Realms and Remembrance

Former TSR designer Jeff Grubb has posted a list 31 interesting facts about the early days of the TSR-published version of the Forgotten Realms. As with his previous post on the "secret origins" of the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, there's a lot of interesting stuff here, most notably (for me anyway):

13) I contributed Festhalls to the Realms. Ed’s original city maps had a high population of brothels, which made them inadvisable to publish. Our choices were rename them or rekey all the maps. I came up with the festhall name, which by definition spread out to handle a multitude of sins (feasts of both foods and flesh, and a bit of day spa added as well). I am very aware when someone else uses them in a fantasy novel.

I've always considered "festhalls" to be a perfect example of the kind of sanitization of D&D that frequently drove me away from the game in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. I understand the logic behind it, but it bugs me and, worse yet, it contributes to a false impression of what the Realms are actually like. To be clear, I don't blame Mr Grubb for this either, even though he's the immediate cause of the existence of festhalls. I certainly don't think he should have "made a stand" back in 1987 over something as comparatively trivial as this, even if I think the decision on the part of TSR's management was a poor one.

Thanks to Dan at Sword and Board for the heads-up on Mr Grubb's post.