How did you first get involved with writing Forgotten Realms for TSR? Well met, indeed!
The Realms began as the setting for my own sword-and-sorcery tales (mainly starring Mirt the Moneylender) about a decade before D&D; I was a kid exploring my father's den full of books, and really enjoying the Fafhrd & Mouser tales in issues of…#SciFiChat— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021
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…FANTASTIC, so I decided to do my own tales. I first got hold of D&D in 1975, and thought it a fun experiment, but didn’t really settle in to regular play until 1978, when the MM and then the PHB came out, and I was delighted to find the monsters of mythology, … 3)
…plus cool new ones, all statted out in detail, and a Jack Vance/Dying Earth-style magic system on top of that! Design GOLD! So I began to express the Realms in D&D form, and by late spring of 1978 had a regular gaming group. By issue 19 of The Dragon (as the…#SciFiChat— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021
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…mag was then known) I was a regular reader, and started writing for Dragon when given the chance to contribute new official monsters to the game. My first was the Curst, in issue 30, and I was so heartened by seeing it in print that I wrote another, the… 5)
…Crawling Claw, which appeared in issue 32, SIXTEEN DAYS after I'd mailed it off to Lake Geneva (yes, the mails were fast back then). And I was off and running, writing so much that I was invited to attend GenCon that year and offered the [unpaid] position of…#SciFiChat— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021
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…Contributing Editor there, by Kim Mohan, which meant he could ASSIGN TOPICS to someone to write about. I put little mentions of the Realms in a lot of my pieces, so when TSR was looking for a new campaign setting, staff designer Jeff Grubb, who read DRAGON each.. 7)
…month, called me at my public library job up in Ontario, Canada, and asked, "Do you have a complete, detailed world at home, or do you make it up as you go along?"
And I answered: "Yes." (To both!) And that's how I got my start, and worked on EVERYTHING.#SciFiChat— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021