So what ever happened to the Far Realm?

[Nebulous]

Don't worry. The far realm and its creatures are too good to be forgotten, and many DM love to use it to give a Lovecratian touch to their games and stories. It is simplemenly not yet, we are working with other things.

Anybody craving some Lovecraftian 5e stuff should pick up Cthulhu Mythos by Sandy Peterson, it's got you covered from races, classes, tomes, spells, gods and monsters.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

But D&D has algo homegrown good ideas, for example the kaorti, the Neh-Thalggu or brain collectors, the cranial escynter or the ethergaunts from Fiend Folio 3rd Ed.

And now Lovecraft's work is public domain now, more 75 years after his death. It can used by 3rd party publishers. Pathfinder monster compendium and Starfinder alien archives have got some creatures from Lovecraf's mythos.

And most of D&d players want to kick-ass monsters, not tragic stories about helplessness against unknown primal forces from the void of the universe. D&D stories styles is more "if you use a Deathstar then I will Luke Skywalker with a X-Wing". Players want to defeat their own fears and to learn to have the right balance between self-criticism and faith in oneself. Even Ravenloft or Dark Sun, the darkest lines of D&D worlds have enough space for noble heroism and hope in a better future.

* If WotC publishes a new edition d20 Modern you can bet they will want its own spiritual successor or the Call of Cthulhu, something like the setting "Dark*Matter"

 

[Ath-kethin]

The Far Realm gets a mention in the DMG and PHB, so it's still there officially. But none of the planes have seen much action in 5e officially yet, really.

 

[Bohandas]

Actually, 3.x did that. Check out 3.5E's Lords of Madness.

The mindflayers were explicitly from the material plane (albeit the distant future of the material plane) in Lords of Madness

It was the Eberron setting that made all aberrations far-realm affiliated

 

[Bohandas]

I'd love to see a book that covers all of the planes and introduces a few creatures from each. Vacuum and Ash are new to me, though. What books are they from?

They're from the Planescape setting, where there were eight "quasielemental" planes between the elemental planes and the energy planes. Vacuum was between air and negative evergy and ash, IIRC, was between fire and negative energy

 

[Teemu]

The mindflayers were explicitly from the material plane (albeit the distant future of the material plane) in Lords of Madness

It was the Eberron setting that made all aberrations far-realm affiliated

Yes, and Eberron was also the first D&D setting to incorporate the Faerie plane into the core cosmology. Both the Far Realm and the Feywild then became part of the core planar structure in subsequent editions.

 

[Bohandas]

Yes, and Eberron was also the first D&D setting to incorporate the Faerie plane into the core cosmology. Both the Far Realm and the Feywild then became part of the core planar structure in subsequent editions.

It incorporated it and screwed it up. The multiverse is supposed to be a subset of the Far Realm, not the other way around. To give a mathematical analogy, if the material plane was the real number line, the multiverse would be the complex plane (or possibly the quaternions) and the Far Realm would be the sedenions

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

The mindflayers were explicitly from the material plane (albeit the distant future of the material plane) in Lords of Madness

It was the Eberron setting that made all aberrations far-realm affiliated

Lords of Madness specifically states that the progenitors of the illithids are of unknown origin - there's enough implied to go with a Far Realm origin.

I agree that you made a good point about the role of Eberron in making all aberrations into creatures of the Far Realm: Lords of Madness makes reference to this in its introduction.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It's been replaced by the Near Realm.

Ill-Advised New Planes Of Existence

But seriously, yeah, as @Fanaelialae mentioned, 5e hasn't done that much with the planes, though it still does get mentioned now and then. I wouldn't be surprised if they have deliberately eased up on it, since 4e was really into using the Far Realm.

 

[Arnwolf666]

I never really understood the concept of the far realm. I just used them as another name for CN Limbo. And I liked that name better.