D&D 4E FR 4E SPOILER - Grand Histoy of the Realms info

[Kae'Yoss]

Honestly I think it's just a poor excuse to turn over the setting, just because there's some rule changes. Most DMs would probably just be like, "well magic has always worked that way" and be done with it.

Exactly. Has worked well in 3e. There was no justification for the changes, they were just assumed to have always been there.

But this is the Forgotten Realms and it does need a cataclysmic event with every edition change, otherwise no one would buy it.

First, 3e didn't have a big bad event that turned half the world into crap. And this one sounds like mor cataclysmic than any three events in the last 1000 years or so combined.

 

[Alnag]

After seven years I am seriously interested in the new face of FR. If it will be dark enough (as it sounds) I might be tempted to buy FRCS at least. Otherwise I will stick with other settings...

 

[Vraille Darkfang]

The whole marriage dealio is this:
Siamorphe gets pissed at the boss, Tyr, and leaves the House of the Triad.
Tyr knows that Siamorphe is a valuable divine entity and wants her back to keep the Triad strong
Sune seeing conflict on the horizon wants to strengthen Brightwater and gives Siamorph a new home.
Helm and Sune barter for Siamorphe's return. Sune figures a political treaty between Brightwater and the HotT would be good. A marriage between Tyr and Tymora would seal the deal. Sune gives some Love potion No.9 to enhance Tyr's and Tymora's attraction. Maybe Cyric diverts the Love Mojo to Helm instead.
Tyr is Awful Lawful and follows some archaic form of courtship. Helm acts as the broker. Cyric creeps over and in his best Iago impersonation gets Tyr to believe Helm is not being chaste enough or something. It only has to be a really minor infraction in Tyr's eyes for him to say something to Helm. Helm takes it as a slight to his honor being impugned and demands satisfaction. Tyr is awful lawful and accepts. Helm dies. Tyr is horrified. Tymora, thanks to Sunes influence, is heart broken that Helm is dead and she is married to his killer. Unlucky in love, I guess.
Sune is one ruthless SOB. She gains a whole bunch of the House of the Traid to her court, gets rid of fickle Tymora and weakens Tyr's position with the other gods. She pins the rap on Cyric and gets him imprisoned but not before he and Shar whack Mystra, Sune's 'friend'. Very Machiavellian. Sune is now one of the most influential gods in the Great Tree or whatever it turns into, the Great Topiary.

I think I have the promo for the new hit series this summer on the CW!!!!!! (since when is Sune LE?)

Really. Trying to rip off Shakespeare usually comes off very cheesy, unless you are one heck of a writer.

How I would have done this.

Bane (back after using "Bless You" Xvim to hide our for awhile) is ready to expand his power. A lot of the LN Aspects of Helm can apply to the LE Tyranny of Bane. Bane whacks Helm to get his power. The Triad tries to intervene, but gets their rear handed to them by Bane (and his allies Shar & Mask). The Triad gets all bent out of shape by their defeat.

As part of his deal with Mask & Shar he agrees to help them whack Midnight (Mystra). They set up Cyric (he hates her after all) to take the fall (after all Cyric has proven to be an incompetent boob in everything else written about him).

Netheril 2.0 Takes Place. Mystra's Powers flow into one of her chosen, elevating her to the new Mystra. I'd take the Witch Queen of Algarond. She's crazy enough to re-write how magic works on a whim.

There you go.

Same result, but doesn't depend on Multiple Divine Beings rolling 30 consecutive 1's on Int & Wis checks.

Bane wants power & revenge. Bane gets power & revenge. Sets him up nicely as one the key gods in 4th ed FR.

And we all know Bane is one bad muther (shut yer mouth).

 

[Banshee16]

Thing I don't like about a "skip ahead" type of reboot is the PCs miss the most interesting stuff. The Bane/Xvim stuff last time was pretty interesting but was over by the time the setting "started" -- it bothered me so much I took an entire campaign to fill out that event and get the PCs involved in it.

Actually, the upgrade to Monte Cook's Diamond Throne setting (AU to AE) did the same thing. "Two years later, the dragons have returned." If I'd stuck with my AU game, you can bet the PCs would have been involved in that.

But do we *know* that it's skipping forward 100 years? That number keeps getting thrown around, but the Grand History of the Realms only mentions that the new world begins after the spellplague. Then, a separate book, a novel, has Drizzt talking about those events that had happened 100 years ago, so, as far as I know, we're assuming it's going to be a 100 year jump.

Maybe it's only going to be a bit of time, and players will be playing in the immediate aftermath of the Spellplague, or maybe 5 years later, with all the chaos that has resulted.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

This is why I kinda liked White Wolf's Time of Judgement series. When they elected to do the biggest, world-changing events ever introduced in their setting, they made them into sourcebooks that could be used to run the events with the PCs directly involved.

It'd be great to see an adventure sourcebook that deals with the "fall of the old world," so you can participate in Mystra's murder (maybe you get tricked into helping), the whole misunderstanding between the gods, and the deaths of the non-human pantheon members.

Sort of like what Monte Cook did with "When the Sky Falls" and "Requiem for a God"?

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

Yeah, but there's evidence to suggest that Dragons of Summer Flame was a deliberate attempt to kill the setting, rather than just move it forward. (There's evidence the other way, too, so the question's murky. The SAGA System and the Fifth Age were an attempt by DL fans on TSR staff to revive the setting under the limits they were given by management--post-DoSF, non-D&D, and possibly a mandate for a diceless game as well. And 'revive' is key--DL as a game line died in mid-1995, and with a whimper at that.)

To put it another way, I've seen a setting assassination attempt, or at least something that could be plausibly argued as such. What we've heard about the FR changes--and I admit, my knowledge of the Realms is limited to most of the Salvatore and Cunningham books--doesn't sound like the same thing.

Maybe I haven't read the right boards or something...where did you hear about this? I believe that Dragons of Summer Flame came out either at the same time that SAGA was released, or SAGA was announced *when* DoSF came out.

Interestingly, the whole thing with Dragonlance is somewhat relevant to the discussion of FR. I have always believed that Dragonlance died as a setting *because* there was no advancement of the metaplot, and no really relevant products for growing the world.

We got the Dragonlance hardback, the chronicles modules, there was that trilogy of modules in which the Kodragon, Amphidragon, and Astral Dragon were introduced, and then Otherlands. That was the first "new" sourcebook that doesn't dealing with War of the Lance Ansalon. Then the Taladas boxed set came out, which was *very* cool, but which wasn't Ansalon, and was basically a whole new setting. Then "Minotaurs of Taladas"..the book about the minotaurs of the empire, followed by the trilogy of Taladas modules, which were actually pretty good for a while, and New Beginnings, which was just a character creation intro book. Finally, there was the Tales of the Lance boxed set, which took us back, again, to the War of the Lance on Ansalon.

I believe that they never really went beyond the War of the Lance, and consequently, weren't able to really develop the setting. It could be said they did this because many fans wanted to play through the War of the Lance. But as a consumer of products, I needed something more to stay interested. I played through the War of the Lance with the modules, reached the end, and...now what? There was no guidance of where to take it from there, since everything was just rehashing the same time period, over and over.

Resetting FR gives them huge amounts of freedom to change things and sell new products (whether you see it as good or bad).

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

Many of them are no "Vanilla Fantasy".

That's what I was getting at...

The Weave: You don't just cast magic, you access the Weave, which is like an interface between spellcaster and raw magic.

That's really not that original though. How is it different than Krynnish wizards channeling power from the moons of magic? Or from the Defilers and Preservers of Athas drawing life energy from the plant (and animal, if you have those obsidian spheres) matter around them?

I think those are somewhat more original than an invisible web of magic surrounding the world that, uh, gives you magic.

Banshee

 

[Mortellan]

That's what I was getting at...




That's really not that original though. How is it different than Krynnish wizards channeling power from the moons of magic? Or from the Defilers and Preservers of Athas drawing life energy from the plant (and animal, if you have those obsidian spheres) matter around them?

I think those are somewhat more original than an invisible web of magic surrounding the world that, uh, gives you magic.

Banshee

"The Force is strong in this one."

 

[eiglos]

You might like to know that before TSR bought the Forgotten Realms in Ed's original campaign there was no Weave. The god of Magic was a carefree deity who took the form of a Unicorn. She is still present in the Realms and for those that know their Realmslore it isn't difficult to find her .

 

[M.L. Martin]

Maybe I haven't read the right boards or something...where did you hear about this? I believe that Dragons of Summer Flame came out either at the same time that SAGA was released, or SAGA was announced *when* DoSF came out.

Long adherence to tracking the genesis of the Fifth Age from what's been said by designers and other involved personnel online. Most of what I know comes from the old (as in MPGN-era) mailing lists and Usenet:

What I know is that:
a) Dragons of Summer Flame's plot was conceived entirely by Weis & Hickman without dictates from the gaming side of things.
b) The Fifth Age game was given the go-ahead based on presales of DoSF, with the direction from management that a) it had to be set after DoSF, and b) it couldn't be D&D. (Statements by Wolfgang Baur in his 30th anniversary interview with Monte Cook suggest that the diceless element might have been dictated by TSR management as well.)
c) Margaret Weis once responded to a fan asking if DoSF was meant to "save DL by killing it" with a response of "Finally! Somebody gets it!". One of the 5A designers also states that he was told by Margaret that DoSF was a wall that Krynn should never go past.

Interestingly, the whole thing with Dragonlance is somewhat relevant to the discussion of FR. I have always believed that Dragonlance died as a setting *because* there was no advancement of the metaplot, and no really relevant products for growing the world.

Entirely possible. James Lowder has said that the post-WotL era was being kept away from in hopes that W&H might someday return.
EDIT: And the alternative explanation for DoSF was that it was an attempt to kick things forward. Again, the evidence isn't entirely clear, but I do think that the book feels more like an attempt to close the setting than to restart it.