I don’t own all the FOR sourcebooks, but I almost opted to skip this one and to get Cult of the Dragon (one I used to own, and loved, but no longer have). I don’t find it particularly interesting and it doesn’t really look like the other FOR sourcebooks. But then, this is maybe the most important of them, so I decided to give it a go.

This is Pages from the Mages (1995), a collection of unique spellbooks and the unusual spells they contain. There’s some historical material, some info on the NPCs who made the books, and a couple of monsters, but, in essence, this is a book about books. And spells.

Thing is, as lukewarm as I am to it, Ed Greenwood loves making up spells. He’s done tons of them, and he did many of the ones that appear in this book for an occasional column in Dragon Magazine. That’s actually the place the wider world got its first glimpse of the Realms, through the histories of these spellbooks. When TSR was looking to replace Greyhawk with a new primary campaign setting, it was the memory of Pages of the Mages column that led Jeff Grubb to approach Greenwood about Forgotten Realms. No Pages of the Mages means no Forgotten Realms, no Drizzt, no Baldur’s Gate, no Undermountain, no Waterdeep. Where would D&D be without it?