So here’s a thing about the Forgotten Realms that’s bugged me off-and-on for thirty years: You see that gap in the Trade Way?

It shouldn’t exist.

According to traditional Faerunian lore, the Trade Way runs from Luskan in the north all the way to (depending on time period/edition) Amn or Tethyr or Calimport in the south. There shouldn’t be a gap in it.

It turns out that the origin of this gap is from this map in the 1st Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting boxed set:

For a long time I assumed that this passage from the campaign setting was responsible for the gap:

In recent years, some evil agent allied with he orcs, trolls, and bugbears of the High Moor succeeded in opening a gate to the Nine Hells within [Dragonspear Castle]. Strengthened by a growing army of devilkind, the combined forces of the High Moors tribes devastated the area from The Way Inn to Boarskyr Bridge, such that today that part of the Trade Way is not considered safe territory.

Given the absence of the road from the map, I thought “not considered safe” and “devastated” might mean that the Trade Way had actually been destroyed here, severing the easiest trade route between the northern and southern reaches of the Sword Coast.

This was not actually the case. In fact, an army had marched against the devils of Dragonspear Castle, sacked it, and established regular armed patrols out of the Way Inn.

Before we move on, however, let’s talk about what happens between Scornubel and Baldur’s Gate:

For an even longer time (based on the map), I assumed that the Trade Way actually was interrupted here: Trade would come down the road to Scornubel and then take the Chionthar River to Baldur’s Gate before continuing south.

This also turns out not to be the case: The Trade Way has always entered Baldur’s Gate via the city’s north gate, which would imply that there must be a road which runs from Scornubel to Baldur’s Gate (and various snippets of text support this).

But here’s the odd thing: Elturel is never described as being on the Trade Way, despite the fact that logically a road from Scornubel to Baldur’s Gate would pass right through the city. In fact, Elturel is explicitly NOT on the Trade Way; instead a road heads northeast from the city and “meets the Trade Way” at the village of Triel.

Now, more detailed maps DID exist:

(Thanks to @roboros for pointing this one out to me.)

You can see from this map that the “gap” is actually a section of less-developed road along the Trade Way. There’s still no road between Elturel and Scornubel, however, so we still don’t know how the Trade Way gets from Scornubel to Baldur’s Gate.

The next map was, as far as I can tell, produced for the Forgotten Realms Atlas (1990):

The big difference here is that the road leading directly from Dragonspear Castle to Baldur’s Gate has been upgraded to a major road. Which also prompts a new question: Why isn’t THIS road used as the Trade Way?

We do have another source here: Ed Greenwood’s original map.

These were apparently displayed at Gamehole Con in 2019 and you can find photos of them here.

The details are a little hard to see, but we can generally make out that the maps we’ve seen so far largely echo Greenwood’s original cartography. (The only quibble I’d have is that I’m fairly certain the intention is for two roads to leave Boareskyr Bridge to the south; not for one road to run several dozen miles south before splitting.) The big thing to note here is that the lack of a road between Elturel and Scornubel is NOT a production error; Greenwood didn’t have it on his original map.

This brings us to 2^nd Edition, which largely follows what we’ve seen so far but notably labels the road to Baldur’s Gate as the “Coast Way”:

(We’ll come back to this.)

The Realms map was then completely redone for 3^rd Edition:

It turns out this map is very controversial among Realms experts. While adding considerable detail, it notably introduces a number of errors. (For example, in this section you can see how the road which is supposed to cross the Winding Water at the Troll Claw Ford is depicted here as missing the Troll Claws entirely.)

As far as the Trade Way is concerned, it’s a mixed bag. The decision has been made to upgrade its entire length to a major road, and it’s also added the road between Scornubel and Elturel that we’ve hypothesized must exist. But the route still isn’t particularly clear: West of Elturel, the road now cuts far to the northwest (almost all the way to the Troll Claws), and this section hasn’t been upgraded to a major road like the rest of the Trade Way.

Let’s move onto 4^th Edition:

This map is… interesting. It’s obviously a regression in terms of detail, but there are also a number of glaring inaccuracies. (The road crossing the river far to the east of Baldur’s Gate instead of passing through Baldur’s Gate is probably the most notable for our purposes.)

The other notable thing here, however, is that the writers of 4^th Edition also clearly wondered why the Trade Way would go all the way easy to Scornubel if there was a road heading straight to Baldur’s Gate.

Their solution was simple: It doesn’t. In 4^th Edition, the Trade Way no longer goes to Scornubel. The write-up of Scornubel never mentions the Trade Way and the description of the Trade Way itself makes it fairly explicit:

Over the centuries, numerous separate caravan paths coalesced into a well-traveled route along the western edge of Faerun called the Trade Way. Regular traffic once extended from Luskan to Calimport, but has been truncated since the Spellplague. It now runs from Waterdeep to the southern edges of Tethyr. Parallel to but usually some distance from the coast, the route moves farthest east just north of Baldur’s Gate, where Elturgard paladins guard the crossing at the Winding Water River. Few, if any, of the lands through which the Trade Way passes are completely safe, and caravan guards are in constant demand.

(Somewhat incoherently, however, the same campaign guide still asserts that the Trade Way crosses Boareskyr Bridge. Which, of course, it wouldn’t do if it’s following the road to Baldur’s Gate.)

This brings us back to 5^th Edition’s version of the Realms, with the original version of the gap we looked at to begin with. My understanding is that 5^th Edition’s cartography went back to the original 1^st Edition maps in order to sort of “get back to basics.” Unfortunately, the result was to also reintroduce a lot of errors and shortcomings from those original maps (including the gap in the Trade Way).

THE TRUTH OF THE TRADE WAYS

When I started this write-up, my original intention was to basically just say, “Hey! Look at the gap!”

But it turns out there’s a deep lore here.

If you do a close reading of the 1^st Edition boxed set (which I, in fact, just did while fact-checking all this), you’ll discover that the entire idea of there being a single “Trade Way” is an illusion.

There was a Trade Way from Amn to Waterdeep. For example, Baldur’s Gate was “situated on the northern shore of the river, astride the Trade Way from Amn to Waterdeep.”

But there was another Trade Way, from Waterdeep to Iriaebor:

And it is this second Trade Way that goes to Scornubel!

The reason there’s no road from Scornubel to Baldur’s Gate (and why Elturel is explicitly not on the Trade Way) is because there ISN’T a Trade Way between Baldur’s Gate and Scornubel.

They’re two different Trade Ways. (In fact, my suspicion would be that there were originally many more Trade Ways. These were just the ones that got particular mention in the first boxed set.)

In the 2^nd Edition boxed set, the addition of the “Coast Way” was actually an attempt to make the difference between the two different routes clear. In fact, this boxed set never refers to Baldur’s Gate as being on the Trade Way. Instead, “it is situated on the northern shore of the river, astride the Coast Way from Amn to Waterdeep.”

But I suspect that due to all the prominent references to Baldur’s Gate “being on the Trade Way” and “the Trade Way follows the coast” that already existed, this distinction became confused. In short order, the Coast Way was effectively just another name for the Trade Way, and shortly thereafter it would be explicitly stated as being such, reintroducing the confusion.

Of course, this means that there’s actually ANOTHER gap in the Trade Way, this one between Scornubel and Iriaebor:

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any clear solution to this. No maps of the Realms appear to depict roads heading south from Scornubel.

Nevertheless, the original intention is fairly clear: The Trade Way from Waterdeep split north of the Winding Water, heading to Amn (gateway to the South) and Iriaebor (gateway to the Inner Sea).

LOST IRIAEBOR

I think the real victim here is Iriaebor.

If the cartography accurately depicted the Trade Way running all the way through to the City of a Thousand Spires, Iriaebor wouldn’t just be one of a number of cities crammed in around the Far Hills. Instead, it would very clearly be the Constantinople-like lynchpin between the Sword Coast and the Dalelands.

Let me show you what I mean by sketching in the “missing” roads on the 1^st Edition map (imagining the Trade Way punching through the Reaching Wood southeast of Scornubel for lack of a better option):

(click for larger image)

The importance of Iriaebor immediately leaps out. It’s obvious at a glance that it’s the only game in town for east-west travel for hundreds or thousands of miles in either direction. Every campaign in the Dalelands that wanted to go to Waterdeep would have gone through Iriaebor, sitting almost directly in the middle of the map with every road north of Amn leading straight to it.

I find it quite plausible to imagine that more DMs, designers, and novelists would have been drawn to the city. In the Cyclopedia of the Realms, page 54 might have become well-thumbed:

The Ruler of Iriaebor is Bron, who was an adventurer catapulted into the position in the heat of a shooting war between merchant families. Bron feels Iriaebor has the resources to become another Waterdeep…

Let’s spend a little moment dreaming of Bron’s dream together.

The Forgotten Realms suffer cataclysms to explain why the world changes from one edition of D&D to the next.

This means that the transitions between editions are canonical in the setting.

Therefore, if you run a time travel scenario in Faerun, you must swap the edition you’re using as you go backwards into the past.

Do you redesign the PCs for the previous edition? If so, then they adapt to the time period.

Or do you just use their current stats and try to interpret them through the lens of the previous edition? They’re out of place in time. What does that feel like to the characters?

And how do the jagged edges resolve? There are no rules for using Hit Dice to recover hit points in 1st Edition, so can 5th Edition characters even heal in the 14th century? Can 4th Edition clerics (with spells that trigger the target’s Hit Dice) heal NPCs back then?

If you go far enough back in Faerunian history, though, things start getting really weird: You blow past the OD&D singularity and find yourself in an epoch of history ungoverned by the rules of any roleplaying game.

History books make it sound like the world was a fully functioning place, but that’s just a facade of narrative. In reality, the people of this epoch are rote automatons merely simulating the actions of a civilization. They are little different from a colony of ants or a hive of termites.

The only people possessed of a semblance of sentience are those leading military operations, for the world is governed by the the rules of Strategos N.

Does this work both ways? Are the PCs beacons of sentience causing automatons to flock to their presence, becoming military leaders by default?

Or is it the opposite? The PCs find their free will draining away and must either escape this epoch or attract an army of followers in order to grant themselves sentience?

Even further back, the rules become cruder yet. The terrain itself seems to lose cohesion, as it were built of molded sand. The economies of civilizations are no longer modeled, and the world becomes a gray veil of nonentity except for the bright beacons of meaningless wars.

Tagline: The Accursed Tower is a fairly solid module, with a handful of potential problems.

R.A. Salvatore is best known for his novels dealing with the drow character Drizzt Do’Urden – one of the finest swordsman in all of literature. There are some who worship these stories; others who revile them. Personally, I find them to be possessed of both significant strengths (such as Salvatore’s outstanding description of fight scenes and some of the soul-searching for Drizzt found in the Dark Elf Trilogy) and significant weaknesses (such as the repetition of some of the plots and several weak characteristics to Salvatore’s writing).

Similarly these novels are set in the Forgotten Realms, a campaign setting which some worship and others revile. As with Salvatore himself, I find the Realms to be possessed of both significant strengths (breadth of the setting, the wealth of detail and support) and significant weaknesses (some ridiculously bad supplements, over saturation, and general silliness).

I therefore approached The Accursed Tower (an adventure for 4-8 characters of level 1-3) with a fairly open mind – Salvatore and his original gaming group (the Seven Swords) “return to the Savage Frontier” of the Ten-Towns in the Icewind Dale. The characters get a chance to explore a well known area of the Realms, while running into some well known characters of the Realms.

THE PLOT

The PCs are in Luskan, the City of Sails, along the Sword Coast (with that (in)famous “it’s up to the DM to determine how” that seems to be present in every D&D adventure I’ve ever read). They sign up to guard a merchant caravan which is going to the Icewind Dales. When they get there the caravan owner reveals that he has an opportunity for them to earn a great deal more money if they help him out with something.

It turns out that the caravan dealer is searching for a ruined tower where a mage died while researching a healing salve with the potential to help a great many people. If the PCs help him get the notes from that research, they will not only be helping in his humanitarian quest – but will also share in a significant portion of any recovered treasure.

The PCs track down the location of the tower with the help of a few familiar faces – Regis and Drizzt from Salvatore’s books – and then go off to obtain the diary. They do so. End of story.

Except, that’s not all that’s going on. The caravan driver isn’t actually a humanitarian — he’s an evil mage who has killed the actual caravan driver and taken his place. The research he’s after isn’t for any healing salve – it’s for becoming an immortal lich.

It’s time to insert the dramatic music.

THE GOOD STUFF

The set-up is intriguing and provides a solid base for the adventure. Salvatore and his gaming group construct a complex plot with several different hidden agendas and machinations going on behind the scenes – wheels within wheels is the order of the day. First, you’ve got the dual nature of the NPC who hires the PCs. Plus, one of the people the PCs get to help them out is actually an ancient barbarian sorceror, who once fought against the evil mage who owned the Accursed Tower and was responsible for his downfall.

The adventure is also blessed with some remarkably strong NPCs. Drizzt and Regis, of course, get an extra boost thanks to their literary background, but there are several others – including the father-son team from the caravan who befriend the PCs, the barbarian sorceror, and several others.

I was also impressed with a number of hooks which were left open for future expansion at the DM’s discretion – such as a scroll the PCs find half-buried in a snowdrift, with no ready explanation as to how it got there or why.

Finally, the entire package is strong one. As per usual for a TSR book the production values are high, the art is of decent quality, the book has been thoroughly proofread, and the lay-out is clear.

THE BAD STUFF

First, there’s no excuse for recycled art in a 32 page book – even if you are just filling up the quarter page of blank space left on that second-to-last page. This is particularly true if you’re TSR. They’ve published hundreds of books. Surely there was a piece of art from some other book they could have recycled instead of copying the art from page 17.

Second, the book suffers from that perennial Realms problem: Silly names. Maybe some people don’t have problems with names like “Peddywinkle” in their fantasy campaigns, but I do.

Third, random encounters are not a substitute for meaningful plotting. Although the first part of this adventure deals with a caravan trip, absolutely nothing happens on that caravan trip of any significance. The only planned event is a goblin encampment, and that only happens if the PCs follow a specific set of tracks. Everything else is a random encounter. I wasn’t too impressed with this – you could just as easily have said “the PCs are in the Icewind Dales” instead of “the PCs are in Luskan”.

Fourth, the “healing salve” cover for the archmage’s true intentions was a little annoying. It is described as “healing any wound and curing any disease”, and the guy goes on to say how he wants to “make this salve known to all, so that the world would be free of sickness”. Yeah, right. Did the Realms suddenly become devoid of healing potions?

Fifth, the map on the inside front cover is of the caravan route. Along this route are numbers. What these numbers are supposed to be is never mentioned, but you can interpolate and figure out that these represent how far the caravan gets on each day of the journey. This has relatively little importance (after all, it is a set path), especially considering the complete unimportance of the caravan drive to the overall adventure in general. The book would have been better served with a map of the Icewind Dales, where the PCs have to trek all over the place to figure out the location of the tower.

Finally, the early part of the adventure is fairly railroaded (except for those sections where nothing of importance is happening). The last part of the adventure, where the PCs have reached the tower, is nothing more than a standard event-by-location dungeon.

CONCLUSION

The primary appeal to The Accursed Tower is going to be for those familiar with Salvatore’s writing. The basic plot and elements of the adventure are nothing to get excited about (and are, in fact, possessed of several drawbacks) – but this can be mitigated when the PCs run into characters well known to them from their favorite books. It’s the same kind of rush you got from the line, “Anakin Skywalker… meet Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Or from those Howard stories where you’re following some unfamiliar character and suddenly they run into Conan.

So, The Accursed Tower gets an average rating overall. Those with an interest in Salvatore’s writing might want to pick it up; those with an undying hatred of Salvatore, Drizzt, or the Realms should avoid it at all costs.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Author: R.A. Salvatore and the Seven Swords (Mike Leger, Brian Newton, Tom Parker, David Salvatore, Gary Salvatore, and Jim Underdown)
Company/Publisher: Corsair Publishing, LLC and Sovereign Press, Inc.
Cost: $25.00
Page Count: 168
ISBN: 0-9658422-3-1

Originally Posted: 1999/08/16

I honestly have no idea what my problem with the name “Peddywinkle” was.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.