LOST LORE OF THE REALMS #25

I'm back! Gamehole Con and Phantasm are sadly behind me (great to meet so many of you! More big hugs!), and it's back to creating! The new official Forgotten Realms books are on the verge of appearing in all of our hands, and SOULS FOR THE TAKING (Rhys Yorke and I penned it for the Realms) is not far behind! (Look for it on DM's Guild; it was a blast to write.) In the meantime, I have new lore finds from the dim depths of time, for your entertainment, so...enjoy, I hope!

Moneylender Prudence And Protection

In daily operations in the Realms, moneylenders/moneychangers usually deter thoughts of swindles and robberies by making sure “everyone” knows they have hired mages present and vigilant. Also, many moneylending/changing operations, especially rural, are temples. Angering clergy is seldom prudent, and monies lost mean the community as a whole suffers: the funds aren’t there to be used for work, like wells for clean water and irrigation, the temple-to-temple item and message delivery service (equivalent of Post Office), and so on. So “bank robbers” are seldom folks who value civilization, or see a personal future need for some of its rules and services, or are local residents. (In the Realms as elsewhere, there is an interconnectedness of all things. Which back when I went to school, was usually put to us as “consider the consequences.” :}

Some moneylenders and moneychangers won’t deal in particular commodities (such as bulk food or furs, due to spoilage, or deeds, due to counterfeiting). Which is why gold coins (for their gold value), trade bars (for their metal value), and gems are more “universal.”

Most cities on Toril (Waterdeep, Baldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter included) use land deeds to register ownership of land and buildings (and the two are very rarely separated).

Forgery In A Sword Coast Port City

The cost of having someone prepare a false document depends on the length and complexity of the document, and how needy or urgent the requestor seems.

The base level for “just plain folks” is 100 gp base level for deed or contract, but sometimes as low as 50 gp. However, if I’m a forger and I think or know you’re wealthy (you’re a city landlord, or a noble, or a courtier of high rank), that price is quickly going to shoot up to 10,000 gp or so. Even more if I think you’re desperate. Less, of course, if I owe you for something.

Forgery should be expensive—or everyone would be tempted to forge first, earn legit documents second!

In Sword Coast trading cities (like Waterdeep, Baldur’s Gate) guild and city representatives as well as priests sign as witnesses, making forgeries much harder to pull off.

There are roving portrait-artists operating all over the Heartlands—and some of them make very good sideline incomes selling saucy and naughty paintings, and fake land/building deeds. (They typically hide these slid flat between a “for sale” painting and its protective wooden backing.)

Gorgon Blood Preventing Teleportation

Gorgon’s blood mixed into building mortar still works as a means of preventing teleportation through such a mortared wall (and so, if one is thorough, into or out of a treated building), but the supply is unreliable, thanks to the danger of getting blood out of gorgons (who aren’t crazy about parting with it, for obvious reasons); the blood proportion in the mix has to be correct (strong enough) or it doesn’t work; and the peril involved in obtaining the blood has sometimes resulted in the blood of other creatures being passed off as gorgon blood by the unscrupulous (again, not foiling what it's supposed to).

Whereas lead, which also blocks teleportation, and is malleable so it can be made into sheets with relative ease, and placed on doors as well as walls, is (comparatively) easy to obtain.

Wise bank robbers don’t storm banks, by the way. They indulge in property deed fiddles (such as selling city buildings they don’t actually own), and similar frauds. Which is why so many adventurers in the Realms make coin hunting down and bringing back alive miscreants (the living can be made to reveal where their ill-gotten gains are; the dead tend to be unhelpful in this regard, so very skilled questioners must be used).

Most Popular Artists In Amn, In The 1370s DR

In the city of Athkatla, the most expensive (and celebrated) painter is Arvros Albristaun (known for his large, grand, ‘flattering’ portraits of nobles).

A close second is the ‘wall painter’ (as in, he does his paintings directly on large plastered walls) Nemmedrar Malaharkos, who’s much given to sensual depictions of dancing winged women, half-seen in misty blue moonlight. He’s been hired to adorn many a tavern and highcoin-club wall in Athkatla’s River and Bridge Districts.

The foremost sculptor is probably Eldameir ‘Bright Hammer’ Hanthos, a dreamy, almost trance-trapped man of frenzied activity, who sometimes bursts into streams of profanity and vivid descriptions of things only he can see. He’s known for his exquisitely-detailed little (slightly taller than the length of a long-fingered human hand) statuettes of armor-wearing human males and females of, ah, ‘heroic proportions,’ who always have some hint of strangeness about them (such as a tiny tail, or beast-talons, or an extra arm, or a long, horse-shaped head).

However, the younger and edgier folk of Athkatla, especially women, prefer Alais the Dancer, a nimble, athletic, and quite beautiful young half-elf lady who climbs along her carvings as she leads a team of grim, close-mouthed dwarves in crafting larger-than-life grand stone tableaux of family elders depicting in moments of battle-heroism, outside manor gates or in the courtyards of patrons’ mansions. Her craftings are always handsome and strong of appearance, though they’re said to sometimes little resemble the people they’re supposed to represent. (Though few folk know it, her real name is Alaysiea Avaharander, and she hails from Zazesspur.)

Paintings, Sculptures, and Adornments In Faerûn

The wealthiest nobles sometimes purchase paintings that bear minor illusions suggesting motion (the hair of person stirring occasionally in unseen winds, a smile that comes and goes, the gaze of the depicted person moving about, small gestures), but most folk regard these as “creepy” and want nothing to do with them.

Most nobles commission these to impress (and hint that the paintings harbour more formidable defensive magics, so would-be thieves and other intruders had best beware).

Non-nobles tend to buy paintings as portraits of places they’d visited, such as Waterdeep (“I’ve been there” souvenirs), remembrances of realms they had to leave behind (usually birthplaces); portraits of monarchs they revere; holy events (usually mortals receiving divine aid or experiencing a manifestation or rapture rather than actual depictions of deities) of faiths they follow; or people they know (parents, more remote ancestors, loved ones, or selves).

Pictures of people are sometimes painted as plaques (palm-sized slate or wood carry-arounds, either carried wrapped or fitted with little ‘doors’ like many a modern real-world dartboard, or icon), but are usually life-sized, shoulders-up pictures hung on walls in the best rooms of domiciles or guild offices.

Many curio shops in Waterdeep have an assortment of ‘portraits of dead nobodies’ hung up for sale, and yes, there’s a brisk trade in portraits of scantily-clad female beauties, often mounted ‘on the back’ of a family portrait so the thing can be hastily turned around when Aunt Oskaula comes to call.

Most guild offices have the symbol of the guild (guild, coster, and family badges and full heraldic displays are the most popular ‘expensive art’) hung up on the wall as a painted wooden carving, a portrait or portraits of the founder(s) of the guild, prominent past (long dead and famous in their field) guild members, and present and past guildmasters.

A few guilds have begun to demonstrate their wealth in a way increasingly adopted by ‘wannabe-noble’ rich merchants (but thus far, sneeringly dismissed by ‘real’ nobles, at least in Waterdeep): they’ve purchased ‘waiting-room’ paintings, usually of guild-related elements (smiths have anvils, forgehammers, tongs, and so on), that are ‘everchanging’ or ‘living.’ These terms are, of course, misnomers: what such paintings (typically large dark square pieces) really do is to display the same sequence of painted elements over and over.

To use the smiths’ example: a fire kindles and seems to ‘grow’ out of the painting, tongs and a bar of metal can be seen thrusting into it, and then the flames fade to reveal an anvil looming up. As it ‘drifts’ forward dramatically, the now-glowing bar is lowered onto it, a forgehammer smashes down on it twice, the scattering sparks wash away anvil and bar to leave just the mighty hammer (backlit by forge-glow). We see it slowly rise and fall, emphasizing the force with which it is wielded, and then it fades to reveal a tiny tumbling object that comes ‘out of the distance’ towards us, growing rapidly in size. We see that it’s a horseshoe, and then it dwindles again, back into flames that become the kindling fire (and the cycle repeats from there).

Such pictures are the latest fad, although some of them (like paintings of fires blazing in hearths) have actually been available for years. They’re very expensive, and it remains to be seen if they’ll really catch on outside of Waterdeep, Athkatla, and the largest cities of Sembia.

Looting The Dead

Doing so is illegal in law-and-order jurisdictions, and always illegal for royalty and nobility. However, out in the wilderlands with no one watching, most folk would loot a recently-deceased bandit, or take grave goods from an exposed tomb. If a wayfarer came across survivors looting bandits they’d slain, they’d consider it “just” and look the other way.

So it’s okay to take the belongings of a bandit or fellow wayfarer who attacks you in the wild, but not someone who attacks you in a city—because if the city has a Watch, they step in; they want to see what's in his pocketses. If you can convince them that “this stuff” is yours, just snatched, you may get it back on the spot. That's the price of civilization. Needless to say, a lot of bodies get looted before anyone cries for the Watch.

More Medical Know-How In The Realms

Most civilized people in the Realms know that disease transferral works "sorta like this for shaking fever, and like that for blacktongue," and so on. They disagree on treatments (aside from rest, care, bathing and purgatives, careful feeding of observed specifics), except for remembering what worked for them and their friends. The reasons for these disagreements are the various churches, most of whom do their level best to keep influence and control (and a continuing flow of coins for healings) by spreading misinformation (at the lower ranks, this is usually done unwittingly; the village priest knows no better, and is merely repeating what a superior has told him) as to precisely how this or that disease is best treated. As with real-world doctors, differing views on illnesses and their treatments often lead to heated professional disagreements.

“Bad hygiene” in the Realms means wash hair every four days or so and before special occasions, bathe “smelly areas” of one’s body every night if possible, scented oil plus sand-scrub when bathing impossible—not reeking, filthy bodies. (“Unwashed peasants” is not the Realms norm.)

Widely known afflictions include:

Fevers: blacklung fever, blacktongue, marsh fever, shaking fever

Diseases: darkrot, sallar (typhus), whitewasting (leprosy)

Plagues: featherlung, Spotted Plague, the Shaking Plague (which once ravaged Scardale)

Magical diseases: lycanthropy, mummy rot (flesh rot), green rot/scaly death (Talona)

Other Widely Known Ailments: heartstop (heart attack) and winterchill fever (pneumonia)

As for Talona, the goddess of poison and disease, she’s worshipped for appeasement by most folk in the Realms (i.e. “My Jhardath’s going on a journey; by this prayer and offering, dread Talona, keep him from your embrace!”), although there are non-fighting types (the stereotype being the aged crone) who pray to Talona to bring diseases down on their foes (“Let sores burst in his mouth until he cannot swallow fast enough and his tongue becomes stuck, let shaking fever make him unable to walk or ride or hold things, let marsh fever make him spew up all he tries to eat or drink and sweat out all the rest until his innards and all dwindle, let . . .” and so on, in like manner).

...And the "wouldn't fit" tags for this instalment are:

#marsh fever

#medical know-how

#message delivery

#minor illusions

#monarchs

#moneychangers

#moneylenders

#mortar

#mummy rot

#Nemmedrar Malaharkos

#Neverwinter

#nobles

#painter

#paintings

#port

#portraits

#portrait-artists

#prayer (to Talona)

#River District

#robberies

#sallar (typhus)

#scaly death

#Scardale

#sculptor

#shaking fever

#Shaking Plague

#Sembia

#smiths

#Spotted Plague

#swindles

#Sword Coast

#Talona

#tavern

#teleportation

#temples

#tomb

#Toril

#trade bars

#Watch

#Waterdeep

#whitewasting (leprosy)

#winged women

#winterchill fever (pneumonia)

#witnesses

#Zazesspur

See you next time! More lore is a-building as I type this!