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It's sort of by WotC. It's published by WotC via DMsGuild (like for example any of the much shorter products they've put out to benefit the Extra Life charity, or like the Wayfinder's Guide). But it doesn't look like anyone on the WotC RPG team worked on it. Instead, its lead designer was James...

I'm not persuaded by the "5e doesn't really have any rules anyway, only guidelines" argument. And there's a wide gulf between "people who don't trust their DMs" and "players who would like to understand how their abilities work without having to ask their DM to clarify them, and would like those...

Take a look at the revised War Priest that WotC revealed as an example of the new approach. That’s not a Yuan-ti or even a lich. It’s basically an NPC version of a common (vanilla, even) PC—right down to the newly added "Cleric" type. It’s one thing to redesign this NPC’s spellcasting to be...

The published text is the only thing that matters when Crawford answers questions about the game rules. In this very article there's a classic Crawford formulation: the harengon's hop isn't a high jump or a long jump, and if it were either of those things "the text would have said so." He uses...

This line in the new article leapt out at me: "A magic-using monster’s most potent firepower is now usually represented by a special magical action, rather than relying on spells." That distinction confirms that these actions are not spells. Unless they revise the wording on Counterspell, RAW...

That looks really good. The spine treatment is a big improvement over previous volumes, and the total package looks excellent.

The One Ring, The Dark Eye, Dungeon Crawl Classics

Don't forget the comic books and the upcoming "middle-grade" novel series (both also set at least partly in the Realms). I've seen various people insisting that FR novels were quite profitable even at the end of the 4e era. I find this unlikely. But I also strongly suspect that the situation...

Nic Kelman left WotC in March. The lawsuit filing went a bit out of its way (IMHO) to point out the controversy over the publication of Kelman’s first novel, which some critics believed glorified criminal sexual behavior (edit for precision) “misogyny and pedophilia.” Those are literally the...

Glad to help. Looks like you're missing Ed Greenwood's Spellstorm and the past seven Drizzt novels—Archmage, Maestro, Hero, Timeless, Boundless, Relentless, and the just-released Starlight Enclave. Four of the short stories (out of twelve total) in the paperback short story anthology Untold...

"Nobody wants to play the cleric."

It seems to me that WotC's current approach to lore, even in their setting books, is extremely detail-light, very restriction-averse, and also very have-it-both-ways. So while they certainly would never say, for example, "There are no orcs native to Krynn," they also probably wouldn't add orcs...

100% kitchen table player here: apart from not being able to use the cards in the Standard competitive format, which I wasn't planning to ever do anyway, I have no idea what this declaration actually means. Here's the best way I can come up with to ask the question: without any changes to the...

That city guidebook exists—Ed Greenwood’s The City of Ravens Bluff was published shortly before this novel was. The novel relies heavily on the material in that sourcebook, which itself was Greenwood’s attempt to bring together and unify a thousand different individual RPGA members’...

Lord of Stormweather is narrowly my favorite of this whole series. Shadow’s Witness, my 2nd-place choice, is close to this level of quality, but that one doesn’t have as many weird ideas as this one, and in one or two ways Shadow’s Witness still feels like its author’s first novel—which, unless...

It hasn’t ever been explicitly labeled as an evil thing, to my knowledge. Implicitly, though? Well, an evil god originally created it, and Kelemvor’s submission to Ao’s demand that it be retained is (reading between the lines a bit) one important step in the process of solidifying his...

Ed Greenwood, Twitter, 10/26/2020: "A very small handful of sentients in the Realms truly don't believe deities exist (less than 0.5%); they would be the 'Faithless.' Most DO 'believe in' all the gods, even if they profess to repudiate them. Many 'cleave to' one deity above others, even if...

An evil god of the dead, Myrkul, created it. But then he was replaced by Kelemvor, who considered destroying the wall and was instructed explicitly by the Overgod, Ao, to retain it. FR isn’t really a setting where you can say “the gods are all naughty words”—the gods don’t all behave the same way...

Yes, I think many FR fans hate WotC so intensely that they would prefer that nothing official ever again be published for the setting. (I'm not one of them.) I have fairly limited experience with fandoms, but of those I've been involved with, the most embittered and hostile fans I've ever...

It doesn't have to, because the latest SCAG errata brings that book in line with the version presented in Tasha's. (This is not an endorsement of your interlocutor's position.)