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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ibrandul" data-source="post: 8127545" data-attributes="member: 6871736">I think most FR fans agree with you, with the exception of some of those who first got into the setting during 4e.I'm a 5e-era FR convert—I never played in the setting or followed it before 2016. But since then I've dived in deep, reading all the 5e hardcovers and a lot of earlier novels and supplements.Unlike a lot of longtime FR fans, I like the 5e Realms a lot. I especially like the 5e hardcover adventures more than longtime fans do—and they seem to me to be more respectful of the lore than a lot of 2e supplements were.I even like the 4e Realms, though I wish it were a lot more fleshed-out (I also wish this about the 5e Realms). I also recognize that I only like the 4e Realms because by the time I joined up, it was in the past; if I'd been a fan during the 3e–4e shift I'm sure I would have hated it like most other fans did.But I have one major problem with the 5e Realms that's growing bigger and bigger as I play in more 5e groups.The problem is that the 5e Realms function in two almost incompatible ways with relation to the setting's recent history.The first Realms is a default fantasy setting—a lore-rich setting that's still close enough to generic high fantasy that you don't have to explain much to newbies in order to get going (there's no high concept like in for example Eberron).The second Realms is what I like to call a post-post-postapocalyptic fantasy setting.The Wailing Years—1385 to 1395 DR, the decade immediately following the onset of the Spellplague—were truly apocalyptic. Suddenly whole regions were destroyed or transformed in a magical cataclysm, and many thousands of people mutated into spellscarred monsters. The Realms of that era would essentially be a postapocalyptic fantasy setting.But because of the time-jump, the 4e era starts almost a hundred years after that, when things are still pretty weird but have settled down a lot—into a post-postapocalyptic fantasy setting. In fact, I think part of the justification for the time-jump was (or should have been, even if this wasn't actually a major motive) precisely so that the apocalyptic transformation would be far enough in the past that players could be told "this is the way things are, and have been for a while" rather than "everything changed just a few years back."Then comes the Second Sundering, which is really almost as big a transformation as the Spellplague was. It only seems less huge because the resulting status quo is closer to generic high fantasy, rather than farther from it. The 5e Realms, by this logic, is a post-post-postapocalyptic fantasy setting. But there was no second time-jump (or rather, there was a very short one), so the Second Sundering is very recent history.The majority of PCs in 5e games in most regions of the setting should be keenly aware of this event—probably not of the reasons for it, nor the cosmic specifics (they might know nothing about Abeir, for instance), but of the fact that whole regions and even populations suddenly appeared or reappeared, loads of gods returned to power after a long absence, etc.The original apocalypse, the Spellplague, is now just over a century old in historical terms; most characters don't need to know much about it. But in the 5e Realms, the "restorative" apocalypse of the Second Sundering happened over the previous decade. It's not in the rear-view mirror, it literally just happened. For campaigns to gloss over it would be like setting a pulp adventure game in 1949 and ignoring WWII.And yet, in order to function in its first role, as a generic default high fantasy setting, the magnitude of the recent history has to be minimized or ignored.As a player and a DM in games where most other players aren't as invested in the setting as I am, I'm constantly bumping up against this. Increasingly it feels to me like players who know a lot about FR and players who don't are playing in completely different settings.This isn't just like a Star Wars nut playing a Star Wars RPG with folks who've only seen the movies; in that case you might have the fan sometimes informing people about this or that alien race or planet or whatever.With FR, it's more like the knowledgeable fan telling the rest of the players, "Well, you know, the region next door was trapped on another planet for a hundred years, until it mysteriously returned at the same time as half the gods were resurrected—last summer." To which the response is a very understandable "WTF is this setting supposed to be anyway?"</blockquote>

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