Forgotten Realms - Public petition

[FourthBear]

The Realms need a reboot, yes. But what they need is a real reboot -- a return to the Year of the Prince -- followed by a temporal lockdown, such that the setting never advances to the Year of Shadows, and a divine lockdown.

Now this I could definitely get enthusiastic about. I've been a long time Realms fan, but I have to admit that the Tiime of Troubles bounced me right out of canon compliance. I have a hard time getting upset about the upcoming Realms Shaking Events for 4e, since my group has been ignoring canon ever since the 2e switch. We've borrowed lot of ideas from the Realms since then, but certainly not completely.

I do like a number of effects of the RSE they're describing: cleaning out a large number of high level and redundant NPCs (and deities), organizing the deities around something that resembles pantheons (rather than a rummage sale), giving a few more points of ongoing conflicts in the Realms. I'm not terribly enthused about how they're going about it, since I have to admit I really dislike cosmological shifts after the setting is initially presented. I find it very hard to respect a set of divine entities that change their roster so frequently. Of course, this is a more general problem, as I've always thought that the novel writers of the Realms do a terrible job depicting the gods. Every time I've read one with the gods in it, it's killed my enthusiasm for playing a cleric of that god. So I stopped reading the novels. I will say that the RPG writers have been much more consistent, since they seem to realize that the gods in the Realms have a purpose beyond the soap opere and slapstick.

 

[Belorin]

I too am a fan of the Realms, AND think the Realms need revision.

However, I'm firmly of the mind that this revision needs to take place out of game. There should be no in-game rationale for any changes. The 4E Realms should just be different, no explanation. No more "Time of Troubles"-style events. Save the RSEs for novels, and divorce novels from the campaign setting. Once that is done, you can lock down the Realms like they are doing to Eberron.

I agree AND disagree with this, having no in-game rationale for the changes is like saying the Forgotten Realms are gone, but the Points of Light campaign is set on the continent of Faerun, we changed everything else.
Divorcing the novels from the CS is probably the only change we could hope for in the future, but we would have to make a very strong case for it as many of the novels are written by staffers.

Bel