Would you like Maddman's Forgotten Realms?

[WampusCat43]

My players just entered Waterdeep last night. It's now become the "Land of 10,000 Wights", a result of their previous group getting annihilated by Dragotha in the 'Age of Worms'. There was no Spellplague, just a catastrophe brought about by Kyuss flexing his muscles.

Mt. Waterdeep is a glowing, green volcano. The palace is rubble. The city has become one big WWII Warsaw.

The Walking Statues came to life briefly, just long enough to march destructively through the town, then keel over in a heap, blocking each of the exit gates.

Giants guard the gates, hurling rubble at refugees and occasionally grabbing one and using it for batting practice. Why they're in league with the undead is not yet known. They have also ransacked all the shops.

A group of gnomes has set up shop in one of the wrecked Statues (which are metal, and hollow), and are seeking the PC's aid in getting enough residuum to animate the statue and attempt to retake Mt. Waterdeep.

Piergeiron is holed up in the second floor of the church of Torm ("We had to tear out the stairs - there were too many of them!"). Torm himself managed to break the through the interference of the dark green clouds overhead and inform the heroes that "you mortals really screwed the pooch this time."

The heroes are now seeking the fabled Caravan Stones, which contain the essence of their previous characters (their group was called 'Allustan's Caravan'). Only then can they hope to retake the city, and make it their own.


And that was just last night. Take your setting and turn it on its ear. Canon is for cowards.

 

[RodneyThompson]

The very point is that he isn't removing everything associated with FR, he is specifically reimagining it for the direct purpose of comparison with the original. Take FR out of the picture entirely, and the whole concept falls apart.

In fact, you can really only pull this off with a setting like FR, or Eberron, or possibly Greyhawk, which has years and years of supplements full of lore, guaranteeing that your players have picked up on some of these stories and can, in turn, make that knowledge a part of their characters' knowledge.

I suppose the DM could make up his own campaign world, but then he'd need to write up a whole bunch of world info to give to his players a head of time...that would turn out to not be true. The whole premise of the campaign leans on the idea that "everything you know is wrong, or at least exaggerated," and it seems like it would be more difficult to pull that off if you were handing your players a whole new setting, that they then had to learn, only to find out that you handed them a bunch of stuff that isn't true.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

What you're talking about could be something like Dark Matter for D&D. The world is grim, and different from what people think. You would be turning it on its head, in that the world is thought to be more magical than it really is, rather than the reverse.

Once your players get used to that, present them with the opposite -- maybe there is a story that has been down-played from what really happened, and nobody believes even that.

 

[Jhaelen]

I think you are missing the point. The entire goal of the campaign is to present the players with a brutal harsh world that exists in specific counterpoint to the legends and myths their characters know. The grim nature is emphasized by the way it contradicts the tall tales and epic stories that have no truth to them.

Ah, alright, I indeed missed that.

Actually, that's almost the standard approach I take when using an official setting:
If I know that one or more of my players are as knowledgeable about the setting as I am (or even worse: know it better than I do), then I change things until the player(s) no longer know what to expect.

E.g in my Dark Sun campaign Kalak survived and Rikus was killed. Naturally, this changed everything that would have happened after that - according to the novels.

The alternative is not using the setting, since nothing is more annoying than a player that interrupts you every time you're describing something, because you're 'describing it wrong'. I had that happen to me in a one-shot session of MERP: A rabid Tolkien fan(atic) isn't something you want in your group, unless you're one yourself.

So, yes, Maddman's approach should work just fine (excluding rabid FR fanatic players ).

 

[jonesy]

Huh. This is an angle which might actually make the Realms appealing to my group. We've made several attempts to play there that have mostly ended in apathy and lack of interest.