Greenwood, Ed

Ed Greenwood
Greenwood at Gen Con Indy 2012
Born	(1959-07-21) July 21, 1959 (age 57) Canada
Occupation	Writer, game designer
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1979–present
Genre	Role-playing games, fantasy

Ed Greenwood (born July 21, 1959) is a Canadian-born fantasy writer and the original creator of the Forgotten Realms game world. He began writing articles about the Forgotten Realms for Dragon magazine beginning in 1979, and subsequently sold the rights to the setting to TSR, the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, in 1986. He has written many Forgotten Realms novels, as well as numerous articles and D&D game supplement books.

Ed Greenwood grew up in the upscale Toronto suburb of Don Mills. He began writing stories about the Forgotten Realms as a child, starting in the mid 1960s; they were his "dream space for swords and sorcery stories". Greenwood conceived of the Forgotten Realms as one world in a "multiverse" of parallel worlds which includes the Earth. He imagined such worlds as being the source of humanity's myths and legends.

Greenwood discovered the Dungeons & Dragons game in 1975 and soon became a regular player. He used the Realms as a setting for his campaigns, which centered arounds the fictional locales of Waterdeep and Shadowdale, locations that would figure prominently in his later writing. According to Greenwood, his players' thirst for detail pushed him to further develop the Forgotten Realms setting: "They want[ed] it to seem real, and work on 'honest jobs' and personal activities, until the whole thing [grew] into far more than a casual campaign."

Beginning with the periodical's 30th issue in 1979, Greenwood published a series of short articles that detailed the setting in The Dragon magazine, the first of which was about a monster known as The Curst. He wrote voluminous entries to Dragon magazine, using the Realms as a setting for his descriptions of magic items, monsters, and spells.