Netheril's Fall - First Impressions

If Astarion's Book of Hungers is the player-facing add-on for Heroes of Faerun, than Netheril's Fall is the slightly more beefy add-on for Adventures in Faerun. The new digital "DLC" for the Forgotten Realms book is a gazetteer for the lost kingdom of Netheril, with an overview of the fallen kingdom, a look at two of its cities (one flying city, Eileanar, and the landbound city Conch), some magically-themed environmental hazards, and a short collection of mini-adventures in the style of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Netheril's Fall is functionally a mini-gazetteer, albeit not quite as beefy as the five gazetteers found in Adventures in Faerun that detail various regions.

At first glance, it's easy to see why Netheril's Fall wasn't included in Adventures in Faerun. Netheril is a fallen empire and having an adventure in Netheril will likely require the use of time gates (which are conveniently explained in the supplement, with two adventures dedicated to traveling and crossing through a Time Gate. I'll note that the adventures in this book feel much more specific than what we saw in Adventures in Faerun or the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. While the adventures in other books could be "plugged" into any level-appropriate campaign, these adventures feel much more narrow in scope and cover specific locations or events found in the DLC. There's a few adventures in Adventures in Faerun that cover locales seen in the gazetteer, but there aren't very many that cover a specific event. I don't mind the "one page adventure" format, but I'm not sure it works with every adventure type. If an adventure sends players into a mad wizard's attempted ascent into godhood, I want a little more meat than a few encounters and a resolution of "well, the players will have time to explore the city before the ritual fails."

Another criticism I have of Netheril's Fall is that Netheril doesn't feel nearly as fantastical as an ancient high-magic society should. Given that Adventures in Faerun did a very find job of elevating the Forgotten Realms beyond its generic high fantasy trappings, I feel like a bit more care could have really sold Netheril as more fantastical in nature than what we got. If we could have gotten a few more pages about Netheril's culture, I feel like Netheril would have been more appealing as a place that DMs would want to incorporate into their campaigns. As presented, there are a few cool ideas, but even the phaerimm (one of my favorite D&D monsters) feel a bit flat compared to what we would have gotten.

I was critical of Astarion's Book of Hunger's price point, and while I feel that $15 is still too high for Netheril's Fall, there's a lot more "content" compared to that book. Generally speaking, some adventure content, a gazetteer, and some monster statblocks is probably a bit more valuable than one new species and a collection of feats, although I'm probably a bit biased towards DM content since I'm usually the one behind the DM screen. I personally would had preferred a $10 price point for this DLC, but others may feel that the price point of these are more fair.

All in all, I feel a bit underwhelmed by Netheril's Fall. Netheril seems like a very cool part of Forgotten Realms lore, but it's not given full justice here. I know there's some other Netheril content out there from past editions, and I encourage people to check those out on DMs Guild if they want a real deep dive into this lost empire.

 

[JPL]

I imagine it to be a bit like the Time Lords of Gallifrey - hyper advanced society, caste based, with strange customs.

Or like the Aes Sedai flashbacks from the time of legends.

Or the Romulans

I think you have to bring Netheril through cultural and behaviors oddities that develop from a society where magic runs like tap water. Eberron dialed up to eleven!

100%. You need to hit the time-traveling players with something really foreign and antiquated and exotic, and it is hard to do when they are pretty much walking from one epic fantasy Renaissance faire into . . . a somewhat epicer fantasy Renaissance faire.

 

[Zardnaar]

Nonsense.

Alot of people aren't that interested in real world events or history.

So if they dont watch the news, read much and neither do their friends.....

 

[Zardnaar]

And others with similar comments of course

We have people in a real world with a highly available internet who have already forgotten about major events and nations within their own lifetimes.
Knowledge and civilizations fade really fast.

Yup.

Xenophon camped in the ruins of Ninevah iirc. They didnt know who built it. Neither did the locals who lived there.

City was destroyed 200 years before that.

Bronze age collapse. History quickly became legend.

 

[Chaltab]

I think Paul's point was that these facts aren't lost knowledge. Anyone who looks into it can easily discover which side the Soviets fought on in WW2 or can easily look up when the Berlin Wall fell.

Though seeing as Faerun doesn't have an easily accessible internet it makes more sense that elves could forget aspects of Netheril in a few generations.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think Paul's point was that these facts aren't lost knowledge. Anyone who looks into it can easily discover which side the Soviets fought on in WW2 or can easily look up when the Berlin Wall fell.

Though seeing as Faerun doesn't have an easily accessible internet it makes more sense that elves could forget aspects of Netheril in a few generations.

Counterpoint is people dont do that. Well not everyone.
So you can live through historical events and be oblivious if its not in your back yard.

IRL if elves existed and old one could remember Byzantium. An old 1E one could potentially remember Rome. Or they didn’t live nearby and be oblivious.

 

[JPL]

Or. . . .Romans were kinda mystified by the pyramids, which were as ancient to them as the Romans are to us.

And Faerun has had some cosmic shifts and resets that we haven't had. As far as we know....

 

[Chaltab]

...yes, out of their own disinterest. Not because WW2 is a mysteriously distant past outside of memory.

 

[TheSword]

I think Paul's point was that these facts aren't lost knowledge. Anyone who looks into it can easily discover which side the Soviets fought on in WW2 or can easily look up when the Berlin Wall fell.

Though seeing as Faerun doesn't have an easily accessible internet it makes more sense that elves could forget aspects of Netheril in a few generations.

Worth also remembering that the elves were in open conflict with Netherill. What elves know about Netherill could be extremely prejudiced.

 

[Zardnaar]

Worth also remembering that the elves were in open conflict with Netherill. What elves know about Netherill could be extremely prejudiced.

Some elves. One of the survivor states had lots of half elves.

Really hard to find exact locations for those states. Insets on a large map old product 1991 only map I found.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

It's really tricky to talk about conceptions of antiquity when you have characters that live for 750 years. We just don't have any kind of real-world basis for comparison. Do elves think of history differently to humans in D&D? Presumably if they don't live exclusively with their own kind, it must be kind of jarring to see the pace at which society evolved around them! Funnily enough, even Tolkien falls foul of this, despite his meticulous work elsewhere: he has his Elvish languages evolving realistically over realistic timescales...but the people using those languages are functionally immortal and presumably notice that they aren't speaking the same way they did in their own lifetimes. We all just agree to ignore it I guess.

In my own settings, I generally take 2,000 years as the baseline for whatever civilisation is calling the shots. This conveniently means that I can say the year in the game is the same as the actual year. And, as our own civilisation and dating system demonstrates, two millennia is long enough ago (for humans) that it's not considered unreasonable to believe an incarnated god might have been wandering around the place at that time.

I think any longer than that - as much as fantasy (and sufficiently worm-based or grimdark sci-fi) settings throw around tens of thousands of years of history - raises too many questions, sociologically and psychologically speaking. In theory there are in the order of 10,000 years of human history available to archaeology, but in practical terms we can't really grasp that span of time and what it means.

A couple of thousand years is fine. You can do a lot in that time! Probably a lot more than you think, just like how a couple of hundred miles of landscape is more than enough space to fit in basically any campaign when you start drilling down into every little forest and valley.

If Elven memory is as reliable or only marginally more reliable elves could experience a past where their own memories are unreliable guides.
Be a hella interesting thing to explore.