Grand Master
@TheEdVerse
, could you tell us about the Bank (financial entity) that operates in Baldur’s Gate? My Campaign works in this city and I need a little of your knowledge! Thank you and big hug!
Banking in the Gate, as in most cities in the Realms, is primarily done by three groups of people: temples, moneylenders (wealthy private individuals), and guilds. There are also rollcoins and manycoins businesses (see the…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

2)
…“Money Matters” chapter of the “Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster’s Forgotten Realms” sourcebook). In addition to these groups, the larger shipping fleets and trading costers (overland trading companies) have always functioned… 3)
…as banks for some of their clients (often as a way to “tie” those clients exclusively to them).
Dissatisfaction with such practises, and with the increasingly shady tactics of some moneylenders (who, with all the local…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

4)
…competition, have had to cater to increasingly desperate/financially unstable/long-odds-mercantile-gambles clientele), led to the establishment of the Counting House.
Located on the waterfront of The Steeps, overlooking… 5)
…Gray Harbor, and run in 1492 DR by the rather sinister (and aloof, guarding his words carefully and spending much of his time looking calmly expressionless; his beard has two dark streaks down either side of his—hidden by…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

6)
…it—chin) LE gold dwarf Rakkath Glitterbeard. Who is publicly the treasurer for both the city-sponsored Council’s Eminent Fellowship of Financiers and the Honorable Order of Moneylenders—and far less officially, Kingpin of… 7)
…the Steeps in the criminal organization known as “the Guild”—which means he governs and settles disputes among the less forgiving lonesharks and the “enforcers” they employ, following a policy of “dire warnings are fine, but…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

8)
…a dead deadbeat can’t be squeezed; leave them alive—just—as a more effective dire warning.”
The Counting House is the center of official trade and business in the Gate, offering banking safe storage (vault) services, … 9)
…currency exchanging for bulk amounts no independent moneylender could easily manage as well as small transactions, and investment (in Gate cargoes, businesses, real estate, warehousing rental space, and both land and naval…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

10)
…shipping) banking services. It’s open dawn to dusk, and is famous for its polite, unflappable staff.
The Counting House is built like a fortress, with thick stone walls and windowless upper floors. Belowground, it descends…11)
…for many levels in a cylinder of thick stone guarded by water-warding spells (against coastal flooding) and some secret devices and guardians surrounding that cylinder, and within the cylinder and very much menacingly…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

12)
…visible, stone golem sentries that patrol the deepest levels in such a manner that two are always within sight of each other.
These deepest levels store the wealth of many Baldurian families—not to mention many treasures… 13)
…stolen by the Guild, and quietly placed there by Glitterbeard.
Local rumor in the Gate says that the regalia of several fallen thrones are among the contents of the Counting House vaults.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 5, 2021

Q1: While many tabletop role-playing games have come and gone, Dungeons and Dragons endures. Why is it still so popular after 47 years?
You ask something oft debated among creators, at least in the halls and cubicles of TSR back in the day. :}
It lets friends sit down and play together, just as when we were kids, telling a story together.
And does it via an exploring, mystery-solving treasure hunt.#SciFiChat

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021

Are there a lot of stray cats, dogs, and other domestic pet type animals around the Realms? No, because such creatures on the loose are food to so many things.
(In our modern world, many predators have been eliminated or almost exterminated. Not so, on Toril.)
So a few…but not a lot.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 15, 2021

I’d like to know what goes into the planning for the Forgotten Realms timelines for the novels that keep coming out. Seems highly coordinated. Is there a committee? #SciFiChat Well, right now, there's no novel line. There's just Bob Salvatore writing new Drizzt books under a license, so the coordination is a LOT easier than it used to be.
In slightly older days (The Sundering) we had secret summits at Wizards, wherein we planned chronology..#SciFiChat

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021

2)
…and major events, so authors could share supporting NPCs and have characters talk about offstage “news” that had happened in novels penned by others. The Books Department did that, and when it was dissassembled, Chris Perkins as Story Manager backed up by Matt… 3)
…Sernett doing a spreadsheet of "this scene must take place in this month of this year, so…" references and cross-references.
In still earlier days than that, I developed the habit of NOT putting precise dating in my Realms fiction, so as not to add to…#SciFiChat

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021

4)
…continuity problems. However, several tidy-minded editors began to insist on dating, so in early or opening scenes of my later books you'll see lines like "It was an unusually sultry evening in Ches in the Year of the Wobbly Donkey" (I'm inventing this example!).#SciFiChat

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021

I like it! Where were you, in the Year of the Wobbly Donkey…#scifiChat "Well, officer, to tell truth, I haven't done that since, oh, must be the Year of the Wobbly Donkey. Matter of fact, that's why the donkey wobbles, nudge nudge, wink, wink…"#SciFicChat

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) March 5, 2021

Well met realmsfather! Looking more into deep underdark and it’s integration with Toril… Does the Underdark beneath Faerun/Kara-Tur connect with Underdark realms beneath Zakhara, Maztica, or the other continents? Beneath more shallow portions of the seas perhaps? Oh, yes. Everything connects. Not that the journeys may be safe, mind you.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 21, 2021

@TheEdVerse Where precisely is Yartar, relative to the River Dessarin? It's described in the SC Adventurer's Guide and other 5e materials as "situated in the fork where the Rivers Surbrin and Dessarin join," and as a result some fan-created maps of the city show the city … 1/5

— Jeremy Powell (@jmhpowell) February 1, 2021

1)
Yartar began as a ferry-base (ferries as in: barges tethered to cables stretched across both rivers, from timber pilings on the banks designed to hold even sagging ropes above the river flow) across both the Surbrin and the…2)
…Dessarin, so it does indeed occupy the northeastern “angle” between the two rivers as they join. As Yartar grew into a town, it expanded across the Surbrin to the west bank (the easiest area to swiftly evacuate if an orc… #Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 1, 2021

3)
…horde came sweeping south), and eventually that ferry got augmented by (not replaced by) a bridge.
Over time, as Yartar became an important town, it got its first defensive wall (really a ditch with an earthen rampart topped… 4)
…by a palisade of logs) in an arc from the Surbrin to the Dessarin, using the fast-flowing rivers as the other “walls.” This increased density in the defended area, choking the streets and leading to taller buildings, and…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 1, 2021

5)
…increasingly to building in stone (as timber buildings under heavy snowfalls and no maintenance tend to collapse) and cobbling the muddy lanes, and then to expansion of the walls and building them in stone, with proper…
#Realmslore 6)
…gates, and finally to expansion to the south bank of the Dessarin, until eventually what’s seen in BGIII results: rivers flowing through a bustling city to join within that bustling city, with bridges.
Many of the early…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 1, 2021

7)
…published maps of the Realms shift the symbols for population centers off rivers and other natural features, sacrificing accuracy for clarity, but Yartar began as a way of crossing the two rivers at their confluence (to take…
#Realmslore 8)
…the Evermoor Way through this point), and camping there and using it as a trading and transshipment (and so, caravan-mustering and -breakup) point, so Yartar has always really been where the Surbrin and Dessarin meet, …#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 1, 2021

9)
…initially in the “wedge”-angle between them as a built center, but from the beginning with camping-places on the “outer” banks (west bank of the Surbrin and south bank of the Dessarin). #Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 1, 2021

Hi @TheEdVerse, I have a random (and very specific!) question for you: what is the approximate ratio of spellcasters to nonspellcasters in the Forgotten Realms? 1 out of 10,000? 1 out of 100,000? Even more rare than that?

— Benjamin Huffman x Sterling Vermin Adventuring Co. (@sterlingvermin) December 29, 2020

My answer to that: to most of them. There are variations in talents and skills from individual to individual, and the Gift (the talent to wield the Art) is by no means held by everyone. (And among those that do have it, many have never discovered that they do.)#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) January 23, 2021

@TheEdVerse is the Untheric culture, religion, and people the toril counter part to the babylonian of our own world? if not which culture/religion is?

— cole hartwig (@colehartwig) June 9, 2021

2)
Published Unther seems to draw on both Babylon and ancient Sumerian (Gilgamesh). My original was a little different.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 11, 2021

Are there two different realms you somehow keep track of? Like, the Published/Wizards Realms and your “Headspace Realms”? I’m aware the Published would be based off your original but has the original grown as a separate entity without the Spellplague and Sundering in your head? I TRY to keep track of several different versions of the Realms (computer games & other licenses have important differences/inconsistencies from the published Realms, which over editions has had differing cosmologies). The original hasn't reached the Spellplague yet.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021

How different?

— Magnus Odinsohn & The Appalachia Chronicles (N)SFW (@LVBluePigeon) June 12, 2021

1)
“My” original Unther was an ancient kingdom, ruled by a royal family who claimed to be “of the blood of the gods” and to regularly be “the consorts of gods” (i.e. gods privately visited them, had sex with them, and gave them…
…special powers AND missions/tasks for themselves and the realm). This claimed special status infuriated the senior nobles of the kingdom, who believed it was a fiction concocted to allow the royal family to erode the rights…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021

…and powers of the nobility, and take all unto themselves.
Their problem was: it wasn’t a fiction; gods DID visit the royal family (the House of Haelcaunter) and charge them with tasks (these gods being: Gargauth, Moander, …
…Shar, Jergal, and various of the Seven Lost Gods, most of them seeking to worm their way back into more personal power, except Jergal, who was trying to manipulate the doings of the royal family “sideways” into longterm…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021

6)
……regional stability rather than the chaos that Shar and Gargauth, in particular, were pushing Unther towards).
Down on the daily life level, Unther was a verdant realm of barley farms and beer, craftworkers (weavers especially)… and stonemasons, barges and canals and “haemdra,” who are all ten to twenty year olds that didn’t exhibit the Gift (ability to wield the Art); they serve as unpaid laborers (slaves in all but name, though they had rights to…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021

8)
food and shelter and good treatment) for that decade, wherever the realm wanted them to work (usually building or repairing roads, bridges, drainage pipes and ditches, and buildings), ere the state gave them some land of… …their own and full citizenry.
Unther had a professional army that also served as police and patrolled heavily, had laws that made innovations common property, and had an energetic fashion (personal garments, cosmetics, and…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021

hairdos) scene, and had abundant gold mining that made gold-and-jet fashion adornments relatively cheap and therefore popular, and gold finger-rings widely used as currency. Unther’s coins were small and copper, or large and…
…gold, and in either case triangular.
The nobles were a fractious, feuding lot who ached for independence, but couldn’t achieve it because their bodyguards were strictly limited in size so as not to become private armies, the…#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021

…royal family had a cadre of courtiers specifically dedicated to spying on the nobles, and every noble family wanted to rule a new land consisting of their traditional lands that they were Malacht/Malrayess [=Duke/Duchess] …
…over, PLUS in all cases some territory they had their eyes on, that belonged to another neighbouring Malachtam. Unther’s traveling traders were known as urdolphim, and some were clever, innovative mountains-of-coin.#Realmslore

— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 12, 2021