jester47
First Post
All factors considered, the Forgotten Realms in my mind seem to be a pretty wild and dangerous place. When you consider more intelligent lifeforms than you can shake a stick at, Evil and Good orgs fighting all sorts of different kinds of wars, the near direct involvement of gods, huge cataclysms, terrain that is weird and erie for all its miles, Gaurded and armored caravans as a matter of principle, HUGE mountains, vast forests, endless planes, locations that seem other worldly. If all of this were emphasised I think the place would get a different reception. However, it seems to me that what is presented as the forgotten realms is not what all the facts indicate.
Is this true or just my imagination at work. I mean you can't travel 10 miles in this place without tripping over some ruin, natural marvel or historic site. Maybe it is my tendency to go to extremes in description.
I find that I can drop most darker grittier supplements into the realms with little or no modification. Hollowfaust dropped right in, The Hornsaw fits too. Most anything by necromancer works too.
It baffles me how the place gets sort of sterilized. There seems to be an underlying assumption by people that assumes that travel is not really dangerous and the places are not really interesting. And I dont mean that this out of familiarity, but rather it seems that it is expected not to be interesting. Maybe its the descriptions of the places and the people. I don't know where thatattitude seems to come from. But when I look at locations in the realms, they seem really really interesting. I mean look at hills edge and all the stuff going on around it. Granted it is not described too much but a little looking around and extrapolation and you can come up with a pretty interesting place. I find that most real life cities are interesting to look at from almost any vista. Add magic and fantasy and I can't imagine Hills Edge not offering some sort of spectacle.
And I think that is what it comes down to. Spectacle. How much spectacle does the setting offer? And how frequent is the spectacle? And I think that is why FR gets a bad reputation as being kind of droll. The spectacle that is there is not presented as such.
But thats not all of it either. There seems to be a layer of weirdness that is there but does not come accross easily. Think about it. with all thedifferent forms of life, and all the different peoples and intelligent beings (ancient, alive and dead) that almost always somthing is going on and that somthing has a 75% chance of being darned strange. Reading of the areas around Secomber would prove this. You have Zhents from the black road, wererat bandits, strangeness from the highmoor, lizard people, and the high forest. Think of everything that could be going on there... Five things could be happening in the high forest, bandits and zhentsusing whatever was handy in attempts to control trade, hostile intelligent ecology! Things in the river, town politics again involving interesting locations and things on the outskirts. Yuan-ti. remains of dead civilizations all over. Remains of dead people all over (you know they have to be there!) In a place as unstable and uncertain as the realms, most everyplace probably has the remains of somthing ot someone nearby. Throw in magic, and strange creatures and well, the place becomes really active and starts to look more like Swords and Sorcery rather than Heroic Fantasy or high fantasy (whatever these terms might mean). I get the impression that it is a world where you have to be very well guarded, very brave, very stupid or very nuts to travel beyond a settlement.
It is stated in the materials that "Faerun's city-states and kingdoms are small islands of civilisation in a vast hostile world, held together by tenuous lines of contact." So, the way I deal with this is that typically if it is a village or smaller and on the map, that village is the only settlement in the area. If it is a city or town, there is a network of lesser settlements around it that have the protection of the town or city. See my other thread for a system to figure this out. It is stated that for every 1 person living in a city there are 9 in the countryside. This in my opinion should be the extent of civilisation in FR. A thin tenuous latticework streached over miles of the unknown, savage and magical spectacle so dangerous that civilisation becomes a spectacle itself. But even then civilisation is only about 50% civilized. It seems to me to be a place where nature is brutal, swords are used as often as words, magic is everywhere and rarely completely beneficial (ones man gain is another's loss).
So what I see here is this setting that when I give it a good look has as much grit and is as S&S as the next, but somehow when people remember it it turns into vanilla...
well I think I am done.
Aaron.
Is this true or just my imagination at work. I mean you can't travel 10 miles in this place without tripping over some ruin, natural marvel or historic site. Maybe it is my tendency to go to extremes in description.
I find that I can drop most darker grittier supplements into the realms with little or no modification. Hollowfaust dropped right in, The Hornsaw fits too. Most anything by necromancer works too.
It baffles me how the place gets sort of sterilized. There seems to be an underlying assumption by people that assumes that travel is not really dangerous and the places are not really interesting. And I dont mean that this out of familiarity, but rather it seems that it is expected not to be interesting. Maybe its the descriptions of the places and the people. I don't know where thatattitude seems to come from. But when I look at locations in the realms, they seem really really interesting. I mean look at hills edge and all the stuff going on around it. Granted it is not described too much but a little looking around and extrapolation and you can come up with a pretty interesting place. I find that most real life cities are interesting to look at from almost any vista. Add magic and fantasy and I can't imagine Hills Edge not offering some sort of spectacle.
And I think that is what it comes down to. Spectacle. How much spectacle does the setting offer? And how frequent is the spectacle? And I think that is why FR gets a bad reputation as being kind of droll. The spectacle that is there is not presented as such.
But thats not all of it either. There seems to be a layer of weirdness that is there but does not come accross easily. Think about it. with all thedifferent forms of life, and all the different peoples and intelligent beings (ancient, alive and dead) that almost always somthing is going on and that somthing has a 75% chance of being darned strange. Reading of the areas around Secomber would prove this. You have Zhents from the black road, wererat bandits, strangeness from the highmoor, lizard people, and the high forest. Think of everything that could be going on there... Five things could be happening in the high forest, bandits and zhentsusing whatever was handy in attempts to control trade, hostile intelligent ecology! Things in the river, town politics again involving interesting locations and things on the outskirts. Yuan-ti. remains of dead civilizations all over. Remains of dead people all over (you know they have to be there!) In a place as unstable and uncertain as the realms, most everyplace probably has the remains of somthing ot someone nearby. Throw in magic, and strange creatures and well, the place becomes really active and starts to look more like Swords and Sorcery rather than Heroic Fantasy or high fantasy (whatever these terms might mean). I get the impression that it is a world where you have to be very well guarded, very brave, very stupid or very nuts to travel beyond a settlement.
It is stated in the materials that "Faerun's city-states and kingdoms are small islands of civilisation in a vast hostile world, held together by tenuous lines of contact." So, the way I deal with this is that typically if it is a village or smaller and on the map, that village is the only settlement in the area. If it is a city or town, there is a network of lesser settlements around it that have the protection of the town or city. See my other thread for a system to figure this out. It is stated that for every 1 person living in a city there are 9 in the countryside. This in my opinion should be the extent of civilisation in FR. A thin tenuous latticework streached over miles of the unknown, savage and magical spectacle so dangerous that civilisation becomes a spectacle itself. But even then civilisation is only about 50% civilized. It seems to me to be a place where nature is brutal, swords are used as often as words, magic is everywhere and rarely completely beneficial (ones man gain is another's loss).
So what I see here is this setting that when I give it a good look has as much grit and is as S&S as the next, but somehow when people remember it it turns into vanilla...
well I think I am done.
Aaron.
)
