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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Epic Meepo" data-source="post: 9461644" data-attributes="member: 57073">What Year Is It?If you’re planning on writing a Forgotten Realms supplement, time is your enemy. Wizards of the Coast is constantly releasing new Forgotten Realms products, and quite a few of them advance the setting’s timeline. No matter what you write in your supplement, there’s a good chance some or all of your content will be rendered obsolete in the near future. Setting information rapidly becomes dated.The easiest way to side-step this problem is to embrace it. Select an in-game year and explicitly declare everything in your supplement accurate as of that particular year. Alternately, pick a few years, and present facts that are true in each of them. If you create a snapshot of the Realms at one or more specific moments in time, you don’t need to worry about future developments.Or you enlist the aid of a time-traveling chronomancer. Better yet, enlist the aid of the Chronomancer, a well-documented historical (from someone’s perspective) figure in the Forgotten Realms. Before his story ended many centuries ago, the Chronomancer served as the in-game narrator for the trail guide I haven’t finished writing yet. One relevant quote that didn’t make the cut:“Chronomancer's Note: If someone claims to know precisely when and where (and if) an event happened, don’t take their word for it. Somewhere on the plane of time, so-called gods preserve an accurate, immutable history of the Realms. I will tell you what I know of that history, and everything I say will be true. But don’t expect it to agree with the past as you know it.”The trail guide compiles information drawn from many existing products. Those sources describe the state of the Realms as it they exist shortly after the Second Sundering, an event which occurs in a single, definitive year. So what year is it? The Chronomancer isn’t going to say. From his perspective, recorded history is an unreliable narrator. Only your table’s DM knows the true history of the Realms.</blockquote>

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