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In answer to the thread question: Signs are that the 2008 Realms will change significantly in feel and design sensibility. Given this, If Rich Baker, Bruce Cordell, Rob Heinsoo and the rest of the in-house team can, in a couple of years, create and describe a setting that is anything like as...

In fact, there are almost no instances of Mystra directly acting in Faerûn. There's no sign that Wizards plans to give up the RSEs, though. That explanation sounds plausible, but I never heard it before. Do you have a source? Folk in the Realms rarely see things in such Manichaean terms -- it's...

This thread shows that there are many terms, using normal vocabulary words, which communicate the basic idea, along with more information. What possible advantage is there in making up yet more clannish RPG jargon or trying to standardize on a single dead metaphor? I never heard this word until...

It permeates both; for instance, while 'freedom' is a propaganda term in American politics and 'modernization' in British, D&D is currently big on abusing 'evolve' -- see the Pathfinder ad in Dragon #358.

I hope: present it as what it is, with a lucid introduction like the 3E Eberron book has, let it fulfil its strengths without obscuring them with gimmicks, whims and rules artefacts. As a fan of both, I'm glad neither is going to be the default setting for the new edition.

My favourites of the 3E Realms books are Silver Marches, Lost Empires of Faerûn and Power of Faerûn. Worst is Player's Guide to Faerûn: not a player's guide, just a set of rules updates with a couple of appendices.

You certainly don't need them, but that's a lot of information and ideas for the money. They have interesting Star Wars content regardless of rules.

Anyone except a Jedi -- able to predict the future and mystically sense the positions of objects and beings around their body -- is liable to dismember themselves the first time they try to use a lightsaber.

The Avatar crisis achieved no worthwhile aim, wasted a lot of publishing resources, set the destructive precedent for the Realms-Shaking Events that followed, misportrayed several prominent characters, gave a lot of people wrong ideas about gods in Faerûn, introduced an inappropriate...

In Ron's definition, narrativism is also about exploring a particular premise. What's simulated doesn't at all have to be realism: a simulationist Star Wars RPG is designed to reproduce the experience and dynamics of the Star Wars films. In this case, though, the material being simulated is...

In fact, this was always the case: 'The "gods" of the Realms . . . grow or diminish in personal power in relation to the number of mortal worshippers they possess.' (1987 Cyclopedia of the Realms p. 10). So that 'change' was as poorly conceived as most aspects of the Avatar Crisis. Before and...

Well, yes. Same as the demands which led to statting Elminster of Shadowdale and spellfire, and similarly overexplaining or needlessly statting (in my opinion) a lot of other things in D&D. Anyway, this thread is about non-game-mechanics material.

Sepulchrave, I have to plug Gary Gygax's Living Fantasy again. It looks into exactly those 1E societal dynamics (with revisions to the role of clerics) at book length.

Then you know that you can find examples of 'both' conceptions in myth and legend (and the Homeric gods are a late, literary portrayal of Greek religion). But you said that killable gods was what D&D was, not what you'd like it to be.

Whenever you describe aspects of a campaign world in any interrelated depth and detail -- as opposed to a collection of unconnected bits -- they can't help diverging from the assumptions of some home campaigns, just the same whether it's in the context of an existing, named setting or a...

Fables of Burdock is a terrific idea. I'd set most of it, however loosely, in the World of Greyhawk, try very hard to get contributions from Gary Gygax, and find some way to pay tribute to Hugh E. Burdick, after whom, like Heward, the Fables are named.

For me, this is the same question as 'What books would you like Wizards to publish?' OK: Life in Faerûn: The texture of what it's like to live there: a huge deluxe compendium discussing music, law, art, theatre, food, private worship, language and names, fairs and festivals, games, rites of...

I'd do that. As a dangerous dungeon with a lethal reputation, it's better suited to mid- and high-level adventuring than low; it's only written for levels 1–10 because of edict from above. So I'd start with other adventures, with rumours of Undermountain to build it up; lead the PCs into it...

Lots of very good answers above. They don't: these are relatively small cults devoted to 'psychological' niches of dedicated worshippers. For instance, 'Talona, like most chaotic evil gods, is more feared than worshiped and is propitiated to avoid her attentions, not to draw them' (Faiths &...

It's an understandable impression, but it's wrong. There are novels, in which the protagonists, as in commercial fiction generally, largely win out in the end. But throughout the lore there are many times more examples of evildoing that's either not dealt with at all or by PCs in modules; and...