Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8127186" data-attributes="member: 5948">I honestly don't know of anyone who genuinely liked the continual train of Realms Shaking events (by the time of late 2nd ed they were even coming along purely in novel series, while the game supplements struggled to catch up, continually about 3 cataclysms behind - Rage of Dragons, Death of the Dragon, Return of the Archwizards, Evermeet the novel, Last Mythal, Threat from the Sea etc all come to mind), but in the most part they were relatively ignorable.  They tended to be localised, so if your game was set somewhere else and if you GM didn't feel the need to bring Elminster or the Seven Sisters into things to update the party on what they'd been doing, and if none of the PC clerics worshipped whatever god TSR had murdered this week, it probably wasn't a big deal to you.  There was still a huge volume of lore out there, many regional sourcebooks, and most of it was still perfectly usable as reference material.  Time advanced sure, but not so quickly as to immediately obsolete any of the legacy books.The Spellplague and the transition to the 4th ed realms was a beast of a different colour.  It went out of its way to be destructive, and it took deliberate pains to make sure that all the old lore was of no use.  The time jump of 100 years made any NPCs or small, localised settings obsolete, because most of them would have died of old age.  The enormously huge changes to the pantheon - not just who the gods were, but the very nature of them - rendered decades of lore about the deities and churches largely unusable.  Huge tracts of Faerun , which had been painstakingly detailed in multiple sourcebooks - were blown up, or sent to Abeir, or rendered magically radioactive wastelands, and all that lore was rendered moot in a stroke.  It's like Spellplague and similar changes to the realms were designed with the express intention of making old sourcebooks useless.  And even worse - after burning the old Realms to ashes, WotC didn't even bother trying to replace it.I can understand SOME of the rationale behind what the designers were trying to do.  Clearing out the glut of Named Novel NPCs who did everything, and breaking down some of the big realms nations a bit to better reflect the 'Points of Light' model they were busy promoting.  But creative destruction requires creation as well as destruction, and WotC badly dropped the ball (and for what it's worth I think they do now realise that, given there was an interview a while back where one of the designers talked about how they'd lost the trust of the FR player base and had to prove once again that they were worthy custodians of the lore).After the Rage of Dragons, I could still play a priest of Tyr.  I could look at a bunch of older sourcebooks and there'd be lots of material there on Tyr, his church, his doctrine, etc etc, and the Rage of Dragons would have left that largely untouched.  After the Spellplague, I got three lines in various disparate sourcebooks vaguely saying that Tyr had murdered Helm and then abandoned his godhood and then (after the FR playerbase read about this in the Grand History of the Realms previews and pointed out how mindnumbingly stupid it was) came back, and I have no detail on how this affected his church or clergy or faith, or whether he'd changed as a result of the experience.  Probably the most significant event in the history of Tyr, and there's no effort put into it whatsoever.  Lazy, bad, design that destroyed without creating.Same with Var the Golden.  Tiny little place, in the far south-east of Faerun.  Got one chapter in an old 2nd ed sourcebook and has been largely ignored since then.  Quiet and peaceful sort of agricultural place -  'the Golden' was a reference to the fertile fields of wheat surrounding it.  I could run a campaign in Var the Golden using that single old sourcebook all the way through 2nd ed and 3rd ed, regardless of what was happening with Mystra and Shades and the Cormyr monarchy etc.  The 4e books, on the other hand, carefully and maliciously devoted one sentence to dropping Var the Golden into the sea, therefore destroying a functional (if old) setting and replacing it with nothing.  I mean, if Var the Golden was too nice for Points of Light, there's a thousand solutions.  Put it under the control of a renegade evil Chosen of Chauntea who goes all Children of the Corn and sacrifices people to the harvest, for instance.  Don't just offhandedly destroy it.   FR has, since Avatar, always been somewhat in flux.  It's a pretty gonzo sort of place, of Big Magic and Big Villains and Big Melodrama and Big Evil Plots.  I was no fan of the continual Realms-Shaking Events that always seemed to be dealt with by boring NPCs in forgettable novel series, but I could accept them as part and parcel of the setting, and entirely in keeping with the FR ethos.  The Spellplague was on a different order of messed-up.</blockquote>

Verification