So one of my most favoritest books of all time is "The Reluctant Swordsman", by Dave Duncan. I found that... I want to say in the late '80s (Wiki says 1988), where he just knocked it out of the park. Second one suffers somewhat from Second Book Syndrome (see also The Two Towers, Dune Messiah, et al.), and the third one is fantastic again. The fourth one (written 25 years later) tidies up some bits.

.

Anyhow, I keep my eye out for things by him, and a couple of weeks ago I found his two-book series, "The Starfolk", the first published in 2013.

And I was intrigued to see two names used in there: "Elnath" was the elfin king who first created the starlands for the starfolk, and "Naos" is the level of magical power that identifies the most highly-ranked of the starfolk.
And I knew darn well that our Elnath and Naos pre-dated a 2013 publishing date by quite a bit.

So it led me to wonder if maybe Dave Duncan ever played GemStone.

(Sadly, the Wiki article telling me the published dates, also says that he passed last year. So it's not like he could, you know, out himself here on the Boards at this point. <sigh>)

Wow, that's some coincidence, but not entirely surprising I suppose given the subject matter of those books.

Naos and El Nath are both names of stars.

When I was deciding on the name for my GM self, I was actually talking to (maybe-ex?) GM Elnath at the time and he told me that his GM name was the name of a star. That piqued my interest and so I went looking at star names as well. I found Naos and since I was looking for a short name it was an easy pick.

Naos is a pretty neat star, by the by.

I should check out these books.

--
Naos

>and yes, Shonsu wore an all-blue outfit...

Heh, references. I have seen a heron sword in game, and ask me about Brother Cafael sometime.

:D

Well, the author's dead, now, so... yeah, I knew it wasn't Naos. :)

>So it led me to wonder if maybe Dave Duncan ever played GemStone.

If he did play, he wouldn't be the first author to do so.


Avaia, player of