On Forums and Blogs

• EN World: http://www.enworld.org/forum/story-hour/311732-ballad-hal-whitewyrm.html
• BW Forums: http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?11309-The-Ballad-of-Hal-Whitewyrm-about-a-play-by-post-game-in-progress
• Candlekeep: http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15670
• Githyanki Diaspora: http://githyankidiaspora.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/the-ballad-of-hal-whitewyrm/
• Highmoon’s Pondering: https://danielhighmoon.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/burning-realms-the-ballad-of-hal-whitewyrm/
• D&D Forgotten Realms monsters and NPC’s burned up

Online Resources

• Highmoon – I’m not sure of FR years but that looks right.
• And here’s another nice resource with a map and some details about Highmoon.
• More Maps including Highmoon, Scardale, Shadowdale, Harrowdale and Suzail.
• A great resource with lots of FR map links.
• An overview of the Dalelands, probably has items that happen at a later date but still, a nice reference.
• FR Calendar Tool
• Elven Phrases
• English to Elvish Dictionary
• Zhentil Keep
• Westgate
• Cormyr

Print Resources

• Forgotten Realms Campaign Set – Almost all of what I’ve riffed off of in our game is in the Cyclopedia of the Realms. Its a neat book with a perfect amount of setting detail and inspiration for me. The rest is stuff that I don’t consult but is on my FR shelf that I keep for the game.
• FR1 Waterdeep and the North
• FR6 Dreams of the Red Wizards
• Cormyr
• The Forgotten Realms Atlas
• The Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas

Introducing Hal Whitewyrm

In which Daniel writes a love letter to his character:

Hal Whitewyrm is a half-elf bard living in Highmoon, in Deepingdale, in the area known as the Dalelands. He has somewhere in his heritage a trace of weredragon blood which gives him orange eyes. He’s a joyful fellow who honestly loves adventuring.

Hal is the character I created back in the early 90s, when I first started to get into AD&D in high school. He’s the character I would constantly recreate during class, the one I would write short stories about, the one who was my avatar in the world of high adventure that are the Realms. He was a shallow character concept³ with cool orange eyes and a weredragon girlfriend who existed mostly in my 5-subject spiral notebook in story after story. And I loved it.

I just never got to play Hal. My D&D group played Basic D&D/Rules Cyclopedia and we had a fairly regular schedule, so, little time to try out new ideas. Then we played less and less, then I moved, etc. Aside from the fact that I used the name as an email address for some time, I have not gone back to this character in over a decade. Which is why I surprised myself when I answered Judd’s question about what character I would play in a Burning Wheel Realms game as follows:

* I’d play the character I’ve carried with me for years, Hal Whitewyrm, a half-elven bard with weredragon blood in his ancestry (weredragons are a race of female-only shapeshifting wyrms from the Moonshaes – see the thread there?). He’s the guy I wrote stories about in my teens yet never got to play. Hal is all about the romantic journey (as in literary genre, not mass market Harlequin titles), facing adventure in a large world, ideally of the legendary danger kind, with fast friends at his side, a love life to look forward to, and death around him to put it all in perspective. Think Aragorn’s journey, but with a bard who also deals with issues of identity.”

Wow, I’d never really put those ideas into words before but yeah, that’s what Hal is all about for me: exploring the high fantasy romantic character arc; less about killing monsters and taking their stuff, more about zero-to-hero who saves the princess and loses friends along the way.