Neil Bishop said:
It doesn't matter if FR4E's campaign setting is a marvellous piece of work (I think most people, according to various reviews etc..., consider the FRCS for 3E to be outstanding)
It's a very good and thorough piece of work, but in retrospect it spends too many pages flatly cataloguing, without distinguishing what's fundamental about the setting and what's peripheral, and not enough describing what the Realms is like and how it works. It's not surprising that many fail to understand Faerûn's high-level intrigue, for instance, because it isn't described in any one place. In contrast take the far more coherent 1987
Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, or the
Eberron Campaign Setting which lays out that world's sensibility, principles and influences at the start.
Wizards seemingly realized this, and have said they're making the 4E
Campaign Guide more focused, in part by removing parts of the Realms (including Unther, Halruaa and Chondath) the designers feel lie outside the setting's core feel. On the other hand, they're making changes which concede to ideas about the Realms they know are mistaken, having not even attempted to clarify or explain the actual situation, and Rich Baker at one point referred dismissively to this kind of explanation as 'lecturing'. It really would not be all that pedagogically difficult a task.
because, within no time, a series of novels will come out and resolve some of the interesting plot hooks that are to be found in the new campaign setting.
Although Rich has said the RSEs will fall off for a while after the Spellplague, I also see little precedent for hope that Realms novels won't continue to hotshot and use up plot threads faster than they replenish them.
Also, FR3E suffered from not having an introductory adventure or series of introductory adventures that would show a new FR DM how to use the setting as his own campaign world.
Yes; extraordinarily there's only one really good, representative introductory adventure for the Realms -- Ed's FRQ1
Haunted Halls of Eveningstar -- and it's too small (two-thirds was cut in editing) to really show off important aspects of Realms adventuring such as the hallmark multi-sided, multi-stranded conflicts. (The recent
Shadowdale: The Scouring of the Land looks a lot like the campaign adventure we should have got 15 years earlier, but it was too compressed in its use of historical elements, too tied to the ongoing timeline, too short on the social aspects of the Realms, and too late.)
I suppose my essential point is this: the campaign setting can be good or bad, that's almost irrelevant, what really matters is whether there will be a clear and defined strategy as to how the novels and the game world will interact. (2)
I think there have been several good-faith attempts to make the relationship work better, but the two have different real and perceived calls on the setting, and again, there's no reason to think the new Realms will solve this legitimately hard problem.
Bob Salvatore's insistence on using dwarves as comic relief still baffles me, given his respect for and debt to Tolkien, who did so much to redeem them from that. As for Faerûn-authentic naming, that's something that otherwise first-rank Realms authors, such as Jeff Grubb and Elaine Cunningham, took a while to figure out.
