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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 3783664" data-attributes="member: 6318">In answer to the thread question:Signs are that the 2008 Realms will change significantly in feel and design sensibility. Given this,If Rich Baker, Bruce Cordell, Rob Heinsoo and the rest of the in-house team can, in a couple of years, create and describe a setting that is anything like as rich as Ed Greenwood had by 1987, after twenty years of organic development through short stories and campaigns, I would be surprised.I like Ed's world very much, and the work of those who've added to it sympathetically and creatively, from Jeff Grubb to George Krashos; more than the work I've seen of the authors of the 2008 book. So chances are I won't like the 2008 setting as much, myself, even if it's very good in its own right.I emotionally disengaged from the current timeline over several years, so the events at the back of the Grand History of the Realms aren't as much a shock to me as to some. Some of those events I'm indifferent to. Others -- the destruction of the Weave, a powerful metaphor for the bonds of lore and love in the Realms, and not just the structure of magic but part of the metaphysical fabric of Toril itself -- I don't think much of at all.If Wizards cease to publish the 14th-century Realms -- leaving the bulk of Ed's huge Realmslore backlog untouched, and many characters (Mirt, Sharanralee . . .) likely dead before their stories were ever told -- I'll be sad, though it will have had a wonderful run, despite my many misgivings with its treatment under Wizards and TSR. While Wizards has the legal right to do this, artistically and morally is another matter.I will probably buy the 4E setting, and try to read it open-mindedly.Commercially, given how often this kind of drastic shake-up has failed and how rarely it works -- never, that I recall, in D&D worlds -- it's certainly a big risk. I suspect there may be no short-term way, save an unpredictable sales surge, for Wizards to publish setting sourcebooks that make Hasbro-level profits.</blockquote>

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