Let's break the Realms!

[JoeGKushner]

Netheril never fails.

Unlike some story books that talk about how great and mighty the old empire was without mention of what they ruled like, modern Faerun is in dire condition because of the status of the current rulers of magic. Dwarves slave in the mines, elves have essentially left the main land as any confrontation between elf high magic and Netheril magic based on the lost scrolls of Nether will result in vast destruction.

Highly secretive of wizardry, they hunt down bards, sorcerers and warlocks. None should know the secret of magic least they create another opportunity for the weave to be damaged.

The only hope?

Destroy the weave, even if at least temporarily. Find a way to cause something similar to the Avatar Crisis. Present the other gods with too tempting a target of Mystra. Find enough Smokepowder to blow the gates of Heaven open and shout forth for the dogs of war.

 

[Nymrohd]

Lathander succeeds in his incantation. Instead of the Dawn Cataclysm, all evil gods of Toril are exiled and unable to reach their followers. The churches of Lathander, Tyr and Helm start a crusade against the remains of the churches of evil gods.

 

[Nymrohd]

Heroes fail to defeat Sammaster's plan before he manages to convert hundreds of chromatics into dracoliches. With an army of undead dragons, the Cult lays waste to Damara, Vaasa, Impiltur and the Vast and proceeds to meet an allied army of Cormyr, Sembia, the Dalelands and Zhentil Keep only to crush it and devastate most of the Heartlands. Soon though, the Cult is unable to satisfy the demands of it's dracolich allies despite the widespread pillaging. Several powerful dracoliches seize back their phylacteries as well as those of other undead dragons and carve vast tracks of land into miserable kingdoms of undeath and horror.

 

[jdrakeh]

Years ago, I extensively plotted an "Overdark" campaign in which a certain Red Wizard (formerly of Thay) managed to escape from Ravenloft with an artifact that amplified shadow-related magic and magical abilities. He then used this artifact to strike an allegience with several shadow dragons and, in turn, with the Drow of the Underdark.

The basic plan was that the shadow dragons, with their new found power, would fly high above Toril, blotting out the Sun over Thay, thus allowing the Drow armies to emerge from hiding and fight unhindered in the artificial night. In this manner, Thay would be conquered and serve as a new kingdom (with Halik as its master) for those previously exiled to the depths of the Underdark.

 

[I'm A Banana]

When I mixed it with Cthulu, my basic idea was this:

Change the Rules of Magic, then Have Something Big Attack.

I decided to have magic make you go insane, and then pepper in giant tentacled horrors from beyond the stars, but it should work if you do something like...magic requires a sacrifice of life (one mortal per spell? ten mortals per spell?), or magic is defiling like Dark Sun, or magic suddenly goes wild, or spells open up the equivalent of nuclear explosions, or whatever.

Magic is sort of the way the good guys win in most of high fantasy including, especially, the Realms. Suddenly change the rules they work by, and problems get tough to solve.

Then you introduce not some falliable, intelligent, scheming villain, but simply something that's big and destructive. The Terrasque, or elementals, or a 4e-style demon, or Elder Gods. The people of FR start to use magic to fight the thing -- and that magic does more harm.

I liked mixing the Mythos with FR because it helped me get that "helpless, horrified" feel that I feel works well as a counterpoint to most of FR's daisy-fresh fantasy. Elminster wasn't just killed off, and he didn't just go evil like a big cliche, but he went insane, which is more dangerous. And then no one could find him, or any of the other powerful magical entities of the world (every Chosen? insane. Mystara herself? Insane. Divinations? Make you go insane), and had their own problems besides. A key part of the campaign revolved around infiltrating a horror-show perversion of the Dalelands, a sort of American Gothic filtered through HP Lovecraft, with terrible infinities and isolated, flesh-eating cannibal communities, trying to find the most powerful entity on the planet to beg him for help, only to find him knee-deep in his own waste babbling the Fibonacci sequence. "1, 1, 2, 3, 5..." That sort of iconic power reduced to helpless nothingness was much more effective than keeping him powerful and just making him a bad guy (and, of course, eventutally the PC's had to kill him, and it was poingiant and heart-wrenching to have to put down a world-famous hero, a sort of death of all the Realms were, rather than just a romp for haters -- when they put him down, it barely lasted three rounds).

Drizzit had his angsty rebellion removed since the drow, always paranoid and scared of their shadows at the best of times, faded into night-gaunts and then into simple vapor, the stuff of dreams. His own rebellion kept him grounded in the world for a little while longer, but he was struggling to hold on. When they searched the frozen north (because what is a Lovecraft-style game without at least one antarctic trip?), Drizzit was their guide, but was dangerous and unstable and eventually left them to die (and probably wandered off a cliff rather than become a spectre like the rest of the drow, at the end).

Things that I loved about that campaign:

1. The people who loved FR had a lot of fun saving their favorite places and people. Once they knew that "magic = crazy town," they were able to make a big difference in the places they loved. I think one played an elf and loved the idea of Silverymoon, so I let her character actually make a difference there.
2. The tone of hopelessness is a counterpoint to the FR tone of shiny good vs. stupid evil. Evil is no longer just "bad guys." You're fighting for simple survival against a force so overwhelming that it makes you crazy to contemplate it. PC's can be huge in such a setting, especially since magic doesn't solve any problems anymore.
3. The flexibility that mystery gave me. I could have the players invested in various places without revealing events on the outside until the characters investigated, and found that the tide just keeps going, and more and more of the world is dark, and empty, and lonely, and dangerous.

If you want to keep it grounded in fantasy, I might set it during the spellplague, rather than after. Mystara is dead, but everyone is still sorting out that event, as the spellplague begins to ravage various lands and alien monsters come from over the sea (the first people to see Dragonborn probably won't welcome them...). It would be a but more light-hearted, but it's still a pretty big RSE.

I also wouldn't have sold this as the "new Realms." I wouldn't play in the Realms after this. There's nothing really left. I would play in the realms during and before this, but the thing that's left is unrecognizable, drained of all the metaplot and characters that made people adore the Realms in the first place. If you never wanted the Realms in the first place, it's fine, but why would you call it a Realms game? If you wanted the Realms, this won't work, either.

 

[Nai_Calus]

The Sundering never happens. Corellon steps in and stops the Elves from causing it. Which is probably too damned long ago and too big of a change to even conceive of how that would change things. >_>;

Lolth somehow never finds out about Toril. No Lolth, no sodding matriarchal insanity, no bloody Drizzt. You'd still have Vhaeraun and possibly Eilistraee, but Lolth, no. (Which would totally screw over the Lady Penitent series, but that's mostly the POINT. Vhaeraun was awesome, damn it.)

The Crown Wars don't happen, or go differently. Whatever the reason, the Dark Elves are never turned into Drow.

Nobody said it had to be *recent* events we were breaking.

 

[S'mon]

My preference would be to just use the Grey Box and ignore everything else, including all the stuff about Chosen and the you-can't-kill-this-NPC spells (I remember as a teenage DM I let a player take Elminster's Evasion as a spell... *sigh*)

 

[Olli]

This may be a bit of a threadjack, but:

This Elminster´s Evasion Spell. I have only access to the 2nd Edition version, and it´s pretty annoying, but shouldn´t a wellplaced Disjunction solve all problems with a contigencyladden mage????? Wouldn´t it boil down to who wins initative??

So, whats the problems with this spell that I don´t see??

Olli

 

[S'mon]

This may be a bit of a threadjack, but:

This Elminster´s Evasion Spell. I have only access to the 2nd Edition version, and it´s pretty annoying, but shouldn´t a wellplaced Disjunction solve all problems with a contigencyladden mage????? Wouldn´t it boil down to who wins initative??

So, whats the problems with this spell that I don´t see??

Olli

Eh? All NPCs/monsters have Disjunction spells?

AIR, what happened was that the PC had been paralysed and was wrapped in the coils of a Type V (Marilith) demon, either about to chow down on her (male player, female PC) or already dead, I don't recall. She EE'd and escaped/self-raised. Doesn't sound so bad these days maybe, but for a 1e campaign* it was pretty game-breaking and made the PC effectively unkillable. There weren't a heck of a lot of NPC Arch-Magi flinging Mordenkainen's Disjunction spells around, given its risks.

*Given the long run of bad luck and freak occurrences it took to threaten a 19th level PC with a 7 hit dice demon in the first place!

 

[Nymrohd]

Elminster carries a few minor artifacts on him, and has a very vengeful half-crazed girlfriend that can defeat all the exiled archdevils in Avernus before breakfast. Disjunct him if you dare