Some pics from recent trail rides

I downloaded some pics off our digital camera today from yesterday's ride with Sally and the girls.  Then I downloaded a couple more from another ride we did last week.  Enjoy!

Me and the girls

Sally and the girls

Hannah lookin' stylish

Emma with Hannah in the background.  Little goofy, no?

More girl goofiness!

Litchfield Hills Triathlon Race Report

I hate to call the Litchfield Hills Triathlon my “A” race for the season because, bottom line, there’s nothing that makes it particularly important.  There was nothing on the line, this wasn’t the first time I’ve raced at this distance, I have no real use for the results now that I have them.  Really, there was nothing much to distinguish this particular race from the others that I’ve already run and/or plan to run later next month.  And yet, every season has to have some kind of focal point, and this race came at the end of the summer after a full season of relatively healthy training.  It was also the last Olympic distance triathlon I’m doing this season, so that made it a logic race on which to focus my tapering strategy.  And finally, I’d run most of the course before, and that’s a huge advantage in a triathlon.  Thus, sort of by default, I’d been thinking of this race as the culmination of my season, bearing in mind that the Fairfield Triathlon is next month, and that that one is both a better distance and a better course for me personally.  However, since Litchfield Hills is by far the harder of those two races, it demanded primacy of place in my season training plan. 

Does that make it the most important race?  I don’t know.  Certainly, I wanted to do well.

The Taper

I’d planned to do a straight-up 1-week taper leading up to the race, but at about two weeks out, I felt tired enough and sore enough that I thought I might need a bit more rest to get up to my peak performance.  Plus, with only a pair of Sprints left to go afterwards, it seemed like a safe play to go ahead and taper fully now and try to start getting fast, even though I know that there won’t be time to get back up to a full base-load level of training before I have to start peaking for my last series of events next month.  Eh.  I’ve got a solid base built at this point, so right now what I need is more speed.  It’s definitely a switch from the norm, but that’s what makes the end of the season so wonderful, right?  So anyway, I started cutting back on my workload with about 14 days to go before Litchfield, increasing my intensity to compensate for the lesser volume of work.  Then, a week before the race I did a long practice brick—a 17-mile pace ride with hill-work, followed by a 4.8-mile run with some interval work.  And I felt GREAT during the brick, so I headed into race week with a full head of steam and plenty of confidence.

Unfortunately, my wife Sally got sick on the Thursday before my race, so that by Saturday morning, she was the next best thing to completely immobilized.  That left me to do EVERYTHING around the house Friday night and Saturday morning, and by the end of Saturday—the day before my big race—I was exhausted and ready to collapse.  My back hurt, and my groin, which I’d pulled badly back in March and been slowly rebuilding ever since, felt worse than it had since early May when I first started trying to run again.  But what are you gonna do?  I’d already paid for the race, and I’d already made and executed my training and tapering plan.  True, this wasn’t the best way to end a taper, but I was still gonna race, come what may.  What choice was there?  I was already all-in.

Pre-Race

I got up Sunday morning feeling better than I probably had any right to feel.  I mean, I’d been tired Saturday, but it was the fatigue of a single day’s chores not the intense exhaustion of a full season’s endurance training.  Race day morning I felt fine, save that my lower back was still ominously sore.  Still, I got up, loaded the car, and headed out.  Thankfully, it was raining, meaning that temperatures were destined to stay cool all day and also giving me a good reason to let my still-sick wife stay in bed for a few more hours.  She’d planned to go and watch the race with the kids, but the weather gave her an honorable excuse to skip out.  That was a good thing.

Check in, body-marking, and setting up in transition were all no big deal.  I’ve had a few mad scrambles this season, but Sunday I got in early and got set, leaving me plenty of time to down a goo and then go start warming up slowly in the water.  That was good because I wanted to have plenty of time to get my back as loose as possible before the race started.

Swim

Last year, I remember this being a long swim course that I finished in 28 minutes.  This year it was shorter.  Much shorter.  The water was very nice, maybe 78 degrees, and the air was warm enough that I wasn’t shivering pre-race despite the rain.  Anyway, we started soon enough, men in the 2^nd wave for some reason, and I was lucky enough to find someone to draft off of.  That doesn’t happen to me very often.  So I let my man pull me for maybe the first third of the race, but then I lost him somewhere after the first turn.  After that I was on my own.  But I swam easy and felt good despite having swum little in the last month or so.  I got out of the water with the leaders, well up ahead of where my actual ability should have had me.

Swim:  Advertised .9-mile; I later calculated it at .78.  Time: 19:03.  4/32 Age Group; 14/260 Overall.

T-1

The run from the lake up to Transition in this race is about .2-mile uphill, and it’s one of the hardest parts of the entire course.  I jogged easy, found my bike, threw on socks, shoes, helmet, number, etc, and then headed out.  I wasn’t burning by any means, but that seems about an average time in T-1 by comparison, so I suppose I’ll take it.

Total Time in T-1: 5:22.

Bike

Last year, the bike leg on this course was something of a rude awakening.  The first maybe 8 to 10 miles are roughly downhill, followed by another 8 to 10 miles of easy climbing interspersed with flats.  Then there’s a section of maybe a mile of rough road followed by about 3 miles of climbing, still on fairly rough roads.  And the last maybe half-mile or so of that last climb is brutally steep.  Really, it’s the kind of grade you have to experience to truly appreciate.  Last year, it was a misery, and it left me absolutely floored.  This year I was much readier.  First off, I knew what to expect, and then too, I’d been training on hills a lot.  Also, the Pat Griskus Tri earlier this season had NINE miles of climbing, some of which were every inch as brutal as that last bit of Litchfield’s course, meaning, bottom line, I knew I could take it.  I might not break any speed records on my way up, but at the same time, I knew the course wouldn’t break me either. 

In the event, I felt really good on the bike, held a decent pace, and enjoyed myself tremendously despite the rain.  The last bit of climbing was tough, but I held steady and finished okay if not quite as well as I might’ve hoped.  But it was fine.  I was happy enough with the end result and in a good mood headed into T-2.

Bike: 23.5-miles in 1:16:16.  Average Speed: 18.5 mph.  17/32 Age Group; 106/260 Overall.

T-2

Another uphill run to Transition, followed by changing of shoes, a short stretch of my back and a gulp of Gatorade, and I was off.  Total Time: 1:41.  That is NOT fast.

Run

And the run.  My nemesis.  Also, the only part of the course I’d never seen before.  Sally and I did this race as a Mixed Tag Team last year.  But I’d heard that the course was rolling and not too bad.

Heh.  I’m sure that was true for some people.  I’m just not one of them.

In the event, the first two miles were rolling—steeply rolling, with far more downhill than up.  I started tired, but at the end of two miles I’d recovered somewhat, and if the course hadn’t been quite so up-and-down, I probably would’ve run a decent race from there.  Unfortunately, that isn’t how it was.  In reality, after that first two mile decent, the course turned back up and proceeded to climb through the next three and a half miles solid, almost without a break.  Holy crap!  They told me after the race that the last mile was mostly downhill, but I cannot honestly say that I remember that.  All I remember is thinking that surely THIS was the very top of the State of Connecticut, and so we couldn’t climb any more—until we did.  What’s worse is that at Mile 3 my right quad started locking up, and I was briefly concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to finish.  But I sucked it up and drove on, eventually entering a kind of trance-like mental state that I don’t think I’d experienced since doing 3-hour swim practices at West Point on early-season Saturday mornings.  I used to do this set of 5 x 300 on like 3:30 with the distance swimmers, but I did the sets in butterfly.  I distinctly remember that set and how much it hurt and how going through that left me in a weird kind of mental Hell that haunted me for days afterwards.  Sunday was like that all over again.  I could feel my form falling apart, but I couldn’t do anything about it, and the road just kept climbing, which kept me from being able to get my head and ass wired together for some kind of late-race rally.  Ugh.

Fortunately, nothing lasts forever, and indeed, once I reached Mile 5 my quad loosened up enough that I knew I would at least finish.  I was never able to pick up the pace or put my form back together, but there is something to be said for finishing with your dignity intact.  I did that, at least.  People said, “Good job,” when they passed me, and I didn’t scowl or snap at them.

Run: 6.2 miles in a wretchedly slow 59:29.  Average pace: 9:36/mile.  25/32 Age Group; 203/260 Overall.

Total: .8-mile swim, 24-mile ride, 6-mile run: 2:41:52.  20/32 Age Group; 115/260 Overall.

Final Thoughts

That was a better overall performance than I had at the Pat Griskus race, especially on the bike.  And that’s good.  But I’m still not where I want to be at this distance.  Bottom line, I need to keep running, and I need to stay healthy if I’m going to get to the point where 6 miles isn’t a “long” run.  And that’s where I need to be if I want to be competitive in these Oly’s.  I don’t necessarily need to lay down a 45-minute 10K to end the race, but if I could at least average 8:30/mile, I’d be within striking distance of 2:30 overall, a decent goal for me at this point.  2:30 would’ve put me 13^th in my age group, slightly better than the median time, and I think for now that’s what I need to shoot for.

Party Girl

So after reading another volume of Fables and a Tim Sale Superman HB, I finally decided to take a break from my norm and read Anna David's Party Girl.  I thought it was going to be a typical chic-lit book, which would have made it a totally new experience for me, but it turned out to be an addiction memoir dressed up as chick lit.  There wasn't even much sex beyond the opening chapter, which was obviously meant to shock, but our heroine did about 10,000 lines of cocaine, so I suppose it all balances out.  I mean, it WAS depraved, just not in a sexual way.  What it REALLY showed was how insane a person can be if they listen too closely to their inner monologue.  David's protagonist is so concerned with being "bitchy and fabulous" that she ruins her life--twice!--trying to put on a show that people will want to watch.  It was a weird perspective but plenty entertaining, and anyway, it looks so difficult and confusing to be a girl that the story itself didn't seem at all far-fetched.

At the base of Party Girl is a common "I can have it all" kind of question: How can a girl be sexy and accessible AND successful and empowered all at the same time?  I mean, TV and magazines make it look necessary, important, and even EFFORTLESS, but the reality is that no one person can be everything.  And like I said, I've personally never felt the need to be all that stuff, but then again, I've never been a 17-year-old girl looking at Britney Spears as an even inadvertent role-model.

Eh.  I don't want to get into a rant about the impossible-ness of "having it all" but look, even a cursory glance at that phrase ought to hint at its impossibility.  Still, we live in a society that seems unable to make choices, so the story here isn't surprising.  It was just a window into the insecurities that breed that base desire.  I have my insecurities for sure but feeling like I'm not good enough because I'm somehow not fabulous enough isn't one of them, thankfully.  Now when someone writes a book about trying to be an awesome triathlete, dad, and engineer all at the same time, that one'll get me where it counts.

Need a Book Recommendation

I finally finished Stalin’s Ghost, and now I’m in mourning.  I’m all caught up on the adventures of Arkady Renko, and I swear that it seems there’s not another decent book left in the English language that I’ve not read.

For the uninitiated, Martin Cruz Smith wrote Gorky Park back in the mid-1980’s.  It was a seriously inventive murder mystery set in Communist Moscow, and it did pretty well, both with critics and bookstore sales departments.  Then they made it into a movie, and that did pretty well, too.  Polar Star followed in late 80s—about the time that Glasnost was breaking out—and for my money, it’s the best book in the series.  It’s also a murder-mystery, this time set aboard a Russian fishing factory ship, leaving it with perhaps the most inventive plot that I’ve ever seen or even heard of.  From there, books followed as Russia and the rest of the world evolved.  Red Square was set back in Moscow, in a newly opened, awakening Russia.  Havana Bay followed in the remnants of Cuba, a place seemingly surviving on crumbs now that the great hand of international Socialist brotherhood no longer supports it.  Then came Wolves Eat Dogs, in late 90s capitalist Russia.  And finally Stalin’s Ghost, set amidst the backdrop of ultra-nationalist neo-Soviet post-democracy.  Bottom line, it’s all good, high-quality fiction with excellent prose.  Believe me, I’ll miss it until the next volume comes out.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading old Fables TPBs and The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which is great when taken in moderation, and John LeCarre’s Little Drummer Girl, which has terrific prose but a plodding style ala the unabridged Les Miserables.  But although that stuff is readable, it isn’t as satisfying as some of my other recent favorites.  LeCarre isn’t in Cruz Smith’s league, for instance, and as good as Conan-Doyle can be, it still lacks the visceral feel of John Ringo’s better work.  Or anything by Richard K. Morgan.  Hell, at this point, I’d settle for something by Elaine Cunningham or Jim Butcher, both of whom disappoint but rarely.  And what’s Brandon Sanderson up to these days?

So.  Anybody got a book recommendation?  I could use some decent sci fi or sword-swinging fantasy in my literary diet about now.

Race Report: Amica Ocean Beach 19.7

I did a race last week—the new Amica Ocean Beach 19.7 triathlon in New London, CT.  I didn’t realize this before the race, but apparently Amica is an insurance company that has, for whatever reason, decided to sponsor a series of sprint-distance races around the country.  There’s one in Texas and a few others around in other places, and now we have one in northeastern Connecticut as well.  No doubt they were hoping to lure some of the tri-types from NYC with the race’s location, but although there’s a convenient ferry to New London from Long Island, New London itself is a helluva long drive from the City, and it didn’t look like the inaugural race sold out.  Moreover, when I looked at the results, most of the participants had been locals.  Which doesn’t mean that this was a slow race.  I mean, as with any Sprint, there were quite a few newbies and maybe even some first-timers, but from looking around, it seemed to me that most of the crew were experienced triathletes.  For example, I saw more actual tri-bikes than road bikes at the race and very few mountain/trail bikes.  Usually your triathlon first-timers show up on bikes with fat tires. 

For me, the race was a kind of a midseason checkpoint.  I’ve been mostly healthy this season, and I’ve been training hard, and so I really wanted to see kind of where I am in terms of my personal fitness versus past years.  How much has a mostly full season of training without issue helped me?  How much have I been hampered by my groin pull from back in the Spring?  These were the questions I was looking to answer.

Pre-race was about what you’d expect.  I didn’t sleep real well the night before—I was keyed up for the race, plus we had a HUGE thunderstorm at around 1am—but I got enough sleep that I didn’t think it would affect me too much.  At any rate, I packed up my stuff the night before, laid out my clothes and some food for the hour-plus drive up to the race, set my alarm, and then got up around 4:30am.  It took me maybe fifteen minutes to get dressed, get my bike loaded, gas up the car, and then get out on the road.  I got to the race-site at a quarter-to-six, parked my car, registered, set up in transition, and then went about starting my pre-race routine.  I stretched, talked to some of the folks, got in the water, and basically did my thing.  I also had a gu about 20 minutes before the race to try to buffer my blood glucose.  Finally, the race started a little after 7am.  I was in the 2^nd heat of swimmers, the 1^st large heat after the 10-man “elite” group set out.

Swim:

I swam pretty well.  The air was maybe 80 degrees, and the water was 71.  Perfect conditions, at least for me.  There was a slight tide running inward with swells of maybe 8”-12” once we got out away from shore.  It didn’t bother me much, but it served to break up the pack in the open water, so that by the time we hit the turn-around buoy, there was only one swimmer ahead of me from my heat.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite hold his draft at a comfortable pace, so I had to let him go.  Still I managed to come out of the water second.  Folks were cheering and ringing cowbells.  I felt like I must be going pretty fast.  Life was good.

Swim: ½-mile, 12:12.  2/21 AG, 14/293 Overall.

It was a short run over loose sand into transition.  I rinsed off my feet, threw on my shoes, helmet, and race-belt, decided to go without my cycling jersey, and grabbed my bike out of the rack.  I don’t wear a wetsuit, so that wasn’t an issue.  Soon I was on my way.  Unfortunately, the wooden deck was slick as all Hell as I tried to run out to the street, so I ended up walking.  Still, I almost fell—twice.

T1: 2:15.

Bike:

The biggest problem I have going from the swim to the bike is that my heart rate out of the swim is usually quite a bit higher than I’d like it to be on the bike.  But you hate to come out of the water in the lead and then slow down while you’re getting your heart back under control.  So I tried to settle in as best I could, but I kept pushing, knowing that the course was supposed to be mostly flat and that I’d put in a good swim and felt good doing it.  In the event, most of the ride was false-flats, maybe a 2% rise or descent, with a couple of more substantial hills and one actual climb—about 175 feet over about half-mile of riding.  If my math works out, that’s a short climb at a 5.6% gradient.  Anyway, I spent about 75% of the ride in the drops (I don’t have aero-bars), and I tried to work the little climbs as best I could to try to keep my speed up.  Still, the ride wasn’t easy by any means.  All those false-flats were wearing, and there were a LOT of very sharp turns, and sixteen miles, though not long, is a long way to try to ride FAST.  It took me maybe ten miles to really settle into the ride, by which time it was almost over.  And I’d been passed by a goodly number of better riders riding better bikes.  Maybe I’d have caught some of them back on a longer ride, but who knows?

Bike: 16.1 miles, 48:40, average 19.2 mph (from my bike computer).  9/21 AG, 88/293 Overall.

I came into T-2, and it was getting HOT.  We’d had 90+ degree temperatures throughout the week leading up to the race, and on that particular morning, it was already maybe 85-degrees with high humidity and full, blazing sun.  I switched out my shoes, stripped off my gloves, was glad to have decided to go without a shirt, and finally took a long last pull on my Gatorade bottle.  And then I was off.  My stomach was full of Gatorade and water, but I knew it would pass, and in the meantime, I wasn’t going to go down with dehydration.  After an hour of racing, that was an important consideration.

T2: 1:20.  Looking at some of the other times, that’s not fast.  But it’s not terrible, either.

Run:

Ah, the run.  My nemesis.  I’d been running okay before I got hurt back in the Spring, but since then, I’ve not been at all smooth or fast, and I’ve only lately started to feel even decent with my stride.  On top of that, it was already hot, and there was almost not shade whatsoever.  Looking at some of the times, it seems like I’m not the only one who suffered out there.  Still, it was at least very flat.  Thank God.

The first water station was maybe a half-mile out from Transition, which was unfortunate because at that point, I didn’t really feel like I needed water.  Still, it was hot, and I was afraid not to take it.  So I threw some water down and made the lump in my stomach worse.  It would eventually take me maybe fifteen minutes to get rid of that feeling, by which time I was almost back to the water station again.  Ugh.  But it was HOT, so it probably didn’t matter.  I was breathing okay, and I didn’t feel like I was overworking, but at the same time, I couldn’t get anything like acceleration going.  So I just ambled along, trying to keep my stride smooth and steady, working away the miles and waiting to either feel like I could start picking it up or simply finish strong, whichever came first.  If it’d been a full 10K, it would have been miserable, but fortunately, this race wasn’t that long.  I still started feeling like I was going to overheat after a couple of miles, but there was nothing to do for that except to keep doing what I’d been doing—going slow and steady.  After what felt like at least a half-hour, I finally got back to the water station.  From there, it was a short slog to the finish, but I still didn’t have any acceleration.  I finished as hard as I could and was very glad to be done.

Run: 3.1 miles, 27:14, average 8:47/mile.  13/21 AG, 152/293 Overall. 

And that right there ought to tell you how punishing the heat was during the run.  When a damned-near 9-minute pace is middle-of-the-pack, that’s pretty slow, especially when a full third of the bikers were averaging faster than 20 mph.  I don’t think I was at all the worst sufferer on the day by any means.

In any event, I grabbed a bottle of water and headed straight down to the beach.  The water was beautiful, and I spent at least ten minutes trying to get my body temperature back under control.  After that, I felt better.  I ran myself under a hose to rinse off, changed clothes, grabbed a banana and a couple of bagels, and then headed home—where I promptly cut the grass.  After that, I was dead to the world and even fell asleep on the couch with my girls watching Scooby Doo on Zombie Island.

Life is good.  My next race is the Litchfield Hills Olympic Tri, also sponsored by the Hartford Marathon Association.  It’s in late August, and they have free beer.  Hopefully, it’ll be a little cooler by then, too.

Channeling Your Inner Nerd: a guide to my favorite Forgotten Realms novels

So, first a question: What is the Forgotten Realms?

The simple answer is that the Forgotten Realms is the most popular setting for Wizards of the Coast classic fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. 

Back in 1973, an insurance adjuster named Gary Gygax came up with an interesting gaming concept based on insurance actuarial tables*: you can simulate the sum total of a set of actions in combat using probability tables in the same way that you can use insurance actuarial tables to simulate the life outcomes of a given group of people if you have enough information about them to model the probabilities of the outcomes of their lives.  Which is to say that if I have a weapon, and I use it to attack something, then I have a specific probability of hitting my target and doing damage.  And I can measure and model that probability if I can come up with a way to take into account a reasonable number of the factors involved in my attack and in the target’s defense.  If I then simulate the separate combat actions of a given fight in a reasonable sequence—using dice to generate random outcomes—I can effectively model an entire fight.  And if I have a way to model fighting and other kinds of combat interactions under a wide variety of potential circumstances, I can use it to build a very broad-based tactical simulation and/or role-playing game.  Gygax did both.

Gygax’s company, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) published a small variety of tactical simulations and combat-based role-playing games, the most famous of which is D&D (based around the iconic Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien) but which also included various miniatures-based simulations of World War II and modern-era combat as well as (eventually) games based around James Bond-esque spying (Top Secret), intergalactic science fiction (Star Frontiers), dystopian science fiction (Gamma World), the Marvel Universe (Marvel Superheroes), and probably a zillion others that I can’t think of right now.  I distinctly remember playing one of TSR’s hex-based aircraft dog fighting games as a kid with my folks, for example, but I’ve no idea what that was called.  Regardless, Gygax’s theory was groundbreaking and easily applicable to an enormous variety of different situations and settings.  It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military’s war gaming owes its current functionality to Gygax’s work, and that the video gaming industry could not exist were it not for the fact that we can today apply our understanding of probability and statistics to games of skill and strategy.

Still… if there were (and are) many potential applications of insurance theory for gaming, what on earth made Dungeons and Dragons the one that stuck?

Well, one could easily argue that D&D made the biggest impact because a) it was first, and b) it was based on the most iconic source material, but personally, I kind of doubt that explanation.  After all, D&D is only good when its setting is well-articulated by your Dungeon Master, and we’re not all Tolkien.  Building an engaging setting is hard work.  And more to the point, it’s as easy to build an engaging setting using intergalactic or dystopian science fiction as it is using a fantasy base, and we’re talking about the 70s here.  The age of Star Wars and Star Trek.  Not to mention Bradbury and Heinlein at the peaks of their powers.  In that age, one would not automatically give the nod to the hobbits.

Personally, I think D&D won out primarily because the game is probability-based.  TSR didn’t briefly take over the world because nerds like swords.  It took over the world because nerds like MATH.  And math-lovers like swords.  And maybe, in the backs of their minds, they think that the math of D&D works a little better for the swords and the magic than it does for bullets or laser beams or even super-powers.  I know that was always my feeling, at any rate.  Seriously, look at my game.  We have TWO professional physicists AND an electrical engineer.  Clearly, there’s a certain comfort there with the mathematics underlying the system.  I don’t think that the smart folks in my game would hang around if they thought that the game system itself defied all logic and reason.

And then, too, maybe it’s true that Gygax himself loved hobbits better.  One of the smarter things he did with his company was to publish adventures for use with his inherently story-based games.  Which is to say that you could make up and play any game you wanted, but if you couldn’t come up with anything, TSR was more than happy to help you out and give you some useful ideas.  And while there were adventure modules published for several of the games, it’s no stretch to say that the ones published for D&D were the best.  To that end, in 1979 TSR published an article by Ed Greenwood in the 30^th issue of its magazine The Dragon*.  Greenwood would eventually go on to write about a zillion more articles for The Dragon and D&D in general, and these, taken together, soon formed the basis for the Forgotten Realms (FR) campaign setting.

The good thing about the FR is that it’s so big and versatile that it can be literally all things to all people.  Unlike some of the other published D&D settings.  For example, in Dragonlance you’re eternally stuck in a world-spanning war between good and evil dragons (ugh).  In Dark Sun, you’re stuck in an endless the desert Hellworld.  In Eberron, it’s all prophesy-based fantasy-tech noir, all the time.  Heck, even in the Fourth Edition’s new basic “points of light” campaign setting, you’re basically stuck in an eternally fallen world, endlessly searching through the ruins of some long-forgotten lost empire.  Thankfully, in the FR, there’s more.  Cities.  Ruins.  Villages.  Castles in the sky.  Temples under the ground.  Noble politics.  Village scuttlebutt.  Really, whatever you want, it’s all there.  Well, what do you expect when the Realms’ creator has been steadily working at it since the late 60s and allowing its use as the basis of a line of shared fiction novels since at least the late 1980s?  At this point, it’d be weird if there weren’t a whole lot of very usable source material out there covering every conceivable situation and setting.  In my game, we’re just using the northern half of one coast (the Sword Coast), and believe me, it’s work just to try and see all of that.  We haven’t even been to the biggest city in the region yet!

So.  Shared world fiction can be a tricky thing.  When it’s good, it’s very good.  There’s a sense of history and mission and familiarity that’s both comforting and deeply engaging.  The setting becomes one of the characters.  And it’s for this reason, I think, that the FR is my favorite literary vice.  It’s awesome fun to see how new writers are gonna play in my favorite sandbox.  But then, too, shared world fiction can go soooo far off the rails.  If you get an author who doesn’t get it or doesn’t want to get it or just plain can’t write, well…  That ain’t good.  With that in mind, I try to be a little skeptical of new FR novels—and new authors.  Books are expensive, and there are a lot of them out there, so I try not to waste my money one inferior products.  Plus, with so many FR books out there, there’s no reason to pick up a bad one.  You just have to do the research to make sure that the one you’re considering is worth your time and money.

Thus, without further ado, here’s a brief list of my favorite FR novels.  If you’ve got one (or more) to add, you’ll be dong me a disservice not to let me know about it.

Swordmage, by Richard Baker

Cormyr: A Novel, by Ed Greenwood and Jeff Grubb

The City of Splendors: A Waterdeep Novel, by Ed Greenwood and Elaine Cunningham

Books by Elaine Cunningham

·         The Magehound (Counselors & Kings #1)

·         The Floodgate (Counselors & Kings #2)

·         The Wizardwar (Counselors & Kings #3)

·         Elfshadow (Song and Swords #1)

·         Elfsong (Song and Swords #2)

·         Silver Shadows (Song and Swords #3)

·         Daughter of the Drow (Starlight & Shadows #1)

·         Tangled Webs (Starlight & Shadows #2)

·         Windwalker (Starlight & Shadows #3)

Book by R. A. Salvatore

·         The Crystal Shard (Icewind Dale #1)

·         Streams of Silver (Icewind Dale #2)

·         Homeland (Dark Elf #1)

·         The Legacy (Legacy of the Drow #1)

·         Starless Night (Legacy of the Drow #2)

·         The Silent Blade (Paths of Darkness #1)

·         The Spine of the World (Paths of Darkness #2)

·         Servant of the Shard (Sellswords #1)

·         Promise of the Witch-King (Sellswords #2)

·         Road of the Patriarch (Sellswords #3)

·         The Orc King

·         The Pirate King

Books by Paul S. Kemp

·         Shadowbred

·         Shadowstorm

·         Shadowrealm

The God Catcher, by Erin M. Evans

Let me close this up by adding a few notes.  First, my favorite series on this list is the “Counselors and Kings” series by Elaine Cunningham, and Ms. Cunningham is without a doubt my favorite Realms author.  She’s easily the most consistent of the bunch, and she does strong characterization.  Of course, “Counselors and Kings” is now out of print—and indeed, the entire nation of Halruaa in which the series was set was destroyed in the Spellplague that started off the Fourth Edition—but there’s some hope in that the new FR Campaign Guide covered Jordaini Enforcers in its section on the ruins of Halruaa. 

Eh… that’s not much in the way of hope.  But still…

Cunningham’s “Starlight and Shadows” series is probably her most popular series—because it features the drow—but I think my second recommendation of hers would be The City of Splendors.  That’s a great book, and it does a very good job of exploring what is perhaps the most important location in the entire Realms.

With that said, my favorite FR book (not series) is either Starless Night or Servant of the Shard, both by R.A. Salvatore.  Salvatore frustrates me as an author because he’s so inconsistent, but like the FR, when he’s good, he’s very good.  And both Starless Night and Servant are examples of Salvatore at his best.

For readers new to the Realms, I recommend The God Catcher.  It’s a good book, it’s quest-based without any re-hashed humanoid invasions, and its new, so you’ll find it everywhere.  That’s a good thing.

Finally, my game The Sellswords of Luskan is largely based on the Salvatore novel The Pirate King and on Paul S. Kemp’s “Shadowstorm” trilogy.  Not so much because I loved those books—although I liked both enough to put them on this list—but because I liked specific story elements that I felt I could effectively re-use.  With that in mind, if somebody would write a really good book incorporating the church of Bane, the Black Lord of Conquest, I’d really appreciate it.  We use Bane a lot in my game, but there’s not much in the way of source material for what we’re doing with him.  And worse: there are a lot of mid-Heroic Tier Bannite villains and a fair collection of Epic Tier Bannite villains, but not much in between.  And yeah, it’s easy enough to wing it, but without much in the way of source material, I always feel a little like I’m flying blind.

*The info on Gary Gygax in the opening was taken from his obituary in Newsweek.  I got the stuff on Greenwood’s background off the Forgotten Realms Wikipedia page.

Happy 4th of July!

We watched fireworks, had some people over, and generally enjoyed ourselves.  Overall, a good time was had by all.  I even got to watch a little of the Tour yesterday, which was awesome.  'Course, I missed all the crashes, but what are you gonna do?  You can't have everything.