D&D General Alright, Forgotten Realms junkies! a Q or two.

[DragonLancer]

Can't you just use a lizardfolk statblock for a saurial and just remove their ability to speak draconic?

Apologies. I wasn't asking for the purpose of using them. It was more a question of are they still there as after 2nd edition I never saw any reference to them.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Apologies. I wasn't asking for the purpose of using them. It was more a question of are they still there as after 2nd edition I never saw any reference to them.

Tome of Annihilation suggests they aren’t.

Maybe they found their way back home?

 

[bloodtide]

I'm currently attempting to solo play thru the Sword of the Dales trilogy from 2E AD&D. More or less converting it for play with my real group. I've found it needs a bit more work than I expected. One thing I found surprising, and not at all what I have seen in a lot of the old modules I gone through lately: The lack of loot! There are oodles of magic items, but almost no $$ type treasures, aside from the odd belt pouch or saddle bag with a handful of coins. At now 4th level, my party is just as broke as they were when I rolled them up- and that's pretty sad, lol. Both of the "dungeons" in the first two modules have bugger-all for treasure. So, before I run it for a REAL group, that needs changed. (otherwise, the torches and pitchforks might come out, lol)

The early low level 2E adventures were made to be simple and easy. Part of that was very little loot. New adventurers were meant to be kept in the poor house as a reason for them to go on more adventures.

You also get the Realms more Practical Loot . So, not every foe has a pile of treasure.....but most have some stuff. And if your desperate or crazy enough you can collect every 'clay cup' and arrow and go to a town and sell them all.

Bonebat.

Bonebats are undead bats that serve as messengers, guardians, and battle allies to evil priests and wizards and to powerful undead (such as liches, archliches, and vampires). They appear as skeletal giant bats.

For stats they are just "skeletal bats" with a paralyzing touch.

spider skeletons

Just spider skeletons

Verbeeg Skeletons

Just Verbeeg Skeletons. Verbeed are in the Icewind Dale book. Though as skeletons they just 'hit stuff'. You could just say 'ogre' or 'ettin' skeleton.

Hairy Spiders. (in 2E Monstrous Manual)

Just giant spiders

Darkenbeasts. (a monstrous manual entry is at least included in the module- as well as the spell used to create them)

Well, you have all the lore about them. Just little flying monsters.....'Dust Mephit' works just fine.

 

[pukunui]

Tome of Annihilation suggests they aren’t.

No, it doesn't. I literally quoted what ToA says about them upthread. If it suggests anything, it's that the number of saurials on Toril in the 5e era is roughly the same as the number on Toril in the 2e era. It does say there are no known communities of saurials, implying that the community that settled in the Lost Vale at the end of Song of the Saurials is no longer there ... but given they settled there because their homeland had been destroyed by Moander, it's more likely that they either dispersed across Toril or have hidden themselves Wakanda-style.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No, it doesn't

Read the post I was responding to. It was asking specifically about known saurial communities. That doesn’t include lone saurials wandering the lands (of which we know there is at least one), or unknown non-canonical communities the DM might care to add.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

It did, most of 5e was from 1489 DR (Rime of the Frostmaiden) to 1497 DR (Aquisitions Incorproated) with majority of books and Baldur's Gate 3 set in 1492 DR, as of 5e 2024 it is 1500 DR

I get what you're saying, but, it's still kinda/sorta. All the changes done in 4e were more or less retconned out of existence, so, those changes really don't count unless you happened to be following the Realms at the time. Additionally, 10 (ish) years isn't really an advance on the calendar to speak of. Like really, who cares? And, finally, since the only events that were actually detailed about the setting all occurred in the Sword Coast, the rest of the setting has been frozen in time. We simply have no idea what's happened anywhere else.

Plus, there's the point that none of the events of the Adventure Paths actually impact the setting in any meaningful way. Every single AP ends with a return to status quo. Tiamat did not enter the Realms. The Ordining is fixed. So on and so forth. There is no meaningful change in the setting. We have brief snapshots of what individual places might look like at a given point in time, but, there is no actual change in anything. Elturel gets sucked into outer planes, but, by the end of the AP, it's right back where it started.

I'm not really sure that you can say that the timeline has advanced when everything is frozen in time.

 

[Voadam]

The bonebats intrigue me the most, as there isn't any info in the modules save standard stat blocks. (which like all such, are simple combat stats only, and assume you have the full description in another source.) It is NOT in the Monstrous manual.

FA1 Halls of the High King from 1990

Later reprinted in Monstrous Compendium Annual III in 1996