Crown of Fire

Ed’s (Elminster’s) Afterword

Hello. Well Met! Welcome to my world. This book has been long requested by many patient fans of the Forgotten Realms® world. Here it is—and I hope it’s just the book you’ve been waiting for.

I’ve been waiting even longer. I began the Realms circa 1967 as a setting for fantasy stories. When the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons® game first appeared, I was impressed by its precise detailing of magic and monster abilities, so I recast the ever-growing Realms to match its rules. Game play followed, with a band of loyal friends who demanded a logical, detailed, colorful world—and set high standards of role-playing. The events we spun together and the rooms full of Realmslore notes—heraldry, history, genealogy, recipes, fashion notes, and more—have piled up steadily.

About twenty years after I created the world, TSR adopted it as an official home of the 2nd Edition AD&D® game. From sporadic articles in Dragon® Magazine beginning in Issue 30, the published Realms has grown into a huge line of novels, boxed game sets, adventure modules, rule books, sourcebooks … and now even travel books!

Dozens of creative folks have joined me in writing about the Realms—often surprising and delighting me with their work. If you play games set in the Realms or read its tales, it’s your world too. You are one of the authors of a rich, continuing chronicle that details what is now the largest, most written-about fantasy world ever.

Hmm ….I could almost hear trumpets there.

I’d best calm down a bit and settle back into my armchair with a good book … about the Realms, of course.

I’ve read, reread, and enjoyed every Realms novel so far. They each show very different folk and very different corners of the Realms, but are all the more interesting for being so varied. The Realms is a world in which lots of folk live, not just a small band of heroes who constantly save the world from villains (sound familiar?). Thus, the Realms has lots of stories to be told.

Among the most interesting Realms tales are the Harper books, a series of self-contained stories about folk associated with a mysterious “good” organization: Those Who Harp. (Game rules and additional information about the Harpers can be found in the Code of the Harpers sourcebook [FOR4]. I could say it’s excellent, but I won’t because I wrote it and Elminster spends a lot of time chiding me for what I left out!)

As a Harper novel, Crown of Fire is a direct sequel to Spellfire, published by TSR in 1987. In Spellfire, the saga of Shandril Shessair, wielder of spellfire, began, but either book can be enjoyed without reading the other.

When I set about writing Spellfire, I wanted to give readers a taste of what it would be like to dream of adventure and then suddenly be thrust into it, with all its discomfort, worry, and excitement. I also wanted to turn some fantasy cliches on their ears. For instance, at the book’s beginning we see a band of adventurers too inept for their own good. Instead of miraculously winning through, they all get slaughtered! Similarly, since guys always get to be the heroes in fantasy, I chose a heroine instead.

About the heroine: I needed her to be powerful enough to meet hostile wizards and monsters and survive, so I gave her spellfire. Only a rare few folk in the Realms can call forth spellfire, and it can cleave through or consume most magic it encounters. Since the Realms are ruled by magic, spellfire is very powerful and very important, indeed. Its precise limits aren’t yet known, but all “power groups” in Faerûn see spellfire as an extremely potent weapon they must at all costs possess, control, or destroy to keep it out of the hands of their enemies.

But a character with ultimate power is boring. What could challenge her? I needed my heroine to be naive about the real world, physically weak, and lacking a family to call on for aid. Out stepped Shandril, a dreamy orphan girl who’s grown up drudging in one place.

(While we’re on the subject of place, let me say I was tired of fantasy books in which a hero wanders calmly through a lifeless landscape and thus comes to rule the world [or defeat its evil ruler] without anyone else noticing, caring, or even seeming alive. So in both Spellfire and Crown of Fire, a host of other folk are always busily at work, swirling around the main characters. Sometimes this supporting cast is more powerful and important than the heroes. As I said, the Realms is a place where lots of people live.)

Spellfire ran longer than was convenient—if bits of it seem choppy, well … bits were chopped—and I felt Shandril’s story was unfinished. I lamented most the loss of the main villains—the sinister Shadowmasters, who keep Elminster and the Simbul too busy to aid Shandril directly. The Shadowmasters manipulate many of Shandril’s foes throughout Spellfire. Elminster and his lady protect Shandril offstage by fighting these evil beings for the latter half of Spellfire, and by the time Crown of Fire begins, the younger, more reckless Shadowmasters have decided to strike openly. Hence the mayhem in the previous pages.

Will there be another tale of Shandril? Who knows? There are so many other tales of the Realms to be told that I don’t know what we’ll get to read next! Elminster grumbles that we’ve only scratched the surface; almost nothing of the grand past history of the Realms has seen print yet, and only a bare few tales of here-and-now. I’ll be reading along, though … and I hope you will be, too.

See you by a fireside, somewhere in the Forgotten Realms!