Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cryptos" data-source="post: 4523336" data-attributes="member: 58439">I know this is probably hostile territory for this, but I feel like I've just done a 180-degree spin RE: The Forgotten Realms.I'm actually reading the non-crunch material in the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and liking it.  I thought I was a bit of a fool paying full price two days ago for (essentially) one class and one warlock path, and maybe I am.  I fully expected to toss the rest of the book's contents aside.Somewhere around the end of 2nd edition to the beginning of 3rd edition, I absolutely hated Forgotten Realms.  I was sick of it.  Everything seemed to be pushing FR, all the major video games seemed based on it.  The 'big names' of the setting seemed to make adventure for the little guy implausible ("Wait, why doesn't Elminster just handle it himself?")   Never mind all the copy-cat characters Realms fans would seem to create.  The widespread areas of goodwill and racial harmony made me wonder how tiny pockets of evil survived and thrived, or where they came from in the first place.  The geography didn't make much sense to me from a naturalistic standpoint, it seemed like someone threw a spastic interior decorator with godlike powers onto the continent and had him move around mountain ranges to taste.  Since in many popular parts of FR, danger didn't seem to be on anyone's doorstep, I largely credit the setting with all the abysmal, unimaginative "you meet in a tavern and explore a tomb" campaigns.I was even skeptical of the preview material for the "new" Realms. I honestly wished the Forgotten Realms would be, well, forgotten.  But this... granted, I haven't seen the FRCS book... this seems completely different.I was just looking through the descriptions of the regional benefits for starting characters to see if it was something I wanted to use in my own setting, and wound up reading the entire entries on some.  Some of them actually gave me adventure ideas, one gave me an entire campaign idea, pieces falling into place one by one as I read.  FR hasn't inspired me since... well, let's just say I was somewhere just beyond puberty and there was this grey box.I'm not ready to endorse the setting whole cloth, but I am now intrigued.  In brief, it seems they've taken the 'Points of Light in the darkness' thing to the extreme.  It doesn't seen like a Dungeons and Dragons Family Theme Park at all any more.  There's evil in the world, and it has easy access to everyone else; the world is being radically changed and torn apart by powerful, unknown magic; and there don't seem to be a whole lot of people standing up for the little guy, he's on his own.  There actually appears to be room for adventure here that doesn't involve treading in anyone else's footsteps.I guess my big question to anyone that might know is: Is this consistent with what's in the actual campaign setting book (FRCS)?Other questions:  Is the FRCS book set up in a similar way to the FRPG's Background chapter?  I like the way it breaks things down by region.  Does the FRCS cram a bunch of high-powered NPCs down your throat?  The FRPG doesn't seem to mention them, thankfully.  Is there a template for these Spellplague-mutated creatures in the campaign book?</blockquote>

Verification