The massively popular Neverwinter has become a staple of the MMORPG scene since it first went online in 2013. Taking inspiration from the classic Dungeons & Dragons world of the Forgotten Realms, Neverwinter explores one of the most beloved and well-known locations in the TTRPG community with a heavy emphasis on storytelling and characters -- qualities which Ed Greenwood, the Forgotten Realms’ creator, lauds as the keys to great fiction.
Neverwinter celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. To commemorate the occasion, the game's producer, Cryptic Studios, announced the theme for its annual Protector’s Jubilee: a multiverse story introducing a variant of Elminster voiced by Greenwood, who created the character as a self-insert in the Forgotten Realms. CBR had a chance to sit down with Greenwood and the game’s executive producer Brett Norton for an in-depth discussion about Neverwinter's 10th anniversary, how AI could impact video games, and the creation of the Forgotten Realms nearly sixty years ago.
CBR: You've talked about this before, but it's such a great story that I'd love to have our readers learn about it. Could you please tell us how you got into writing in the first place?
Ed Greenwood: Oh, dear. Okay, here we go again. There's this house -- still exists in Don Mills, Ontario. My father had a den downstairs where we all learned to practice the piano, and the main living room was upstairs. I would read everything in my dad's den. He was a book collector, and like most book collectors, he built his own bookshelves to cram things in by size so he could get the maximum amount of stuff in. So I was reading everything cheek by jowl. So The Robe by Lloyd Douglas was right next to a first edition The Lord of the Rings, was right next to The High White Forest by Ralph Allen, which was a novel of the Battle of the Bulge, which was endlessly fascinating to a young kid because it involves three pages of undercover Nazi agents, who are just people trying to learn how to say the F-bomb like Americans so they can go behind enemy lines. You know, when you're a young kid, that's like, "Whoa, gold," but I was reading everything.
I would always pound upstairs to my father -- usually interrupting him when he had a room full of NORAD missile guys or whatever -- and say, "Dad, Dad, this is great! Where's the next one?" I'd be holding up a wartime paperback, a falling apart book that was usually something totally inappropriate, like Owl Hoot Trail, "She was staked out nude in the sun to die," or something of that sort. I would wave it at him and say, "Where's the next one?" He'd always go, "Son, that author died in 1938. If you want any more, you'll have to write them yourself." I'd say, "Oh, okay," and pound back down the stairs to where the card table was set up.
My aunt Clara, who'd lived through two World Wars and a depression on a farm, had taken every brown paper bag that we got groceries in from the supermarket because there were no plastic bags back then -- I am old! She'd slit the sides up and iron them flat. On a farm, that's what the farmers wrote on. So that's what I wrote stories on. My father would take them to his workplace and read all this pastiche, and I would copy everything from P. G. Wodehouse to Lord Dunsany to pulp men's action adventure. What I was writing was utter balderdash, but I was learning how to copy other people's styles, so I was having great fun. That's where the Realms started. I started writing fantasy stuff.
I think I recall that you started creating the Forgotten Realms when you were about six, and Mirt was inspired in part by Shakespeare's Falstaff.
Greenwood: Yeah. 1965. Neverwinter, by the way, doesn't come along until 1966. So when you guys are saying, "the 10th anniversary," I'm going, "Whoa, it's a lot." But I know what you mean. So yeah, it started with a daydream in a boring class in public school [about] two ladies who have silver hair, who turned out to be Storm and Dove. I didn't know who they were or why they were there, and I wanted to know more about [them], so I started imagining this world. But yeah, the first point-of-view character was Mirt. Mirt the Moneylender was a wheezing old man who had to swindle people because he couldn't outrun them anymore. He had to outthink them.
He was three people: Guy Gilpatric's Glencannon from the men's magazine stories about this drunken Scottish engineer on a tramp steamer, Nicholas van Rijn, who is Poul Anderson's pulsar, technically, old swindling trader, and Shakespeare's Falstaff. So he was my point-of-view character, and I explored the Sword Coast starting way up at Fireshear and moving down through Mirabar, so we got to Neverwinter pretty early on. All the Mirt short stories were the same thing. He'd come in with enemies -- rival merchants, he would do something bad in that city, and he'd have to leave town on a ship in a heck of a hurry right at the end of the book before the authorities got ahold of him. So he was moving down the Sword Coast.
Brett Norton: That sounds really familiar to Honor Among Thieves' characters.
Greenwood: Yeah!
What were some of the inspirations you had for Neverwinter specifically, and how did you approach creating it?
Greenwood: It started with the name Neverwinter, and I wanted to have a volcanic rift nearby that warmed the climate in that area. Specifically, it was in a woods or mountains above the woods, so you couldn't live there, but it warmed the waters of the river that flowed down through the port city that grew up at this river mouth where it hit the cold sea -- so there were lots of fogs. It didn't ice up, so you could use a port all year round. So it could grow quickly. The other cute thing is I did all my maps with a stapler pen, drawing each little individual building, building all the cities of the realms. And the conceit for Neverwinter was that the king forbade any maps of the city from being published.
So there were no maps of Neverwinter. Which is why when it was time to do outside licenses, computer games from TSR, they immediately turned around and said, "Hey, Ed, we're stealing that Neverwinter Nights name," which was the name of a broadsheet or newspaper. It was, you know, the local free newspaper that you looked up what hot club acts were in the hot clubs tonight. So if you wanted to go out and entertain yourself in Neverwinter, you open the copy of Neverwinter Nights. And they said, "We're stealing the name and giving it to this outside license." And I said, "Sure, why Neverwinter?" And they said, "Well, you didn't map it. So they can do anything they like." Because, of course, in those days, computers had tiny memory. So you couldn't delve into this huge city and go on for blocks and blocks and thousands of buildings. There just wasn't enough room in the memory of the computer. And of course, "But I do have a map." "Never mind," said Jeff, "We'll tell them you don't."
Did you get a chance to play it yourself? What did it feel like to see your world become a video game? Brett, did you play the original Neverwinter before coming on to the current MMORPG?
Brett Norton: Yes, I did play the original Neverwinter Nights way back in '95. I want to say it was hosted on AOL. It's one of the reasons why I got on to America Online because they put out an advertisement for it. They're like, "Hey, we got this D&D game Neverwinter Nights," and I was playing a lot of D&D games. I was like, "Wait, you can play some of these D&D games online with other people?" I jumped in and spent the last couple of years before they eventually shut down Neverwinter Nights as the technical infrastructure aged out and wasn't working as well anymore. I spent several years playing Neverwinter Nights. I think it's considered the first graphical MMORPG. There were some text-based MUDs before that, but the original Neverwinter Nights was the first graphical MMO.
Greenwood: I didn't play it at all because I was writing on a Mac, which TSR had given me. All the games were made on Macs or Sun SPARC, but they were all made for PCs. I didn't have a PC. Nor did I have an internet connection out here in the wilds of Ontario. They would occasionally give me copies of the game as a gift. I would go to the store and say, "Hey, what computer do I need to run this?" And they tell me, and I go buy that computer, take it home and load it, load the game on it, and go, "Oh, oh, that's sort of underwhelming." I wanted to be able to Dungeon Master. I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to jump out this window instead of going through the door. I want to do my own. "Oh, well, why can't we roleplay on these things?"
Just to take a step back real quick. Did the Forgotten Realms change from your initial concept before returning to your homebrew world for D&D?
Greenwood: Oh, it changed a lot in little ways. TSR had stuff that they had to drop into it. They warned me, "This is a kitchen sink world." They had the Desert of Desolation modules, which had Egyptian pyramids in them, so they were going to drop that into the realms. My Mulhorand and Unther changed. They actually had a gate, Postulated Portal, in later editions of the game where people from Earth came through and were in the realms. They also had the TSR Albion campaign that got orphaned, and they sunk my Moonshae. Doug Niles' completed elven campaign became the Moonshae Isles, and there were lots of little things. They are little things, but it's amazing how much of the Realms is just the way it was at the home gaming table.
The majority of it is because they were smart or stupid -- depending on how you look at it -- enough to keep me on board unofficially, as the guy that everybody phoned in Canada and said, "Hey, I've got a deadline that's a week away. Do you have anything lying around [about] this kingdom?" And I'd say, "Sure!" Their FedEx account would get lit up one more time, and this giant package would make its way to their offices. I would get to influence how they were developing this, that, or the other thing. So Maztica and Kara-Tur were added on. I don't use real-world cultures [or] direct analogs in the realms. It's always messy. There are always problems with that, but when you're in a hurry and have to tell an artist, "Well, they look like this." You know, you've reached for a real-world historical analog, or even worse, a Hollywood historical analog.
Brett, it sounds like you've played D&D before you got to the Neverwinter game. What was your first exposure to the Forgotten Realms?
Norton: I'm not exactly certain what my first exposure to Forgotten Realms was. I read some of the early novels [by] R. A. Salvatore and played some of the early D&D video games that pick the Forgotten Realms as their core setting. I can't pinpoint the exact moment in all that because I also played some of the early editions of D&D, even some actual first editions way back in the day. But I can't remember when I got into Forgotten Realms because I had done some things in Dragonlance and a few of the other settings that were going on at the time, but at some point, Forgotten Realms took over as the de facto standard setting for many of the video games that were coming out at the time. It became the core setting you expected to play when you were playing D&D.
The tabletop games I was playing at the time eventually almost all shifted to Forgotten Realms. At some point, Forgotten Realms took over much of the tabletop experience and the PC in video games experience -- somewhere around the early to mid-90s. About the time that Neverwinter Nights came out. Maybe it was because of that, but a lot of the Gold Box games that had come out before were pretty much set in the Forgotten Realms, too. The game behind me right now -- Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures -- came out roughly in the same era as Neverwinter Nights. Many of the games were all in bed, and after that, as they started the next generation of non-Gold Box video games, a lot of them continued with the Forgotten Realms setting, like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights and beyond.
I believe you got involved with the current edition of Neverwinter in 2019, is that correct?
Norton: Around then? That was 2020. I've been on the project for a couple of years now. I've worked at Cryptic for a little bit longer, but I was only indirectly working on Neverwinter. A few years back, they put me up formally on it. It was just '22. It was only early 2022. So it's a little over a year now. But I've been at Cryptic for several years prior to that and was playing Neverwinter pretty extensively and working with some of the team members on it.
It sounds like you've got quite a history with Neverwinter.
Norton: Not as extensive as some of the people at Cryptic, like Randy [Mosiondz], who worked on it before it shipped and has worked on it many times since it shipped. He's been off and on the Neverwinter project for the entirety of its 10 years in some form. I'm a more recent inclusion to Cryptic, but I've got a long history with D&D video games and D&D as a whole.
What made you decide to have Ed cameo now?
Norton: That suggestion came directly from Randy, who I mentioned earlier, who had worked on the project for a while. He's had a chance to really get to know and interact with a lot of various people in the greater D&D culture and was like, "Hey, we got the 10th anniversary coming up. It'd be cool if Ed came on and did something for it." We were like, "Wow, do you know Ed?" He's like, "I think I can dig up his contact information. He managed to get it all together. We had been planning some big festivities for the 10th anniversary. Within Neverwinter, we have the character Elminster, and he's been on a couple of our modules and has done a couple of different sections. But we've never had Ed voice or do anything for Elminster.
Elminster being this mythical, legendary figure, we're like, "Alright, what if we did sort of a multiverse story where we had multiple Elminster running around in Neverwinter?" We decided, "Well, that's what we'll do. We'll keep our current Elminster and not put his voice actor out of a job, but we'll bring in an additional Elminster he created. That's where a Greenwood comes in. So Greenwood plays the part of this additional Elminster, so there are two Elminsters running around in the Realms. Players will have a chance to do various 10th-Anniversary festivities, and they can unlock this new Elminster as a special companion to use for the rest of their stay in the game. If you like Ed Greenwood and want to hear him talk to you for the rest of Neverwinter, make sure you get on the 10th-anniversary and unlock that companion.
Greenwood: Tag Team!
Could you speak more about the inspiration behind this cameo? What details can you tell us about the event in general?
Norton: Neverwinter hosts a one-week anniversary celebration every year, and this year will be the 10th anniversary of when it first launched on PC. We always have a big event. There are always tons of free giveaways that we do. We run a whole bunch of sales, and we've had a couple of unique events that run only for that week. We want to do something more than just the typical events for the 10-year anniversary. That's where Randy came up with the idea, "Hey, what if we got Ed involved." So we were like, "Alright, let's go ahead and do that." We had to figure out, "Okay, what are we gonna do?" We've had Elminster, the character, appear throughout the Forgotten Realms. Elminster is Ed Greenwood's avatar within the world if you will. So we wanted to figure out a way to have that come in, but since we'd already been using Elminster as a character for various different stories and whatnot, we're like, "Okay, what can we do with this?"
That's where we did a lot of research. The writers' group came together with a couple of different ideas, and we shopped them around and talked about, "Hey, what can we do with this?" We actually had to get some of our various ideas approved by Wizards [of the Coast] because we were like, "Hey, we want to have multiple Elminsters running around in Neverwinter. We proposed a couple of different solutions to Wizards of the Coast, and they had to tell us what we could do and which versions of that story were acceptable for us to use Elminster. That's when we settled on -- I don't want to spoil it too much because there's a little bit of fun story involved if you actually do the story missions that come out with the anniversary event. It explains what happens, why there are now multiple Elminsters running around, and why they sound and look a little bit different.
Greenwood: It's our version of Timey-Wimey stuff.
It's a little bit Doctor Who, a little bit of all the multiverse stuff going on with comics and films these days. Ed, did you get to contribute to the story, or what was going on with this cameo?
Greenwood: I was voicing lines from a script, and I was encouraged to write a bunch of lines of my own that might or might not get used. So I did. I had fun doing spell incantations that rhyme as Elminster. Who knows how many of those you will see or hear because who knows what you will do in the game? I just had fun. I was voicing lines, and it was great fun.
What are some of your favorite parts of Neverwinter, both the city itself and in the game?
Greenwood: Go ahead, Brett.
Norton: Neverwinter, the game, encapsulates a bunch of different areas. It's funny because Neverwinter started as a fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons game and now has progressed into the Fifth Edition. We've had to update portions of Neverwinter because they've changed some of the history and some of the activities that have been occurring with Neverwinter. In the fourth edition, there was this huge, destructive event that tore the city nearly asunder, and the survivors had to band together to reform. Over time, as more and more players came into the game and the fifth edition came out, Neverwinter was more of a subtle place. A lot of the hazards and problems that had happened during the spell plague had been resolved. So we had to change a bit of the topography of Neverwinter to make it feel a little less hostile. We moved some of the leveling activities to try to match what had happened within Fifth Edition. Through all that, What I've really enjoyed with Neverwinter the city is some of that level of progression. I think that the Protectors Enclave has always been a hub and the heart of where the current Neverwinter game is set. That's where you do all your activities and where everyone heads to. It's the home of Neverwinter and where everything gets directed.
Outside of Neverwinter itself and the larger Forgotten Realms, there are tons of great areas. We do multiple ventures in Icewind Dale, our current module setting going through the Underdark. We've done tons of different areas. Much of the early game experience is set in tons of areas. I can go to Mount Hotenow and a few other places. Sorry, Mount Hotenow is currently unavailable. We're talking about bringing that one back -- a little bit of a spoiler alert for that one. We have a couple of other great areas throughout it -- Velarsburg, etc. Other ones that you tore through. It's hard for me to pin down which kind of area I want because we're up to 25, and soon, we're releasing our 26th module. Each one of those goes to a different place. I have a special place in my heart for the Tyranny of Dragons because it meshes a bit of the Dragonlance elements that I've loved. I don't know if you consider that a bastardization, Ed, but it's always something that, since I love both of those elements, I love seeing Tiamat -- she is a great villain.
I'm particularly fond of what we've recently done with Menzoberranzan and the Underdark. That's something that became a significant part of the lore. I was stunned when I started work on Neverwinter and found they hadn't done Menzoberranzan and large portions of the Underdark as major zones that you can visit. There was something that they were talking about when I joined the team. I was like, "Yeah, that sounds like a great idea." As a player, it's one of the areas I've wanted to see. There are many great areas you get to check out above ground, going from areas like Chult all the way to Neverwinter through huge portions of Icewind Dale. All up and down the Sword Coast in many areas. But they hadn't done much with areas like the Underdark prior, so we've had a chance to do some of those areas.
Greenwood: Nice!
Norton: Ed, definitely add what your favorite areas are in the Forgotten Realms, so I can take some notes and see what areas we haven't explored yet for a future module.
Greenwood: Well, my favorite things are the Dalelands and Waterdeep. But it's really hard. That's like asking what is your favorite child?
Norton: Everyone wants us to do Waterdeep. It's a sprawling, massive city. It's tough to do, but we've looked into it.
Greenwood: Or choose a smaller one like Marsember, which is all sunken barges in scummy water and people going out on wharves late at night, and there's this "bloop!" and they're never heard from again. Or Suzail or something because it's smaller in size. I don't know. That's a question I hate, "Which is your favorite?" Because they're all my favorites! I want to do them all. I think the economy of the United States of America is strong enough that we can carpet bomb the entire globe, doing game after game after game after game. I don't understand why companies don't see the light bulb and do that.
Now to answer your question, Julia: my most intriguing secret of Neverwinter -- Brett, don't listen -- is how many sentient enchanted items, from old spellbooks to magic swords, are hidden in the city? How much are these items aware of each other? How much do they communicate with each other? And what, if any, common agendas do they pursue? So that could -- maybe, maybe not -- work its way into a future game. When something happens and all across the city, magic items start nudging the humans and others around them to do something... Anyway, just saying.
Norton: Great story hook.
I watched your video about the secrets of Neverwinter recently. I thought what you said about Neverember's family and some of these related characters was fascinating. Do you have any interest in exploring them further, like in a book or some other form in the future? Could fans eventually see them in the Neverwinter game?
Greenwood: I'd love to see that. My problem is I'm 63 now. I have a limited amount of time left. My "really want to do" Bucket List of dream projects is miles long. As we just talked about, Waterdeep could take all of it. Unless I become one of those guys who cheats death, and I'm 163 years old, dropping my false teeth all over the table and still writing novels, I'm not going to get to all of them. So if somebody else wants to pick up and run with some of them, I'd be delighted because I'd get to see them before I die. So yeah, I would love that. I did detail some of these sorts of low-profile undercover Neverember family members. That's what I do in the realms. I put toys in the sandbox for all the kids to come along and play with. I just leave them lying there in the sandbox. Every kid should get new toys to play with every time they turn around. That is my goal in life, to give people new toys to play with.
I hope they do. I would love that. Now, the aspect I'd like to see more of, which is the hardest thing to do in a computer game, is more and more role-playing interactions between characters. Intrigues. As you get older and your eyes go, your hand-eye coordination goes, you break more and more fingers, shooting things and pushing buttons faster and faster and faster becomes less and less doable and less and less enjoyable. So I less and less want to fight except fighting as in your typical Henry VIII Court movie, where it's "Good, my Lord. Dost thou now realize what danger you caught? The lady behind you does; I can see it in her eyes." That sort of fencing I love, but that's the hardest thing to put into a computer game because it takes gobs of memory. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure with 48 paths at every paragraph.
Norton: We're talking a lot about this metaverse kind of stuff. It may not be this generation of online games and persistent games, but I think we're getting closer to sandbox-style games as a whole. That's one thing I've noticed working in video games for a while is that it's gotten a lot easier to do more sandbox-style games with more player agency and more choice. For the first video games, you had to be very prescriptive. It was very hard to do a lot of stuff and allow player choice and whatnot. Now we've gotten to the point where we can have a lot more open-ended games, a lot more agency, [and] a lot more choice. It's still not perfect. There are still a lot of on-rails that we have to do. It's getting better than what it was even 10 years ago. Every time we have an increase in computer power, we take a generational leap forward.
It'll be interesting to see, especially when we have tools. This is an interesting one: things like AI that can better respond to what players do, sort of like an automatic Dungeon Master, because that's some of the limitations. There [are] so many things that players could do. It's very difficult for us to preemptively figure out what it could be. Whereas if we had better AI-powered open-world games, we could have an AI that could react to it, say, "Oh, the players did this. This is a reasonable outcome from that," [and] use the tools available with the game to generate something for it so we don't have to try to figure out every possible solution ahead of time. We can actually have the equivalent of an automated Dungeon Master helping out there.
Greenwood: Love it!
I love that idea. Is that something you think you could explore more as Neverwinter continues to expand as a game? Is that something you would consider trying to incorporate as it evolves?
Norton: We certainly do try to incorporate more elements as far as content and things like that [to] offer more player agency as well as choice. But I think that what I'm talking about is something that would require a technological leap forward and probably something like a Neverwinter 2. There's something in there. I think that's when you get to the level of a new technical underpinning to build a new game more foundational. I think that what we'll see is a lot of video games, as we go into the late 2020s now and perhaps into 2030, that start to embrace these types of things.
Going back to the secrets of Neverwinter topic and that video, Ed, you said something about the big event at the end of the recent Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves had an impact on Neverwinter. Keeping it kind of vague in case anyone hasn't seen the movie yet. But does that mean that you would consider the events of that film canon to the official history of Neverwinter? Is there a chance we may see some of that incorporated into future Neverwinter lore?
Greenwood: Yes. I realized that it's difficult to reconcile cannon. There are two super fans of the realms -- Eric Boyd and George Krashos, who have published official stuff as well -- who have made an entire career of pouncing on apparent contradictions and explaining them away by generating new lore that actually explains away that contradiction, and I love it! They always pass them to me, and I go, "Oh, goody!" Gleeful, jumping, leaping around. I will always try [to] reconcile contradictory or apparently contradictory canon. Of course, one of the big ways of doing that is everything we know about the Forgotten Realms comes to us through unreliable narrators. The gods lie to their faithful clergy. The clergy turn around and lie to the people, maybe not knowing that they're lying because, hey, they're trusting their god. Elminster lies to us about everything in the Realms. Volo doesn't even hide his lies. So you put all those together, and everything you read about the Forgotten Realms or experience in a computer game is written in quicksand on a stormy beach with the tide coming in.
So if you bear that in mind, that you should be having heaping handfuls of salt, that gives you enough wiggle room to try and put everybody's contributions into the same pot and saying, "Well, there may be lumps in the stew, but it's still a good stew. You know, we stirred it enough, and it should work." I see nothing wrong with that. So yeah, having seen the movie, I am going to try and incorporate everything that was said in that. Now, I mean, I'm going to have to think that a particular character by the name of Forge Fitzwilliam, his ancestors must have come through a portal to have that "Fitz," which was just the way of denoting particularly in the Flemish tongue, "bastard children." If you weren't a legitimate child of Mr. Williams, you were Fitzwilliams. Okay, so I'm going to assume that somebody came through a portal who uses that naming convention, and he is descended from that. Other than that, I have no problems. I'm taking it all and putting it straight into my headspace canon for Neverwinter and writing that way from now on. However, what I have to do is see this new game and play it. I'm such an old fart. I'm thinking, "Does it come in a box? Can I go into a gaming store and buy a box with the shiny shrink wrap, or is it only online? Because if it's only online, I might need a faster computer." So I don't even know that, but I want to play the game and see if I can incorporate that, too.
Brett, do you think there's a chance that we may see some of those new Neverwinter events from the movie and such incorporated into the game? You touched on this already a little bit, but are there any other plans you can tease for the game's future?
Norton: Certainly, I can talk about two of those elements. So the movie is a tricky and interesting licensing space for us. That's one of the things that we've had to deal with. The way it works is that the movie created a whole bunch of unique stuff, and that unique stuff has to be incorporated back into the larger Forgotten Realms setting. Once it's put back into some portion of the larger Forgotten Realms settings, then we can use it. So it's like branches that have to flow back into the main tree. We have the ability to use anything that's part of the main tree, but if it's created by an offshore branch, like a movie or something very unique, we have to make sure that we get permission from Wizards of the Coast to use that. So there's always a bit of unique licensing when it comes to television and movies about who owns the intellectual property for when unique things are created for that one. We have to wait, sadly, until we can get those back into the main line before we can use anything particularly unique to [the movie].
That being said, the movie is full of a lot of great things that are not unique to the movie, even though maybe players and fans aren't aware of it. For example, -- slight spoilers -- the chunky red dragon in the movie, Themberchaud, is not unique to the movie. That is a character that's in the larger Forgotten Realms setting. So we could, for example, leverage that without any concern. But there [are] a few unique elements that they came up with for the movie that if we wanted to leverage those, we have to wait until those are incorporated into the core Forgotten Realms lore. The way that Neverwinter is set up. We've licensed the core Forgotten Realms lore, and those unique branches are off-limits to us until they're incorporated back in.
We have some fun surprises coming up. I don't want to spoil too much. We've hinted at a few things. We just released our Menzoberranzan module, and we're looking at a couple more things related to the Underdark or tying up some loose ends. We'll be doing some announcements on those shortly dealing with some very powerful Drow deities that may or may not be appearing in some future modules. We'll discuss more with some future releases, but we're building up to a good hopeful climax for that arc. Beyond that, later this year, in particular, we'll be moving into a whole new arc, which I can't spoil anything on since it's in the early pre-production stages. It's going to be following some of the more recent inclusions to the larger D&D setting, Forgotten Realms, and everything as a whole. So it's going to be an interesting change of pace -- very, very different than what we were doing with the Underdark. I'll say that it's radically different.
Greenwood: You can tell us! It's just you, me, and the internet!
Norton: Exactly. Ed's very good at keeping secrets. We did a lot of unique new updates for it. We went back and updated a number of the old events and a bunch of other great stuff. We have all kinds of good new rewards that we give out. We have a free gift. You log in and play Neverwinter at any point during the 10th anniversary, and we give out a whole bunch of free stuff. The next module we release will be module 26 for Neverwinter --that's gonna be coming out [in] July. There's not a set date, but that's a rough timeframe window. We're kind of in a pattern. We try to release one early in the year, middle of the year, and then later in the year. So we should be hitting around [the] middle of your module. More information on that will be coming shortly. I've dropped a few hints about what that might center around already. The module at the end of the year, which is probably going to be in early November, that's going to be the one that takes a pretty sharp twist. It'll be very different than anything players have experienced in Neverwinter, and as a result, we're keeping a little tight-lipped about it. The setting is going to shift quite drastically for that one, and we're gonna be doing some very unique new things for it.
That sounds very exciting. Ed, is there anything in particular with your cameo that you're doing or something that you're particularly excited about with Neverwinter's event?
Yeah, it's really fun to play Elminster. Everybody looks at me and says, "Oh, he's your Mary Sue, your alter ego, your insert." You've got to remember I was five years old and didn't look like this when I invented Elminster. This has all come along since. I guess Elminster is working on me. I'm trying desperately not to spoil too much here. Let's just say Elminster -- the me Elminster, the extra Elminster -- does talk a tiny bit about how he came to be and why he's here, and that involved Elminster getting to see just a few longing things about the goddess he serves. Let's just put it that way. I think I didn't fall off the tightrope. Even though I thought I was walking along spaghetti. That's a tightrope there.
Ed, are there any other projects outside of this that you want to mention that you're currently working on?
Greenwood: Oh, dear. I am still writing sourcebooks for the Realms, and they look like official sourcebooks with nice glossy hardcovers, and I've done the Border Kingdoms. I've done Thay, the land of the Red Wizards. There will be more. One of the ones I am working on with another team is a little thing called Volo's Guide to Ormpur. Ormpur is the city on the coast of the Shining Sea, south of the Border Kingdoms. I do want to get back to Waterdeep and do Volo's Guide to Various Wards in Waterdeep. I might start with Castle Ward.
I have to say, before Brett goes, "Oh, no!" I dropped back on Neverwinter because a little bird told me that Neverwinter was going to be in the movie. So I thought, "Well, I better not do Volo's Guide to Neverwinter." So instead -- spoilers for the movie, folks -- I did a book on Thay that came out right when they were [making the movie]. I will shut up now because I have like 42 little projects. Who knows, some of them may never see the light of day, and some of them may morph. That's the other problem when you're working on the Realms. As Brett was telling us about things having to be approved, you can send something back, and it's like, "Oh, well, we can't actually tell you about another outside license." Somebody's doing bendable hand puppets or lunchboxes. So we can't. For instance, Themberchaud.
The reason I mentioned Eric Boyd is he created Themberchaud years and years ago for the Realms. He might be intrigued to see a lunch thermos that is like a chunky dragon because his Themberchaud wasn't fat. Then it was because it was how Themberchaud was trapped in this area in the Realms lore. Then in the movie, he got moved out of that area and trapped in another area because I guess he got even fatter. Things can change. That's why I should shut up and not share more because they might never happen. Then you're waiting for something because I teased it, and it will never happen, or it will happen but morphed so completely. What if the paradigm for how we play computer games changes? Because when I was a little kid -- Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio, and then when my father was working on his holograms that shot out of your watch and played right in front of you, so everybody was doing this, going around the Realms, and they were playing like that. So it's like, what if the paradigm for how we play computer games changes?
Norton: Some people are betting on various forms of VR or AR. It'd be very interesting to see once we get the technology miniaturized enough, how much that takes off for exactly those reasons. By the way, there is Themberchaud popcorn. He opened his mouth, and you can have popcorn, and they were a giveaway at some of the movie screenings.
Do you two have any suggestions for people getting into Dungeons & Dragons and trying to create their own worlds? Would you have any recommendations for people trying to delve into that or others who want to create a world for a video game?
Norton: I'll let Ed go first to talk about that since he's the pioneer in the tabletop part of it.
Greenwood: Okay, just a quickie. A world, a setting, is people first, geography second. The worst rabbit hole that most world builders start with is they start talking about the history of the world. Then it becomes like the beginning of the Bible where it's so and so begat so and so begat so and so begat so and so, for 82 pages. No, no, no. Tell me what's happening right now, and make it about the people. The people may not be human. They could be dragons, or they could be little weird monsters of yours. They could be tribbles. It's the characters first and how they're bouncing off each other. What are their conflicts? What are the things they band together for? What excites them? What are they trained for in life? What are their aims?
From that, the world will grow as you need your story to grow. That's actually easier than going, "Oh, well, there are mountains over here, and then there's another continent. Oh, I have to detail an entire continent. There's a continent here. Now I have to do two continents. How old am I?" You can make it terrible. But if you keep it about story first, and story possibilities because that's the wonderful thing about gaming. Rather than the writer writing the story in a linear set fashion where you can't deviate, in a game, you can go, "Nah, we're going this way, not that way. He wants us to go that way. Look, the archway is floodlit, and there's a huge devil guy going, 'Come, my pretties, come!' No, we're not gonna go there. We're gonna go the other way." That's gaming. It's always easier to concentrate on the story and the story possibilities.
Norton: I would like to say that is also excellent advice for people that might want to get into writing for video games. The mistake, especially early on when I started in video games, that a lot of writers I worked with made was that they did approach it from writing history and backstory. Writing for video games is more like writing screenplays, and it did involve more about the characters. It also was probably more focused on dialogue, in particular. How do you interact with these characters? What are they telling? Why are they interesting? Tell me more about what they're doing right now than about why they exist and what's going on. Memorable characters stand out in video games far more than memorable locations do. That's just a human conceit that we all have. It's something that a lot of writers who have been trying to get into video games feel they've struggled with, realizing that sometimes the locations aren't as important as the people and the stories around them.
Focusing on the characters, the stories, and what they say and how they say it gives you a lot more for people to latch on to, and it makes better video games. We have to record lots of dialogue in video games, as Ed's discovered. Getting to the point where you're committed to writing dialogue and recording it is important since we've got deadlines and have to do all kinds of things like localization. From a larger video game standpoint, and creating worlds for games, there are lots of ways to do it. You can do it as an artist, you can do it as a level designer, you can do it as a programmer. I think the important thing, if you wanted to get into video games and making all kinds of experiences for video games, is to find something you like to do, whether it's art or design, programming, audio, etc. Then get good at that and look at ways you can do that within video games. The video game industry, as a whole, needs lots of people from many different skill sets, producers, QA, and everything included. As a result, if you really enjoy doing fantasy art, you can probably find a home in video games. There are different fields that you could do that in.
I think the only area that's really unique, too, is probably video game designers because we're not the same thing as the tabletop industry. There's a slightly different skill set required there. We have a lot of overlap, where people who make good video game designers are often also really good tabletop designers, but there are unique skills for each of those that you have to get good with. If you want to get into video game design, you open up a game editor and work with game tools. Ed's illustrated a lot of the limitations of the games compared to tabletop games, but you got to figure out the best way to make fun stuff within those limitations. That's the real problem with video games. We do have a lot of technical limits, as well as just game engine limits and whatnot. It's not about making the most fun thing your imagination can handle. It's about figuring out a way to cram your imagination into a very limited space. That space is getting bigger with every generation of new hardware that comes out, but it's not a perfect mirror of the real world yet, or even a fantasy world. There are always some things that you [have] to deal with when it comes to limits.
Neverwinter's 10th-anniversary event with Ed Greenwood as Elminster begins June 15 at 8 AM PT and runs through June 22 at 8 AM PT.