The Parched Sea is the first novel in the Harpers series, set in the Forgotten Realms

Forgotten Realms

The Forgotten Realms is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Commonly referred to by players and game designers alike as "The Realms", it was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as a setting for his childhood stories...

 campaign setting

Campaign setting

A campaign setting is usually a fictional world which serves as a setting for a role-playing game or wargame campaign. A campaign is a series of individual adventures, and a campaign setting is the world in which such adventures and campaigns take place...

. The book was written by Troy Denning

Troy Denning

Troy Denning is a fantasy and science fiction author and game designer.-Career:Denning joined TSR as a game designer in 1981, and was promoted a year later to Manager of Designers, before he moved to the book department...

.

Plot summary

The Parched Sea is another name for the desert

Desert

A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than...

 Anauroch in which the novel takes place.

The Zhentarim

Zhentarim

The Zhentarim is a fictional organization in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Also known as the Black Network, it is an evil organization based on the continent of Faerûn. One of its goals is to dominate the lands from the Moonsea to the...

, determined to drive a trade route through Anauroch, send an army to enslave the nomad

Nomad

Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...

s of the Great Desert. Ruha, an outcast witch, tries to gain the trust of the Sheikh

Sheikh

Not to be confused with sikhSheikh — also spelled Sheik or Shaikh, or transliterated as Shaykh — is an honorific in the Arabic language that literally means "elder" and carries the meaning "leader and/or governor"...

 as tribe after tribe fall to the Zhentarim. The Harpers send an agent to counter the Zhentarim, and Ruha helps this stranger win the Sheikh's trust, so that he can overcome the tribes' ancestral rivalries and drive the invaders from the desert.

Release details

• 1991, USA, TSR (ISBN 1-56076-067-2), Pub Date ? July 1991, Paperback