#calimport

Jet Jambiya Tavern is located in the Taorahl drudach. That makes it a good guess to which neighborhood Khalid was stationed as an amlak in. It's even a bit of a straight shot from the Amlakkhan(2) to the Jet Jambiya(27)🤭🍻

Taorahl is described as having embassies to promote foreign alliances in commerce and politics. Not a bad beat for a Harper, I think!

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"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.

I'm currently re-reading The Halfling's Gem from The Icewind's Dale Trilogy by R.A.Salvatore, I'm at the part where the Companions of the Hall are traversing through the desert towards Calimport, and Wulfgar ends up having some problems with the camel he's trying to ride and ends up fighting it off in the end.

I can’t help butthink that Salvatore actually played that scene out in a game long before he wrote it in his book. Maybe I'm wrong about that but it just feels like  that when I'm reading the scene in the book. I can just imagine Salvatore failing some kind of skill check involving Animal Handling while trying to get Wulfgar to lead his camel, causing him to be thrown off by said camel, and thus having to fight his mount in the end.

[[ If you’ve been following me for a while, you can probably imagine my surprise and sense of de ja vu when this picture popped up on my social media feed, posted by Todd Lockwood. This was a shock to me because earlier this year, I’d found the final iteration of this concept, but it wasn’t done by Lockwood. I’d never seen any hint of this from Lockwood before or heard anything about his involvement in this distinctly familiar piece.

Despite the striking similarities, to the point where it seems obvious that WotC gave Clyde Caldwell Lockwood’s concept art to finalize, Lockwood had never seen Caldwell’s finished piece. It is unclear whether Lockwood was even aware of its existence until recently. According to James Fallone, former Director of Sales & Marketing at Wizards of the Coast and TSR regarding the Caldwell piece, “I was never a fan of that art suggestion. The seagull on the wraparound (Clyde did it I think) made the whole thing look like a weekend at Mystic Seaport and Aquarium. Luckily we had some marketing budget left so we could commission a more evocative piece for advertising. [Lockwood’s] Silent Blade ad piece was inspired. So good in fact that we made it the book cover instead.” This certainly sheds a bit of light into why Caldwell’s piece isn’t more widely-known.

Follow-up correspondence by James Fallone on this topic after a fellow follower of Lockwood asked about the issue of integrity involved in the transfer of the subject matter between the two WotC-employed artists garnered the following clarification: “...we used to do mock up covers for our catalog from original art suggestions which was done around the 4th quarter for the next year's catalog. These could be as much as a year in advance of the books actual publication. Later on the covers got assigned to final artists and based on schedule and workload it often ended up a different artist than the comp. In this case Clyde. When we started talk of a marketing piece Todd's schedule had opened. I think because the piece was originally for marketing where was a little more freedom and when Todd suggested reflections of the characters faces in their weapons we loved it. The piece was so good we successfully argued replacing the Clyde cover. This cover say the tone of the rest of the books in the series by focusing on the characters faces for drama like the powerful Spine of the World.”

Words from Lockwood regarding this image:

The Silent Blade Comp. 5 x 8 Before the original painting of The Silent Blade, with Drizzt and Entreri’s faces reflected in their weapons, this was a comp I painted for the cover that never came to fruition. In it we see Wulfgar standing at the docks while Jarlaxle and Entreri watch from the shadows.

When we all still worked in Lake Geneva, I did this comp (comprehensive) for the cover of an upcoming novel, The Silent Blade, by R.A. Salvatore. It was part of the usual push of comps—endless numbers of them—done as placeholder images for the catalog of forthcoming products.

Someone else got the commission. I believe it was Clyde Caldwell, though I never saw the painting. Marketing was unhappy with it for some reason and commissioned me to do a different painting for their marketing push. They liked that painting so much that they used it on the cover of the book, my first for a Drizzt novel. The rest, as they say, is history.