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: 9104750" data-attributes="member: 5948">To be fair, the Dales in particular are not unproblematic from a design perspective.  Not because of any cultural insensitivity issues, but because you're still stuck with Elminster and Storm Silverhand and the usual suspects there - the old FR problem that people have been complaining about for decades about the uberpowerful NPCs who could/should have solved the problem the PCs are working on.  Greenwood did a lot of great work designing that part of the Realms, but when it comes to the whole Chosen of Mystra thing someone badly needs to rein him in.  YMMV of course, but I always found the whole 'whole 'hail fellow well met' and 'all the hot magic women want crumbly old randy goat Elminster' Dalelands shtick pretty twee and annoying, and the way the WotC toned down of the centrality of Elminster and co to the setting is one thing about 5e FR that I've actually liked.  But that's the 'avoid talking about stuff which is too hard to fix' WotC philosophy of legacy settings in action again.  If you're covering this part of the world, you can't just ignore the guy.Annoyingly, the Spellplague left Storm Silverhand (a good-aligned proactive adventurer in direct competition with PCs for the limelight) alive, but killed off the Simbul (who was actually a useful game character, being a preoccupied ruler of a small nation constantly at loggerheads with a much-larger Thay, and being considerably more dangerous, capricious, and morally ambiguous than the usual Shadowdale faces in the bargain).Of course, there's more to the North than just the Dalelands.  I'd probably find a way to bring back the Simbul though.  Aglarond was cooler with her in it.</blockquote>

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