Epic Forgotten Realms

Jürgen Hubert said:
Well, Nobilis is a diceless RPG (and a very, very beautiful one), though adapting the concepts to D&D shouldn't be too much of a problem.

However, these Imperators also have certain "bodies" to take care of (as opposed to their minds, which are off to battle). These "bodies" are created by sweeping up a small (or not so small) part of reality and investing it with their essense - essentially creating a new plane. They also create caretakers to look after this body while they are away. You see, each Imperator has several aspects of reality that are a part of him - such as Love, Shadow, and Innocence. So the Imperator takes three humans (or other entities), and makes them into the Nobilis (or Sovereign Powers... though in D&D parlance, it is more appropriate to call them Gods) of, respectively, Love, Shadow, and Innocence. These folks are then charged with (a) defending their Imperator's body (and a wise Imperator makes sure that his plane has some sort of internatl problems that make sure his Nobilis keep some attention to it instead of wandering off...), (b) defending the aspect of reality that they now embody - for if they are killed in the right way, the very idea of Love, Shadow, or Innocence might vanish from the multiverse - and (c) make ware against the agents of the Excrucians.

Wow. Thanks for this excellent write up Jurgen Hubert. I got what I needed from it. It sounds like it would be a very interesting game, but what I'm looking for is DEFINITELY not a diceless rpg, and the point of what I'm going for here is more about keeping an epic campaign "on the ground" so to speak in the FR. I'm sure someone else reading this thread is going to say, "that's exactly what I want!"

I think it may be possible to hold an entire epic campaign in the Forgotten Realms, without leaving the plane. Or if you do, only "jaunting" for a very quick little bit.

Has anyone else had this experience? What has worked and not worked?
 

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greymarch said:
I have been playing in an Epic FR campaign for several years. Here are some campaign ideas...

1. In the Throne of Bloostone modules, the heroes whack Orcus, and destroy his precious Wand. Orcus is back in 3rd edition D&D (and 3.5), so have Orcus either try for revenge, or try to take over the Forgotten Realms.

2. The Shades are an extremely powerful organization that recently returned to the Realms. Several of their leaders are 30+ levels.

3. The absolute deepest levels of Undermountain can provide a challenge for Epic level players.

4. Avatars, avatars, avatars! 3rd edition FR provided us with detailed statistics for many of the gods, and their avatars. The typical FR avatar can provide more than a challenge for a group of Epic characters. There are several FR gods that cannot be beaten by PCs. Supreme initiative is the best ability in D&D!

Orcus (or other possible BoVD baddies) entering into the realms. I like it...

The City of Shade. No doubt. Keep in mind, however, that if I were to run an epic "campaign" I would be ending with five or six characters at level 40! That means the City of Shade leaders (centering around 30) would have to either do some work to keep pace, or would be outmatched.

Undermountain. Really? Astral/Ethereal/Wish/Mordenkainen/Multi-spell/Improved Metamagic...
Really? I don't see Undermountain being on that level.

Avatars. Avatars. Avatars. And not ONE of them written with EPIC rules in mind! D'oh! Do the avatars play a more "active" role in the realms, and become significant antagonists to the PC's. What happens if an epic party wipes out 5 or 10 of the avatars roaming around?
 

ashockney said:
Avatars. Avatars. Avatars. And not ONE of them written with EPIC rules in mind! D'oh! Do the avatars play a more "active" role in the realms, and become significant antagonists to the PC's. What happens if an epic party wipes out 5 or 10 of the avatars roaming around?
Our DM rewrote Lolth's avatars, because yes, they aren't epic. But we've killed 3 so far! That leaves Lolth with 17 active avatars, and those 3 will be back at some point. So having bumped off a few avatars hasn't really made us feel good. :)

PS
 

Storminator said:
Our DM rewrote Lolth's avatars, because yes, they aren't epic. But we've killed 3 so far! That leaves Lolth with 17 active avatars, and those 3 will be back at some point. So having bumped off a few avatars hasn't really made us feel good. :)

PS

Thanks Storminator!

Wow. It's interesting to see that I'm not the only one considering going down this road. Would you care to elaborate a little on your campaign, and why you're chasing down the Llolth avatars? What other backstories have you tied in?

The prevalence, and relevance of the drow in the FR does make Llolth a good target. Possibly tying in some of the components currently being played out in the novels. Anyone who's read them have any thoughts on the subject?
 

ashockney said:
Thanks Storminator!

Wow. It's interesting to see that I'm not the only one considering going down this road. Would you care to elaborate a little on your campaign, and why you're chasing down the Llolth avatars? What other backstories have you tied in?

The prevalence, and relevance of the drow in the FR does make Llolth a good target. Possibly tying in some of the components currently being played out in the novels. Anyone who's read them have any thoughts on the subject?
Incredibly, the Lolth thing is mostly a distraction.

Long ago in the campaign, our bard started having nightmares about this evil staff. She didn't sleep for a year game time. Then she started getting dreams that a half-dragon kobold sorcerer had the staff and was raising an army. So off we went to defeat him. We kick him in the junk and take his wallet, er... staff.

The staff is an artifact. It imprisons the ancient dragon god, and he can control anyone that wields the staff, unless that person is our bard. She, by virtue of her bloodline, is immune from its influence. So we've got an evil artifact holding an angry god.

So a teleport goes bad, and we're sucked into the staff. It's the Oathbound setting. (here there appears to be some serious out of game wrangling. Some players didn't want to move the campaign from FR, and the DM wasn't as ready to run Oathbound as he thought. Not sure on the details). So we meet a mysterious person that zaps us out of the staff and back to Toril. The sending has set in motion the inevitable destruction of the staff, and the releasing of the ancient god, bent on multiverse domination.

The elves (we're all elves) created the prison, and we're fairly certain evil elder god will want us (the whole race) dead. So we're trying like mad to make the elven nation a world spanning empire of good and light and happy puppies, yadda yadda yadda.

We've reclaimed Myth Drannor, and it is now a growing multi-race city, we've connected Evermeet with Myth Nantar, and we've saved the Yuirwood (and with it Seldeyuir) from the Thayans. So we turn our attention to the Elven Court. It's seriously cursed. To remove the curse we need the head of an avatar of Lolth as a material component. So we went and got one...

We enlisted Shevaresh, the elven god of revenge and killing drow. So we had god battling. Shevaresh isn't powerful enough to have an avatar, so he came personally.

This broke the "no gods fightin" rule. Bane and Lathander duked in out in the streets of Waterdeep, crushing the Spires of the Morning in the process (see next post for bonus details). Then Lolth's avatars showed up on Evermeet and started kicking the tar out of us. And Ao stepped in.

He stripped Lolth of enough powers that we ended up beating the vastly weakened avatars (tho I ended up at 7 hp and 1 STR. Ow.) and forbade any direct avatar battling. We don't know where that's going, and which gods are willing to break the rules again.

So now we're off the the Elven Court, to clear the place of ghosts and poisons and once again raise up the banner of the elves.

I have no idea what we're doing next. :)

PS
 

Bonus details of Bane vs Lathander.

Last summer we ran a short evil campaign set in the city of Waterdeep. I played Denker Thorn, priest of Bane. He was a very cool PC. One of his schticks was his hit list. Bane has a list of gods that he hates, and he lists them in order. I wanted to sacrifice a worshipper of each of those gods, in order, each worshipper more powerful than the one before. The culmination of this was I wanted to sacrifice paladin Harkiis Cormalis, the Hand of Tyr, on the steps of his own temple in broad daylight.

So in the Elves game, the DM used that. Denker summoned Bane's avatar to destroy the Spires of the Morning as a distraction so he could sacrifice Cormalis.

Added boon: Denker poses as a priest of Lathander, and as one of my last acts before the campaign stopped, I bought a run down building and turned it into Denker Thorn's Home for Wayward Children. So back in the Elves game, I had my PC go to Waterdeep, and while there, he donated a bunch of gold the the orphanage, now teeming with the children of dead Lathanderites.

PS
 

Epic in the FR

Some interesting stat stuff. If there are 65mm people in the FR, if 1 in 2000 is 20th level, that would mean there are 22,000 people of 20th level or higher. That's a ton!

If it's 1 in 200,000, there are 221 epic characters. That's still far more than what appear to be detailed in the books. If there are 20 regions in the Forgotten Realms, that is eleven epic characters per region.

Could there be some epic characters out there that are undiscovered?

Who would make for some fun/interesting additional epic characters.
 

ashockney said:
Wow. Thanks for this excellent write up Jurgen Hubert. I got what I needed from it. It sounds like it would be a very interesting game, but what I'm looking for is DEFINITELY not a diceless rpg, and the point of what I'm going for here is more about keeping an epic campaign "on the ground" so to speak in the FR. I'm sure someone else reading this thread is going to say, "that's exactly what I want!"

While it is diceless, you don't have to use the rules material in Nobilis that way (and most of the book is setting anyway). After all, there are a few assumptions in Nobilis that aren't true in the Forgotten Realms - most importantly, that the Powers are assumed to be automatically more competent than mortals at pretty much anything. In fact, most of the work for D&D is pretty much done in "Deities and Demigods" - just split up Divine Rank, and you are almost there...

And for keeping the campaign "on the ground" (i.e., not turning the PCs into deities)... well Excrucian shards (lesser sendlings of the Excrucians) will make the perfect villains for your PCs. After all, when some entity conducts some weird rites to siphon power from your patron deity, and your deity is unable to defend itself thanks to the form of the ritual, who ya gonna call? ;)
 

ashockney said:
Undermountain. Really? Astral/Ethereal/Wish/Mordenkainen/Multi-spell/Improved Metamagic...
Really? I don't see Undermountain being on that level.

You have got to be joking. Undermountain at its deeper levels would eat an epic party alive. We're talking about a dungeon constructed by a guy with more arcane spellcaster levels than Elminster himself, whose spent the last several centuries in his dungeon, modifying it to suit his whims. Little things like Astral or Ethereal movement would have been the first thing he took care of, and the rest of what you listed wouldn't be hard either. Undermountain is never easy, not for anyone.
 

I think about Epic Characters like Billionaires. Everyone has heard of Bill Gates. Most people have heard of the Walton family (Wal-Mart), Warren Buffett, Paul Allen, Michael Dell..etc.

But how many people in the US have heard of Karl Albrecht? You haven't? Well...he's a German Retailing Magnate worth $23 billion and the 3rd richest man in the world.

What about John Mars? Ever heard of him? He's the 27th richest man in the world with $10.4 Billion. Course, if you haven't heard of John Mars, I am sure you have heard of M&M's, Snickers, Skittles...all made by Mars, Inc.

But he's still famous sort of right? Cause you've heard of the stuff he makes...

Ok then, what about Charles Ergen, 34th richest man in the world with $9.1 billion. Where did he get his money? EchoStar communications. Now...some of us may have heard of him or his company, but I bet most of us haven't.

The end result...yes, there are many famous Epic Characters in the realms that everyone has heard about. But there are also many who never achieved fame and never became a household name. And some of them may not be too far from the top of the power scale (...Karl Albrecht anyone?).

Cedric
 

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