D&D 5E Sundering - So what happened?

Scrivener of Doom

Adventurer
Can't have anyone competitive against Elminster and company.

I think you're right but for a different reason to what I was originally going to post.

One of the frequent complaints about FR, particularly from people who have wasted part of their life reading one of the novels featuring the likes of Elminster, is that the NPCs come across as hyper-powered superheroes. Perhaps if the supervillains are no longer around, we won't have to see the "heroes" in superhero mode either?

And maybe this is all part of a conscious decision to return Elminster to his original position as an unreliable sage rather than an archmage so arch he fornicates with his goddess.... (Oh, I forgot I had retained that memory. Out, damned spot!)
 

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transtemporal

Explorer
One day, someone at WotC was reading DCs Crisis on Infinite Worlds and they thought "Eureka! This is how we solve the continuity cluster:):):):)!" so they wrote six novels to make some cash and hit the reset button. Thats what The Sundering is about.
 

Scrivener of Doom

Adventurer
One day, someone at WotC was reading DCs Crisis on Infinite Worlds and they thought "Eureka! This is how we solve the continuity cluster:):):):)!" so they wrote six novels to make some cash and hit the reset button. Thats what The Sundering is about.

Agreed.

That's essentially what I posted a couple of pages back.
 

Eirikrautha

First Post
One day, someone at WotC was reading DCs Crisis on Infinite Worlds and they thought "Eureka! This is how we solve the continuity cluster:):):):)!" so they wrote six novels to make some cash and hit the reset button. Thats what The Sundering is about.

Worse than that. I think they held a hiring seminar and only invited fired Marvel and WWE writers. Then they canned anyone who made it through 15 minutes without drooling on themselves. Their final selections were the guy from WWE who had a blank page with "herp-derp" scrawled in the center, and the guy from Marvel who drew an owl bear picking its nose.

I mean, the storyline reads like someone threw scrabble tiles in an open centrifuge, then transcribed the results verbatim...
 

TheSleepyKing

First Post
I’m actually cautiously optimistic about 5E Forgotten Realms... mostly thanks to this interview with RA Salvatore where he talks about WoTC’s realisation that they’d made a horrible mess of FR with 4E and were working to rectify it.

It looks like the Sundering is going for a soft reboot. Everything that happened, happened, but the Realms is being reverted to something like its 1E/2E/3E state. It’s a bit cheesy (the first three and final novels of the series are basically “here’s how we teleport our favourite novel characters into the current timeline”), but I think the idea is right.

My big concern is that they make the same mistakes they made with 3E. Although 3E was my favourite FR edition, it certainly had problems – namely that the good guys had the bad guys outnumbered and outgunned by a considerable margin (largely thanks to the far-too-many almighty Chosen of Mystra). The setting’s villains had been humiliated so many times that they’d lost all credibility as threats. The only ones that retained their aura of supervillainy were the Shades (and now they’ve been silly-slapped by Elminster as well).

4E was the worst kind of response to that problem – they just nuked the entire setting, and it still makes me mad in a they-cancelled-Firefly way. Most “non-western” realms were destroyed, and they did things like introducing Dragonborn by literally dropping a nation of Dragonborn from the sky. I think they’ve realised that that was an unpopular direction – and are walking it back as best they can.
 
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