D&D General The Purple Dragon Knights are tied to an Amethyst Dragon (confirmed)

[TiQuinn]

Either that's true for every setting or it's not true for the Forgotten Realms.

The lore remained the same regardless of what individuals groups did and only changed when the company that owned the setting or Ed Greenwood decided it did.

Drizzt remains a hero in canon even if a DM decides he's a serial killer in their individual campaign.

I agree - it’s true for every setting. Heck, there are many fans who rejected / still reject Greyhawk’s official canon because they felt it clashed with Gygax’s vision of the setting despite TSR advancing the timeline. Also, if the lore is spread out across what WotC says it is and Greenwood says it is, how do they (fans) reconcile them when they conflict if there are two separate lores? Ultimately, they have to choose which one they want to follow but they are then ignoring the other.

 

[Parmandur]

No it's not, as I've repeatedly explained, it's about the use of character death.

Important characters died in that comic and didn't come back because bringing them back would be bad storytelling.

If Batman got shot in the head everyone would just be waiting for him to get resurrected or for it to be revealed how he managed to survive. Or maybe he'd get replaced by a clone or a Batman from another universe.

When a character in the Forgotten Realms comics died there was every reason to wonder if they were gone for good.

Honestly, I've read Forgotten teams novels, and this all feels very par for course whatever method they use.

 

[Necropolitan]

Honestly, I've read Forgotten teams novels, and this all feels very par for course whatever method they use.

Which ones?

List of Forgotten Realms novels - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Aside from the main protagonists of Legend of Drizzt or characters like Manshoon where coming back is part of their deal what books involve death being easily dealt with?

There are hundreds of novels. In the overwhelming majority of them death is final.

 

[Parmandur]

Which ones?

List of Forgotten Realms novels - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Aside from the main protagonists of Legend of Drizzt or characters like Manshoon where coming back is part of their deal what books involve death being easily dealt with?

There are hundreds of novels. In the overwhelming majority of them death is final.

I meant they are DC or Marvel comic book levels of storytelling. If Sammaster comes back because of a tiem traveling interdimensional clone, that's just freaking Second-Day in Baldur's Gate.

 

[Necropolitan]

I meant they are DC or Marvel comic book levels of storytelling. If Sammaster comes back because of a tiem traveling interdimensional clone, that's just freaking Second-Day in Baldur's Gate.

I'm still talking about the use of character death and you'd still be wrong if I wasn't because that's not true.

I've backed up all my claims with specific examples. What are you basing your claims on?

 

[Parmandur]

I'm still talking about the use of character death and you'd still be wrong if I wasn't because that's not true.

I've backed up all my claims with specific examples. What are you basing your claims on?

I don't need to :back up" anything, I'm just saying there are a million ways they could bring Sammaster back that would be surprising or out of genre. No point getting preemptively upset before even knowing which FR style malarkey theybare using, it will fit anyways.

 

[Necropolitan]

I don't need to :back up" anything, I'm just saying there are a million ways they could bring Sammaster back that would be surprising or out of genre. No point getting preemptively upset before even knowing which FR style malarkey theybare using, it will fit anyways.

No, it's the same problem as "Somehow Palpatine returned."

Regardless of how it happened it's bringing the character back that's the major problem. It being done in a way that either violates established lore or brings in time travel or the multiverse would make it worse.

As I've repeatedly pointed out it'd be like bringing back Thanos after Avengers: Endgame.

 

[Parmandur]

No, it's the same problem as "Somehow Palpatine returned."

Right, but here's the thing, the fun Star Wars novels already went there decades before Disney. In the Thrawn trilogy of blessed memory, even!

Is it cheesy, pulp comic book storytelling? Yes. Is the Forgotten Realms a cheesy pulp comic book setting? Also, yes.

It's like getting riled up at rumors that McDonalds will introduce a new menu item that is fried.

 

[Necropolitan]

Right, but here's the thing, the fun Star Wars novels already went there decades before Disney. In the Thrawn trilogy of blessed memory, even!

Is it cheesy, pulp comic book storytelling? Yes. Is the Forgotten Realms a cheesy pulp comic book setting? Also, yes.

It's like getting ruled up at rumors that McDonalds will introduce a new menu item that is fried.

The Thrawn trilogy didn't bring back Palpatine, in fact its use of cloning made it clear clones weren't the original people they were cloned from. Palpatine used already-established methods of moving his mind into cloned bodies in other books and comics, but that was used in the same way Manshoon's clones were. It didn't use it as a cop-out beyond avoiding his first death in Return of the Jedi.

And as I've repeatedly pointed out character death in the Forgotten Realms is treated completely differently than character death in DC and Marvel comics. The vast majority of the time named characters who die don't come back.

WOTC has done nothing to inspire confidence that it choosing to bring Sammaster back is anything other than an attempt to profit off name-recognition at the expense of good storytelling.

 

[I'm A Banana]

That works for RPGs in a way that it doesn't for fiction worlds, because RPG products are just menus of options for DMs to mine for material. Canon is just a suggestion.

Now, will they have some hokey comic book plot explanation of his he came back? Sure, probably, that's how the FR and D&D works, and we know that time travel is a theme in this set of books so literally anything and everyone is on the table.

Is D&D really a story at its heart? The novels are controlled by their various authors (most of the time but not always) but the foundation of D&D is that every table tells its own story because ultimately it’s a game. Not a story. Sometimes there’s an attempt at a collective story, sometimes there isn’t. None of it lends itself well to a firm canon, though.

Its Saturday morning cartoons. Same as what 40K has been turned into really. You have the main protagonists, that now have models that GW wants to sell, and the main antagonists, that have their models that GW wants to sell.

The 'bad guys' have a habit of being able to resurrect, and so guess who loses the 'fight' to later return?

Its all so shallow and cheap.

I meant they are DC or Marvel comic book levels of storytelling. If Sammaster comes back because of a tiem traveling interdimensional clone, that's just freaking Second-Day in Baldur's Gate.

There's a sort of nihilism death spiral that can take over on this path. "Everything is made up and the lore don't matter!" Well, sure, but then there's no reason to invest in it, attach to it, no reason to elevate it, no reason to do better, endless excuses for phoning it in and messing with stuff because nothing matters anyway so who even cares.

That's toxic. It treats the idea of caring about something as if it is a mistake - "Don't care. It doesn't matter to anyone else. What are you a child?"

Screw that noise with a duck. That's not the kind of future I want to see in this hobby. I want the fans' passion to be rewarded and treated as the precious and amazing thing that it is. It's not even how Saturday morning cartoons work anymore (if things like Gravity Falls are any indication).

If a villain coming back is going to wreck engagement like that, it's arguably not worth it.

I don't know that Sammaster coming back is necessarily going to be like that (like I said, I have a lot of tolerance for whatever earned reason they want to put forth), but I think that it is a legit concern. Especially when we're involving time travel, which is the hackiest of hacky excuses.