The Best $5,000 D&D Spent: Buying the Forgotten Realms
Cover image of Cyclopedia of the Realms by Keith Parkinson courtesy Wizards of the Coast.
While writing my book of D&D history, Slaying the Dragon, I discovered a number of fascinating historical documents hidden from public view until now. Over the coming months, I’m going to be sharing some of these captivating items with you…
The Forgotten Realms are the flagship setting of Dungeons & Dragons, and after the D&D movie comes out this spring, the Realms will have the same cultural currency as Middle-earth or Tatooine.
You know, Disney bought Marvel for about $4 billion in 2009. In 2012, it bought Star Wars for about the same price. But D&D snagged the Realms for a mere $5,000. An entire universe changed hands for the price of a car.
Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Realms, said he never regretted the decision to sell the property to TSR, the first company to make D&D. The five grand he made was $4,000 for the Realms itself, and then $1,000 for services as a design consultant. (That’s $13,000 in 2022 dollars).
The relevant passage from the January 1987 contract between TSR & Ed Greenwood.
When that deal was signed, the Realms had nowhere near the cultural bulk of today. They’d been used in a few Dragon magazine articles, and that was all. The sale allowed Greenwood to see the Realms brought forth to the world in amazing products for decades, and gave him a long career writing in the setting.
To Create New Worlds
The creation of the Forgotten Realms stretched back before the creation of D&D. In 1965, inspired by Poul Anderson and Shakespeare, a young Ed Greenwood began penning tales about one Mirt the Moneylender. Once a mercenary known as Mirt the Merciless, he had grown fat and old, and Greenwood said “a typical Mirt tale ended with him fleeing town a bare stride ahead of the authorities, his established rivals, and the new enemies he’d made during the story.”
Soon, Greenwood discovered Mirt was moving south along something called the Sword Coast. By the next year, Greenwood decided this was taking place on a continent called Faerun. Mirt himself landed in a metropolis called Waterdeep. According to Greenwood, Mirt decided the city was “big enough to stay in, establish himself, and make his fortune/refuse to leave.”
O Mother of All Magic, make this movie good!
By 1967, to keep track of Mirt’s travels, Greenwood began scrawling maps on 8.5 by 11-inch sheets of paper. When he discovered D&D, he used Faerun as the setting of his D&D campaign. And as he explored the Realms through D&D, the map grew. He said he, “drew the master map page by page, as I needed to know more accurately where ‘distant Sembia’ or ‘far-off Thay’ was, building outwards from the Sword Coast.” He often drew with a Staedler pen because he discovered that he could then put another, blank piece of paper on top of that one and write notes about what foes and treasures might be found in various locales, but still give the first map to the players without spoiling any surprises. That original map lives in a box under Greenwood’s bed to this very day.
The Immortality of the Realms?
Ray Winninger, executive producer of D&D, said that the Realms, “may be the most fully realized fantasy world ever created.” As of this writing, over 200 novels set in the Realms have been published. Winninger added, “More than thirty years after the first Forgotten Realms campaign setting was published, we still enjoy creating, and our fans enjoy playing, adventures set in the Realms.”
Greenwood pulled down to Earth a world that does not exist, but which countless millions of us have visited in novels, games, and soon, in movies. He began writing about them at a mere six years old and continues today, most recently with a release on the Red Wizards of Thay. I suppose one could ask where Greenwood truly resides, in Canada, or in the world his mind birthed, Faerun.
The Forgotten Realms are his life’s work. They will no doubt outlive him, as 12-year-olds who start playing in the Realms today will likely return there again and again over the course of their lifetimes, and perhaps introduce their children to the setting as well. And so the Realms may breathe and bleed in the minds of generation after generation, ascending to cultural eternity like Troy and Elsinore and Gotham City.
