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Adventurer
Volo is a better way to relay information about the Realms to the players.
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D&D 5E Forgotten Realms - How would you publish this setting this time?
- Thread starter howandwhy99
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Volo is a better way to relay information about the Realms to the players.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
I don't see a real difference between using him rather than Elminster, in fact, I consider Volo to be another example of a character playing the same role for the books. Both are personalities that lend a voice to the prose.
CM
Adventurer
I am prepping for a Neverwinter setting game to run alongside my Sundering game and reading through the Neverwinter Campaign guide for the first time.
Wow.
I hope any future regional books WotC publishes have as much detail and as many plot hooks spread out throughout them. Nearly every page has sidebars with plot hooks, and many major NPCs are left open to DM interpretation as to where their true loyalties lie (usually with several suggestions). There are very few NPC stat blocks. At most, they recommend using stats of "NPC X" from one of the monster manuals. It's supposed to be a heroic-tier setting, but I could easily see a Neverwinter campaign going straight through epic and not running out of material. If you haven't perused this book yet, at least page through it somewhere.
I will second the motion for an online interactive atlas. Tying it to a DDI account would work for me.
Finally, I'm not sure complaints about FR's Mary Sue NPCs are valid in the 4e era. Most of those from the 2e/3e era are dead, and the few remaining rate, at most, a paragraph or two. Going from memory, I think Elminster rates a quarter-page sidebar in the 4e FR campaign guide. Drizzt's mention in the Neverwinter guide is limited to a brief note about his camp in the city, and a few "grandmaster techniques" he can teach the players. Hopefully the Sundered Realms don't revert back to page-long statblocks for such NPCs.
Wow.
I hope any future regional books WotC publishes have as much detail and as many plot hooks spread out throughout them. Nearly every page has sidebars with plot hooks, and many major NPCs are left open to DM interpretation as to where their true loyalties lie (usually with several suggestions). There are very few NPC stat blocks. At most, they recommend using stats of "NPC X" from one of the monster manuals. It's supposed to be a heroic-tier setting, but I could easily see a Neverwinter campaign going straight through epic and not running out of material. If you haven't perused this book yet, at least page through it somewhere.
I will second the motion for an online interactive atlas. Tying it to a DDI account would work for me.
Finally, I'm not sure complaints about FR's Mary Sue NPCs are valid in the 4e era. Most of those from the 2e/3e era are dead, and the few remaining rate, at most, a paragraph or two. Going from memory, I think Elminster rates a quarter-page sidebar in the 4e FR campaign guide. Drizzt's mention in the Neverwinter guide is limited to a brief note about his camp in the city, and a few "grandmaster techniques" he can teach the players. Hopefully the Sundered Realms don't revert back to page-long statblocks for such NPCs.
I am not a Realms fan, but that book made me want to run a Realms game. It's one of the best single-book settings in D&D history. an_idol_mind
Explorer
Personally, I think purging the Realms of the powerful NPCs would actually hurt some of the charm of the setting. As a collection of maps and lore, I don't think the setting is all that special. The many conflicting personalities and the feel of the Realms as a living world is one of the things that drove it to high levels of success while other settings faltered.
I think the big thing to avoid is having the novels radically change the setting. The novels as part of canon aren't a bad thing, but players and DMs shouldn't be hamstrung by them. If WotC wants to put out a novel that pits Elminster against some uber big bad (say like Elminster in Hell, but with much less suck involved), that's fine. But don't have the consequences radically revise the whole world. That way, if DMs want to use elements of that story, they can, but they aren't forced to do so.
As to a massive retcon, the problem with hitting the reset button is that you're going to have some people vocally displeased no matter what. You can say "restart everything at the gray box," but that voids a lot of lore that was actually pretty good. The Time of Troubles, for example, was a horrendous event but brought out elements that many people like, including wild magic and the Baldur's Gate video games that many people like to work into canon in their Realms. That's also not to mention that just resetting everything to the gray box seems like a wate to me - if you want to play things like that, why not just get the gray box and say, "this is the point we're playing from"?
That said, the 4th edition Realms was unpopular enough that it's probably the one place I could see a retcon working from. It's not that the 4th edition Realms were bad, but they took gamers so far away from the people and places that defined the Realms that it might be a good idea to go back. Jumping the timeline 5 to 10 years ahead is one thing. Jumping it 100 years ahead and changing the basic physics of the world is another.
Overall, WotC seems to be setting the Sundering up as something akin to the New 52 in DC comics, where we're going to have elements from the past smashed into a post-Spellplague Realms. Maybe that will work well, but I get the bad feeling that it will probably be more confusing than any other option. Hopefully, that won't be the case and the Realms can go back to what made it such a strong setting in the first place.
I think the big thing to avoid is having the novels radically change the setting. The novels as part of canon aren't a bad thing, but players and DMs shouldn't be hamstrung by them. If WotC wants to put out a novel that pits Elminster against some uber big bad (say like Elminster in Hell, but with much less suck involved), that's fine. But don't have the consequences radically revise the whole world. That way, if DMs want to use elements of that story, they can, but they aren't forced to do so.
As to a massive retcon, the problem with hitting the reset button is that you're going to have some people vocally displeased no matter what. You can say "restart everything at the gray box," but that voids a lot of lore that was actually pretty good. The Time of Troubles, for example, was a horrendous event but brought out elements that many people like, including wild magic and the Baldur's Gate video games that many people like to work into canon in their Realms. That's also not to mention that just resetting everything to the gray box seems like a wate to me - if you want to play things like that, why not just get the gray box and say, "this is the point we're playing from"?
That said, the 4th edition Realms was unpopular enough that it's probably the one place I could see a retcon working from. It's not that the 4th edition Realms were bad, but they took gamers so far away from the people and places that defined the Realms that it might be a good idea to go back. Jumping the timeline 5 to 10 years ahead is one thing. Jumping it 100 years ahead and changing the basic physics of the world is another.
Overall, WotC seems to be setting the Sundering up as something akin to the New 52 in DC comics, where we're going to have elements from the past smashed into a post-Spellplague Realms. Maybe that will work well, but I get the bad feeling that it will probably be more confusing than any other option. Hopefully, that won't be the case and the Realms can go back to what made it such a strong setting in the first place.
the Jester
Legend
I'm pretty sure that his fix is the Sundering.
Scrivener of Doom
Adventurer
Funnily enough, one of my proposed "fixes" is to ensure that RAS never has any further influence on the Realms. Gungans were bad enough in Star Wars; turning every dwarf into a bearded gungan is just too annoying....
Yeah, RAS and the other novel authors are very much the ones responsible for the "RSE to end all RSEs" ... until the next novel series needs an RSE to sell.
I'll continue with the 4E Realms for a few more years... but I would still prefer a reset back to 1375 DR and for the needs/wants of the novel authors to be ignored.
Lord Blackstone
First Post
Greetings....
Personally I would love a complete series of Forgotten Realms Encyclopedias. With the sheer amount of information, this can be done with an Appendix that comes out every year to update new material.
But my other idea is a a Grey Boxed Set made from the same material as a hardcover book for durability.
BTW... New Guy... lol
Personally I would love a complete series of Forgotten Realms Encyclopedias. With the sheer amount of information, this can be done with an Appendix that comes out every year to update new material.
But my other idea is a a Grey Boxed Set made from the same material as a hardcover book for durability.
BTW... New Guy... lol
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