D&D 5E Forgotten Realms Deities

[Mephista]

Candlekeep forums are the best place to go to look for lore on the Forgotten Realms. For the most part, however, each returning god has his or her own reasons. The Sundering novels covered the resurrection of one god, the sun god split in another. The return of Eilistraee and the other drow dieties was actually planned out in the original novels where their death occured - the writer left room for them to return if necessary. Mystra was revived by the actions of Elminster.

In general, however, the basic idea is that Ao decided that it was to happen during the Time of Troubles, and planned for it when he broke the Tablets. The overgod made sure everyone had a chance to come back, and most of them did through various efforts.

Here's the thing with the second Sundering. Unlike the Time of Troubles, there was no single cataclysmic, world changing event. Rather, the Sundering was just a very large number of small events happening simultaneously. Succubi left Asmodeus service to either go back to the Abyss or independant which restarted the Blood War, lost lands returned, the Weave was restored when Elminster revived Mystra (ending the Spellplague), gods decided to fill in the Sea of Fallen Stars with lots of rain, the Many-Arrow orcs decided to rampage, etc. Just a million smaller things happening around the same time.

So, the gods, even dead ones, had an opertunity to arrange things for their return through their Chosen. And the vast majority of them did.

 

[Pragmatic]

Wow, I've missed so much by skipping 4E and not reading the novels!

Granted, I've always "house ruled" the Realms in my headspace. I have found the Realms to have a ton of great ideas, perfect for "data mining." (E.g., "Oooh, a country of halflings? That'd go great with The Five Shires and Kendermore!" Combining ideas from multiple products and even multiple publishers, to make something that seems cool to me.)

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

That's one of the great values to be had from the Realms.

 

[gyor]

Wow, I've missed so much by skipping 4E and not reading the novels!

Granted, I've always "house ruled" the Realms in my headspace. I have found the Realms to have a ton of great ideas, perfect for "data mining." (E.g., "Oooh, a country of halflings? That'd go great with The Five Shires and Kendermore!" Combining ideas from multiple products and even multiple publishers, to make something that seems cool to me.)

You did miss alot, 4e had its flaws, but there were some great novels.

 

[pukunui]

Granted, I've always "house ruled" the Realms in my headspace. I have found the Realms to have a ton of great ideas, perfect for "data mining."

Which is precisely what WotC wants you to do - hence why there's a sidebar in the SCAG telling DMs that much info was deliberately left vague and/or unreliable so they could customize it to their taste, and why there's an appendix in the back with suggestions on how to adapt some of the material to other settings.

 

[Pragmatic]

You did miss alot, 4e had its flaws, but there were some great novels.

I still can't wrap my head around the classes and monsters (too much "you can move an ally three squares" stuff), but from what I've read (and note the caveat; lots of my information about 4E is from second-hand sources), I LOVE the "Points of Light" stuff.

Astral Sea (with spelljamming ships), Elemental Chaos, Feywild, Shadowfell, the elves being split into eldarin and elves (and being originally from the Feywild), and so on.

I really liked most of what they did with the backstory of Dark Sun (my favorite setting). Nowhere near as happy with what they did with the Forgotten Realms (e.g., Turmish and the Shining South were two of my favorite "headspace" areas... and destroyed in 4E). No clue what they did to most other settings.

But like I said, I just couldn't wrap my head around the classes and monsters...

 

[gyor]

Turmish wasn't destroyed in 4e, it had some economic troubles bscause it key city which depended on its ports found itself landlocked, but Turmish was still around in 4e.

But I agree with the essencing of your point, that 4e was coolest when it added interesting fluff, and at its weakest when it was destroying interesting fluff.

Had 4e not destroyed locations, but had just added the continent of Returned Abier and added in Tymanther and Akanul without removing or destroying anything, and maybe reduced the time jump greatly, the 4e realms would not have been as unpopular as it was.

I know of no one who objects to part of Tymanther sticking around and if Returned Abier was still around, but shifted from its current location, but still on Toril in order to make room for Maztica's return I don't think anyone would object.

It was breaking things not adding things that upset people.

Its why the one relatively unpopular thing 5e's Sundering did was smash Shade and Myth Drannor together destroying both. The loss annoy some people such as myself.

 

[gyor]

Even Core 5e retained some of the cooler elements of 4e, the Shadowfell, Feywild, and the Elemental Chaos remained, although changed. Those were the coolest parts of 4e's cosmology, and they got mixed with the great wheel, and added some new ideas like the border elemental regions, and that the part of the outer planes that mortals can experience being only a small part of an outer plane, to create something cool, something better then the Great Wheel and the Great Axis. I've nicknamed it the Great Wheel +.

 

[gyor]

Which is precisely what WotC wants you to do - hence why there's a sidebar in the SCAG telling DMs that much info was deliberately left vague and/or unreliable so they could customize it to their taste, and why there's an appendix in the back with suggestions on how to adapt some of the material to other settings.

That's ironic because that was one of the things realms fans complained about the most when it came to the 4e FRCG, that it was too vague.

It feels like they fixed some of the mistakes of 4e FR, but missed the broader lessons entirely about what went wrong.

 

[Huntsman57]

Leira has always been my favorite. Her return was not well explained. To some extent that's understandable given it is Leira after all but it felt kinda like nothing more than Wizards just decided to say "hey ya know what, Leira was damned cool. Maybe it was a bad idea to kill her off. Lets create some lame excuse for why she's alive." From the player's perspective it should be not well described. As a DM I want to know the actual history behind these events.