Thanks for the response!
jdrakeh said:
They hadn't written all of the details yet. Somebody will undoubtedly say that Greenwood had it all mapped out from the start, though I can guarantee that events like the Time of Troubles were commissioned -- the event in question was custom-tailored to reflect the core rule changes in AD&D 2e (which themselves came about due to public allegations of the game being weighted toward "evil" social mores).
I think Greenwood has confirmed that ToT was not his idea, also, though he wrote the modules to go along with it. But it does seem to me from the Spellfire books, for example, that he had a lot of the trade connections, etc, between different lands roughly laid out fairly early. After all, he'd been working with the world for, what, 20 years or so by the time 2e came out?
Settings grow. That's understood. The problem was that FR grew in horrible, uncontrolled, ways that had little to do with FR itself and everything to do with pandering to certain critics. It eliminated entire character classes, removed references to demons and devils, dispensed with old gods who were deemed to violent or amoral, introduced new gods who were 'bad' but signifcantly scaled back on 'evil', etc, etc, etc.
I assume you're talking about the same 2e revisions here. But did this change the overall feel of the Realms as a setting about the struggle between good and evil with good at least mostly winning after a hard fight? Or was that not the feel before?
Later, bits of FR novels were retroactively grafted on to the Realms as part of an arguably successful marketing move, though said alteration resulted in yet another aspect of FR that is frequently decried by players (as opposed to readers). Notably, prior to official canonization of the novels, FR has one notable Mary Sue character in the form of Elminster -- afterwards, such NPCs were legion.
Yeah, I agree with the novels being a bit of a problem. Too much happening too fast! I wonder, though, are the high level NPCs too many compared to the population given the 3e RAW in the world-building section of the DMG? Anyway, that's a tangent. More directly, didn't 1e have characters like Khelben (who shows up in an early RAS novel, I think), Mirt, etc?
I guess the real question to me is just this: Given the
very little info we have so far, 4e FR seems like a much darker setting (which is just how some people like it) but is arguably very different in tone from the previous editions. What's your take on that? What was the tone of 1e FR? Thanks!
That's huge! Is Toril known to be larger than Earth?
