TREASURED MEMORIES
The great irony in the title of Dungeons & Dragons’ most popular setting is that we’ve never been allowed to forget it. Since the 1980s, when the genre we’d recognise as the RPG was born, any year without a release that takes us to the Sword Coast, or Icewind Dale, or the dungeons beneath Waterdeep has been an exception. If history is made up of stories that exist in the collective memory, then the city of Baldur’s Gate is as real as Los Angeles or New York.
Strange, then, to think of a time when the Realms existed only within the bounds of a single head, situated somewhere in the suburbs of Toronto in the mid 1960s. The author Ed Greenwood invented the setting in his childhood daydreams, scribbling stories that followed a wheezing, Falstaff-inspired rogue named Mirt the Moneylender from port to port as he dodged his creditors. Where Mirt moved, the world grew, ultimately spawning the stretch
