What should the Realms Lose?

[delericho]

Reboot it from scratch. Toss out all the previous continuity and start again from word one. Toss out and discontinue all the novels. Get better writers and start again.

Thing is, if you do that, why not just create an entirely new setting from scratch? Isn't that more likely to support a whole new line of supplements than the Forgotten Realms name, where a lot of people are going to complain about "paying for all the same stuff again" (whether that perception is correct or not)?

And make the mountains flow correctly, for God's sake.

I'm confused. Make the mountains flow correctly?

 

[Kae'Yoss]

The Realms need to lose exactly one thing:

People who don't like them how they are and want to turn them into a clone of all the boring Double Vanilla Fantasy settings out there.


Got Mana? Then you don't belong to the Realms, play somewhere else.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Keep all the gods. Hell, add more. It's very reminiscent of Greek mythology that way, where the gods are always meddling in peoples' lives. And to whoever doesn't like the idea of a goddess of magic, in a magic-using and pantheistic society, of *course* magic is going to have its own deity...it just makes sense.

Go back to the 1e level of development...lose a lot of the roads, towns, and extra details that have mysteriously appeared since. In other words, follow the 4e trend and go points-of-light.

Declare that anything not in the box set (or however they release it) is not core...all the novels, for example, should be treated as just really elaborate fanfic...and people can develop and use the setting as they like.

Keep the magic, both in amount and oddballity.

Downplay (but don't eliminate) some of the over-used iconic characters e.g. Elminster. Make it clear these characters need never appear in a FR game unless the DM desires otherwise, even if the party has its home base in Shadowdale! That said, play up some of the iconic characters that haven't been seen as much e.g. the Seven Sisters (and who says FR doesn't have strong female characters?).

Lanefan

The final sign of the Appocalypse has come: I agree with most of what Lanefan wrote!

I wouldn't lose any cities or roads. Points of light would work even with all those cities and highways - after all, it's not Coruscant with a Megacitiy that covers the whole landmass. There's still countless miles of empty road with no building in sight. And beyond those roads there's untold square miles of unpatrolled landscape.

I would probably keep all the fiction as core - one thing I like about the Realms is that stuff happens all the time, not just from one campaign setting to the next.
Of course, with the DI, they could give us a Forgotten Realms Newspaper that summarizes the plot from the novels, and adds some more news, some small, some grander. Say, some book where a small town in southern Cormyr is levelled by warring factions comes out in June. Then July's or maybe August's News will contain that info. Maybe with an excerpt of the book.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I would probably keep all the fiction as core - one thing I like about the Realms is that stuff happens all the time, not just from one campaign setting to the next.

Unfortunately, the quality of the writing is uneven, and at least some GMs are going to find it really irritating if they wanted to use Tilverton as the set-piece for their campaign, only to read a book (or adventure!) where it gets destroyed by a magical black hole, or what have you.

The same thing happened to the Dark Sun setting. There was this wonderful book called "the Veiled Alliance", which is a hidden group of good-hearted wizards (and other characters) operating in various cities in the setting. (Wizards = witches there, as far as perceptions. A wizard caught by a crowd is lucky if they simply get ripped to shreds, stabbed or stoned right then and there.) The various Veiled Alliances didn't have a common organization though; the one in, say, Nibenay was very different from the one in, say, Urik.

In addition to information on the Veiled Alliance, there was also lots of flavor and color about the various cities.

Then someone wrote an official five book series that killed off several sorcerer kings, letting the wizards come out of hiding. (They're still largely hated but there are no more epic level wizard/psions actively hunting them down in at least three cities.) In addition to changing the Veiled Alliance in each of those cities, they also changed the color and flavor of those cities. That's a bit annoying if opposing the templars of Balic was a big part of your Dark Sun campaign.

That was a Dark Sun Shattering Event, and those always have at least some negative repercussions. Even the coming changes to FR are going to hurt some (a lot of) campaigns; if they're really moving the setting a hundred years into the future, a lot of non-uber good-aligned NPCs are going to die, and so will some interesting villains.

 

[green slime]

IMO, the realms would do best if they lost WotC.

Seriously.

They were most interesting in the 1e grey box, as envisionaged by Ed.

The further it got from that vision, the more of a hodgepodge disaster it became.

That's not entirely the fault of WotC; even TSR played its part.

Probably the best decision would be to let them go their seperate ways.

 

[WayneLigon]

...than the Forgotten Realms name, where a lot of people are going to complain about "paying for all the same stuff again" (whether that perception is correct or not)?

I think we've established that 'paying for the same stuff again' is not a problem where most people are concerned; we saw that with 1E Realms, 2E Realms, 3E Realms, etc. There will be a few people who will storm off in a huff, but for everyone that does, the rest will bitch about it and then open their wallets as long as the new stuff is perceived as at least the same level of quality and has at least some new material, or is presented differently. And the new people that come into the hobby are getting it for the first time, so they don't care.

I'm confused. Make the mountains flow correctly?

Mountains and formed in chains that run in definate patterns, not bunched and scattered about the map whenever someone needed a convenient obstacle or filler. Same with hills, woods and most other geography. There are large swatths of the Realms that ignore lots of basic geographical principals.

 

[green slime]

Mountains and formed in chains that run in definate patterns, not bunched and scattered about the map whenever someone needed a convenient obstacle or filler. Same with hills, woods and most other geography.

"If mohammed cannot go to the mountain, the mountain must come to mohammed."

Or in other words: In a fantastical place containing real deities, and mortals with near godlike power, would you really expect an earthlike geography based on billions of years of plate tectonics, and erosion?

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Mountains and formed in chains that run in definate patterns, not bunched and scattered about the map whenever someone needed a convenient obstacle or filler. Same with hills, woods and most other geography.

You're so nasty. You're practically telling Chauntea that she's a disfigured crone. That's psychological abuse. She could sue you. Screw that: She could smite you.

 

[wayne62682]

Declare that anything not in the box set (or however they release it) is not core...all the novels, for example, should be treated as just really elaborate fanfic

This is the best suggestion, IMO. The biggest issue I have as a player (don't usually DM) in FR is that I enjoy the history and flavor of the world, so I like to read the novels. When the novels all have an impact on the world and you publish as many of them as FR does, it screws everything up. I played in one game that was set a few years before the then-current crop of novels (I think it was the series after Return of the Archwizards); it was very hard for all of us to not think of events that occurred in the novel, because FR novels are all core and all happen in "real time" as soon as they're published.

Yes, a campaign can ignore the events of the novel, but it's not the same, and for people like me who enjoy playing a setting in its pure, canon form, it feels "wrong" to discount the events of the novels.

So I agree - make the novels "alternate universe fanfiction" and be done with it, instead of letting each new batch reshape the world and add/remove NPCs and cities and events.

 

[delericho]

I think we've established that 'paying for the same stuff again' is not a problem where most people are concerned;

I'm not sure of that. I thought the reason WotC stopped doing 'region sourcebooks' for 3e was that the sales of the first few were relatively poor. They put that down to people wanting crunch rather than fluff; I thought that part of the problem was that the initial FRCS was so good, it didn't need expansion at $30 a go. Either way, there it was.

Mountains and formed in chains that run in definate patterns... There are large swatths of the Realms that ignore lots of basic geographical principals.

Oh, right, that makes sense. I agree - I believe it was the old "Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide" that said that fantastic elements on your world map were a good thing, but that they worked best in moderation, and that you should have a reason for placing each one.