D&D 4E Ed Greenwood on 4e F Realms

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Seems to me like "damning with faint praise."

Thoughts?

I disagree with your interpretation. It's difficult to praise effusively when you are in the dark about what's being done.

 

[Sundragon2012]

I like FR and respect ED for his work at creating a great setting in the Forgotten Realms. I can defininitely appreciate Ed's comments and wish they allowed him greater creative control of FR trough the years.

I hated the fact that they shoe-horned Al-Qadim, Maztica and Oriental Adventures into FR making it a nearly complete earth analogue setting. It's no that these settings aren't excellent but I think that making so many rival pantheons in FR messed it up. I think that the gods of FR should be the gods of FR with different names throughout the entire world. I Read somewhere that Ed didn't even want the racial deities in FR but TSR stuck them in their anyway.

TSR and WoTC turned FR into a "kitchen sink" world that tried to include everything in a messy, sloppy manner that diluted FR into something I think Ed never desired it to be.

In regard to this reboot, I am entirely for it. FR is too light and fluffy. I run a good, noble-hero type campaign nearly always, but I much prefer darker settings than settings involving rollicking adventure. High Fantasy is not about rollicking mercenary adventurers in a world of stupid villians while Gritty Fantasy can be about mercenary adventurers, but it isn't a fun-filled outing where one can expect victory and battles scaled to one's abilities. IMO the reboot might make FR more of both High Fantasy and Gritty Fantasy in their truest sense as opposed to merely D&D fantasy which is IMO something other entirely.

Hopefully from the reboot on, they will decide to write the gods as other than dumb, colorless, one dimensional caricatures and make them more like the gods they were modeled after. Don't go halfway. Make them beyond alignment, complex and interesting like the gods of myth who do what they do for reasons beyond the understanding of mortals.



Sundragon

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

"Halaster Blaster runs Under-Town!"

Shoot, he didn't even make it out of 3.5!

For some reason I read the thread title as "Greenwood says 'F the Realms'!"

Ed can be sad about where the Realms are going, but he lost control of them a long time ago. There are a lot of things TSR/WOTC have done to the setting I dislike (novel-based RSE's impacting RPG campaign settings and deities as pseudo-PCs top the list), but there would probably be things Ed does in his own Realms that I dislike. If his novels are any indication, I really don't care for some of his characters.

But like the rest of 4E, there appears to be some good and some bad with the Realms revision, and I'm going to have to wait and see what the final version looks like before I judge whether to continue supporting or drop the setting.

My Grey Box works just fine as a campaign setting regardless of mechanics.

 

[KingCrab]

* Drizzt and Elminster are still around, but most of the other characters that were mortal are now dead.

This one, I wish they had done the other way around. Pretty much the only characters I want to see dead are Drizzt and Elminster.

 

[Najo]

This one, I wish they had done the other way around. Pretty much the only characters I want to see dead are Drizzt and Elminster.

well the novels that sell say otherwise

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Link - http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=207436

Seems to me like "damning with faint praise."

Thoughts?

I see it more like when a parent raising their child, thinking they would become a doctor, discovers that they are instead going to become an auto mechanic. There is disappointment that things won't go as the parent dreamed for so many years. Because they love their child, they are hopeful and optimistic that things will turn out well, but there is always just a bit of sadness when they think of what might have been.

 

[(contact)]

This one, I wish they had done the other way around. Pretty much the only characters I want to see dead are Drizzt and Elminster.

QFT. I ran a 3e FR game that included Elminster as a wizard 4 / expert 6 with a fantastic PR lady as a cohort.

"Elminster! Chosen of Mystra! He's an Archmage!"

 

[chris.crouch]

I don't expect the Realms to be stagnant. I just don't want Mad Max.

Now THAT'S what I want FR to be! Post-Apocalyptic!

Seriously, it's an idea that's been going through my mind for a few weeks now. Burn it all down, and let the players loose on it. Lets me use anything that I or the players think is cool, and get rid of the rest.

In my Mad Max FR, Elminster is a crippled madman who wanders about spouting nonsense

Chris

 

[Jakar]

As long as they do not do anything like this to Eberron, I will be happy.

 

[Kaodi]

It's just... logic does not seem to be a strong suit of setting redesigns.

I mean, come on. In the Time of Troubles, Ao steps in to stop everyone from treating their followers like dirt. Then, a couple decades later, he sits by and does nothing while half of the worlds inhabitants are royally screwed over because all of their deities end of dying for stupid reasons. I can't help but think that Ao's mysterious master would be rather disappointed in Ao's cosmos, if he keeps working like this.