Why *Dont* you like Forgotten Realms?

[Stoat]

Well, we can blame TSR for that; I don't think the "original" Realms had Egyptean or Mesopotamean pantheons, for example.

I've seen several posters make this point or one similar. But so what? I a person doesn't like some aspect of the Realms, what does it matter where the fault lies?

Take the name "Fzoul Chembryl." (please) I don't care if it was cooked up by Ed Greenwood or some third-string freelancer or the vengeful ghost Lorraine Williams. What I care about is that it's a stupid, silly unpronounceable name.

 

[Dausuul]

Of Sues Best Unspoken - RPGnet Forums

Man, if that counts as perverted, count me among the most vile and debased gamers around. Most of my games are around DC Vertigo level of Mature, because real people do fun stuff without clothes sometimes. We don't describe things as they happen at the table, because, well, eww, but certainly I've had background plot points in my settings that could compete with that example.

Just read the linked-to post, and yeah--squick. Not because of the sexual content, but the stuff surrounding it. Alustriel is super-available, has no nudity taboo, and likes having her anatomy commented on. The Goddess of Magic is perpetually pregnant but stays slender and hawt at all times. The whole thing reads like a horny 14-year-old male's personal fantasy world. I'll concede that we should not cast aspersions on the author--maybe Mr. Greenwood was making a sociopolitical statement, or something--but regardless of what he had in mind when he wrote it, reading it is enough to make me want to take a shower.

This is a fairly small part of my dislike of the Realms, though, since it's not in any of the official material that I know of. It's just the slimy cherry on top of a sundae of bland derivative fantasy, sprinkled with chopped overpowered NPCs and drizzled in thematic incoherence.

It seems people are judging this from the stereotypical "nerd" view that all DMs and Players are just engaing in power-fantasies and don't get laid in real life. I don't think we'd be judging Ed Greenwood as much if he wasn't writing for games, as I've seen more pruient content in a Piers Anthony novel than I ever saw in any of Ed's fiction.

Wait... you're using Piers Anthony as a counter-example? Thinking about his stuff makes me want to shower with bleach and a sandblaster.

 

[Nymrohd]

I would say that the enormous amount of interloper deities violates the consistency of the pantheon. They are interlopers, but from where? Other worlds? From real world pantheons? That in itself violates believability for me. If Erathis suddenly showed up, nothing would really change about the realms. It would just be another notation, another set of portfolios, though some portfolios may get traded around like trading cards.

Other worlds. In 2E the multiverse was vast with multiple prime material worlds. The interloper deities were largely multispheric deities worshipped in more than one crystal sphere; they simply chose to expand their sphere of influence to Toril since belief=power as explained in Planescape supplements. Moreover many of the current people of Faerun were actually not people of Faerun; the elves, dwarves, grey orcs, likely the gnomes and multiple human populations (the Calishites both human and halfling, the Untheri and Mulhorandi) are all transplanted or invading populations from a different crystal sphere that also brought with them the worship of their deities.

Moreover the many human populations of Toril created their own pantheons over tens of thousands of years. Human were one of the creator races of faerun, present since the time of the Sarrukh and spread over the supercontinent and later continents with little contact. Yet it is documented that they all worshipped hosts of tribal spirits and possessed at least a semplance of divine and arcane lore (the compilation and codification of such lore being in part the nether scrolls). Within tens of thousands of years many of those divinities became part of small local pantheons. Spheres of influence of these pantheons; primarily the Illuskan, Tethyrian, Chondathan and Netherese ones were restricted in the location of their worshippers beyond the few common deities across pantheons that were there since the creation of the world (Chauntea, Shar, Selune and several deities that were created as a result of Shar and Selune's war such as Mystryl but also Tempus and others).

I would allege that the many diverse pantheons did not dissolve the boundaries of their spheres of influence until relatively recently in FR history as a result of the Dawn Cataclysm and Lathander's machinations. Likely those sphere had been dilluted earlier still because of the many human migration waves, particularly of the netherese and chondathan peoples, the latter of which had a tradition of religious missionaries.

 

[ProtoClone]

Too much awesomeness that it ceased being awesome.

 

[Hella_Tellah]

Wait... you're using Piers Anthony as a counter-example? Thinking about his stuff makes me want to shower with bleach and a sandblaster.

Be sure to steer clear of Robert Heinlein, then!

 

[Celebrim]

After three days camping and away from the computer, topics which formerly seemed pressing and interesting to discuss seem far less interesting. This is especially true when the topic seems to have drifted into areas you aren't comfortable discussing given how uncomfortable you were with how close bashing another DM's work comes to bashing the person to begin with.

However, I do wish to risk a meta-comment on the thread itself.

In this thread people were asked to give an opinion. Whether you like something or not is inherently an opinion. You can't prove the validity of your own likes and dislikes, and you can't disprove the validity of someone elses.

I tend to have strong opinions and I tend to I think support them. I don't expect everyone to like what I like, but I generally act as if I could at least get people to understand and empathize with my likes or dislikes - though in fact, I know that from experience you can't even manage that. Because of my strong opinions, I tend to attract conflict from those that are equally opinated and equally sure of the validity of their own opinions. A number of such people attempted to say that I was wrong on the grounds that I had misperceptions. Initially in this thread, I thought I could show those people that my opinions weren't grounded in misperceptions but merely different perceptions, and that with a few exceptions (I really did believe Drizzt had been someone's PC at some time, because he reads like one and because I thought I'd heard that before, although in my defence I'll say that this appears to be a common misperception) everything that they described as a 'misperception' was exactly what I had described viewed from a different angle. However, the more I argued, the more it became clear that certain other posters simply could not accept that people would percieve things differently than they did. I was repeatedly challenged to give some basis for my opinion, which I think I did, but was repeatedly told that this basis was 'insufficient' or yet another 'misperception'.

I have been accused of using 'sock puppets' in this thread. I presume the accuser does not realize how serious that charge is, as IMO the use of sock puppets constitutes a fundamental violation of internet ethics. I welcome any scutiny over whether I'm using sock puppets from the admins. I believe no examples of impropriety will be found, and I'm certain I've never used any other account to post to EnWorld than this one. What I find interesting is that the accusation - like many such accusations - I think reveals more about the accuser than it reveals about me. If you believe that my opinions are just completely off the wall, then obviously if you see anyone else holding a similar opinion, it must be that that other person is actually me. It couldn't possibly be that my opinions aren't actually so completely baseless and off the wall as you'd like to insist, right?

 

[Primal]

I've seen several posters make this point or one similar. But so what? I a person doesn't like some aspect of the Realms, what does it matter where the fault lies?

In the end, it doesn't; it's just that it's not fair to heap blame on Ed, when he has very little to do with this particular aspect of the Realms.

Take the name "Fzoul Chembryl." (please) I don't care if it was cooked up by Ed Greenwood or some third-string freelancer or the vengeful ghost Lorraine Williams. What I care about is that it's a stupid, silly unpronounceable name.

Fzoul is an original NPC created by Ed. And I just love those FR names. No matter how weird or "unpronounceable", I think Fzoul or Khelben or Manshoon or Aubaerus are vastly better names than what I see in 99% of fantasy fiction and RPG products (not to mention the titles that feature RW names). At least there's a unique feel to them. But that's just my opinion.

 

[Philosopher]

I have a question for those who say the Realms is bland. What do you consider more interesting? Describe how your favourite campaign setting (or your own homebrew) doesn't have the same flaws as the Realms. I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious about what people do find interesting. That may help in understanding why people dislike the Realms. So I sort of have the same question as the OP, but I'd like a positive description of what would be good rather than merely a criticism of the Realms. What are some concrete examples of things the Realms lack? (Some people have already done this to an extent, but I wanted to make it more explicit to hear from others.)

 

[Dausuul]

I have a question for those who say the Realms is bland. What do you consider more interesting? Describe how your favourite campaign setting (or your own homebrew) doesn't have the same flaws as the Realms. I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious about what people do find interesting. That may help in understanding why people dislike the Realms. So I sort of have the same question as the OP, but I'd like a positive description of what would be good rather than merely a criticism of the Realms. What are some concrete examples of things the Realms lack? (Some people have already done this to an extent, but I wanted to make it more explicit to hear from others.)

Mainly it's a matter of having a coherent theme and flavor that define the setting.

Dark Sun is an excellent example. The theme of Dark Sun is a brutal struggle for life in a dying world, where the tradeoffs people make to survive only hasten the downward spiral. All sorts of elements feed into that theme. You have city-states where tyrant sorceror-kings offer protection and subsistence in exchange for abject servitude. You have arenas where gladiators kill each other to pacify the masses. You have desperate shortages of water, metal, food, knowledge. You have magic that rips the very life from the earth.

(It's noteworthy that the Prism Pentad and the revised boxed set shifted Dark Sun away from this theme and toward a more traditional save-the-world epic fantasy, which is part of why those changes were so reviled.)

Or take Planescape. In Planescape, the dominant theme is philosophy-as-physical-reality; the way you view the world shapes the world. On the most basic level, there's the Great Wheel of the planes, in which each alignment is embodied as a vast planar realm. Then on top of that are the factions, groups of fanatical philosophers with powers that arise from those philosophies. All of this comes together in Sigil, where the Lady of Pain creates a kind of neutral zone for planar beings and faction members to engage one another without waging all-out war.

My current homebrew setting is an ice age world, where the slow advance of winter is dooming civilization. I'm actually not satisfied with the way that theme has played out in the campaign; I included too many cookie-cutter D&D-isms and let myself drift into a rather generic plotline. Were I to do it over again, I would scrap a lot of the standard elements and focus a lot more on the hazards of the environment and the threats posed by hunger and cold.

 

[Barastrondo]

I have a question for those who say the Realms is bland. What do you consider more interesting? Describe how your favourite campaign setting (or your own homebrew) doesn't have the same flaws as the Realms. I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious about what people do find interesting. That may help in understanding why people dislike the Realms. So I sort of have the same question as the OP, but I'd like a positive description of what would be good rather than merely a criticism of the Realms. What are some concrete examples of things the Realms lack? (Some people have already done this to an extent, but I wanted to make it more explicit to hear from others.)

I think any homebrew would include "personalization" and "investment" as things that any published setting would lack. Even if a game would appear little different from the FR to a truly independent observer, those two things change the enjoyment level intensely.

To reiterate, I've nothing against the Realms; I simply prefer homebrew, and make some different choices. But if specific points of variation are useful data, then:

- More focus on the martial, less focus on the arcane. Wizards and their ilk can be interesting characters for sure, but overall they have no particular positions of prominence in the overall setting's themes.

- Deities draw power from what they represent, not from worship. The god of justice grows stronger if abject agnostics or even atheists act to further justice, or grows weaker if zealous worshippers spread injustice throughout the land and call it "justice."

- No deities of mortal origin. Purely personal preference.

- Not as much emphasis on some of the more gently romantic thematic elements. Elves and cats and silver and moonlight and bardic music and things like that. I totally respect their inclusion, and am not trying to be contemptuous here: I think it's awesome that a fantasy world can go for that romantic side. But most of my players (including my wife) are more dwarf-metal or gnoll-tribal than elf-lyricism at heart.

- More customized monster palettes. I don't really use beholders, mind flayers or drow, for instance, and I like "gnome" to mean "earth elemental."