What If: The Time of Troubles Never Happened?

[Knightfall]

Okay, I'm borrowing this idea from Marvel Comics and applying it to role-playing campaign settings. First up, the Forgotten Realms.

Any Realms fans knows what happened during the Time of Troubles and how it changed the Realms. So, how would the Realms different if that story arc never happened?

Did your FR campaign ignore the Time of Troubles and just continue on as is and if so, how was it different?

 

[Crothian]

If it had never happened I would have bought more FR books in second and third edtion.

 

[Knightfall]

If it had never happened I would have bought more FR books in second and third edtion.

Sigh.

Okay, I'm glad somebody got that joke out of the way right away.

 

[joethelawyer]

Okay, I'm borrowing this idea from Marvel Comics and applying it to role-playing campaign settings. First up, the Forgotten Realms.

Any Realms fans knows what happened during the Time of Troubles and how it changed the Realms. So, how would the Realms different if that story arc never happened?

Did your FR campaign ignore the Time of Troubles and just continue on as is and if so, how was it different?

back when we did FR, we bought the original FR box set, pre-time of troubles. the time of troubles novels were the first and only FR novels i ever bought. after reading them and seeing how stupid they were, i decreed as DM that the whole time of troubles never happened in our version of the world, nor did anything else from any of the other novels ever published. we bought some of the supplements detailing certain areas of the world, and thats about it. We did it our own way. If some of the supplements incorporated novel elements, we let them stay, without knowing if they came from novels, as long as the stuff never contradicted anything we did. we fine tuned the world to our own tastes anyhow.

 

[Crothian]

Sigh.

Okay, I'm glad somebody got that joke out of the way right away.

Who's joking? I'm dead serious, after the Time of Troubles I wanted very little to do with the Realms. I own maybe a half dozen FR books and it's because of the Time of Troubles.

 

[joethelawyer]

Who's joking? I'm dead serious, after the Time of Troubles I wanted very little to do with the Realms. I own maybe a half dozen FR books and it's because of the Time of Troubles.

ditto

i think i have the boxed set and 6-8 supplements describing certain regions. like the savage frontier, the dreams of the red wizards, etc. thats it. everything after that was just a stupid exploitation of the "lets write a novel that creates a disruption in the world which causes people to have to constantly buy more supplements because so much changed." i never got onto that money train for T$R.

 

[demiurge1138]

Well, the pantheon would be very much different. For one thing, Mystra would still be LN, so there's a good reason for "why doesn't the Weave just shut down for evil people?" Would probably stop chosen-inflation, a pernicious disease among high level characters.

The Gods of Death would still be around, Bane, Bhaal and Myrkul. This is a mixed blessing. Those three gods are awesome, and Cyric is a chump who I'd be glad to get rid of, but I like a non-evil death god like Kelemvor. Plus, there's a lot of plot potential in gods of death not quite staying dead (the Baldur's Gate series, Myrkul's Horned Helm, the FR conversion of Age of Worms).

 

[Knightfall]

Who's joking? I'm dead serious, after the Time of Troubles I wanted very little to do with the Realms. I own maybe a half dozen FR books and it's because of the Time of Troubles.

Oh, I believe you, but I figured that some pre-ToT Realms fans would do what joethelawyer and his group did and just ignore it. Plus, I figured that pre-ToT fans might have an interesting take on how the Realms could have developed if the Time of Troubles hadn't happened.

 

[SpiderMonkey]

I have mixed feelings on the subject. Pre-ToT Realms was my favorite back in the day (I don't count novels, so...). The product glut along with the novel canon baggage made the setting a bit...unwieldy, particularly if the players had internalized a lot of the assumptions that went along with all that stuff. Also, I didn't think the changes from 1e to 2e were really drastic enough to require an event like ToT.

To actually answer the question, I think keeping Cyric out of the picture would have made for more interesting stories as the 3 gods of death vied against one another. The weave...did that come before or after ToT? Didn't care for it, and I preferred a LN Mystra.

That said, I really like the 4e Realms.

 

[Silver Moon]

Okay, I'm borrowing this idea from Marvel Comics....ignore the Time of Troubles

I have it on good authority that the Time of Troubles was the result of invading Skrulls.