I said yesterday that I don’t really like Forgotten Realms. But I do like bits and pieces a lot. I love the Black Network. Shadowy organizations full of factions working at cross purposes is just catnip to me.

I also love James Lowder’s Prince of Lies, which, as I mentioned when I posted about it a while back, is easily my favorite D&D novel. In it, he pretty much destroys Zhentil Keep. It is awesome. In a novel. I am mixed on the destruction of the Black Network in the campaign setting.

This is a good example of my frustration with FR. It launched in 1987 and the Zhents were obviously a central, but only slightly detailed, villainous organization. Just two years later, the Avatar trilogy of novels up-ended the status quo, destroying Bane, the god of the Zhentarim and replacing him with Cyric, a newly ascended god. By 1993, Cyric was finished and the Zhentarim broken. Yet, while the meta-story was plunging forward at a break-neck pace, TSR only got around to publishing the first in-depth look at Zhentil Keep in 1995. In seven years, they had two cataclysms but were still struggling to fill in the key locations of the setting. Ugh.

Ruins of Zhentil Keep presents the history of the city and the Black Network, both before and after the events of Prince of Lies and because of that, it feels like less than the sum of its parts. And like most FR products, it doesn’t make good on the promise. The Zhents presented here in detail do little to capture the imagination the way the hints up to this point had. Part of this is down to a lack of design work – Manshoon, my favorite Zhent, is just another wizard in a robe hare. Compare to Brian Despain’s truly bizarre iron-masked, impossibly bearded weirdo from the 3.5 Epic Level Handbook and you’ll get an idea of why that seems so disappointing.

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