D&D 5E Current state of the Forgotten Realms

[Wolfskin]

Yeah, the issue with RSE wasn't that 'big things' happened in the setting, but that gods died, places were destroyed and so on. I'm pretty sure the ToD storyline -or any future storyline for that matter- won't pull off these kind of things. Or at least I hope so.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

True enough. That said, do the needs of the novels really mandate a Realms Shaking Event every few years? If anything, I would have expected the opposite to be true, as the constant changes make it ever-harder to stay current on the canon. It's not at comic-book levels of insanity just yet, but doesn't it get hard trying to remember if Mystra is alive or dead this week?

Yeah, you would think so.

The biggest seller is RAS's Drizzt books and they don't involve RSEs, just really bad names.

But Ed is required to write a lot of comic book levels of insanity in his Elminster books - which is why I don't read them - and WotC also loves RSE-based trilogies or multi-book series.

I think the world can be kept fresh and interesting without RSEs - or RAS - but I am clearly in the minority.

 

[the Jester]

Considering most of the plot of Tyranny is coming out of the Adventurers League modules, of which the myriad of players and PCs playing it are probably going to be successful in putting the Cult of the Dragon down (and thus not have much far-reaching effect on Faerun on the whole)... I don't know if we can really consider this a "Realm-Shaking Event".

Is it a pretty big plotline for those in The North and around the Moonsea? Sure. But for everyone else across Faerun... it doesn't sound like there's going to be much of anything Tyranny (and Cult of the Dragon) related. So it appears the Realms might be rather unshooken once the plotline finishes up come February.

First off, full disclosure- I don't really have an iron in this fight as I'm not a Realms fan. I hate metaplot, though; that's my fundamental issue with RSE type things. They typically shake up the campaign world in ways that might conflict with a dm's home campaign, and thenceforth, supporting material conflicts with the home game. Yes, it's easy to ignore the conflicting material, but it's unnecessary and disappointing (to me) in the first place.

So I hope you're right, and this will be a less dramatic RSE than usual, but even "Heeeeere's Tiamat!" is pretty Realms-shaking from a certain point of view.

Yeah, the issue with RSE wasn't that 'big things' happened in the setting, but that gods died, places were destroyed and so on. I'm pretty sure the ToD storyline -or any future storyline for that matter- won't pull off these kind of things. Or at least I hope so.

I hope so too, even as a not-FR-guy. I'd prefer it if the shake-ups and high stakes events described by WotC were on a more human scale (or demihuman, if you prefer ), and they left the god-killing, continent-shifting, empire-smashing to home DMs.

 

[Dungeoneer]

After [MENTION=1210]the Jester[/MENTION] said it, I just couldn't resist...

 

[Dungeoneer]

What I don't understand is, there's already a well-regarded solution to dealing with 're-imaginings' of fictional worlds... alternate timelines. You simply do your Realms Reset and have it take place in an alternate timeline. Then if people want to play in R.A. Salvatore's world they can, but otherwise they can use the 5e shard of the timeline. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

What I don't understand is, there's already a well-regarded solution to dealing with 're-imaginings' of fictional worlds... alternate timelines. You simply do your Realms Reset and have it take place in an alternate timeline. Then if people want to play in R.A. Salvatore's world they can, but otherwise they can use the 5e shard of the timeline. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Here's the problem. A large number of Realms fans of the books are also D&D players and DMs. So, these people expect to see the game books stay in line with their novels. They think it's cool that when a new D&D book comes out that it mentions that a building in town that was destroyed by Drizzt is destroyed.

Realms Shaking Events are the way to keep these things in parity while making sense of them. Why did the book say that spells worked differently now but suddenly they've gone back to working the way they used to? What's the in-world reason for that? The RSE is a way of saying, "That's because the goddess of magic is reborn and she has changed the rules of magic".

That way all the characters in the books can still remember the past without it making no sense at all.