- Joined
- Aug 9, 2014
Considering he looks like this:For all the DND nerds out there: Ed Greenwood.
You might know him as the mind behind the Forgotten Realms, the single most popular official campaign setting and the backdrop for most of the most famous DND fiction - Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, the Icewind Dale Trilogy, etc. He is also a borderline horrorcow, or at least he would be if he kept his online presence relatively quiet.
What's a lot less known these days is that, especially in older material, he used the Forgotten Realms as a John Normanesque outlet for his fetishes. They try to gloss over it these days, but in Forgotten Realms canon, brothels (or "festhalls") are found in almost every settlement at the level where inns and taverns would be found in more sane worlds, and holidays are celebrated by massive public city-wide orgies. Also, incest is considered normal and healthy as long as you don't produce any children through it. In his own published Forgotten Realms fiction, there's a lot of incest - one story involves a grown man adopting a baby girl, and when she grows up they end up fucking each other. Another thing that comes up a lot is rape and sexual slavery, most prominently with the Drow (and another thing that Wizards doesn't want you to know is that according to Ed, Drow matriarchs typically assert their dominance by raping their underlings. Often these are their own daughters). He published one short story in which a group of adventurers is sent by an alchemist to collect nymph tears for a potion, which they obtain by brutally gang-raping said nymph, in a graphically described process.
Perhaps his greatest fetish of all, however, is gender transformation. DND has had a fair amount of magic items that induce gender switching, such as the infamous Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity, and he's always been eager to abuse this. One goddess canonically requires all male priests to spend part of their initiation transformed into women, and even his pet Mary Sue Elminister spent part of his youth as a hot girl, under which he had a steamy lesbian relationship with a female colleague.
For all those non-nerds out there, I'd like to clarify that this is the official default setting of Fifth Edition.
Speaking of Elminister, a lot of the reputation he gets as being a Mary Sue comes from Ed, who wrote much of the lore behind him and was responsible for a good deal of pushing him down peoples' throats. In some older published modules, he exists only to show up and laugh at you if you don't do what Ed wanted you to do before forcing you down the "correct" path. Also, a lot of Realmslore is presented with the framing story that Elminister planeshifted into Ed's kitchen and told him stories of Faerun while eating out of his fridge. I'm not making this up, there was a whole column in Dragon Magazine with this concept behind it.
By the way, it bears repeating that Elminister is an old, bearded man - coincidentially, just like Ed Greenwood - who is the most powerful wizard in the world and constantly bangs hot chicks, including a goddess. Hmm.
Compounding all of this lunacy, Ed, like many lolcows out there, is extremely defensive of his vision and gets upset at any people bashing it, or not letting him have his way. Because he was publishing Forgotten Realms stories before DND even existed, and TSR picked up the license to use the setting for their game (for reasons I have no idea), he asserts full control over the canon. Part of the deal he agreed to stated that TSR/Wizards was legally obliged to put out Forgotten Realms books every year (I don't know if this is still in effect), and if at any point they contradicted anything he said, he would be allowed to take back his toys and not let them play with them any more. In other words, all of this stuff is still canon, even if Wizards doesn't like to acknowledge it, because they legally can't retcon it or they'll lose the rights to their biggest moneymaker setting.
Keep this in mind the next time you play in a Forgotten Realms campaign or read a novel.
That's not terribly surprising.