Would you like Maddman's Forgotten Realms?

[fireinthedust]

Reminds me of Monty Python's Holy Grail. "how did you know he's a king?" "well, he isn't covered in S***!"

Also a bit of Discworld. If you haven't, read "Guards, Guards!" (each book stands alone, btw) and see where it leads you with this idea.

Make the characters be there, but be saggy, awful versions of the characters from the stories.

1) Drizzt is still alive, and he's a letch with a thing for scullery maids. In fact, all the half-elves in the Realms are actually his bastard children.

2) Elminster isn't just a low-level sage, he's a novelist who's been writing these awful stories about the realms and feeding them to the PCs all this time. It's part of a scam to sell land and property around the Realms: he writes up these fake sourcebooks and badly written novels, and people buy them and buy "land in Cormyr" like it's the Golden Gate Bridge.

3) The Red Mages are not evil, they're just from Thay and a visible ethnic group... and people in the Dales are just really racist. Same problem with the Zhentarim, as just a valid trade consortium what screwed the dales in a land deal a while back, so Dalesfolk spit over their shoulders at the mere mention of them.

4) The Seven Sisters are a group of elven seamstresses folks in town go to regularly for help. Please refer to Terry Pratchett's Discworld books for an explaination of what that means.



Play with these ideas for a while (a session of low-level hijinks where you get the players to do things around town that gets them to interact with the famous folk from the books) before you suddenly smack the PCs with your own plot twist for the second session:

The sky opens up and out comes a citadel of Shade from ancient Netheryl! "what, they're real?!" "No! I mean, I made them up!" "Well, whoever they are, somebody's got to stop them!"

The players should be the only truely competent people on the planet (other than the head assassin or some other dangerous local the PCs will want to avoid), and as such are the only hope for the Realms. Well, them and whoever forged those ancient weapons in that surprisingly serious dungeon just outside of town.

Making the townsfolk flawed and pathetic can also make them more endearing for the players; ergo the need to step up and do something to save them.

 

[jdrakeh]

I'd love this. Granted, I'm generally not a big fan of post-Grey Box Realms, though. The more "Wahoo!" the Realms got, the less I liked them. By the time that they were teeming with superhuman NPCs by the dozen, the Realms had totally lost me. Yes, I think I'd like your Realms a lot.

 

[Umbran]

That's what this reminds me of: an alternate take on the setting (especially a grittier one). It's not really an alternate history with a historical point of diversion as a "same setting premise, mythical themes dialed back down."

I think you're totally missing the point. The ways in which this differs from standard as-presented Realms is it's main selling point, not it's problem. That's the whole reason to do it in the first place.

Hm, perhaps I am not making myself clear. I don't think I am missing the point.

What he's talking about doesn't sound like "same premise, mythical themes dialed down". Right now it sounds like, "the premise is that it lacks most or all the major mythological points familiar to players of the Realms". So far (and admittedly, there's only a couple of paragraphs now) it has been defined in terms of what it doesn't have, more than by what it does have.

Need I mention how many settings fail to have Drizzt, Elminster, and Myth Drannor? Pretty much all of them! Not having them is not a selling point. I'd want to see what Realms themes (and place names are not themes) he is playing with other than by simple removal.

When you rework Alice in wonderland, do you start by saying, "Well, there's no Cheshire Cat, no Mad Hatter, no Queen of Hearts, and Alice walks not through a fantastic world but a blasted plain...," and expect someone to think that you are playing with the original Alice themes interestingly? Do you start describing an Arthurian retelling by saying you've removed Merlin, Mordred, and Morgan le Fay?

So, tell me what this setting does have - tell me how this is recognizably still the Realms at it's core, like those other works were still Alice at their core.

 

[maddman75]

Need I mention how many settings fail to have Drizzt, Elminster, and Myth Drannor? Pretty much all of them! Not having them is not a selling point. I'd want to see what Realms themes (and place names are not themes) he is playing with other than by simple removal.

They aren't removed, the PCs and the populace at large still believe in them!

That's sort of the whole point and theme behind the thing. The "real" realms is a terrible place full of suffering and death, so the people create fantastic stories based loosely on real people/places/events. The believe that the renegade drow with a heart of gold is out trying to redeem himself. They believe that there's a lost city full of elven wonder in that dark forest. They believe that the Seven Sisters swoop in and save poor hardworking peasants from monsters all the time. They believe that the most powerful wizard in the world lives three Dales over.

Its these stories that give the PC, and the people at large, hope. And when the PCs discover that these are lies, what will they do with that knowledge? Will they try to convince people of the truth? Not likely to get a warm reception, and even if you're successful all you've done is taken their hope from them. Will the PCs strive to be the great heroes of the Realms, only 'for real'.

I'm not hating on them by referring to this version as the Real Realms. I'm referring to an ideal Realms, the ones that most people know and play in. That's the Realms these people dream of.

I think you're totally missing the point. The ways in which this differs from standard as-presented Realms is it's main selling point, not it's problem. That's the whole reason to do it in the first place.

I'd play it in a heartbeat, Madmann. You ever run this as a Pbp, let me know.

I'd love to, but PBP doesn't work for me. Not something I'd get to do in the forseable future, as I don't think any of my current players were ever that into FR. And if the players don't know it, it won't work.

2) Elminster isn't just a low-level sage, he's a novelist who's been writing these awful stories about the realms and feeding them to the PCs all this time. It's part of a scam to sell land and property around the Realms: he writes up these fake sourcebooks and badly written novels, and people buy them and buy "land in Cormyr" like it's the Golden Gate Bridge.

LOL, Elminster is literally Ed Greenwood. Love it.

One thing I'd keep at least partially, is Cormyr. No, they don't have wizards running all over the place, but the Purple Dragons are very much real. One of the best places to live overall, as their knights are fed these stories morning noon and night. You can't make things too grimdark, there has to be something worth fighting for.

It occurs to me that thematically it would work well with 4e's light in the darkness idea.

 

[Kzach]

This is actually very similar to how I like to run my games. I tell players that whatever knowledge they have as a player that pertains to the world is fine to assume as character knowledge, just don't count on it being accurate.

The best way to use this is to have some legends be true accounts, or close to true, and a lot being nothing but exaggerations. If you always turn every legendary tale into nothing but prosaic prose, then the world quickly becomes pretty dull and lifeless.

But if the fantastic actually does exist, and the characters can engage it, then it's a matter of never knowing 100% what is real and what is fake and what might just bite you in the arse around that next corner.

 

[the Jester]

Sounds like fun to me!

 

[Mean Eyed Cat]

I like it. My philosophy with the Realms has always been take what you like and what you don't like, toss it. I'm currently running a 4th edition FR campaign set in High Imaskar. I've combined it with Mongoose's Wraith Recon with the characters working as a secret military task force for the government. Currently, High Imaskar is feeling threatened from all sides - Chessenta in the West, the Cult of the Dragon (Murghom) in the East, the Beastlands from the south and on the northern border, Thay is amassing a huge undead Army. Not to mention the civil unrest within the kingdom from the former Mulhorandi citizens. I'm coming up with all kinds of interesting dynamics.

 

[ppaladin123]

I like this idea but that may be because I have only general (as opposed to encyclopedic) knowledge of the realms. My fear is that those people who have invested significant time in mastering Forgotten Realms lore (reading all the novels and splatbooks, participating in the candle keep forums, etc.) are likely to view it as sancrosanct. If you gear the game toward such players and present it as a, "what if?" scenario you might end up with plenty of arguments at the table*. If you instead choose players with less detailed knowledge of the realms, many of the changes you present will be lost on them. At that point you might as well just make a new setting.

I suppose my point is that you'll have to tread carefully in this if you decide to use labels like, "Elminster," and "Drizz't." You can certainly create your own realm that has similar twists (heroes that don't live up to their associated legends, charlatans who take credit for epic accomplishments, mythic powerfully civilizations that actually crumbled years ago) without stirring up negative emotions by assigning these twists to beloved characters and locales.



* Example: When the movie Mission Impossible came out I had a paroxysm of rage when I saw that 1. the team was killed off in the first 15 minutes and 2. one of the great characters from the series was reinterpreted as a villain. "This is not a reasonable reinterpretation!" "They treated the source material with disdain!"

 

[BryonD]

I like it. It takes advantage of the Realmslore knowledge that most players in the game are likely to have and so their characters will have vastly more knowledge of the "myths" of their fictional world than pretty much any other campaign could possibly provide. And then the players can go about discovering of the "real". Two fictions for the price of one. Genius.

 

[SPECTRE666]

I could get into it. Heck a Realms where Harpers are really in league with the Zhents...