Tuesday, September 10, 2024

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Pages from the Mages"

Ed Greenwood catches a lot of grief among a certain segment of the old school community, usually for things for which he was not himself responsible. Perhaps these old schoolers associate his Forgotten Realms campaign setting with 2e and 2e with the regime that ousted Gygax or ... something. It's always been rather unclear to me what crimes against gaming Greenwood was supposed to have committed, especially when my earliest memories of his name are indelibly connected to articles like "Pages from the Mages," which appeared in issue #62 (June 1982).

The article presents four "long-lost magical manuals" – the tomes of powerful and famous magic-users, each of which is unique in some way. All four books are given a name, a description, and a history in addition to a list of their contents. Every one of these entries made these librams much more interesting than just a simple catalog of, say, the spells they contained or the magical effect they conferred upon their reader. Thus, we learn that the eponymous author of Mhzentul's Runes was slain at the Battle of the River Rising and that Nchaser's Eiyromancia contains not one but two heretofore unknown spells.

Greenwood's articles always impressed me with their feigned depth. That is, they seemed to be part of a rich and complex setting, whose every little nook and cranny had been detailed beforehand so that he could just pluck them from his mind and present them whenever required to do so. As I learned later, this is a parlor trick, one that I learned to perform in time, too, but it doesn't make me any less fond of "Pages from the Mages" or its later sequels. In the span of comparatively little space, Greenwood provided readers with not only some new magical items to insert into their own games but models for how to make almost any magic item a locus of information about a campaign setting and, by extension, an inspiration for adventure.

12 comments:

  1. I agree with you that at least the first five Pages from the Mages articles were some of the best reads. I think the only issue that I ever had with Ed Greenwood was to disagree with his characterization of Fiend Folio back in Dragon 55.

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  2. Ed Greenwood was very good at creating fluff. I first noticed his work with the article on shields in issue #89. I was hooked.

    Unfortunately though he is terrible at adventure writing. That could be seen with the first adventure set in Myth Drannor (which appeared in Dragon IIRC and the original boxed set). The ones involving Elminster were the worst. I think Bryce had a good description for those, something like "look at the fancy museum but don't touch anything or Elminster will get mad."

    And yes, the fact that he is associated with 2nd edition doesn't help.

    The Heretic

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    1. "The Endless Stairs" is another stinker of a module and a waste of a great cover painting.

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  3. I think Ed Greenwood gets blamed because his vanilla fantasy setting became the default and so everyone with a favorite setting holds strong feelings about the death of their setting.
    Personally I don't like the Forgotten Realms but recently I restarted playing and chose to start with Lost MInes of Phandelver and one of the kids playing got really excited whenever any element from the movie showed up (a Red Wizard of Thay... He even thought the townmaster was from the movie although I doubt it.) Anyway there is value in communal myths and having some backstory that is already know.
    I still don't particularly like the setting.

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  4. I liked "Pages from the Mages" and even the first few Forgotten Realms products. The setting went to hell in a hand basket later, but much of that was not due to Greenwood, but due to side effects from horrible novels written by other people.
    My brief against Greenwood would be the inclusion of certain dodgy subjects into his personal version of the Realms that TSR & WotC wisely did not include. He has the right to do that, of course, but I still find it (and now him) repulsive.

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    1. It's probably for the best if I don't get specific here. A little googling will get you the answers.

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  5. I have no beef with Greenwood (he seems a fine fellow) but his kitchen sink Forgotten Realms frankly sucked, and yet still ousted my beloved Greyhawk setting...

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  6. I thoroughly enjoyed his articles on named items. Suddenly, a spell book could become a treasure unto itself. In later articles, he did the same with weapons. Now the +2 sword had a history and a reason someone would kill for it. I read the first FR novel, it was alright.

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  7. Greenwood's writing on spellbooks, weapons, poisons, etc. was really unprecedented, eye-opening in its level of detail and world-building at the formative time I was reading that era of Dragon. If I have any quibbles about Greenwood in practice, it's that the detail sometimes violates the Brycean norm of being discoverable by the PC's, and at other times is laid on thick in quantity when a single trait or feature would do - I would be more satisfied with 5 treasures, each with a single memorable trait, than one treasure of equal value with 5 such traits.

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