Greenwood on FR npcs

[Razz]

I like FR and it's high level NPCs. They have to exist. Maybe I watch a lot of anime and read a alot of comic books, but the whole "There's always someone or something more powerful out there" is fundamental wherever you go. I believe the whole "The PCs should be the only most powerful beings out there" is both unrealistic and, obviously, boring because then you have nothing to challenge them.

Ed Greenwood needs to read some more Marvel comics and watch some more anime. He can be inspired or realize it's not a big deal with high powered NPCs in the Realms.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I've talked to Ed about the differences between the commercial setting and his setting in some detail.

Unfortunately, most of us don't have access to his version of the Realms. So while criticisms of Mr. Greenwood might not be fair (unless its in his novels), criticisms of the published Realms are fair.

A couple of things:

* The gods are impersonal and mysterious in Ed's Realms.

A bit like Eberron... but not like the published setting and not like the novels, some of which (like Elminster in Hell) are written by Mr. Greenwood. In the novels, the deities are just NPCs with uber-power.

* His major NPCs either exist as a byproduct of his fiction

Some of these don't look like PCs at all

were former PCs, or were constructed for eminently sensible, average RPG play reasons

None of the Chosen fit into either of those categories His best known characters, except maybe Mirt, don't fit into those categories.

and should be looked at as ciphers for characters that *you* create for those reasons.

What do you mean by cipher?

The patronage that people like Elminister, Mirt, et al provide are not much different than what NPCs do in many games.

You mean pull them out of the fire? Because that's pretty rare in games. But these guys should be doing that all the time - there's little reason not to.

I think the CoM and other high-level spellcasting good-aligned allies are too powerful to be offering patronage. The moment you tell them the world's going to end, they should sigh, finish their manicures, and get to work. They can't metagame and assume that the published adventuring module is beatable by PCs - they have to act like powerful characters who don't want the world to end would act like.

It's quite a different situation from, say, getting patronage from a high level general. Sure he can kick your butt, but he still can't take on a whole army by himself, prevent the witch king's madness, move magic portals around or otherwise solve all your problems. The most he can do is offer advice and maybe introduce you to contacts or give you weapons. (And probably not even magic weapons!)

(Actually, while Mirt may be higher level than the large majority of PCs, not being a wizard, he's not capable of doing things the PCs aren't doing. Ed's wizards - in his novels - sure get a vast library of spells* available to them that PCs will never see. Mirt's not fixing holes in the Weave and - as far as I can tell - operating ridiculously accurate information networks the way Khelben does. Plus, without teleporting, he isn't mobile enough to deal with threats away from Waterdeep.)

* Not that I want to use those spells as a PC. I think those spells are basically deus ex machina, and shouldn't be available at all.

To conclude this well-reasoned discussion that turned into a rant about one paragraph in (whoops), I think the powerful NPCs should be treated like other NPCs (and PCs), deities should be treated as deities, and there should be a lot less deus ex machina (the first part being literal in Mystra's case).

 

[librarius_arcana]

As much as I generally avoid the Realms these days, Ed Greenwood seems to be the type of guy who I'd like to game with.

Yeah same here sounds like a great guy, bet he kicks all sorts o booty when GMing

Nice to her how Elminster talks too lol (right from the horse's mouth, so to speak)

 

[Fenes]

I use those NPCs a bit differently - I simply don't assign stats to them until needed. They got a reputation, but that doesn't fix their level and powers. So - players and player characters can't assume the NPCs will be able to do X or Y.
That let's me use the background of the NPCs if needed, without trying to hard to find reasons why they would not jump in to save the world.

 

[green slime]

We know this in some detail. The central Realms (which Jeff Grubb named the Heartlands), up to the time of the Old Grey Box (1357 DR), is very close to Ed's Realms; beyond those regions, and into the TSR/WotC ongoing timeline, less so. Factor in stuff like the Code of Ethics, and Henry's point that Ed's Realms isn't unchanging. However, Ed's underlying setting has proved amazingly resilient and keeps poking out from under the cruft -- unsurprisingly, as he's still its most prolific author and several other current writers (more than in the early 1990s, in fact) are 'on his side'. The gap is more in how the later setting is presented than in how it works.

I had the privledge of meeting the old greybeard himself back in the summer of '88. We sat and chatted a little, he signed my copy of FR5. (back in those days, gaming supplements were affordable by students.) If I recall correctly, some of the major changes to the setting compared with his original was:

The size of the "continent" was increased massively (by around a factor 10?).
Some change involving Anauroch and the Great Glacier; I can't quite remember.
Somewhere in my mudlled mess of a game room, there may be a few slected notes.

 

[Staffan]

Some change involving Anauroch and the Great Glacier; I can't quite remember.

As I recall, TSR wanted to retroactively place the Bloodstone series in FR, and to make room for Damara they melted off a piece of the Great Glacier.

 

[green slime]

As I recall, TSR wanted to retroactively place the Bloodstone series in FR, and to make room for Damara they melted off a piece of the Great Glacier.

That was it... The not quite so great Great Glacier.

 

[Chimera]

The problem was that every player seemed to want to tie himself to one of the world's major NPCs, which sort of tied them to the big guys' apron strings. It's like they thought that they weren't good enough to be heroes in the world unless they had some association to characters from the novel line.

But that's pretty much Human Nature.

Real Life Occult Orders (Wiccans, Golden Dawn, etc) usually make up some "Lineage" to some important person or some such nonsense. Because people feel better if they can feel like their new faith/belief/practice has been around for thousands of years rather than made up by a bunch of people 50 or 100 years ago.

Entire historical books of philosophy and so forth have been put in the name of past masters and historical persons in order to give them weight.

Heck, even more recent works of art were put in their master's name rather than the student claiming credit. Because the master's name has value.


So... How much "cooler" is it to say "I was taught by Elminster himself!" rather than "I was trained by Fred Jones in the village of Turdheim."

 

[Davelozzi]

All I can say is Ed really knows how to get into character. And female NPCs are definitely fair game for seduction depending on his mood and the character he's playing.

I think that's one of the problems with some of Ed's material. I really don't need to hear so much about the sex-life of his characters.

 

[xmanii]

I've talked to Ed about the differences between the commercial setting and his setting in some detail. A couple of things:

* The gods are impersonal and mysterious in Ed's Realms.
* His major NPCs either exist as a byproduct of his fiction, were former PCs, or were constructed for eminently sensible, average RPG play reasons, and should be looked at as ciphers for characters that *you* create for those reasons. The patronage that people like Elminister, Mirt, et al provide are not much different than what NPCs do in many games.
* There are many, many aspects of the published Realms that have nothing to do with him, but he isn't unhappy about that. He freely admits that some of his background detail is unpublishable in a commercial market (and not just the, er . . . naughty bits).
* Much of this came out of a seminar where Ed and Ken Hite discussed how to incorporate the Cthulhu Mythos into the Realms, which resulted in ideas so cool that they will pretty much dominate how I run any high level play there. Think, "The gods of the Realms are the equivalent of microbes feeding from the spare essence of the sleeping Old Ones," and "The Drow live underground because they know what's going on; they were the original elves who survived past ages and the happy, Evermeet-tripping elves are the refugees who don't know what's coming to get them." Cool, cool stuff.

Feel free to elaborate more on any and all this (and anything that was mentioned)