RIP James M. Ward

News has sadly broken that tabletop roleplaying pioneer James M. Ward has passed away at the age of 72.

Born in 1951, Ward was an acquaintance of Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and agreed to help him road-test a new game he was developing in 1973. This game became Dungeons & Dragons, with Ward as one of the early players. Gygax created the wizard Drawmij of Oerth in Ward's honour. When Gygax started TSR in late 1973 and published D&D in January 1974, he recruited Ward to help work on the game as a writer and designer.

Ward collaborated with another of the original plays, Rob Kuntz, to create Gods, Demigods & Heroes (1976), a D&D sourcebook that introduced gods and religion to the game. Back when TSR was trying to publish a number of different systems, Ward created the first science fantasy roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha (1976). Drawing on this work, Ward then co-created (with Gary Jaquet) the better-known Gamma World (1978).

Ward continued working as a staffer at TSR, contributing to different projects. He wrote Deities & Demigods (1980), an effective update of his 1976 book to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition rules.

In 1988 Ward drew on his background playing in Gygax's home games to write Greyhawk Adventures, which updated Gygax's signature home setting for the upcoming Advanced D&D 2nd Edition rules. Ward contributed to the design of AD&D 2E and was responsible for the removal of the assassin class, something he noted did not go down well with many fans.

Also in 1988 Ward worked on Ruins of Adventure, the tabletop supplement based on the Pool of Radiance video game set in the Forgotten Realms. Ward further developed the story and scenario into a trilogy of novels, published as Pool of Radiance (1989, with Jane Cooper Hong), Pools of Darkness (1992, with Anne K. Brown) and Pool of Twilight (1993, with Anne K. Brown).

Ward developed Spellfire, TSR's answer to Magic: The Gathering, in 1994. After an initially strong start, the game suffered from a lack of budget (resulting in a considerable reuse of art from existing projects, to fans' dismay).

Ward left TSR in 1996 during the major financial upheavals caused by Random House returning unsold stock to the company for refund, which the company could not afford to pay. This triggered the company's collapse and its subsequent buy-out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. After departing, Ward worked as a freelancer on various projects (including a Metamorphosis Alpha reboot) before joining Troll Lord Games to work on their Castles & Crusades game line. Ward continued to work on Metamorphosis Alpha material - of which he retained full ownership - until the late 2010s.

As well as the projects with his name on it, Ward contributed in an enormous number of ways to other projects in a variety of roles, from proof-reading the Planescape Campaign Setting (1994) to providing additional design support for the Serenity roleplaying game (2004).

Ward produced new material under his solo companies, Fast Forward Entertainment and WardCo.

Ward was diagnosed with a serious neurological disorder in 2010, for which he received treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Friends, colleagues and fans rallied around with crowdfunding campaigns that ultimately helped him receive the treatment he needed to considerably extend his quality of life.

Ward passed away on 18 March 2024, and is survived by his wife and three children.

RIP Jennell Jaquays, D&D designer and artist and video game designer

Dungeons & Dragons designer and artist Jennell Jaquays has sadly passed away at the age of 67.

Born in Michigan in 1956, Jaquays attended Spring Arbor College in the late 1970s, where she become interested in the nascent roleplaying industry. Jaquays began playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1975, shortly after the game came out, and started a fanzine for the game, The Dungeoneer, alongside Mark Hendricks. The fanzine proved successful, and Jaquays began writing for the official TSR magazine, Dragon. She also began working for Judges Guild and freelancing for TSR, producing the officially-licensed D&D modules Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia, both of which became quite well-known in fan circles at the time. Dark Tower was the only none-TSR adventure included in Dungeon magazine's "Thirty Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time" list in 2004.

Jaquays expanded her remit to cover many of the popular roleplaying systems of the day, expanding from Dungeons & Dragons to work on Traveller and RuneQuest. In 1980 she was brought over to work at Coleco by Michael A. Stackpole (himself a wargaming and roleplaying legend for his work on BattleTech, as well as a Star Wars novelist), where she worked on home ports for popular arcade games like Donkey Kong.

Jaquays worked at id Software from 1997 to 2002, working on Quake II and Quake III: Arena as a level designer, before joining Ensemble Studios, where she worked on Age of Empires III and Halo Wars. After Ensemble collapsed in 2009, she moved to CCP to provide work for their game EVE Online. More recently she worked with her wife at Dragongirl Studios.

For Dungeons & Dragons, Jaquays is noted for her work on the classic Castle Greyhawk module for the World of Greyhawk setting, and for The Savage Frontier module for Forgotten Realms (large chunks of which were reprinted for The North: Guide to the Savage Frontier almost a decade later).

Jaquays co-won the 1989 Origins Gamer's Choice Award for Best Roleplaying Adventure. In 2017 she was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design. She was also active in the LGBTQ+ community, for which she was a strong voice in the gaming world.

A key worker in the field of both tabletop and video games, and with some impressive credits to her name which have been played and enjoyed by millions, she will be missed. She is survived by her wife and two children. She passed away earlier today from complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Warner Brothers close to greenlighting FORGOTTEN REALMS movie

Warner Brothers are reportedly close to greenlighting the Forgotten Realms/Dungeons and Dragons movie they've been developing recently.

Warner Brothers secured a deal last year with Sweetpea Entertainment and Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (who were in litigation over the Dungeons and Dragons film rights) to end a legal dispute and start work on a film set in the Forgotten Realms world. There were indications that Warner Brothers wanted to fast-track the movie, seeing a ready-made opportunity to develop a shared universe akin to the Marvel or DC movies.

Producer Roy Lee confirmed that the long-term plan is to develop films based on several of the Dungeons and Dragons worlds, not just stay in the Forgotten Realms. Other D&D worlds they may consider visiting include the blasted, post-apocalyptic Dark Sun; the epic, dragon-centric Dragonlance; the cosmic, bizarre Planescape; and the old-skool, traditional Greyhawk. Other candidates may include the steampunk Eberron, the horror-tinged Ravenloft or the Game of Thrones-esqe (but note it predated the books) Birthright.

David Leslie Johnson has written the script, which according to Lee is aiming for Guardians of the Galaxy, more light-hearted tone than other fantasy movies. Lee also confirmed that the film will feature the Yawning Portal Inn, which means that the great, iconic city of Waterdeep will feature in the movie.

It sounds like Warner Brothers are keen to move on with the project, especially given the substantial amount of money they spent on sorting out the legal mess and bringing the warring parties together. However, the one fly in the ointment may be the WarCraft movie, which is released on 10 June. If the movie does badly, it may force other studios to reconsider their fantasy options. However, it is not believed that the D&D movie will have as large a budget as WarCraft or will be so dependent on elaborate effects.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 7

For many writers of epic fantasy, the primary reference point is J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. However, in the 1970s another way of enjoying fantastic fiction arose. This was in the form of roleplaying, pen-and-paper games that allowed players to create characters and take part in narrative adventures of their own.

Roleplaying can be defined as a meeting of spontaneous improvisation - where people have to play a character and react to rapidly changing situations as their character would, not themselves - and board games. Americans Gary Gygax (b. 1939) and David Arneson (b. 1947) were avid players of board games and wargames, elaborate recreations of historical battles using miniature figures. The two gamers met in 1969 at the second Gen Con gaming convention in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Their shared love of naval combat games led to them creating their own naval wargame, Don't Give Up the Ship!

The two gamers were still working with miniatures but were slowly moving towards what would become the more familiar form of roleplaying. Arneson had created a board game without a (permanent) board called Blackmoor, in which the players created characters who used medieval technology in a fictional realm, initially highly fantastical but then drawing on science fiction ideas. In 1971 Gygax had created a miniature game called Chainmail which recreated medieval combat and featured rules for armour and weapons. He also produced a fantasy supplement, which added monsters, elves and a small number of magical spells.

In 1972 the two designers met again and compared notes. Gygax saw the appeal of welding miniatures-style combat rules to Arenson's free-flowing Blackmoor idea and experimented with this himself, beginning a series of nascent roleplaying adventures in a land called Greyhawk. Seeing the potential, they collaborated on a rule set. This became the very first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, released in January 1974.

In D&D, players create characters who belong to one of several races (humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings are the standard races; optional rules allow players to control everything from fairies to dragons) and who also play one of several classes or occupations (warrior, barbarian, monk, paladin, wizard, priest, druid and bard are among the most typical classes). The players then have to roleplay their characters, explaining how and why they have joined forces to form a party of adventurers. Another player, the Dungeon Master, then runs the adventure, describing the scenery and adversaries the party has to face and playing all of the other parts in the game. In return for achieving successes, the players gain experience points and can "level up", gaining additional abilities and bonuses to attack and defence. There is no board, with the players and DM instead describing what is happening orally and the game being dependent on communication. Early D&D focused on exploring underground dungeons and ruined castles in search of treasure. However, the game rapidly expanded to include adventures in cities, on the high seas and everywhere players could conceive of.

The generic fantasy backdrop to D&D is often said to have been ripped off from Tolkien. However, Gygax always denied this. Although he'd been a fan of The Hobbit and had included halflings in the game as tip of the hat to it, he disliked Lord of the Rings. Instead, he drew on other sources such as Fritz Leiber (whose Lankhmar setting Gygax later licensed as a D&D setting; he paid Leiber so much money for it that Leiber was able to live off the deal for several years) and, most notably, Jack Vance. D&D's magic system is in fact pretty much identical to that in the Dying Earth series of novels, even down to some of the spell names. Other writers such as Robert E. Howard were cited as inspirations.

Gygax as depicted in Futurama.

A modest success at first, D&D exploded into a wider form of popularity with the release of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in 1977, which dispensed with the previous box set design and emphasised play using just the rulebooks and dice, with no miniatures necessary (although optional rules for their use remained). The game was rebooted with new editions in 1989, 2000, 2008 and 2014. As of last year, Hasbro (the current owners of the game) had estimated that a conservative minimum of 20 million people had played D&D and the game had sold more than $1 billion worth of materials.

Other roleplaying games followed, such as Marc Miller's  Traveller (1977), Steve Perrin's RuneQuest (1978) and Superworld (1983), Steve Jackson's GURPS (1986), Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk (1988), and a series of highly influential RPGs from Jordan Weisman: MechWarrior (1986), Shadowrun (1989) and Earthdawn (1992). There was also the Star Wars title from West End Games (1987) which was important in establishing the now-defunct Expanded Universe and pinning down names and terminology for a lot of the worlds, races and technology in the setting. However, Dungeons and Dragons remained by far the biggest of them all.


The impact of D&D on fantasy was notable. Studying at San Diego University in the late 1970s, Raymond E. Feist was introduced to the game by his friends. Unimpressed with the existing rules and settings, they began changing things around and developing their own setting. Steve Abrams did a lot of work in the creation of this world, which was dubbed Midkemia. In 1977 Feist asked if he could try writing a novel set in that world, to which his colleagues agreed. This became the seminal novel Magician, eventually published in 1982.


In 1981 two young Canadians named Steve Lundin and Ian Esslemont started playing a game of D&D with a group of friends and began developing their own fantasy world. However, they found the rules limiting and became more interested in narrative roleplay, focusing on tragedy rather than heroism. The release of GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System) in 1986, which encouraged a more freeform style of play, saw them add a lot of weight and colour to their world. Shortly afterwards Esslemont wrote very early versions of novels he called Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard (published, after many delays, in 2004 and 2008 respectively). Around the same time Lundin wrote a film script he called Gardens of the Moon. Unable to interest anyone in it, he re-tooled the script as a novel in 1991; eventually (under the pen-name Steven Erikson) it was released in 1999 as the first volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen.

Even more established writers got in on the act. In the late 1970s a writer named James Oliver Rigney started running games of D&D for his stepson Will. Shortly afterwards he was contracted to write a series of new Conan novels under the pen-name Robert Jordan. He was also just beginning to come up with an idea about a fantasy world where only women could use magic and where magic had a precise set of guiding rules, much like the D&D magic system. The influnce of D&D on The Wheel of Time is debatable (Jordan never cited it as a major inspiration), but it is interesting that the biggest epic fantasy author after Tolkien (so far) at least dabbled with the game.

Around this time George R.R. Martin, recently moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, discovered roleplaying. He enjoyed it as a pastime, but it didn't really grab his attention until he was given a copy of Superworld in 1983, which allowed the players to become superheroes. Martin soon began running an epic adventure for his players and collaborators. After a couple of years of focusing on the game rather than his novel-writing career (which had stalled with the failure of The Armageddon Rag), Martin hit on the idea of using the game as a source for fiction. The result was the Wild Cards anthology series, which began in 1987 and is still running today.

Dungeons and Dragons itself did not initially inspire much in the way of fiction directly based on it, despite the release of several different campaign worlds or settings for the game. The first proper D&D novel was Quag Keep (1979), written by none other than the highly-regarded Andre Norton, but fiction deriving directly from the game was not particularly successful until 1984. In that year Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman released Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first novel in The Dragonlance Chronicles, which went on to become one of the biggest-selling epic fantasy series of all time. In 1988 R.A. Salvatore released the Forgotten Realms novel The Crystal Shard, the first novel featuring his dark elf hero Drizzt Do'Urden, a series which went on to be even bigger and more successful.

Dungeons and Dragons had a big impact on the field of fantasy. It consolidated a lot of ideas (some previously originating with Tolkien and other authors) that would become important in the subgenre as it developed, such as worldbuilding, magic, the various races and the idea of a "party" of disparate individuals coming together for a common cause, as well as both inspiring epic fantasy authors and, through its spin-off novels, directly starting the careers of numerous others.

But the modern fantasy genre hadn't quite come into being yet. The groundwork for that was laid at the very end of 1976 when a successful science fiction author and editor named Lester del Rey established a new imprint for Ballantine Books and started looking for authors to kick the line off memorably.

The Worlds of D&D: Greyhawk

The History of Greyhawk

Dungeons and Dragons was created in the early 1970s by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson as an extension of their tabletop wargame, Chainmail. The earlier game was about massed battles between armies of miniatures, initially focusing on historical events and then bringing in fantastical creatures and magic. Continuing the process, Gygax extrapolated out a game focusing on a smaller group, consisting of say 4-6 heroes, in which they went off adventuring. The original focus of the game were 'dungeon crawls', with the players exploring ancient ruins, killing monsters and disabling traps to gain both loot and 'EXP' or experience points. As the characters gained EXP levels they gained more abilities, became tougher and more difficult to kill and more skilled in evading traps.

Of course, amassing vast quantities of loot by itself was no real reward. You needed somewhere to retreat, freshen up, sell your loot and buy new gear before resuming the battle. And of course, repeated dungeon-crawling gets a little monotonous after a while, so why not have adventures above ground? And hey, instead of fighting monsters how about the heroes having to say investigate a murder or guard a caravan or something instead? And if you're going to be moving around outside the dungeon, then you need a world to do that in...

So were born the original D&D campaign settings, actually surprisingly quickly after the original game was released in 1972. Dave Arneson worked on a setting called Blackmoor (eventually absorbed into the later Mystara setting), whilst Gygax's home setting developed quite quickly as well. In his case, the elaborate dungeon (eventually amassing several dozen levels) was located underneath a location called Castle Greyhawk and its attendant city. As the campaign progressed, the players seemed more reluctant to return to the dungeon and preferred getting involved in the politics and factionalism of the city itself, or exploring the countryside beyond its walls, including yet more dungeons (such as the formidable Temple of Elemental Evil) and other cities. With Gygax running several games a week as well as running TSR, the company publishing D&D material, there was no time for elaborate worldbuilding, so he based the map of the continent on one of North America, aligning Greyhawk with Chicago and its southern rival, Dyvers, with Minneapolis.

As the campaign unfolded, the world of Greyhawk became home to many famous and powerful warriors, wizards and clerics, such as Mordenkainen, Bigby, Tenser, Melf (legendarily named because the player couldn't decide on an original name so went for Male+Elf) and Rary. As D&D itself was being developed and revised constantly at this time, these names found their way into the rulebook as spells such as Bigby's Crushing Hand, Tenser's Floating Disc or Melf's Acid Arrow, which survive pretty much to this day.

The 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set for Advanced D&D 1st Edition.

Greyhawk made its public debut in Dragon Magazine (then The Dragon) in June 1976, where Gygax was serializing a novella called The Gnome Cache. He revealed the setting was a world called the Oerth, which was similar to Earth, and mentioned the first Greyhawk deity, St. Cuthbert, in the following issue. An adventure published that year, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, was also nominally set in the setting. Gygax had no plans to publish the entire setting himself, feeling that players were more interested in creating their own worlds to play in, and was surprised when fans kept asking him about it.

In 1978 Gygax finally relented, and many more adventures set in Greyhawk emerged (such as Tomb of Horrors and The Village of Hommlet, which introduced the Temple of Elemental Evil), along with a novel, Quag Keep, written by respected SF author Andre Norton. In 1980 TSR published a folio set called Greyhawk. Gygax had taken his original, North America-based maps and drawn a new landmass around them which became known as the Flanaess, the eastern third or so of a vast continent called Oerik on the world known as the Oerth ('Oi-th', pronounced as with a strong Brooklyn accent, according to Gygax). The setting was hugely popular and led to a deluxe box set called The World of Greyhawk, released in 1983.

Unfortunately, Gygax began an acrimonious withdrawal from TSR around this time, and as part of the separation agreement TSR retained ownership of the Greyhawk setting and all its characters, something Gygax later came to regret as he saw his world developed in a manner he was not impressed with in later years. In 1988 the Greyhawk Adventures hardcover book was published, which was a more cohesive single-volume guide to the setting and brought the history of the world forward by some years. However, TSR had become more invested in its Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings and Greyhawk was not properly revisited again until 1991, when the Greyhawk Wars board game was published. This game saw the continent being torn apart in a huge, game-changing war. The subsequent From the Ashes boxed set reintroduced the setting as a D&D game world but, despite some good reviews, was not a huge success. Although a few additional materials leaked out, the setting looked like it had been abandoned for good.

Despite this, there were a few last bursts of activity. In 2000 the new, 3rd Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game was published by new owners Wizards of the Coast. The game was a huge success, and eagle-eyed players were surprised to learn that the game had a 'default' setting which was Greyhawk. The Greyhawk gods were named the 'default' gods of the game, and Greyhawk-specific items and locations were mentioned here and there through the core rulebooks and many of the earlier adventures. A very brief guide to the setting was also published, as well as 3rd Edition reprints of earlier Greyhawk adventures, such as the Temple of Elemental Evil super-adventure. It looked like Greyhawk had been brought back into the fold for good, but it was not to be.

WotC decided to make Greyhawk the setting for their collaborative, massive 'living campaign' world, Living Greyhawk, a newer version of the Living City and Living Jungle mass-campaigns for 2nd Edition (both set in the Forgotten Realms). Run by the RPGA Network, this was effectively a pen-and-paper based version of online games such as the then-popular Ultima Online and Everquest, and the later World of WarCraft. Whilst the game was successful, with several thousand players signing up and playing regularly, it was also notably non-canon. It also absorbed the resources of all the Greyhawk material planned for 3rd Edition, meaning that for people not interested in the Living Greyhawk setting, no new stand-alone material was published after 2001, whilst WotC concentrated on Forgotten Realms and a new setting, Eberron, although a single adventure, Ruins of Greyhawk, did creep out in 2007 as one of the final 3rd Edition game products. WotC shut down Living Greyhawk in late 2008 as D&D 4th Edition was launched.

The future of Greyhawk has not been outlined, but a recent 4th Edition game product made mention of several major worlds: Toril, Eberron, Athas, Krynn and Oerth, the worlds of the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Dragonlance and Greyhawk settings respectively. With the Realms and Eberron already back in print as 4th Edition settings and Dark Sun planned for next year, it seems inevitable than Greyhawk will return as a 4th Edition setting, probably in 2011 or 2012.

Fanon map, although drawn from canon materials, of the whole Oerth.

The World of Greyhawk

The setting for the Greyhawk campaign is the world known as Oerth, which is an Earth-sized planet consisting of one large supercontinent known as Oerik and several smaller landmasses, namely the jungle continent of Hepmonaland, the polar continent of Telchuria, and an unnamed, remote landmass in the southern hemisphere. Gary Gygax's original plan was to develop the whole planet in a reasonable amount of detail, but virtually all of the published gaming materials to date focus instead on the eastern third or so of Oerik, a region called the Flanaess.

The Flanaess is a heavily and traditionally Medieval European-inspired land of temperate zones, feuding city-states (the city of Greyhawk being the most well-known), powerful kingdoms, cloistered dwarven cities, remote elven lands and so forth. According to Gygax, Middle-earth was not a strong influence, instead claiming to have been more influenced by the likes of Fritz Lieber, Roger Zelazny, Robert E. Howard and Jack Vance. Humans are more or less the dominant species, but dwarves, halflings, gnomes, elves (and their dark brethren, the drow), giants, orcs, goblins, kobolds, dragons and many other races exist in the setting. Gygax ruled that gunpowder and all of its associated developments does not work on Oerth, thus apparently trapping planetary technological development in the pre-industrial age permanently.

The Flanaess, the main setting of the Greyhawk world.

Greyhawk was developed as a place for lots of individual adventures rather than a massive over-arcing story, but the actions of Gygax's original characters did give rise to a metaplot of a kind. The original 'main' storyline saw various small nations and parts of the Great Kingdom attempting to break away, with varying degrees of success. After Gygax's departure, TSR decided to go for a larger, more epic story in which the evil demigod Iuz attempted to conquer the rest of the world and the other nations of the Flanaess united to stop him, with a few other power groups (such as the Scarlet Brotherhood) attempting to further their own ends during the chaos. By the time the Greyhawk Wars had ended some of the established borders had changed and some kingdoms had risen or fallen. The later TSR and Wizards material is notable for emphasizing Iuz as the prime force of evil in the world, whilst earlier material focused more on local conflicts and problems caused by an evil deity called Vecna. Vecna was transposed to the Ravenloft setting during the TSR years, but made a return to Oerth during the Living Greyhawk era, and is likely to be a major villain in the hypothesized fourth edition of the setting (since Vecna is listed as one of the core deities of the 4th Edition game as well as a Greyhawk-specific deity).

For areas beyond the Flanaess, not much is known. A miniature game called Chainmail (as a nod to the original miniature game which inspired D&D) was under development in 2001 set in Western Oerik, in a region called the 'Sundered Empire', but this game was canned barely before it could get on the shelves and was replaced by the much more generic D&D Miniatures game, and very little material about Western Oerik made it out, and what did appear largely unimpressed the fanbase (since, among other things, it broke the no firearms restriction).


Evaluation

Whilst I've bought a few Greyhawk products over the years and one of my friends still has a copy of the 1983 box set in good condition, the setting has never really grabbed me. I came to it far too late, many years after first getting hooked into Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, and it lacked the much more original flair of Planescape and Dark Sun. In the 3rd Edition era, Greyhawk's most laudable feature was its emphasis on lower-level adventuring, with very few major and powerful NPCs of the setting being over 20th level, and this was a major change from the very high-magic Forgotten Realms setting, where the number of NPCs over 20th level was frankly ridiculous and there were a significant number over 30th. Greyhawk's old-school, more restrained atmosphere was its most distinguishing feature during this time.

However, whilst Greyhawk itself is a rather generic cod-medieval setting, its place in the historical pantheon of roleplaying settings is assured, as is its huge influence. Whilst the world itself may not be fantastically original, many of its dungeons and adventures, such as the terrifying Tomb of Horrors (Gygax recommended players roll up several characters for the dungeon, since some would inevitably die in the process of exploring it) and the vast Temple of Elemental Evil, not to mention the immense dungeons of Castle Greyhawk, are still popular today (if often transposed to other settings), whilst Vecna and Iuz are classic, old-school bad guys.

With a 4th Edition version of Greyhawk almost certainly on the way, it will be interesting to see how Wizards of the Coast emphasize the setting's differences from Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms in order to hook new players in.

Next time, we visit Krynn, the homeworld of the most feared and reviled creature in all of Dungeons and Dragons, the original Jar-Jar himself: Tasslehoff Burrfoot!