protects Djerad Kethendi and that's where we are now.

Which brings me to my problem with Unther. My problem with Unther, as we've seen it, is that we've been shown too much battlefield and gods fighting, and we've been shown far too little of how people live daily and what they eat, how they dress, what they do, which is all the stuff that a dungeon master has to know if you're gonna adventure there.

And so what we've got so far is like a boring history class. I don't feel the Realms all around me, real and coming to life. I feel like a history teacher is standing at the front and saying, so then, the chariots were used in. Okay. Uh, the, the, now the, the Unther also has plenty of racism unnecessarily. So like Gilgeam elevating "pure blooded Mulans" as replacement nobles instead of everybody else.

It has lots of slavery and other distasteful stuff. And of course, like I said earlier, I'm also not a fan of meth this and meth that in the naming. Yeah. Right. Uh, and on top of that, having god kings walking around it sort of hampers mortal agency, let the gods fade into the background, which is something that Wizards has done in Fifth Edition,

and let mortals live their lives, letting player characters shine as heroes. So perhaps Gilgeam will fall again in this current war. Just saying.

Ivan: Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned that at some point Unther was actually taken out of Toril, right? And, and put into Abeir. And then it kind of very suddenly came back into Toril

and I'm curious like what was going on behind the scenes that might have led to a decision like that? Is that something you can speculate on?

Ed: Yes, I can do more than speculate cuz I actually attended a secret summit. Oh. At Wizards of the Coast where we planned the Sundering or the what is now known as the Second Sundering.

We were planning the whole big event. Now, um, It would offend against NDAs and so on to give you a blow by blow of who said what. Sure. But let, let us just say that there was a lot of what you and I would call chalkboard talk. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Um, where people wrote names of places on the board and circled them and said, what is this kingdom?

What is it here for? As in, what are we gonna, what use are we gonna make of it? Now, I, I suspect, what we were encountering in the minds of the in-house designers at the time was a desire to get rid of a real world analog they were now uncomfortable with. Sure, sure. Um, Egypt and Mesopotamia and with slaves and god kings and Dragonborn was this cool player race playable PC race in the game.

Why don't they have a kingdom? Well, let's just swap one out, put the other in its place. Slick being as we're, you know, being, as we're changing the world, we can make these huge changes. Like, Hey, we're gonna take North America and take it away. Right. And we're gonna put a new continent in it's place, and the new continent is full of My Little Pony or whatever.

Right? Right. You see, if you're gonna make big changes, that is the way to do it because there's two, there's three ways to make changes. Slow and general and in the world. And this happens, and then this happens. And then purple mushrooms appeared, and then this happened, and then there's the, oh, it was always this way,

you just didn't notice. There were always castles full of giants here. You just never noticed them before. Or there's the, let's turn it into a big epic, which we all, all of us who read Marvel comics and, and are as old as me, we've seen Thor. As in the comic book Thor, not the character Thor, the comic book Thor has done Ragnarok umpteen times now because every, every hundredth issue, yeah, sometimes every 50th issue it was time to do Ragnarok again.

You know? Uh, so it was like, let's make this a big event. And, and we did this with Time of Troubles in the realms, you know, if you're gonna make a big change event and Time of Troubles was moving the edition to the. The game to the new editions. Were getting rid of all the assassins and this and that and the other thing to make it match the new edition.

You make it a big event instead of just distracting people. You instead of doing the magicians thing where, see this hand, well, you shouldn't have been looking at this hand. You should have been watching this other hand over here instead of doing that magician's misdirection thing. You're doing, making it a big event.

Stay tuned as the world changes. You know? Um, uh, so that's what they did because hey, if your objective is to sell things to people, why not have a big event that is important and groundbreaking? So you sort of have to buy it to keep your, your Realms stuff current. Um, so I think that's what we're seeing here.

The, uh, now uncomfortable world, real world elements are going away. And the now cool flavor of the moment, new player character, playable, they need a kingdom is coming into the, into their place. So that, that's I think why it happened. And it, it's, it's really fun because one of the things that I've noticed everybody glossing over is, well, how did it work exactly?

Did like, did your kingdom just vanish into the void and there was a great dark moment of emptiness. And then this new one would pop into place. And it fit just like a jigsaw puzzle piece, or, or did they pass through each other? Yes, they passed through each other. It was sort of confusing. It was like the Mists of Ravenloft, you know.

Oh, oh. Except it's not like the Mists of Ravenloft, oh no, let's not confuse the IPs but, but if it's the same thing, so they sort of pass through each other. Elements can pass through each other. Because that's the carte blanche for saying, well, we kept this but we got rid of that. We can't do wholesale swaps and so he, which is why we have this explanation that Enlil liked Tymanther for some crazy reason and wanted to keep it, you know?

Ivan: Right. So you mentioned that Unther is obviously a real world analog for Mesopotamia, or at least that's what it evolved into. And I'm kind of curious if you can speak to what maybe your original Unther looked like before that decision got made and before we've gotten, gotten, brought into the, the recent era of Unther.

Ed: So. My Unther, and I'm not saying this is better, or I think it would've been more playable

interesting. Uh, my Unther was a land of humans worshiping serpents. So unlike the God kings Unther that we got, where everybody develops, um, magically powerful things because they're being led by god king, you know, and all that stuff. You've got people who are basically really good farmers and they're getting better and better, and they're getting better and better because these serpents that they worship, yes, there are little tiny serpents, snakes.

Poisonous Viper types running around everywhere. I'm not talking giant constrictors, I'm talking venomous snakes. And we also have huge ones who are intelligent. So sort of like wingless, slow moving dragons. Okay. And, but because they're reptilian, they go into a torpor if they're too hot and they also die, or

stop doing anything if they're too cold. So they're, they're trying to engineer the climate, not just for where they live, like in burrows so they can go in outta the sun and so on, but they're trying to engineer the microclimate of the, of the kingdom and balance what their needs as serpents with the needs of agriculture so that the humans can feed and they want the agriculture for two reasons.

The humans get the grain and the beer like barley beers. So they get the beer. Very important. Um, yes, very important. And they get all the rodents that feed on it cuz that's what they eat. They wanna gobble down lots of rodents. And so therefore they don't, they aren't a magical powerhouse. And they aren't big tech fabricators.

Like we were talking, um, about Neverwinter, and we talked about how they're great castors. And they can cast medals and make parts. Well, you've got an Unther that isn't like that at all, but it looks south to the dwarves, um, to get smiths and casters. And the dwarves of the Great Rift, the Gold Dwarves, don't wanna have anything to do with them.

No, you worship snakes Get outta here. Gross. Yeah. Yeah. So they go west into Chessenta. And Chessenta is a verdant farming land, uh, where um, all sorts of human petty rulers, little lords and barons, they all rule their own things and they all like to, um, uh, raise horses and have better horses than the guy next door and sell horses to the, they sell the inferior horses to everybody else across the Realms, like all down the Vilhon Reach and Chondath and so on.

Um, so various of these serpent rulers, local serpent rulers, make packs with various barons. And so the barons say, Hey, I can get free food and beer or damn near free food and beer, um, in return for giving out, you know, windows and wheels and axles for wagons and stuff like that, that we've got in excess. Oh, and I, I suppose you want the occasional spell. Good,

that's fine. So what you have is a whole bunch of different, a vying rival serpent leaders making packs with different rival vying barons. And so the, and they all like to hire adventurers as proxy fighters, as dirty tricks agents, and as, um, fodder. To be framed and blamed for the, the bad things. Oh, it wasn't us, it was those outlanders we hired you

you know, they're so uncouth. We would never do such a thing as to burn, burn your, uh, castle and, and plunder, um, all your granaries and everything. It's those nasty foreigners, those outlanders, so the adventurers get. And so I had set up something that was gonna be far more interesting for adventuring play and far less of a grand sweep of history.

Which is what we got, um, which worked very well for names at the border of a map that you're not going to go to, but I was building something. I wanted it real in every part of the Realm. So if you actually go there in a, in a novel or in a short story, it feels real. So if you actually go there at the gaming table, I've built a society around you, which is just as interesting for an adventure to to be in an adventure in as Waterdeep or

the Dalelands or the Sword Coast North and, and going through down Dungeons and fighting Dragons in their layers. I needed to have something as interesting. So that is unfortunately what we got slighted in in Unther. The daily life. I mean, yes, I, if you read Old Empires, that Scott Benny wrote, there's some nice illustrations and some nice pages describing the agriculture and so on, but,

there's never the really, the feeling of living there. It's always looking down from a great height on the vast sweep of history. And we talk about, you know, how many thousands of, you know, uh, soldiers there are in this place? No, no, that, that's the original Greyhawk, which was for sand table war gaming gave us the military strength, but it didn't tell us what it was like to live in the place.

I don't need to know how many troops Furion has or what its banners are like if you haven't told me what it's like to live there, because if you haven't told me what it's like to live there, I can't set my D and D campaign there. So that's what I, we have the same problem here on Unther, and that's what I wanted addressed first.

Show me and like, let me feel what it's like to stand in Unther, having been born there, growing up there looking around me, I'm, and I'm a bored teenager, chafing at my elders because they, they know the right way to do things and they're, they're bent on teaching me the right way to do things. And like any rebellious teenager, I don't wanna learn the right way to do things.

I want to do my own thing. Okay, what is the world, what is the, the country around me like? What are the attitudes of everybody in the country towards the places I've never been to and never seen that are further, like the doors of the Great Rift to the South Chessenta to the West. Oh, those, those evil people in Mulhorand across the sea, you know?

What's it like, um, like if I go to the River of Swords, are there two armed camps facing each other there? Is it like, you know, a defensive line or is it just a post that says you are now entering Mulhorand? We welcome careful drivers, you know?

Ivan: And what makes this doubly egregious, in my opinion, is for listeners or viewers that haven't seen some of the older episodes where we have talked about this in greater detail.

Also, if you haven't go do that. Ed, I know that you're incredibly aversed to adding real world elements into, into the games, and not necessarily real world elements, but real world analogs so people mm-hmm. Can, can or would superimpose kind of real world values. Or cultures or peoples or heritages or what have you into the Realms.

It's, it's, it's kind of a no-fly zone for you. So the fact that, that somebody would very purposely say, here's this thing that you created. Nope. It's Mesopotamia now it's, it's kind of like mind boggling.

Ed: Yeah. It's a, it's a "WHAT!?" Moment? Yeah. No, I'm not adverse to real world elements. Like for instance, uh, say you go to Spain or Portugal as a tourist, And you go into one of those tourist shops, well, one of the things you can buy is these little leather water bottles.

They, they, they're sort of curvy shaped and you hang them on your belt, and if you're laboring in the fields, you drink water from them. And let me tell you, if the, if the hide hasn't been cured properly, it tastes terrible, which is why the modern ones have a plastic liner and they have a little plastic nozzle that screws into place and you can squirt them and everything.

I would not be averse at all. To seeing those leather water bottles in the Realms, uh, minus the plastic. Sure. Uh, sure.

Ivan: Minus because plastic, the, the petroleum industry is booming in Faerun.

Ed: Yeah. Yeah. But, but I mean, that sort of thing, that's a real world element because anybody could invent something like that, and it's cool and it works on a daily basis.

What I would not want is for someone to say, oh, Those bottles. Spain, let's put Franco into the Forgotten Realms. Right, exactly. Or no. Or let's, let's not, right?

Ivan: Yeah. Let's put this strange analog in place of Spain and then just call it something else, but have it be very, very, obviously influenced by the country of real world Spain.

Understandable. Yeah.

Ed: Yeah. And, and my, my hatred isn't real world. It's the fact that gamers are pulled out of the immersive experience of being in the Realms because they start trying to remember what they know about real world Spain from history or from their visits or from Hollywood movies or whatever, and it pulls them out of the Realms and into, oh, now what do I remember?

Bull fighting. Yeah. Or, or whatever. Um, and they start using that knowledge at the table and they're not enjoying the Realms as a character in it. They're now standing, looking down on the Realms as a real world person trying to dredge up stuff from their memory. And it's a completely different gaming experience and there's nothing wrong with that gaming experience, but that's not what I wanted for my Realms.

And you know, I was doing this originally just as my own world. So when somebody says, well, how dare you decide how people will play their games? Yeah. When I started, it wasn't about the game. The game didn't exist. It was my world as a little boy trying to entertain myself. So it's perfectly valid to do the things I wanted to do and the way I wanted to do them.

And now that it's everybody's world, sure, go ahead. But as a design thing, I'm, I'm set enough in my ways cuz I'm old, um, that I don't, I don't wanna fall into this habit of, yes, let's just put everything from the real world in. Let, let, let I, I'm already set in my ways that it seems to work better if you try and come up with

a Realms version of something rather than a direct real world analog. It always seems to work better. We've seen it happen over and over again, and I would submit that Unther is a case in point.

Ivan: Yeah, of course. And, and actually knowing that Unther is so, I guess, politically tumultuous, um, I'm curious if you have any insight for people that are playing maybe in the contemporary realms, like the close to 1500 DR.

What kind of value they could extract from what's happening in Unther now and some of the influence Unther might have in the land surrounding them or directly into their campaign?

Ed: Well, okay. What you've got right now is an ongoing war, and you've got the humans led by Gilgeam. Um, and we don't know much about the sanity or the actual godly powers of this second incarnation.

Um, and let, let us assume for the sake of, uh, convenience that the demons and devils have largely wiped each other out. Okay? There may be individual demons and devils or even a few military units around, but they're not massed armies of them anymore, which could mean they're marauding, they're on the loose, they've deserted the cause.

They're now out in the Realms to see what they can get for themselves. So now you can fight them as monsters. When you are on the wandering adventures. Yeah. The same time you have Dragonborn who are out in the Realms now wandering because some Dragonborn, and remember it's very, and this is the danger of this monolithic, historical thing, you know, that we're the that right, right.

Of thinking that the, that the, the citizenry of a, of a country is a, is a monolithic thing. All Dragonborn will obey their military commanders or so they will all fight. You know, um, um, and, and although it was cute in the Lord of the Rings movies at the be in the beginning scenes, the flashback scenes, to see all the elves reach over their shoulders as one to get an arrow and fire it in unison.

And it was like, look, look how sophisticated and disciplined they are as a, as compared to the dirty humans. Well, yeah, but it was also somewhat chilling. Oh my goodness. Now you could argue all of those people you were seeing were Elvin warriors all equipped the same. They were there on that battlefield for a reason.

So that works. But I would have a great trouble if it was a long line of elves stretching off into the distance. With all of the mothers, the pregnant mothers, I mean, and the old ladies and the children, and they're all trying to do a bow in unison, you know? Right, right. That would be just creepy. Okay.

It's one thing if it's the last stand of a race that is being attacked in their, in their last bastion, but it's completely different when it's an entire country. So I would say that some of the Dragonborn have no interest in this fight at all and they're, they're wandering around trying to find their own place in the Realms.

So they may be going into Mulhorand, MurghÃm, into Thay, until they discovered they weren't welcome, they might go south. You know, they look towards the Great Rift into the grasslands of the Shaar. They're wandering around as adventurers and could be encountered as adventurers at the same time, maybe some of the returned Untherans

are going, no, no, I don't wanna fight and die on a battlefield. Um, I'm just gonna go west into Chessenta. Now that, that begs the question of what's Chessenta like right now. And you have to decide that for your own campaign. And, and I can tell you that there are, there are inventive gamers working on, um, their versions of Chessenta for right now, and that's really cool.

Um, but. I'm just trying to point out that not every single Untheran and not every single Dragonborn of Tymanther will be clashing on the battlefield. Some of them will be trying to get on a ship and go somewhere else and see the rest of the Realms and maybe build a new life in the new place because they're tired of this endless warfare or the tumult of being shoved back and forth between worlds.

They want to find a place where they can like hide from it all. Settle down. And then be accepted because you know, if you're a Dragonborn and look sort of scaly and dragon like, and you show up in the wrong place, you're gonna get attacked by fearful humans instead of welcomed with open arms. Or on the other hand, if you happen, let's just say for the sake of argument, that your ship lands in Saerloon and it lands at one of the festivals

where people are cosplaying as monsters and they say, Hey man, that's a great Dragonborn costume. You come to our party and then there you are, you know, drinking with your arms around people cuz you're the hit of the party. And he says, Hey, I can't even find the zipper for this thing. Can't find the zipper.

Except, except zippers haven't been an invented yet. But anyway, uh, So he, he will depend on your reception, will depend on where you go and what's going on at the time. But I would submit that that is the most interesting thing. There's gonna be a diaspora in all directions of both sides of everybody involved, just spreading out across the realms.

Cuz they don't want to die on the battlefield. Right there. They want live.

Ivan: You're right. Right. And one thing that I always find fascinating about these talks with you is that when we flesh out areas like this in the Realms, It just makes me think of like if I took one person from every location in these videos and put them in a tavern by the end of the series, I would've a very full tavern.

And no matter who my players talk to, they could discover an incredibly rich history of whatever, you know, place in the Realms they happen to be from. And I think that's a lot of the real value of, of these talks is just having it in the back of your head to flesh out that world for your players better.

I mean, should they encounter something like a roaming Dragonborn? Right. All right, ed, it is that time in the episode again where I ask do you have any secrets of Unther, and if not secrets, something that might help folks role play Unther better? Uh, something that you might wish that everybody knew.

Ed: Anticipating that you would ask this question because my mind reading powers are steadily expanding as I grow old and ugly.

Uh, I went back to my original lore notes about Unther and I salvaged what I think will still work, um, going along with the TSR earth peoples and pantheons lore to bring you three new lore, secrets of Unther. These aren't new, new, but they're new to the wider world. Uh, outside my head. Which is most of it.

So the Underdark, deep beneath Unther was the site of one of the early Beholder lands, Glolmarra, g l o l m a r r a. Glolmarra And, although it's illithid underlings rebelled, and many of its gibbering mouther and cloaker guardians broke free and shattered Glolmarra society, so it collapsed into thousands of independent Beholder layers and territories.

A few of the very oldest Beholders remain in the ruins where they have dream spawned grapefruit and human head sized. So I'm not, I'm not saying they dream spawn grapefruits. Um, it works great for breakfast, but other than that, it's kinda useless. Yeah, they dream spawn grapefruit sized and human head sized Beholder-kin to serve them.

So they're currently forging, tentative and wary alliances among each other. And these are hampered by several of these eldest. Going insane and lashing out at friends and allies to develop stronger arcane spells so they can refound or conquer Underdark layers above it to create a new kingdom. At the same time, the diaspora of Beholders who fled Glolmarra to find nuez or to rule carry the memory of Glolmarra's greatness.

And are thinking of ruling slaves, uh, for instance, the Dragonborn and the humans who are currently warring above them in the former Unther and Tymanther as well as neighboring Threskel and Chessenta, they would make ideal slaves, uh, in the new lands that they intend to conquer. Some of them are already spying on the dragon kings of MurghÃm

and the wizard ruled land of Thay trying to decide how best to conquer these much stronger targets. All right, so there's, that's secret

Ivan: not bad number for, for a first crack at it. I can't wait to hear number two.

Ed: Yeah. So all over northern former Unther are not yet disturbed tombs of nobility of Unther who died in the First Untheric Empire.

Some of these are full of enchanted items, magical items, magic items that are unusual today and others contain undead inhabitants who passed into undeath as the result of the enchantments on the items they were intuned with. In other words, they are different undead to those seen elsewhere in the Realms.

Liches, wraiths, specters, and vampires that have strange powers and capabilities if freed by tomb robbers, natural events, or careless magic. They will seek to acquire living bodies to possess as their own and more magic to defend themselves against the unfamiliar threats they will see all around them, and some

being Nobles will rightfully seek to rule the lands all around. A few of them are already out of their tombs, including Krael, K R A E L, Krael, which is short for Harnahrashkrael, H A R N A H R A S H. K R a e l. What? Krael. Krael's easier. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Krael. Krael's Easier A lich. Uh, and this Krael is a lich who has wraith claws.

And folks think of the boneclaw monster, but Krael's long talons are shadowy wraith fingers most of the time. So he can thrust them into foes. And then solidify them for rend, very unfair, very messy, uh, Krael is, is, is lurking in the populous southern cities of Thay. Murdering red wizards on the sly and gaining their magic with great stealth and patience.

Like all Untheran liches, nothing stops Krael from learning new magic or subsuming magic items. Gaining their powers as he dissolves them inside his own body. So that's one thing that the Untheran liches can do. They can subsume magic items. You bring them like a ring of feather falling. They don't stick it on their finger, they thrust it into their body, like by, either by swallowing it or some other cavity.

Let's not get too detailed, but gross. Yeah. Cool. But gross. Yeah. And, and, and. The, the thing glows inside them and melts and its powers become part of them. And they also gain magical energy as, uh, rebuilding themselves energy so they can quote, heal. They're un, they're undead now anyway. Um, now Krael seeks living bodies attractive enough that he can control them to seduce more red wizards.

I don't mean he wants to enter those bodies. I mean, he wants to use magic to control them. So he is gonna have some agents to seduce more red wizards and to lure them to where he can get at them. Cuz remember he wants to take down each one tracelessly. So as far as other red wizards are concerned, they just disappeared.

Uh, they, they met with misadventure. They must have been off doing something they shouldn't have been doing, and they just never came back. So that's, that's secret number two. And now we come to the third and last for now secret, um, in the Unthangol Mountains, which you can find on your maps of Unther in the south there.

If you're heading towards the Great Rift, you'll run across this EastWest Mountain range, the Unthangol Mountains lurks a Blue Dragon that savaged the dying Unthari God Ki. Um, it's "key" not "kai" but you can pronounce it Kai if you want! Uh, she was the goddess of nature in the original Untheric Pantheon, and she was sorely wounded in the battle of the gods, and she was dying on the battlefield.

So a blue dragon opportunistically devoured much of her torso. And was transformed and augmented, thereby. This she dragon. Here we go again: Meirytraukkrul. Meirytraukkrul.

Ivan: Oh my goodness. I'm sorry. These Dragon names man. My nemesis.

Ed: Okay. Okay. Okay. Don't worry about it because she goes by Meer. Perfect. Okay. M E e R. Does you hang out with Krael?

Is that Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, she doesn't. Not yet, but. Krael's gotta ride something. So, you know, uh, anyway, uh, uh, so, uh, um, the proper name is m e i r y t r a u k k r u l Meirytraukkrul. But obviously she goes by Meer. Uh, this she dragon Meer gained the ability to merge with the earth at will and travel through it silently,

tracelessly, but very slowly. But she's able to see and hear outta the earth while doing so. So you know, if she doesn't wanna fight somebody, she can just like sink down into the earth and lie there. You can't find her. Her body is like merged with the earth, not under the earth, not buried, merged with the Earth.

So you can't find her. And she could be right under your boots while you discuss searching for the blue dragon to kill it. And she can be listening to your every word. And watching you looking, looking up your dress. No looking, looking at exactly what you look like for later, so as to come after you anyway, uh uh, and she also gained the ability by, by devouring much of Ki's body to summon all sorts of beasts, including monsters, a half dozen, every round to fight for her.

And she also gained the ability to regenerate 4D4 hit points a round. Meer also gained something of Ki's attitudes in that she no longer wants wealth or influence. So the the things that drive most dragons, she doesn't want anymore. She does want to exist forever, and she does want to remake Toril as she sees fit, slaying those

she dislikes, thwarting the clergy of Gods in particular, and aiding those she takes a liking to. She is disgusted by Shar, Lolth, and others she sees as doing wanton destruction or dragging down mortals from their strivings. And Meer is doing something very few deities have thus far embraced. She's aiding adventurers who are willing to do her bidding or work on causes she likes even rescuing some of them from likely doom.

Meer uses her earth melding powers to stay hidden much of the time and travel where she wants to emerging unexpectedly, often by night to speak and act. She seems to be developing the give her spells that give her influence over animals, plant, and luck, which were the domains that the Goddess Ki commanded.

So there you go. Secret number three. The Meer dragon.

Ivan: That's unbelievable. And I feel like with that, the addition of that dragon, and with Iymrith, which has gotten a lot of attention now in 5e, there is just tons of really great Blue Dragon intrigue going on that players can latch onto.

Ed: I love it. Yes.

Welcome to another edition of #RealmsSpeak, this bijou little segment where we we take names, phrases, and words of the Realms that you may stumble over and we stumble over them for you. This time we're going to tackle this: Usually referred to as the Devil Dragon or Nalavara, and her proper full name is pronounced Nalavarauthatoryl.

Nalavarauthatoryl! Which is why she's usually known as the Devil Dragon. Um, she was also an elf called Lorelei Alavara, which is probably where she derived her own name from. There you go.