Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5198409" data-attributes="member: 20741">Because we were talking about how much the Drizzt novels came to dominate the "official" view of the Underdark in the Frogotten Realms, and how the baggage that those novels accumulated over the course of time began to circumscribe the freedom of GMs to make their FR Underdark into what they wanted -- and not simply as that realm was depicted in the novels?If you've never read a Drizzt novel, and your players haven't read one -- then maybe it has little or no effect?If you have read a novel, or your players have, and the official FR Underdark materials are steeped and aligned with the increasingly large Salvatore "mythos" of Dizzt and the Drow? It becomes vastly more difficult to do this with the same degree of freedom.The counter to this view was voiced as :"The Underdark is a big place, I can do whatever I want. Ignore all tht novel stuff"It might be a Big Place, but Big Place or not, my point was that WotC still feels very constrained (and it's just as Big to them).  You might not feel constrained. That's fine. Many other DMs in the Forgotten Realms, however, did feel constrained -- just as WotC felt increasingly constrained.  To some people, "canon" matters concerning these matters and they feel bound by it -- or their players do. (Note: That observation is not intended to be used in an approving or a pejorative manner. In no way is it implied to be a "canon respecter=good, canon ignorer=bad. It's intended to be a factual statement only) The original point out of all of this is that, happily, almost NONE of this baggage is brought to the Darklands, which is all to the good and was the point of this increasingly tangential discussion.That's how we got here <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Sure is dark in here though -- and BIG, too! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

Verification