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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bodhiwolff" data-source="post: 4439220" data-attributes="member: 71196">I feel the new Realms Campaign book gets an unfair rap. I don't know what people were expecting, but I think that their expectations were unreasonable, and I think that if they were given what they were expecting, they'd ultimately be unhappy.  (and the book would've been 25 volumes!) What they did, conceptually, makes a lot of sense to me.  They advanced the Realms about 100 years in history.  They did a couple of major events (both to explain the 4E changes, but also just 'cause life moves on, y'know?) and had those changes impact all of the various nations, groups, and races in a logical fashion. Some nations rose, and some fell.  Some succeeded, and some failed.  In fact, a lot of the changes mirror a hundred-year historical span of our own global history.  A lot happens, and the landscape at the beginning of a new century is pretty significantly altered. While some people insist on calling the book "fluff", what it really is, is an outline.  It outlines the nation, group, or what-have-you in just enough detail to get you going, but not so much detail that you become hidebound.  It gives you structure, guidance, and the bones of the thing, but leaves you free to fill in the blanks yourself.  (and leaves them free to expand upon it later, to be sure!) They needed to make sure they kept it light. That was always the problem with the Realms.  After dozens and dozens of supplements, and a major rules changeover already, and 50 or so novels, all of which had to somehow be tied into a canonical structure, the Realms was a hidebound, ossified, codified structure that didn't leave a lot of wriggle room. Now, the doors have been blown wide open. You're given the outline of the structure you need to get in and start creating your campaign.  You're given the important bits, and the structure, and the highlights, but not so much detail that you get bogged down. Now, there is room for expansion and detail, sure.  The whole thing is ripe for taking one section and expanding it.  (take a look at the Dragon magazine article on Cormyr to see an example of what I'm talking about). But for a single, solitary, introductory Realms Campaign Guide?  I really couldn't have expected more. They even left the history nice and loose, so you can play with it yourself and make it fit whatever your own needs happen to be.  Instead of tieing your hands with an overly-structured time-space network that you *must* adhere to, they've given you a sandbox and set you free to build your own castles.  Some people argue that they *want* to know what happened in the canonical universe, and for those people, we'll find out via other sources.  As books and novels trickle in, the various wiki's will fill us in.  But I don't need that codified in this book, thanks.  'Cause for *my* world, it liberates me to do things *my* way. And for mechanics -- well, in a month, we'll have the Player's Guide, with tons of mechanics.  The two books together will be quite the one-two punch! If you look carefully, you can see where they carefully made decisions about what to include, and what *not* to include.  While a lot of people might be frustrated about what isn't included, it is fairly obvious *why* they didn't include those aspects (either they can be gleaned from other sources, or they're unimportant and space-consuming, or frankly they just want to keep things lighter and more "meta"). I applaud their decisions. And you *know* I'm picking up the Player's Guide now!</blockquote>

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