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Well, fans who’ve been invested into a particular outcome have said the same things about the other universes I’ve mentioned, and then some. Again, I go back to this is as much a shared creation as ever there was one. Treating it as a carefully planned universe was never the intent. I think you...

I agree - it’s true for every setting. Heck, there are many fans who rejected / still reject Greyhawk’s official canon because they felt it clashed with Gygax’s vision of the setting despite TSR advancing the timeline. Also, if the lore is spread out across what WotC says it is and Greenwood...

I remember having to create a big desktop icon on my parent's computer back in the day that literally said GO TO THE INTERNET, and it just opened up Internet Explorer instead of them trying to hit AOL.

The usage had dropped to just a few thousand users. I think most folks in rural areas who want internet have moved onto one of the satellite providers.

The DC comic universe, or the Marvel comic universe, or the Star Wars universe all have an established lore as well. These are all decades old (like FR), and have numerous retcons, resurrections, multiple authors, but the one thing that makes Forgotten Realms unique is that, as far as it is used...

Is the idea that they can harm the heroes when they die?

Is D&D really a story at its heart? The novels are controlled by their various authors (most of the time but not always) but the foundation of D&D is that every table tells its own story because ultimately it’s a game. Not a story. Sometimes there’s an attempt at a collective story, sometimes...

This. I’ve been reading a few threads now about gem dragons and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used them in a game. They’re not exactly what I consider a high priority.

I don’t expect or place a great deal of importance on narrative integrity of lore in a setting across its entire 40 year published history, especially one that’s as haphazard as the Forgotten Realms.

It’s because they are small, their market is niche and people think they can make a difference in their case.

So much of this conversation just feels like…

And Sammaster is responsible for creating one of the most noted villain organizations in the Realms that has stuck around through the years, long enough to get a name drop in the D&D movie. Also, if I’m understanding this correctly based on the FR wiki, his destruction wasn’t even depicted in...

I really don’t see any D&D setting as being different in nature from any other fictional universe, akin to a comic book universe where heroes and villains are resurrected all the time. Resurrection, reincarnation, and cloning spells are part of the ruleset. If an author has a good hook, I see no...

Which has kind of always been a thing for Faerun maps, unfortunately

Even if it’s a character who never featured in a single adventure and lived and died entirely within the lore of setting books?

Unrelated: That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Sometimes a dragon should just look like a dragon. I don’t see myself looking at this and saying “yeah, I need more topaz dragons in my game” or “I really need to glue the wing on my dragon mini backwards so I have a topaz dragon!”

It seems that as soon as you go down the road of giving ability score bonuses (or penalties) within a class based system where one class derives more benefits from being strong, or more benefits from being smart, you start to get justifying verbiage that says "Wood Elves are naturally graceful...

Yeah, I don't know that retcons even make sense when it comes to TTRPGs given that by their very nature, each table is going to diverge from whatever was originally set up by the campaign setting or adventure scenario. Saying something like saurials were never really a thing, and Dragonbait...

I've done the backstory thing, and I like them but want them to be at best a paragraph. My problem is not any one backstory - it's having 4 to 5 backstories that wildly vary, and finding ways to make them relevant. As I've gotten better as a DM, I mitigate that by setting ground rules and...