(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on, in chronological order of when they were published. If you see a number in brackets like this [1], it’s referring to a footnote at the bottom of this post.)
Welcome to part two of my Trivia & Anecdotes articles about the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book. (If you missed the first article about this book, it’s here.) This article is mostly about Chapter 1: Characters (choices about your PC like species, class, region, and so on).
Dividing Up The Work
With four designers, and one of them in another country, splitting up the writing work for the book was a bit of a challenge. We had decided that Ed Greenwood would write about 32 pages of various self-contained snippets[1] of lore about the Realms, and the other three main designers[2] (Skip Williams, myself, and Rob Heinsoo) would split up the various countries and regions within the book. This made the design process a bit easier, because Ed could write his stuff and we wouldnt have to coordinate with him about how plot elements and such from neighboring regions impacted each other. (For example, if Ed had written Cormyr, anyone writing stuff adjacent to Cormyr would have to do a lot of back-and-forth with Ed, and given the time zone difference between Seattle and Toronto, that would make it a lot harder than, say, Rob or I walking over to Skip’s desk and getting an immediate answer.)
It has been 20 years, so I don’t have a strong idea of who wrote which countries and regions. I know I worked on Cormyr (having just finished writing the Cormy-heavy Into The Dragon’s Lair adventure and having read the Cormyr novel Death Of The Dragon for that project) and Thay (because I’m bald, ha ha?), and I think Skip worked on Sembia (since it was the playground for the Living City campaign, which Skip was heavily involved in), but other than that it is kind of a blur at this point. (Once I get to those chapters I’ll see if I have any notes left from that time about who wrote which … but I had a major computer crash and data loss a couple of years later, and I dont know what bits I have left from this time.)
Realms Species
The Realms have always been a little bit askew from the core D&D rules when it comes to its specific types of elves, dwarves, and so on. Instead of mountain and hill dwarves, FR has gold and shield dwarves. Instead of high and gray elves, FR has sun and moon elves. And so on.
IIRC, Rob and I did most of the work on this stuff, looking to the D&D core species for their bonuses, penalties, and abilities. One day when we were driving back from one of our weekly wallyball games[3], we were talking about halflings, and how both halflings in D&D core and FR lacked a “weird” option (compared to drow for elves, duergar for dwarves, and svirfneblin for gnomes), and started brainstorming weird ideas for a third halfling type. The silliest one was a type of halfling that could shoot lasers out of their eyes, but we decided to tone down the weirdness a bit and created the ghostwise halflings, who have short-range telepathy—the idea was this subspecies was reclusive and very secretive, kinda like wood elves, and their telepathy made it a lot easier for them to coordinate attacks and escapes when dealing with more powerful foes. But we were this close to putting laser-eyed halflings in the book, for better or worse. :D
(Speaking of ghostwise halflings, I gotta say Ive always thought it was kinda funny that in the illustration on page 17 has the strongheart halfling messing with the ghostwise halfling … what a jerk! :D )
Speaking of weird subspecies, this is the first book for 3E that had drow as an option for PCs. And there was a lot of debate about how to do it, mainly because drow get a LOT of special abilities starting out (particularly spell resistance[4]), which makes them more powerful than a typical elf, human, dwarf, or whatever. For a while we talked about making a weaker version of drow, one with weaker-than-NPC-drow abilities because of time on the surface world/away from the Underdark, but we eventually realized that people who wanted to play a drow PC wouldnt want to play a weakened drow, and putting weak-drow PC stats in the game just meant that eventually we would publish strong-drow PC stats and people would start using that for their PCs. We kicked around some other ideas for powerful-species PCs [6], but eventually we went with the idea of level adjustments–which originated in the 3E Dungeon Master Guide/Monster Manual as a way to explain the baseline level of a monster who you added class levels to (like “hmm, what effective level is a bugbear with 4 levels in rogue?”). But unlike bugbears and such, drow and similar PC-focused species didnt automatically include “racial hit dice,” so applying this to drow, right there in front of the players reading the book (instead of in the DMG where presumably only the GM was accessing it) was still kinda new. So, despite having only hit dice from class levels, drow level adjustment was +2, which meant your level 1 drow PC was “effectively” a 3rd-level PC, and the GM was supposed to[5] not allow players to play level-adjusted species unless the rest of the group was already at that level. Which was an annoyance, and really hurt spellcasters a lot (because your spell progression was behind equal to your level adjustment, which meant that a human wizard would be 5th level and your drow wizard would be a very sad and pathetic 3rd level), but it is what we decided to do at the time.[7] Likewise, duergar, svirfneblin, and genasi[8] got level adjustments. Which, mind you, means the FRCS was the first player-facing 3E book to let you play a PC of those species. Huzzah!
Patron Deity
The concept of picking a patron deity, even if you arent a cleric, druid, or paladin, is a thing we put in writing for FR. The Realms is a polytheistic/pantheistic world, meaning that regular people understand that the various deities exist, and that it is common to say a prayer to a relevant deity according to your current circumstances (such as praying to Tymora, goddess of luck, when gambling, or to Umberlee, goddess of the sea, when about to take a sea voyage), but most people have one deity that they prefer above all others—their patron deity. This is usually a deity relevant to their trade, profession, or way of life—most blacksmiths have Gond (god of crafting) as their patron, most farmers have Chauntea (goddess of agriculture) as their patron, and so on. And divine spellcasters had to have a patron deity, you couldnt be a divine spellcaster without one. This generally didnt restrict PCs or NPC from interacting with other faiths and temples, but it did mean that you would have a better relationship with the church/clergy of your patron deity. In other words, a fighter or barbarian might have Tempus (god of battle) as their patron, but that wouldnt mean they couldnt ask for healing at a temple of Chauntea, or that it would be weird for them to make an offering to Umberlee before a sea voyage.
Because the book tells you what deities are “favored” for each country and region, choosing a patron deity is also another way to connect your character to the setting. For example, if your PC is from Cormyr, and you pick Tyr (a favored deity for Cormyr), you can expect that when in Cormyr, you can expect to find temples of Tyr, meeting other people who worship Tyr is common, and so on.
Note also that if you die without a patron deity, your soul still goes to the afterlife, but without an agent of your deity to bring you to their specific godly realm, your soul basically wanders the Fugue Plane forever—or until your stole is stolen by a demon or devil, or built into the Wall of the Faithless as punishment. (However, we also specifically said that a player shouldnt be punished for not picking a patron for their PC, see page 290.)
The patron deity rules gave us another game-mechanic fiddly bit we could use in later books, like spells that had different or better effects if the target had the same patron as you (like a version of cure light wounds that heals the maximum amount for someone with the same patron, which is an incentive for an unaffiliated PC in the group to choose the same patron as the party cleric…). I’ll talk about that a bit more in my upcoming article on Magic Of Faerun, where it comes into play.
Monastic Orders and Paladin Orders
3E was a radical change from previous editions because it let any character multiclass (before, only nonhumans could multiclass, and humans did something not-quite-like-that called dual-classing). However, the monk and paladin classes in the 3E Players Handbook had a unique restriction in that you couldnt multiclass—or, more precisely, if you took a level in another class, you could never again gain levels in your original class. The idea was that monks required such discipline that deviating from that path meant you could never go back, and paladins required such focused devotion that dabbling in another class meant you couldnt advance as a paladin any more.
This was a problem for FR because there were certain deities that historically (in the setting) were totally fine with their monk or paladin followers multiclassing. So for the FRCS we created the idea of special monk and paladin orders that had looser multiclassing options. Frex, monks of Ilmater (god of martyrs) were allowed to multiclass as clerics of Ilmater (and other classes, not important to list them all right here), and paladins of Tyr (god of justice) could freely multiclass as clerics or fighters. While this was initiated as a mechanical option in the FRCS, it also led to some fun worldbuilding, as we created names for these various monk and paladin orders, and talked a bit about their philosophy and religious associations (if any). And it meant that in later sourcebooks, we could name-drop something like “Zorbo is a monk of the Dark Moon,” which immediately clued in the GM and players that that Zorbo is a follower of Shar (goddess of night) and probably mixes sorcerer and monk levels. So that was fun.[9] :D
For Next Time
This article is already longer than the first one, so Im stopping here and Ill continue in part 3! Sorry if these things get pretty rambly … as Ive said before, there was a lot going on behind the scenes with respect to this book! Part 3 is probably going to cover the following topics before the article gets too long and I have to start on part 4:
- Thunder blessing and the end of the elven retreat
- Prestige classes
- Favored region, regional feats, and regional equipment, and making that work without invalidating the Players Handbook
- Wizards vs sorcerers
[1] By these “snippets,” I mean things like “Folk of Faerûn” on page 10, “The Retreat And After” on page 14, “Orcs And Their Kin” on page 16, and so on.
[2] I say “main designers” here because one of the contributing designers, James Wyatt, wrote some monsters for the book as part of his work on the separate Monsters Of Faerûn sourcebook for the core D&D line (which is its own story).
[3] Wallyball is basically volleyball played in a raquetball court with a volleyball thats rubbery like a raquetball. The TSR gang used to play at the YMCA back in Lake Geneva, and after the Wizards buyout we kept it up for a while, but the place with the courts was far enough away from the Wizards office that it was inconvenient, and we eventually stopped playing.
[4] Oh, spell resistance, you pain in the ass. If you’re not familiar, in previous editions, spell resistance was a percentage chance (modified by the caster level of the character casting the spell) that a hostile spell wouldnt work on you at all, it could just be snuffed out even before the target needed to roll a saving throw. For 3E, this became a d20 roll instead of a percentile roll, so drow spell resistance was 11 + character level, and an attacking spellcaster would need to make a caster level check against that number to even have a chance of affecting the drow. Because an extra d20 roll to resolve whether a spell affects a creature is “fun” (sarcasm), and the existence of spell resistance in the game meant every spell in the game needed a separate stat block line for whether or not spell resistance applied to that spell—for example, a spell that conjures a blast of fire would be affected by spell resistance because the fire is magical, but a spell that creates a boulder, like above someones head, would not be affected by spell resistance because the boulder is nonmagical once created. 3E made a lot of improvements to D&D, but it still had its weird baggage.
[5] There’s literally a one-page sidebar on FRCS page 21 explaining level adjustments, the idea of “powerful races,” and modified XP tables for level adjustments of +1, +2, and +3. Sigh.
[6] One of these ideas was a % penalty to XP for these species, so instead of needing 1,000 XP to get to 2nd level, you’d need 1,100 or 1,200 or whatever. But I ran the math on this, and basically using an XP penalty like this only meant that your character was a level behind (compared to a human) a very small amount of time, and the rest of the time you were the same level as the human character. So it really wasnt a penalty except for about every fourth game session (when the human levels up and you are still a little behind). Since it didnt accomplish what we wanted, we dropped it as an option. And of course, nowadays we understand that it is okay if all the characters in the group arent the same level at the same time (and a related topic is that it is impossible to perfectly “balance” two classes mathematically, so worrying too much about this sort of thing is just an exercise in frustration).
[7] Jumping ahead several years, the existence of level adjustments is what allowed us to create various “monster classes” in the Savage Species book (like, “I want to play a weak astral deva at level 1, and level up to my full deva powers over time”), which is the section I wrote for that book.
[8] Genasi are humans mixed with one of the four genie-types, in the same way that aasimar are humans mixed with angels and tieflings are humans mixed with fiends.
[9] Obviously, later editions of D&D dropped this multiclassing limitation entirely, so “multiclassing freely” was no longer needed as a concept and likewise went away. Funny, though, how a restriction in “core” D&D had to be outmaneuvered in the setting book for the most popular D&D setting, and how that restriction eventually went away in core because people preferred the freedom to multiclass how they wanted.
Sean K Reynolds 