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Greenwood on FR npcs
- Thread starter CarlZog
- Start date
Henry
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Ghendar said:
It depends on the time period he was gaming, I imagine. His gaming realms of the early 80's sound quite different from the Realms as he envisioned them writing stories at 10 years old; this is different still from the version released in the mid-80's for 1E. Today's Faerun, if you matched it to his original thoughts, is NOTHING like it. (I always got the feeling of Tolkien mixed with Conan when reading his early stuff. That story, "One comes, Unheralded, to Zirta", is VERY heavily R.E. Howard influenced.)
an_idol_mind
Explorer
Henry said:
Interesting. Is there anywhere where these older Realms stories can be obtained? Are they better than his recent Realms novels? (I found the Elminster series to be pretty unreadable.)
Mystery Man
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Dragonbait
Explorer
CarlZog said:
Agreed. There is an interview on Mortalityradio.net about this, and about his original concepts of the setting.
I was one of those GMs who tried to GM the setting, and keep the historical cannon in place, and had a very difficult time (of course, I placed the game in the Dalelands, which is the most detailed region...) AND I had players who kept pushing for me to use the uber-NPCs from novels that I did not read (Elminster, some of the Sisters, and so on.)
an_idol_mind
Explorer
Dragonbait said:
When I ran the setting, my biggest problem was that the NPCs always seemed to work their way into the PCs' backgrounds. Every mage was one of Elminster's apprentices, and any ranger in the north had run into Driz'zt at some point in the background.
We know this in some detail. The central Realms (which Jeff Grubb named the Heartlands), up to the time of the Old Grey Box (1357 DR), is very close to Ed's Realms; beyond those regions, and into the TSR/WotC ongoing timeline, less so. Factor in stuff like the Code of Ethics, and Henry's point that Ed's Realms isn't unchanging. However, Ed's underlying setting has proved amazingly resilient and keeps poking out from under the cruft -- unsurprisingly, as he's still its most prolific author and several other current writers (more than in the early 1990s, in fact) are 'on his side'. The gap is more in how the later setting is presented than in how it works.WayneLigon said:
an_idol_mind said:
So let the player's character know him. Then, further into the campaign, the character finds out that though he met Drizzt and hung out with him, Drizzt is actually annoyed by the guy, and finds him a little stalker-ish. Elminster may have been the character's teacher for a period....but it wasn't because the character had promise, but because of a promise Elminster had made to the character's grandmother, or something like that....
I haven't really had a significant problem with the NPCs, because I've usually started my FR games in small towns, where guys like Elminster are a distant legend.
It's a campaign setting with literally *millions* of NPCs....it stands to reason that there are going to be some who are pretty powerful. I personally dislike running games where the PCs are the centre of the entire world.
Banshee
an_idol_mind
Explorer
Banshee16 said:
The actual games I ran in the Realms went fine, so the PCs being associated with the NPCs wasn't a problem per se. The problem was that every player seemed to want to tie himself to one of the world's major NPCs, which sort of tied them to the big guys' apron strings. It's like they thought that they weren't good enough to be heroes in the world unless they had some association to characters from the novel line.
I'm not listing that as a problem with the Realms. I ran some of my best adventures in the Realms, and enjoyed the years that I used it as my setting. At the same time, I've enjoyed my homebrew game more, but that's almost always going to be the case when comparing a homebrew campaign versus a published setting.
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