Lost Empires of Faerûn brings the ancient past of the complex land of Faerûn into the present day. In addition to lots of brand-new material, it provides plenty of hints and examples showing how to incorporate the events of history into any campaign. Below are ten reasons why Lost Empires of Faerûn is a great resource for DMs.

10. Add Some New Foes to Your Campaign: With the prestige classes in this book, you can create a variety of cultists who are dedicated to keeping the magical discoveries of the past secret from the world -- just the kind of opposition that treasure-seeking, power-hungry adventures don't want. You can also use the new magelord prestige class to make interesting wizard villains, and the Servant of the Fallen feat to make clerical opponents who worship dead gods.

9. Put Some Mystery into Your Campaign: Dozens of powerful empires have risen and fallen in Faerûn over the course of millennia, and each has left behind a few remnants of its power. That strange magic item with the unfamiliar sigil on it might well be thousands of years old. But where did it come from, and who might still want it badly enough to kill for it?

8. Flaming Skulls and Other Monsters: Both updated and entirely new monsters populate the pages of this book. The terrifying flameskull, plus metalmasters, dreads, baneguards, giant velvet worms, and dozens of other creatures await your PCs in these pages.

7. Flesh out Your Ruins: Wondering where next to send your hardy PCs? The chapters on the Crown Wars, ancient Imaskar, the dream of Cormanthyr and others describe a host of ruined sites that could be brimming with adventure. So give your brain a jump-start and offer your PCs some new adventure sites to explore.

6. Power up Your NPC Spellcasters: Foes with new spells always throw the PCs for a loop. Lost Empires of Faerûn features everything from protection spells (such as backblast) to imprisoning spells (such as bloodbriars), and even a spell that grants a creature the half-fiend template. (Pity that one can't be used on flameskulls, but it creates great monsters.)

5. Randomize Your Ruins: Thanks to the tables in chapter 2, ruins can just pop up out of nowhere in your campaign. You can create entire ruined cities and castles or add features to existing ones in just a couple of minutes using percentile dice. You can also use these tables to create random extradimensional spaces, complete with interesting features and mishaps.

4. Add Secretive Elves to Your Campaign: Try adding in Olin Gisir -- an elf who works to keep ancient knowledge secret and out of the wrong hands (probably nonelven hands, from her point of view).

3. Add More Mythals:Lost Empires of Faerûn described mythals -- those elven expressions of high magic long recognized as the pinnacle of the Art -- in great detail. In these pages, you'll find out how to make them, what spells and magic they can produce, and how to tweak them into more dangerous threats.

2. Put Some Pizzazz into Your NPCs: Give your NPCs some new feats -- the kind that convert ordinary foes into troublesome opponents. Try out Arcane Manipulation, which allows a wizard to break a single, higher-level spell slot into two or more lower-level ones. Or perhaps you prefer Channel Charge, which allows enemy rogues to use more than one charge at a time from a charged magic item. If your Mulhorandi NPC has Godsight, he can use several detect spells as spell-like abilities, each three times a day. And Wounding Spell allows NPC spellcasters to inflict bleeding wounds by using damage-dealing spells.

1. Add Meaning to Your Campaign: Thepresent situation in your campaign is, to some extent, determined by the events of the past. Motivations rarely change, but the choices people make in the present depend on what options the past has left for them. You can give your campaign more depth -- and increase your players' interest -- by tying together the ancient past, the recent past, the present, and the future. Lost Empires of Faerûn gives you plenty of ways to develop the past so that it directly affects the present.