NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9095123" data-attributes="member: 5948">Most of the time they'd do it via novels though, the Grand Conjunction was a bit unusual in that department.  Prism Pentad blew up Dark Sun (Rise and Fall of a Sorcerer-King bounced the rubble a few times), the Chronicles blew up Dragonlance, then the Legends trilogy did it again, and the Chaos War, then the War of Souls.  Faerun got blown up so many times in novels that the game material could never keep up.  Rage of Dragons, War of the Purple Dragon, Return of the Shades, Threat from the Sea, Abolethic Sovereignty, Avatar Crisis, Ring of Winter, that whole business with Szass Tam...Grand Conjunction at least let the PCs be involved.  So did the original Dragonlance modules I guess.  But TSR was a novel company rather than a games company for a while there, and it showed.  The novels were what was blowing up the settings, the game lines were left flailing along behind.  What they SHOULD have done is put a dictum out to the novelists that it's all small-scale stories from now on, unless part of a planned and coordinated event that brought the game material along too.  Like the earlier dozen-odd Drizzt books, or the Elaine Cunningham books, or Brimstone Angels - which not coincidentally, were some of the best-received FR books.  Tell stories that are smaller and more local and more personal, that don't wreck the setting for everyone else.  But of course that'd mean no more Elminster novels, so it was probably a non-starter.And anyway, most of the novel-driven catastrophes were just driven by the desire to sell novels in the setting, to people who liked the setting.  In fact, it was a bit of a joke at the time that FR was undergoing these continual disasters and nobody in any other novel trilogy seemed to notice, because any long-term impact had to be minimal because the Realms couldn't change too much.  Dreadful worldbuilding, but at least it was contained.  The upending of the Realms by the writers of 4th ed FR was a different beast.  An attempt to rejig the setting largely to appeal to people who didn't like it in the first place, at the cost of people who did.</blockquote>

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