LOST LORE OF THE REALMS #31

A fun grab bag this time around; enjoy!

Fruit In The Sword Coast North

The severe climate of the North means very little fresh fruit is available in winter (after freeze-up, when ships stop sailing into Waterdeep and other ports) except in processed (jams, brandies, pickled or honeyed) form. Berries (literally hundreds of different sorts) and apples are the main fruit native to the North. There’s also a savoury (not sweet) fruit native to, and cultivated in, the North known as the sarsae.

Sarsae are tough-skinned and hardy, with a mottled green skin that darkens from yellow-white as it ripens, firm yellow-white flesh similar to that of some real-world apples, and an almost cheese-like, but tart, taste. Sarsae are used as we real-world folk would use tomatoes, and vary widely in size depending on how wet the warm growing months are, and how much sun they get (edible, unshrivelled sarsae may be as small as real-world golf balls, or as large as real-world volleyballs, with most of them being about the size of a softball).

One curiosity of the North is ‘firefruit’ (sometimes called ‘amberglows’). These are small, succulent golden berries, very hard-skinned but filled with a semi-liquid as sweet as honey but fruity in flavour, that grow every three or four years on certain mosses and lichens, when these growths flower. Most mosses and lichens never bear such fruit, and only rangers and other experts on the flora of the area are usually able to tell which of the rare sorts of fungi will bear firefruit. When seen, protruding from hair-thin stalks out of the scabrous fungi, they can be eaten with surety, because there’s nothing poisonous or inedible that looks like firefruit.

Another culinary peculiarity of the North are ‘snowberries,’ which grow in profusion in the Fallen Lands and near Glister in the Moonsea North, but can be found everywhere in the Sword Coast North. Heavily grazed by birds and animals of all sorts, these aren’t a single variety of fruit but rather a rangers’ (and Uthgardt barbarians’) classification of many sorts of vines and bushes whose berries remain quite pleasant and edible when frozen—and so can readily be eaten when found under ice and snow in the howling hearts of winter blizzards.

Many larders in the North, Sword Coast, and Heartlands hold wax-sealed jars of apple and berry jams and jellies, marmalade, pickled whole quinces and lemons (chopped up and used in cooking; almost never eaten whole), and honeyed figs.

Ships bring all of these processed foods (usually in large barrels, with the jarring being done in the ports where the ships unload) from warmer climes, and also bring fresh fruit in season.

One of the most popular such fruit—popular because it travels so well (resisting rot and bruising, and is little loved by shipboard rats, hence only lightly nibbled), and because it has such a long growing season, with fruits ripening for use from Flamerule through Marpenoth—is the tammar, native to Calimshan, the hills around the Lake of Steam, and the Border Kingdoms. Tammar are small, round, hard fruit (about the size of a lacrosse or squash ball). The pink (when unripe) to crimson (when ripe; they go black when overripe) peel or rind is inedible and very hardy to ‘knocks,’ but can readily be cut and then peeled (slowly, in a spiral one-layer-after-another tearing open) to reveal firm, chewy pink flesh that tastes something like real-world tangerines or clementines. This flesh is juicy when chewed, but isn’t as ‘wet’ with running juice when revealed as that of tangerines or clementines, and is split into only four segments (more like ‘buds’ of garlic in sturdiness and shape than the many smaller lobes of most real-world citrus fruit).

A lime-like fruit called a ‘quace’ is also abundant in the coastlands of the Shining Sea (in other words, in all the areas the tammar flourishes in plus Lapaliiya and the Tashalar), but is very easily bruised and very strong (acidic) in taste. Except in various bottled sauces, it’s little known in the North.

‘Ockles’ in Waterdeep are oranges from the Shining South coasts (that is, Estagund, Durpar, and thereabouts) that grow in long strings of attached globes, looking more like strands of pearls than fruit. Except for this configuration, they are pretty much what we real-world eaters would recognize as oranges.

All over the southern lands, pomegranates grow wild, and are sometimes shipped to the Heartlands and the Sword Coast North when a ship has extra space (they command low prices, but can be picked almost for free throughout the warm lands (the Shaar, of course, excluded); many southerners boil them to make sauces or dyes rather than eating them as fruit). In the Realms, however, the word ‘pomegranate’ is unknown; to folk of Faerûn, these are ‘araed’ (as with sarsae, tammar, and quace, singular and plural the same; thus, ‘a basket of araed’ and ‘I ate an araed’ or ‘Cut up two araed’).

The other fruit imported into the Sword Coast lands and Heartlands from late summer to freeze-up (most of them can be kept for some months, if buried under earth or leaf mulch in a cool cellar to keep them from freezing) are melons of various sorts. The most popular three types of melons are ramrath, mritha-fruit, and tlarm-melons.

The ramrath is a reddish, round (volleyball-sized) melon grown in the Tashalar. Its flesh is firm and scarlet, and it can be used as we use watermelons, or sliced and fried (with the rind removed) to make a slab-of-cake-like fruit served on platters topped with desserts (confections of creams and syrups and more decorative fruit). Never say “ramraths,” by the way, unless you really mean to. ‘Ramrath’ is the plural form of the fruit, whereas ‘ramraths’ is a euphemism for human breasts (both female and the large pectorals possessed by fat men).

Many shiploads of mritha-fruit and tlarm-melons are exported from Lundeth. Mritha-fruit are very like apples, but with sweet, acidic citrus-like juices at their hearts. Their skins are pale pink, and grow many reddish streaks and mottlings as they ripen. They can be eaten at any stage from pink to when they become ‘all over red,’ and although their early edibility has nourished many hungry Northerners who eagerly buy them from the first shipcaptains to brave breakup (of the sea-ice), most folk swear by the rich, strong, almost (black) licorice taste they get, from Eleasias on, when fully reddened.

Tlarm-melons are large, oval, green with streaks of darker green (think real-world watermelons in outer size and hue) fruit that have golden-yellow flesh. They taste almost like real-world rhubarb (which is also found growing wild in abundance, in the Heartlands, and is called “rhuu” in the Realms), and have very thick white inedible rinds that can be boiled down to make a glue or caulking, and that keep them very well protected against bruising and rotting. Tlarm-melons ripen late (Eleint), but are so numerous then that tlarm-flesh alone could feed almost everyone in the North (though they’d soon be sick of a steady diet of only tlarm, of course) if some way could be found to ship it all. Many farmers along the Shining South coasts gorge themselves on tlarm-melons, fill their cellars with tlarm-preserves, compete with each other to make tlarm soups and stews that taste like something else—and still have wagonloads of tlarm that they plow under as fertilizer. That’s one of the reasons that the South is where spices are big business (and a wide variety of strong spices are gleamed from local plants).

Wizards of Nimbral

There’s one big error in the 2nd Edition sourcebook WIZARDS AND ROGUES OF THE REALMS, but it’s only a single word long: “All wizards of Nimbral are specialist illusionists.” should read: “Most wizards of Nimbral are specialist illusionists.”

All of the lore given in that 2e tome (quicksilver eyes, lack of weapon proficiency and stamina, etc.) applies only to the large numbers of Nimbrese wizards who are specialist illusionists trained in the ‘Way of Thaernd’ (sometimes called ‘the School of Thaernd,’ though all trace of Thaernd and his actual school vanished long ago).

The restrictions and abilities don’t apply to any Nimbrese sorcerers, nor to the minority of Nimbrese mages who are ‘standard’ wizards or various 3e prestige classes related to wizardry.

Although there’s no stigma to becoming a Thaerndar, most of the Lords and really powerful mages resident in Nimbral aren’t Wizards of the Way. One note about the 2e text concerning Thaerndar: entering a dead magic zone causes only temporary blindness (sight is regained in an instant upon leaving the zone, with no lingering vision impairment or susceptibility).

So your campaign can include all sorts of ‘native Nimbrese’ who don’t have the abilities gained through the Way of Thaernd.

So far as I know, the Thaerndar (also sometimes called ‘Wizards of the Way’) haven’t yet been updated into later edition formats.

Roleplaying The Simbul

The Queen of Aglarond personally dislikes on-the-ground (as opposed to aerial ballet, whilst employing flight magic) dancing (though she doesn’t mind watching other folk dance if they’re good

at it), enjoys very little music (what she does prefer is soft, slow-paced gentle music of chords and fading notes and repeated motifs, not wild, loud, or up-tempo music of any sort), and prefers stormy weather to calm weather (lightning and windstorms preferred to drizzle or plain downpours), night, fog, and twilight to bright sun, and cool conditions to hot or warm (hence her enjoyment of feeling stormy weather on her bare skin).

The Simbul is a very tactile person (the primary reason she likes to go barefoot), and prefers to keep her hands and feet uncovered, and her body unclad (or clad in loose-fitting, well-ventilated garments) whenever possible. In other words, she likes to feel contact with the world around her at all times, and not merely with garments that move and remain with her. She loves having itches scratched, and has a very high pain threshold (she feels a pinch sharp enough to draw blood, for example, only as discomfort).

Her famous rages build far more swiftly (and boil over far more often) when she can’t ‘get away by herself to think,’ and when she can’t avoid or get away from loud noises, bright lights, glaring sunlight, and/or crowds of people (or just their chatter). As a result, the rooms she frequents in her palace tend to be kept as quiet and as deserted as possible by her courtiers.

...And the "wouldn't fit" tags this time around are:

#quace

#Queen of Aglarond (the)

#quicksilver eyes

#quinces

#ramrath

#rangers

#rhubarb

#rhuu

#sarsae

#school

#Shining Sea (the)

#shipcaptains

#Simbul (The)

#snowberries

#sorcerers

#spices

#Sword Coast North (the)

#tactile

#tammar

#tangerines

#Tashalar (the)

#Thaernd

#Thaerndar

#tlarm-melons

#tomatoes

#Uthgardt barbarians

#vines

#Waterdeep

#Way of Thaernd (the)

#wizards

#Wizards of the Way