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 1st-3rd ed. Baldurs Gate & Neverwinter resources
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Tigon
Acolyte

USA
47 Posts

Posted - 25 May 2019 :  18:31:08  Show Profile Send Tigon a Private Message  Reply with Quote  Delete Topic
So between ebay, local gaming shops, and a cool quarterly boardgame and minis swap meet in my area, I think i've collected all of the 1st through 3rd edition resources on Waterdeep. I've got The City System (and am in the process of mounting and finishing all the maps to mount on my wall), Waterdeep & the North, Volos Guide to Waterdeep, & City of Splendors boxed set. When i stumble upon the 3rd ed City of Splendors - Waterdeep, ill snatch that up. ive also acquired:

Maztica boxed set
Karatur Boxed set
Lands of Intrigue boxed set
Menzoberranzan boxed set
Ruins of Undermountain boxed set

FR1 Waterdeep & the north
FR2 Moonsea
FR3 Empires of the Sands
FR4 The Magister
FR5 The Savage Frontier
FR6 Dreams of the Red Wizards

FR9 The Bloodstone Lands
FR10 Old Empires
FR11 Dwarves Deep

FR14 The Great Glacier

FR16 The Shining South

FA2 Nightmare Keep

FMA1 Fires of Zatal

FMQ1 City of Gold

Undermountain Maddgoth's Castle
Undermountain Stardock
Skullport

Volo's Guide to Baldurs' Gate (from the PC Game Baldurs Gate)

5e i have:
Starter set (LMoP)
Dragon heist
DotMM
OotA
TftYP
ToA
PotA
SCAG
Ghosts of Saltmarsh

Yes i know i should grab Storm Kings Thunder as it lays out a lot of the 5e sword coast.


Ive compiled and collated nearly all of the Waterdeep information into my OneNote so I can easily reference it at the table whilst my players run around the city. Now I'm seeking to do something similar with Neverwinter and Baldur's Gate. I know i need Volo's Guide to Baldur's Gate 2, and that there is a bunch of Neverwinter stuff in 4th edition, but its all Spellplaguey with the big chasm in the city.

Yes, I know we'll get more BG stuff in Sept along with Descent to avernus, but i'm striving to get a bit of a headstart and get as much compiled into my onenote prior to release of that title as possible.

Can anyone point me in the direction of MUST HAVE information about these two locations.

Other than the 4e Neverwinter stuff, and previously mentioned Volos' Guide to BGII, Murder at Baldur's Gate and the Heroes of Baldur's Gate book thats on the DMsGuild im not finding much on these cities other than the video games.

Gary Dallison
Great Reader

United Kingdom
6350 Posts

Posted - 25 May 2019 :  18:58:34  Show Profile Send Gary Dallison a Private Message  Reply with Quote
I've found that having pdf versions of everything is great (as long as they are ocr). Then if the pdf are all in the same folder you can do a pdf search on every file in that folder, so search on Baldur and it will find you every reference.

Then there are all the web pages from word, all the dragon and dungeon and polyhedron mags, all Ed's replies on candlekeep and Twitter.

After all that you should have a large library of references to flesh out never winter. The 4e stuff Is also usable, just try to imagine an origin for that lore in the 3e era and you've got another plot point to develop.

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Tigon
Acolyte

USA
47 Posts

Posted - 25 May 2019 :  20:08:08  Show Profile Send Tigon a Private Message  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Gary Dallison

I've found that having pdf versions of everything is great (as long as they are ocr). Then if the pdf are all in the same folder you can do a pdf search on every file in that folder, so search on Baldur and it will find you every reference.

Then there are all the web pages from word, all the dragon and dungeon and polyhedron mags, all Ed's replies on candlekeep and Twitter.

After all that you should have a large library of references to flesh out never winter. The 4e stuff Is also usable, just try to imagine an origin for that lore in the 3e era and you've got another plot point to develop.



Seriously? For one, many of the pdfs I've been able to acquire are not OCR and as such, not searchable.

What do you mean "web pages from word"?

I'm actually running my game in 1492 DR, so we're post second sundering. There's not much, if anything, on Neverwinter after the chasm was sealed up.

While I understand that you think you're helping, essentially what you just told me to do was:

Go download every Forgotten Realms product in existence in OCR pdf format, (which surely would be piracy), go download every issue of Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron magazines (again likely piracy to get them all, otherwise a small fortune), scour all of ed's posts on twitter AND pull essentially the entire archive of Candlekeep.

Yah, clearly if i went and downloaded the entire internet of everything Forgotten Realms and searched it all for Neverwinter and/or Baldur's Gate I'd find everything I'm looking for... but that seems just a tad excessive, time consuming and, for someone who only downloads PDFs of items they have purchased/own, pretty costly. Your answer/suggestion was not helpful in the least when my question was:

"Can anyone point me in the direction of MUST HAVE information about these two locations."

And I asked it so I can make a TARGETED search rather than try and catch everything on the entire damn internet.
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Demzer
Senior Scribe

873 Posts

Posted - 25 May 2019 :  21:44:14  Show Profile Send Demzer a Private Message  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Tigon

quote:
Originally posted by Gary Dallison

I've found that having pdf versions of everything is great (as long as they are ocr). Then if the pdf are all in the same folder you can do a pdf search on every file in that folder, so search on Baldur and it will find you every reference.

Then there are all the web pages from word, all the dragon and dungeon and polyhedron mags, all Ed's replies on candlekeep and Twitter.

After all that you should have a large library of references to flesh out never winter. The 4e stuff Is also usable, just try to imagine an origin for that lore in the 3e era and you've got another plot point to develop.



Seriously? For one, many of the pdfs I've been able to acquire are not OCR and as such, not searchable.

What do you mean "web pages from word"?

I'm actually running my game in 1492 DR, so we're post second sundering. There's not much, if anything, on Neverwinter after the chasm was sealed up.

While I understand that you think you're helping, essentially what you just told me to do was:

Go download every Forgotten Realms product in existence in OCR pdf format, (which surely would be piracy), go download every issue of Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron magazines (again likely piracy to get them all, otherwise a small fortune), scour all of ed's posts on twitter AND pull essentially the entire archive of Candlekeep.

Yah, clearly if i went and downloaded the entire internet of everything Forgotten Realms and searched it all for Neverwinter and/or Baldur's Gate I'd find everything I'm looking for... but that seems just a tad excessive, time consuming and, for someone who only downloads PDFs of items they have purchased/own, pretty costly. Your answer/suggestion was not helpful in the least when my question was:

"Can anyone point me in the direction of MUST HAVE information about these two locations."

And I asked it so I can make a TARGETED search rather than try and catch everything on the entire damn internet.



Well, ok, everyone take a deep breath and chill out.

For "must haves" you are covered by whatever is in the Volo's guides and then the latest updates (5E stuff) and you seem to own everything.

For additional information which is nice to have, you can probably take a (quite long) tour around the fandom wikis around the internet related to all the computer games set in both cities and get a vibe and more visuals for their layout, maps, landmarks and get interesting (even if only pseudo-canonical) ideas about NPC's and shops/taverns/buildings/whatever (if your players have played the games and remember they'll probably like the references even if they're not 100% canon).

For other random bits of lore on Baldur's Gate I know that Dragon 426 has an article detailing some influential NPCs (4E era I think, so maybe still alive in 5E) by Ed Greenwood, Dungeon 217 has a low level adventure (still for 4E I think).

For other random bits of lore on Neverwinter I know that Dungeon 193 has an in depth description of a tavern and two (more like one-and-an-half) adventures in the city.

Additionally, you can try to delve into the Questions for Ed Greenwood scrolls but it will be extremely time consuming. The lore answers that I pulled (which are only stuff I might use or have used, not everything) make up a word file of 392 pages ... so yeah (also I didn't save the timestamps of the answers so that makes referencing them to someone else quite difficult ...)

Anyway, searching that file for "Baldur" gave me 40 hits, most of those are stray mentions of noble/merchant families having some kind of tie to the city, something more important might be if you narrow down the search to Stormkeep (oldest fortification still standing in the city), a reply comparing Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, another on merchant and guilds of Baldur's Gate and a final one on important buildings.

Neverwinter gave me only 27 hits, mostly the same kind of stray mention, maybe you are interested in a small bits about the "city newspaper" called Neverwinter Nights, the Starshine Academy and Borlwynd Hall.

If you want to go in more depth I can send you little text snippets and maybe with an "exact match" search you can find these lore nuggets more easily in the vault.

As a general comment on the topic of researching areas I will just say that it's a tradeoff: using only must-haves is quick and reduces the amount of sources you have to research while being thorough and checking every possible reference make for a more complete vision of the topic researched but of course takes time, sometimes an awful lot of time. Both are fine and legitimate approaches but you cannot have them at the same time (like with many other things in life).
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Tigon
Acolyte

USA
47 Posts

Posted - 25 May 2019 :  22:40:39  Show Profile Send Tigon a Private Message  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Demzer

Well, ok, everyone take a deep breath and chill out.

For "must haves" you are covered by whatever is in the Volo's guides and then the latest updates (5E stuff) and you seem to own everything.

For additional information which is nice to have, you can probably take a (quite long) tour around the fandom wikis around the internet related to all the computer games set in both cities and get a vibe and more visuals for their layout, maps, landmarks and get interesting (even if only pseudo-canonical) ideas about NPC's and shops/taverns/buildings/whatever (if your players have played the games and remember they'll probably like the references even if they're not 100% canon).

For other random bits of lore on Baldur's Gate I know that Dragon 426 has an article detailing some influential NPCs (4E era I think, so maybe still alive in 5E) by Ed Greenwood, Dungeon 217 has a low level adventure (still for 4E I think).

For other random bits of lore on Neverwinter I know that Dungeon 193 has an in depth description of a tavern and two (more like one-and-an-half) adventures in the city.

Additionally, you can try to delve into the Questions for Ed Greenwood scrolls but it will be extremely time consuming. The lore answers that I pulled (which are only stuff I might use or have used, not everything) make up a word file of 392 pages ... so yeah (also I didn't save the timestamps of the answers so that makes referencing them to someone else quite difficult ...)

Anyway, searching that file for "Baldur" gave me 40 hits, most of those are stray mentions of noble/merchant families having some kind of tie to the city, something more important might be if you narrow down the search to Stormkeep (oldest fortification still standing in the city), a reply comparing Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, another on merchant and guilds of Baldur's Gate and a final one on important buildings.

Neverwinter gave me only 27 hits, mostly the same kind of stray mention, maybe you are interested in a small bits about the "city newspaper" called Neverwinter Nights, the Starshine Academy and Borlwynd Hall.

If you want to go in more depth I can send you little text snippets and maybe with an "exact match" search you can find these lore nuggets more easily in the vault.

As a general comment on the topic of researching areas I will just say that it's a tradeoff: using only must-haves is quick and reduces the amount of sources you have to research while being thorough and checking every possible reference make for a more complete vision of the topic researched but of course takes time, sometimes an awful lot of time. Both are fine and legitimate approaches but you cannot have them at the same time (like with many other things in life).



Yes, i agree that "using only must-haves is quick and reduces the amount of sources you have to research while being thorough and checking every possible reference make for a more complete vision of the topic researched but of course takes time, sometimes an awful lot of time." is a trade off.

That said because i've yet to get these two locations started i'm seeking to start with the must-haves, build the base/foundation, and then, after i'm more familiar with the locale's go and research more in depth because i'll be more familiar with what search terms I'll want to look for rather than just the city name.

Primarily my focus is on locations within the city. Taverns, feasthalls, inns, businesses, temples, city government buildings, guildhalls, faction hideouts, noble villas, etc etc. Ideally a detailed map with locations tagged/flagged and a corresponding description of each. I suspect my best bet here will be when I can get hold of Volo's Guide to Baldur's Gate II for BG. Not sure where to get this for Neverwinter unless the 4e setting has it.

Additionally id like to know more about some of the factions that are in the area (i know the flaming fists have a strong presence in Baldur's Gate but are virtually unheard of in Waterdeep), their influence and motivations, THEN id be looking for NPCs.

Honestly, NPCs/Characters are the least of my concern. I'm more interested in keeping the locations and factions cannonical, the name of joe-whoey that runs the tavern is less important to me unless its a really well-known major NPC in the realms (such as Durnan or Mirt, etc). I can make up a new tavern owner, or whatever, and explain it off that its 1492 DR and so-and-so previous owner is dead, so long as I can keep locations and factions as close to cannon as possible.
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