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2013-11-23, 02:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
So, this event-campaign-novel-thingy that reshuffles Forgotten Realms for 5th Edition has been going for some time now. However, I still can't find any real information online.
Does anyone know anything specific about what's happening in Faerūn and how exactly it changes things? The only small piece of information I found mentioned it rolling back the whole Spellplague thing, but apparently without reversing the timeline.We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2013-11-24, 10:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
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2013-11-24, 01:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
I accidentally stumbled on some details on the first sundering novel, and it's just so lame it defies words.
SpoilerKnowing that Drizzt would face a great challenge in the future, his goddes Mielikki snatched up the souls of his companions Bruenor, Wulfgar, Cattie-Brie, and Regis after they died and then kept them in stasis. When the time approached, she offered them to be reincarnated so they could rejoin with Drizzt when the challenge arrives.
So even though we're 140 years into the future, the whole gang is back together as if nothing happened.
I've seen some really bad retconns, but this goes way beyond anything...We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2013-11-24, 02:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
It's almost like Salvatore is just writing the books to milk money from morons who still want moar drizzit.
I gave up after Servant of the Shard, and I didn't like any of the ones since the Legacy of the Drow series, which in itself was not exactly great.
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2013-11-25, 11:03 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
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2013-11-25, 11:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Originally Posted by Yora
SpoilerKnowing that Drizzt would face a great challenge in the future, his goddes Mielikki snatched up the souls of his companions Bruenor, Wulfgar, Cattie-Brie, and Regis after they died and then kept them in stasis. When the time approached, she offered them to be reincarnated so they could rejoin with Drizzt when the challenge arrives.
So even though we're 140 years into the future, the whole gang is back together as if nothing happened.
My thanks for the warning. Now I can be perfectly comfortable in my intentions to completely ignore 5E and everything they do with it.
*whistles happily*
.Last edited by Palanan; 2013-11-25 at 11:27 AM.
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2013-11-25, 11:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
For anybody interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun...%26_Dragons%29
That covers the novels that will detail The Sundering.
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2013-11-25, 02:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Hmm...gods, cataclysms, worlds upended, yawn. Didn't they do that last time?
One thing I did notice...they're planning to somehow incorporate player actions in the future history of the Realms? Is this a select group of playtesters or whatnot, or a more general crowdsourcing approach?
I'm a little removed from the mainstream, so I don't know if this is becoming more common. I seem to recall that for the (generally meh) TV show Defiance, the cumulative effects of players in the MMORPG will have their impact on the storyline in Season 2. Is this something similar they're trying for 5E?
Heh. In the Realms, of all places, where high-level NPCs are thick as cobblestones. Hard to imagine how most PCs would even get noticed.
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2013-11-28, 11:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Is there any information about the Sundering in Murder in Baldur's Gate and Legacy of the Crystal Shard?
We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2013-11-29, 08:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
"Sleeping late might not be a virtue, but it sure aint no vice. The old saw about the early bird and the worm just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
- L. Long
I think, therefore I get really, really annoyed at people who won't.
"A plucky band of renegade short-order cooks fighting the Empire with the power of cheap, delicious food and a side order of whup-ass."
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2013-12-09, 07:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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2013-12-11, 09:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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2013-12-21, 10:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Protecting my Horde (yes, I mean that kind)
Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
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2014-01-12, 04:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
I watched an interview with Ed Greenwoods once, who said that it was not his wich to write so much about ELminster, but due to his contract with WotC he had to. I believe that some of the, in my eyes, extremely poor designed editions, come not from the writers but from game designers. And I fear that some of the otherwise good writers are contractually bound to write the stuff that are complayned about.
Personally my liking stopped at 3.5 and I have no entention of buying any 5th edition. It seems they are going to change the edition every 6-8 years... I simply cant be bothered or afford to buy all the books over and over again. And exporting my character is not always as ease as from BGI => BGII.
WotC blew it with 4th ed, and are trying to mend the broken pieces. I dont think it will work though. And I think 5th ed is the last edition we will get. If D&D is to survive I actually think it would be better for them to keep publishing older editions. 2nd and 3rd in particular. I for one would still buy that. There are a lot of very interesting areas in Fearun I would like to see in a scource book.
Sorry for the negativity!
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2014-01-16, 05:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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- ...at home.
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2014-01-16, 08:28 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
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2014-01-19, 09:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
SpoilerIf this were a DM doing this as a way to bring beloved player characters across a time jump I'd think it was pretty creative. An author doing it to avoid having to come up with any new ideas and keep milking his cash cow is pathetic.
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2014-01-31, 02:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Every new edition causes the Realms to implode in some crazy fashion. It's tradition now.
Realms events can be "Fight For Stasis Quo!" So, ya...it's more or less a 2nd Editioning of post 4E FR this time. Old Schooling the place up.
Sadly they did it to most of the setting with 4E last time. But eh.Last edited by TheLoneCleric; 2014-01-31 at 02:16 PM.
Running games in the Space Coast, FL area. Looking to play? Drop a line.
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2014-02-18, 05:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
I just read this about the last official adventure called The Sundering.
SpoilerThe heroes kill Cyric and sunder his throne. This allows the essence of Mystra to escape and reincarnate, who then restores the proper laws of magic, which also sunders Toril and Abeir apart again. Returning the world back to normal and making the last 100 years a freak accident that everyone can pretend never happened.
A.) Of course Mystra is back, this was pretty much forgone conclusion.
B.) I'm a bit suprised Cyric is supposed to be gone. But I wouldn't be suprised if he'll be back.
C.) And so they did decide to abandon the Spellplague-Realms fans and simply go back to normal. I guess that's one solution to the problem, but not neccessarily one that will get more 4th Edition players to switch over to 5th. Who I assume will be the primary group from which 5th Edition players will come.We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2014-02-18, 09:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
First off ...
Spoileroh really, low level characters in Encounters killing Cyric? That doesn't sound contrived at all!
Second, I haven't liked the Realms since the 1e grey box + a few supplements. The only incarnation I've liked since then was the 4e Neverwinter book, which did a much better job with all this "spellplague" stuff and really showing what the 4e setting was capable of. It's a phenomenal Heroic-tier micro-setting, with adventure hooks dripping off the page and a bevy of tools for a capable DM to run either a Neverwinter sandbox or a more plot-oriented campaign. It's one of the best settings released for D&D in decades, and no matter how much I dislike the Realms I have to admit its quality.
Anyway, if these changes please people who actually care about the Realms, then good on them and good on WotC. I'm fairly indifferent when it comes down to it, because it's just more dumb (and desperate-seeming) Forgotten Realms junk that I'll never use.
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2014-02-18, 09:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
As I see it, 5th Edition will get it's crowd primarily from 4th Edition players. WotC might hope to get the Pathfinder crowd back, but I very highly doubt that. In that regard, this seems like a strategically very dubious move.
We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, but on very tall tower of other dwarves.
Spriggan's Den Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying
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2014-02-18, 10:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
I dunno, it's not winning over many 4e players that I know of, either. The only forum I can think of which seems generally Next-positive right now is ENWorld, and it's a combination of 3e and 4e fans, in about even numbers. It's not getting much traction on RPG.net, SA, here, etc.
But that's a conversation for another thread.
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2014-02-18, 01:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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2014-02-18, 02:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Honestly, even before Drizzt stopped developing as a character (about Legacy? It's been many years since I read the books) there was a noticeable drop in quality from book to book.
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2014-02-18, 03:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
I tried reading R.A. Salvatore's The Companions, and... well... I suppose this needs a bit of backstory.
I have not been a Forgotten Realms fan for as long as some of the old school types, but for me, there were a series of major things that got me into fantasy when I was a kid and kind of proceeded to define my interests in fiction for the next fifteen solid years. While Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was an influence, the biggest thing that switched me on to swords and sorcery and dragons and elves and dwarves was the original Baldur's Gate series. A game series that, to this day, I qualify as my absolute favourite series of video games, and part of that was this big epic fantasy setting with interesting characters, people and places.
I simply adored the Realms, its people and places and situations, and then exploring more of this setting with Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights was pretty awesome. And exploring more of this setting, and various related settings, by way of the tie-in novels was even more awesome. Awesome enough that, around 2004-2005, I actually started getting into Dungeons & Dragons. And then for the next few years I more or less defined myself as a Forgotten Realms fan.
And then in 2008, a few things happened. The game's 4th edition was released, and I'll admit that I really didn't like it. But I was hoping that the stuff that was going on with the Forgotten Realms would be decent; I mean, I could always run the games using 3.5e rules without much difficulty, and picked up the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. I was eager to see what new things would be going to happen with the setting that had defined the entire previous decade of my life.
It was not exactly a pleasant realisation when I saw the destroyed remnants of the Realms. It was a book and setting where half of my favourite places had been completely or irrevocably transformed and for no real reason; indeed, one of my major characters was a Halruaan wizard. And on top of that, in their deference to the Realms-hating crowd, they utterly halted any mentions of major characters and local figures in favour of making the Realms into a relatively generic 'points of light' setting.
After that, I basically reacted by gathering up all the old 1st and 2nd edition material I could and started setting my campaigns far enough in the setting's past that I didn't even have to think about the Spellplague.
Eventually I started hearing about this new Sundering event.
And spurred on by the hope, as fleeting as it might be, of seeing the old and awesome Forgotten Realms being restored... I picked up The Companions with the vaguest hope of encountering the old-school magic and charm that I'd missed for quite some time. After about twenty pages of SHADOW WEAVE SHADOWFELL SHADOVAR SHADE NETHERIL... I put the book down because this wasn't the Forgotten Realms. It was some kind of weird spin-off that had some of the same characters but had been so far changed so that every word I recognised came with a dozen words I didn't. Or which I recognised purely for their being part of 4th edition.
An edition which, I'll repeat, I already strongly disliked for many of the attitudes of its designers.
And that's really not even going into the outright racism showed in the portrayal of the Bedine.
I realised very quickly that the Forgotten Realms has left me so far behind that I might as well not bother calling myself a Realms fan anymore. And since that was, by way of most of my other favourite settings having been picked apart and scavenged for pieces to shove into the Nentir Vale or completely and utterly forgotten about, the last connection I had to modern Dungeons & Dragons....
I think I'll be sticking with the OSR or Pathfinder from now on.Last edited by Scots Dragon; 2014-02-18 at 03:41 PM.
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2014-02-18, 04:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
I had basically the same feeling regarding Legend of the Five Rings and the events of Celestial Edition and on. It basically took an enormous **** on the setting so I cut my ties to the community and stopped buying their stuff and just run my L5R games in personal canon.
As for FR, I was never a big fan. I went through a period of FR-hating for reasons which are rather vague to me now (I think it was something about projecting Elminster on everything) but have since mellowed. There are a lot of good and interesting places in the Realms and fun adventuring opportunities. I just dislike Mystra and her Chosen (Dove is ok) and a few other things. Most of my FR knowledge has come from the various novels. Some are good, a lot are mediocre to crappy. Then I tried reading one of the early 4e novels (something about an undead bard?) and immediately wanted to hurl it across the room.
And what struck me, one good reason I dislike 4e, was that D&D fiction is basically grounded in D&D rules. Sure there were some handwaves for story purposes, but all in all the fiction rarely did any worse than just about any DM did for their story. But the 4e ruleset was so radically different in its function, at least for casters, that there was little or no way they could have the 4e rules work as a believable background for older fiction or newer fiction in the same vein. Add this to affront of the Spellplague and there was only one sensible course of action. Like my L5R love, I just gave up on FR in 4e and when I have wanted to read FR fiction I will stick to the pre-4e stuff, if I want to use some element of FR lore (rare since I run Mystara, but not unheard of) I will use something from earlier editions.
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2014-02-18, 04:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
The Forgotten Realms 4th edition read to me like a setting that was created almost specifically with people who weren't fans of the Forgotten Realms in mind. It seemed to have been written with the implicit assumption that everyone and their pet tressym hated Elminster, the Simbul, Drizzt Do'Urden, the Chosen of Mystra, the multitude of deities, the good drow, the extensive and interesting detail, and various other things that people actually adored about the setting.
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2014-02-20, 01:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Oh Jesus. The introduction of Eilistraee and her chosen is such a massive change of the basic setting that i cannot believe more people aren't calling it more.
Now, there are GOOD Drows on the surface. They are a thing, they are more numerous, they even have their own goddess, which is apparently pretty powerful even if we have established that a god's power depend on the number of followers.
This completely invalidates all the reaction people ever had regarding Drizz't. And the incredulous level of the locals regarding the possibility of a good Drow.
edit: also, why wasn't Drizz't pointed out in the direction of these silver-haired buggers?!?!Last edited by Cikomyr; 2014-02-20 at 01:31 PM.
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2014-02-20, 01:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Eilistraee is, like, old. Early AD&D 2nd edition at the latest. Cf. Drow of the Underdark (FOR2 / TSR 9326, 1991), page 21.
D&D 3.X FR had enclaves of good drow on the surface, and the Promenade of the Dark Maiden in Skullport is an AD&D 2E (maybe 1E) thing. I forget the name of her Chosen, but that's the one from Daughter of the Drow by Elaine Cunningham, from 2003, right? Meanwhile, Qilue Veladorn (Chosen of Mystra, one of the Seven Sisters, and high priestess of Eilistraee) goes back to at least Ed Greenwood (cf. FOR6 / TSR 9475 The Seven Sisters, 1995) so she's about as FR canon as you can get.
None of that quote sounds like a change from D&D 3.X or even 2nd edition, is what I'm saying.
Edit: Drizzt was published in 1988 (The Crystal Shard), so Eilistraee may not have been published when Drizzt was. FR itself only came out in 1987. If we take 1991 as Eilistraee's first apperance in canon, Eilistraee has been part of the now 27-year-old setting for 23 years, or for around 85% of its run. A bit late to get upset, especially when good drow (and neutral half-drow, etc.) were standardized by ~2003, over a third of the setting's run ago...Last edited by Rhynn; 2014-02-20 at 01:53 PM.
D&D retroclones:
SpoilerAdventurer Conqueror King
Basic Fantasy (free)
Dark Dungeons (free)
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Labyrinth Lord (free)
Lamentations of the Flame Princess (free)
Mazes & Minotaurs (free)
Myth & Magic (free)
OSRIC (free)
Swords & Wizardry (free)
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2014-02-20, 02:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Forgotten Realms - What is the Sundering?
Did they do away with Eilistraee in 4e? Because she was definitely around in 3e, not to mention the earlier stuff Rhynn mentioned. I think you're right about 1991 being the earliest mention of E, btw. I can't find anything prior to "Drow of the Underdark"