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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 8716633" data-attributes="member: 22779">Ok, let's see if I can put this into words.Sorry, bit of a gaming story ahead and this might get a bit wordy.  The PC's in my game found a skull of a read dragon (don't question it, just work with me here) and one of the players decided to Speak with the Dead on it.  Ok, fair enough.  He's showing interest in the setting and handing me a golden opportunity to do some setting exposition AND set up an adventure down the road?  FANTASTIC.  Now, as I didn't actually HAVE any of that information at hand, I begged him off, and then answered his questions during downtime between sessions, allowing me to do a bit of a dumpster dive into FR lore on the Wiki.This resulted in me deciding that that was the skull of Acogflagblazen, a dragon that died centuries ago under what would become the Cloister of St. Ramedar.  This is helpful to me because now I can tie the Candlekeep Mysteries adventure The Book of Inner Alchemy to the Cloister and drop some foreshadowing into the game and give the party a decent reason for going to the Cloister which will set the Book of Inner Alchemy adventure off.  Cool beans.So, since I actually OWN the Powers and Pantheons Forgotten Realms book where the Cloister is detailed, I dug into the bowels of my closet and pulled out my 2e book and read the four page description of the location.  Fantastic stuff.  TONS of history and detail.  Loads of ideas.  I can see why people really dig this stuff.  But, here's the kicker, something I didn't really recognize at the time, but, it stands out so much now, in that short, four page description, there are references to the rules found in three or four other books, without which you couldn't actually run several of the encounters, nor use a fair chunk of the material presented.   And, note, these references are only to the book, no page numbers, no publication information.  You're just supposed to go diving into those other books to find the material you need to use the information in this book.Think about how much of a turn off that is to anyone who isn't deep into FR books?  Never minding that the history presented is high level only and is a precis of the expanded lore of Tethyr and surrounding areas found in a number of other publications, each of which only presents part of the larger mass of information, none of which is properly cited or easy to find.Golden age in the sense that so much material was created?  I suppose.  But, I now clearly remember why I would never touch FR material with a ten foot pool other than a couple of stand out exceptions.  For me, an FR branding on the cover was pretty much an instant NOPE because I had seen this kind of thing far too often.  Sorry, but, give me the modern Realms where I can easily search the wiki, and then maybe go dumpster diving into the lore if I need to.</blockquote>

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