Never has there been such a large and open world for players and story tellers to explore and shape. The vast amount of content and possibilities in FR is just amazing. It does an amazing job of giving you a fleshed out world to exist in, while also removing any rails that would keep your campaign locked into a specific theme or setting.
Forgotten realms is the ultimate proof that the greatest DM's aren't ashamed of their magical realm, cherish their magical realm and lead players into their magical realm at every opportunity, while sad incels can at best create something soul-crushingly boring and derivative like Westeros.
Based tbh.
I can hardly blame the elder nerds for doing what they did. I mean, I'm sure if Gen Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers could escape corporate America by writing stories about our self-insert heroes (and those of our friends) going on adventures, living for millenia, and having sex with tons of beautiful women we'd do so. Nowadays everyone's a freelancer with a day job -at best-.
If anything people have overcorrected for this since the Millennium so you see all sorts of stories that are completely sexless, the love interest turns out to be a lesbian, the male heroes get replaced by better female heroes, etc. It's almost refreshing to read something like Conan the Barbarian or Berserk that doesnt't apologize for appealing to young men.
I think it's partly a consequence of the thing's millennials and zoomers were exposed to growing up. I grew up in a town that was normal, even pleasant, on the outset. You were next to a beach, crime was relatively low, everything was in walking distance, what was there not to like? Well, everyone came from a broken home, there were a shitload of sex offenders, and the school district was heavily influenced if not directly controlled by two competing factions: the Religious (later Atheist, I'm not shitting you) zealots, and the local feminist commune.
This had a pretty big impact on people growing up:
>The girls were always the hero, the boys the monsters chasing them.
>Anything perceived 'womens work' would've gotten you hit if you were a boy. Keep in mind this includes shit like taking out the trash, raking dead leaves, Christ you couldn't even admit to boiling water in a pot lest you get called a sissy-homosexual. All this by your own peers. Is it any wonder so many of my peers have trouble not burning a Digorino Pizza?
>Kids talked about Teachers put you on a path based upon the TV show you watched. Cartoons were seen as the domain of morons, Cop/Fireman/Doctor shows got you fast tracked into sports, sitcoms and 90s comedies that would play when there was nothing else on got you into the AP programs, and if you admitted to watching anything else you were seen a lost cause. ANYTHING ELSE: Star Trek, Star Wars, Sopranos, the fricking SHIELD (cause it made Cops look bad), sitcoms that didn't suck, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, hell South Park of all fricking things, got you labeled a deviant. This got really bad in Junior High.
>The weird sex shit. There were always fights over sexual problems in public. Guys would berate and torment the girls for not doing what they wanted (once even literal Scat too), Girls would rip into the guys for being shitty in bed, guys 'accidentally' inserting their dick into the 'wrong hole,' frick. The things I heard.
Where in the frick was this? I refuse to believe it's an actual town outside of Russia.
I fricking wish. It was the suburbs of southern California. People are always shocked but no, there are parts of America that look so beautiful, but the people are so fricking shitty it resembles a third world nation. Now with the busted economy, I have no idea why people risk heatstroke to cross the border.
As a Nor-Cal guy myself the out of state perception of California is heavily warped by the presence of L.A and SF and they do project a lot of influence in the region but to this day there is a large margin of the types of conservatives who are a bit screwy from having the general culture go against them.
Still there are some really different types like entire conservative counties of more established farmers, and the big libertarian influence from the tech industry going back to the 70s, once you get into the really heavily forested parts of the state up north you see the remnants of the old-school hippies also. And this is all allowed to exist because even with highways it takes like 14 hours to cross the state vertically one way.
I'm still standing by my statement that the valley is desertifying. Like it or not, the region is getting drastically less rainfall and I've noticed in Selena that the area's resembling Barstow more and more.
Cali, especially socal, is like a chaos outbreak. An entirely different world inside our own.
Why Russia?
It sounded like the town combined all the worst aspects of modern life and conservative values into one.
If I had the money I'd sponsor a decades long study to figure out how a place like that was made
California's a mess with multiple papers written about the subject. For instance: the entire Owens Valley used to be a fertile region with forests until the main rivers were rerouted to LA. Now it's, for all intents and purposes, a desert. Look it up: the California Water Wars. It even impacted the great Californian Valley in general and is apart of the reason why most of the state is an inland desert.
>The girls were always the hero, the boys the monsters chasing them.
Yeah, I'm Millennial and had a weird guilt complex over being male for awhile.
>Kids talked about Teachers put you on a path based upon the TV show you watched.
Kinda relatedly I grew up in the burbs and if you didn't watch certain shows like Dawson's Creek you were marked as a nerd or too poor to have cable tv. You could be a Buffy person if you had a large enough circle of nerd friends to find safety. (Loved it at the time, but Whedon's fetishes and writing style in general set the stage for a lot of what's going on with TV/movies today)
>The weird sex shit. There were always fights over sexual problems in public. Guys would berate and torment the girls for not doing what they wanted (once even literal Scat too), Girls would rip into the guys for being shitty in bed, guys 'accidentally' inserting their dick into the 'wrong hole,' frick. The things I heard.
China has the right idea in cracking down on porn. Guys getting hooked on anal, cuckolding etc before they've even had their first kiss is going to haunt society for generations even if we clamped down today. I mean, I don't mean to seem like a prude but half the people being weird sex perverts and the other half just giving up feels like the terminal illness of a civilization before some barbarians raze the capital.
>all sorts of stories that are completely sexless,
I prefer "sexless" stories in the sense that I'm here for the plot and the characters, not the romance or fricking. That's what I got pornography for. If the writer really needs to inject either, I just want it to be in service to everything else and get it over with.
Cheesecake is always welcome though.
I'm kinda confused here, cuz you seem to be portraying sex as something other than a perfectly valid aspiration, means to an end, method of defusing tension, etc.
Not to mention horniness is perfect for keeping everyone motivated OOC.
>It's almost refreshing to read something like Conan the Barbarian or Berserk that doesnt't apologize for appealing to young men
Bastard got a Netflix adaptation recently. It surprisingly doesn’t go woke and sticks to the manga. Meaning that there is a lot of breasts, ass, ecchi, some fingering at one point, and the rest.
moronic reddit take, the FRs aren't a magical realm at all.
oof, sorry, what was that again? I didn't hear you because I was too busy having a mind-warping superorgasm because one of the twins I'm carrying just strangled the other one.
Thats from a third party book.
Prove it.
Thats a lie and you were also lying about it in the last thread.
Coomer is a reddit-meme.
>Prove it.
From the long-running Candlekeep website’s So Saith Ed archives, August 2006.
Ed says that families have incestuous sex when young before finding more “exciting” partners outside the family later on. He’s a horny freak.
NTA but I was wondering if there was some additional context that makes that less weird, but having dug up the 'So Saith Ed' you quoted, not so much.
> Incest is perfectly acceptable in Faerun so long as you use a rubber
> Banging your parent's sibling is socially fine even to have children.
> Resurrecting dead kings is illegal.
> Ed made inappopriate comments at strange librarians in public and thinks it's not weird.
Maybe it's best to disregard Greenwood's unpublished ramblings. There's a reason TSR / WotC / Dragon don't publish them.
>The Realms are coomer shit. Always have been.
Is that only if you listen to the unpublished ramblings of Greenwood, or are there any published examples to support it?
Someone post the drow twin murder orgasms.
Oh God, this hits all my favorite kinks all at once. I hope Ed publishes an "Unrated Unexpurgated No-Limits" version of the Realms at some point, even if only in PDF.
No resurrecting dead kings honestly seems like a not terrible rule in a setting with resurrection magic.
Agreed. But the normalized incest and implied sex between teens and parents is rather disturbing.
Ah, Ancient Egypt must've had a big influence on Faerun.
Consider that two of Faerun';s nations are literally made up of Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians who were kidnapped from Earth by a Toril magocracy looking for slave laborers...
During the 4e era there was a pure fluff lorebook for FR released that copied out a lot of his candlekeep posts but censored them right before the "good" parts, usually just by omitting or slightly adjusting. They'd never publish this stuff officially, ofcourse.
Is there other weird sex shit in the other So Saith Ed archives that you've seen??
He's talked a bit about how the cultural baseline across Faerun is towards polyamory and bisexuality.
I seem to recall something about it being a tradition for people to have sex on rooftops at harvest time or some shit.
Do people not do that in the rural areas near you?
2e forced the concept of all of the elves fricking off back to Evermeet in preparation for a major catastrophe that never happened. This is why entire formerly elven areas had become Drow controlled territory and why rules were established for surface Drow who inhabited elven cities, and then with minimal bloodshed became elven territory again in 3e.
There were only a handful of elves across the place that stayed behind, except Evereska which said "No thanks." When the plot device demanded they return to Evermeet to be like LOTR.
>Do people not do that in the rural areas near you?
Only with cousins and uncles.
>the elves fricking off back to Evermeet in preparation for a major catastrophe that never happened.
I got the impression this was a gradual exodus lasting 100 years elf life spans respecting and considering this is supposed to be continental immigration not some bargain last minute holiday resort flight.
>except Evereska which said "No thanks."
Yes about that a whole goddamn elven nation within 200-300 miles of Waterdeep, Cunningham's only two elves the city is looking more and more skeptical.
>I got the impression this was a gradual exodus lasting 100 years elf life spans respecting and considering this is supposed to be continental immigration not some bargain last minute holiday resort flight.
In Grey Box it was something being done over the course of several centuries, with different nations making the decisions at different times and some not even going.
In 2e, it was retconned to be a more sudden thing to explain why the elven deities weren't fricking shit up in mainland Faerun during the Time of Troubles (though no explanation why the dwarf gods or drow gods weren't).
In 3e, it was retconned to have started in 1344 and all of the elves just fricked off simultaneously but they're back now, and also their kingdoms were being defended by fey/plant creatures which is why they're not drow infested anymore like they were in 1e/2e.
Would it disrupt things too much if the Evermeet retreat was just ignored?
Depends what you want to do with elven forests.
In 1e/2e, the only reason the retreat really mattered at all is because it was inadvertently making a lot of ancient elven magic and the drow a threat again.
Like half of the zhentarim plots of 1e and 2e involve going into places the elves formerly protected/lived-in and stealing magic to corrupt/pervert, or in the case of Myth Drannor, just abuse what's already there now that the elven guardians are gone.
Additionally, the drow being elves themselves were able to seamlessly take over anything that was bound to elven blood within the former elven kingdoms, and also use those as surface staging grounds because back then a drow living on the surface for a few months got immunity to the sunlight weakness. Also fun fact, rumor has it that Greenwood wanted FR drow to have more varied skin tones because he felt it was more appropriate for them to be able to easily disguise themselves as Moon Elves, as Moon Elves were the most populous elves within human lands, this is why the Albino Drow exist who happen to have the same alabaster skin tone, I haven't seen confirmation one way or the other on this however.
in 3e the retreat might as well have never happened because the only references to it are "these elves hate <group> for fricking with their lands during the retreat".
They adapted visually yes, but they lost their spell like abilities. That changed after "daughter of the drow" a 'transition to 3e' trilogy.
There was a big war with escaped demon elf hybrids to justify the return.
It's a really good trilogy actually.
The last mythal.
Ed Greenwood has literally said that the nobles of Faerun routinely enjoy incestual relationships without taboo because they have ready access to magical abortions - no inbreeding, so no stigma. He also covered the setting with brothel-temples, and his self-insert Elimster constantly fricks. Go beyond Ed's work and you have Salvatore's take on the Drow, an enjoy culture of emasculated male near-slaves serving tentacle-wielding dominatrix priestesses who wear as little as possible "as a show of confidence."
The Realms are coomer shit. Always have been.
omagad noble incest I guess ancient agypt or GoT is a magical realm too
>got isn’t a magical realm
>Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.
He also said that prostitution is the biggest business in faerun and that people have orgies in the open pretty much everywhere. You just need to ignore the old man's writings when he is in *that* mood.
>prostitution is the biggest business in faerun
It’s one of the biggest businesses in the real world too, I’m not sure that this is really magical ream.
There's a reason it's called the world's oldest profession.
Yeah cause people are fricking moronic. It's literally impossible for prostitution to be the oldest profession.
Coomer anthropologists be all "prostitutes existed before hunters, wet nurses, housewives, herbalists, and tool-makers".
Do you know how we all know that you're virgins?
>Ed Greenwood has literally said that the nobles of Faerun routinely enjoy incestual relationships without taboo because they have ready access to magical abortions - no inbreeding, so no stigma.
But what's the point of noble incest if there's no inbreeding?
But anon Mystra is back and the spell plague is over. The realms are magical again.
The spell what now?
>spell plague
Non-canon. Never happened.
Everything in the realms post-3.5 is simply Cyric's dementia taking over.
>sad incels can at best create something soul-crushingly boring and derivative like Westeros.
My man Gurm got badly burned by Free Love. His 70's sci-fi novellas like A Song for Lya always have the hero's love intest slip away from him join an alien cult or some other obvious metaphor.
true and based
'festhalls' in every town and city wide orgies as a common way of celebrating are author's canon.
Going by the novels, the average prominent female character spends more of her free time nude than otherwise.
> city wide orgies as a common way of celebrating
Last thread that one guy had a meltdown about this. That seems to be limited to Alustriel / Silverymoon, in terms of sources people had to back it up.
> Going by the novels, the average prominent female character spends more of her free time nude than otherwise.
Do you have sources that aren't Alustriel? Most of the ones I've read aren't by Greenwood, and aren't so sex-obsessed. There might be one (non-detailed) instance of sex in a trilogy, and not a lot of nudity beyond that if any.
It did seem Greenwood's novels were some of the worst FR Novels I read.
Myth Drannor had a few horny elves that tried to get to Elminster, they expressed a sense of cultural inhibition towards sex, but they were primarily concerned with the fact that he was a human and with how different that was for them (also that one elf was really just trying to read his mind through his lips).
I don't remember a lot of naked ladies in Making of a Mage, but the old Mystra did turn Elminster into a woman, I guess understanding femininity helps you understand Mystra's magic.
Waterdeep is woke as frick but their orgies aren't usually in public.
>Making of a Mage
>Elminster in Myth Drannor.
I tried to read the Elminster novels in order. I got like half way through Making of a Mage and got distracted and never came back to it. Are any of them actually worth reading?
>Waterdeep is just Seattle
That's more of a 5eism isn't it? 2e and 3e waterdeep content was more about factions and the secret government. I don't remember it looking so Seattle-ish in Blackstaff / Elfshadow / Elfsong / Return of the Archwizards / 2e Waterdeep / City System / 3e Waterdeep.
No Elminster books are worth reading, unless you really hate yourself. Elminster in Hell in particular is a travesty.
Me lending Elminster's Daughter to a friend was what got him into Forgotten Realms.
Wow, sharing daughters, kinky.
get fricked, making of a mage is fantastic
I love reading Greenwood's dry snark, but not everyone does, and the first two are really the best. If they don't grab you then you should just go read something else.
I think the central concept for Waterdeep should be (and generally was) that Waterdeep isn't a melting pot, it's a gem grinder, everyone keeps their own culture and their diversity makes the city shine brighter. That was always a very woke vision for a sword&sorcery metropolis. But still, it must be said, the Waterdeep pride parades are kind of new.
It was interesting how the 1e book for Waterdeep included stuff like ogres moving furniture and orc street cleaners.
>I think the central concept for Waterdeep should be (and generally was) that Waterdeep isn't a melting pot, it's a gem grinder, everyone keeps their own culture and their diversity makes the city shine brighter.
Ironic being as Elaine Cunningham tried to make out as if her special snowflake harper assassin and the other shady not be trusted one were the only two elves in Waterdeep.
The Waterdeep that she was writing in was also pretty heavily humanocentric at anything above street level. Like, all the noble houses are human, will defend that purity to the point of assassination, and the mere notion that one might have some elf blood in them a couple generations back would have been a ruinous scandal.
I much prefer Cunningham's "it's a renaissance Italian city state filled with conflict to adventure in, and the people are self interested and tribalist (and many are racist buttholes) because they're people" to "it's Seattle but full of monster people and furries of all types in equal measure."
But Cunningham's Waterdeep with some stuck up elves and dwarves mixed in would have been better.
Yep. And then my "elven return" to d&d after like 9 years of not buying the game products (except for the edition neutral menzoberranzan and elminster's forgotten realms books) turned into my interest in buying new Hasbro d&d books increasingly drying up. I could have gone for MTG settings if they were *good*. But that would take like a 600 page setting book that's mostly not character options or monsters, but an in-depth exploration of people and places - or each MTG setting getting several books. Not just a shitty gazetteer with character options bolted on.
I'll be raising my kids with forgotten realms novels and comics. I won't be raising them with nu-d&d, which increasingly is going back to sucking at running faerun.
>Waterdeep pride parades
Wait, really?
Dwarf Pride World Wide
You don't want to know. Jeremy Crawford is a peculiar individual.
i remember reading Shandril's Saga and some other Harper novels. female nudity occurred a lot, especially among the 'legendary' female characters.
My take on Forgotten Realms is based on utterly disregarding anything claimed or intimated about the setting by the woke WoTC.
Elmore wrote that setting so his word to me about it is gospel, while anything WoTC in general has to say is mud.
Waterdeep wasn't woke before the subversive started trying to push their politics into the game and i encourage everyone to give no fricks about their fanfic bullshit.
Let's see:
>Planescape: every single fricked up fetish you have can be sated here. Every single one. Everyone's half naked all the time too.
>Dark Sun: everyone's half naked, buff, and sex slavery is the only resource of value. At least until 4E forgot that part.
>Ravenloft: the dark lord now has a literal magical realm.
>Al-Quaim: all the women wear bedlahs, the Sultans have massive harems, and concubines are taken from all over Faerun.
>Dragonlance: the Barbarians are always half naked or borderline nude.
>Mystara: all the women are beautiful, the men haggard, as fiction should be.
>Eberron: I would say it's too autistic so it's the exception but the local Drow are pretty horny here.
4e had plenty of slavery
Just you were supposed to be tearing it down not roleplaying Gor.
>every single fricked up fetish you have can be sated here
recs for prego stuff?
Eberron has a e-girl in charge of Fantasy Christianity, and I think one of the gods was born from rape or something.
They also have a e-girl super lich.
But Forgotten Realms has that too except it's a e-girl elf super lich.
Keep in mind that the lich was never officially depicted as a e-girl, yet the creator of the setting insists that she is one in his games. Hmmm...
Keith Baker also came up with rules for e-girl barbarians using psychic powers to do the barbarian stuff.
He knows what he likes.
Elminster is trans
You are living proof that troons are mentally moronic.
Elminster is whatever the frick he wants, he was literally created to frick with players that took themselves too seriously.
>Elminster is whatever the frick he wants
Yes elminster is a genderfrick. Dont get all butthurt about it, hes a fun character.
to be fair, Mystara's condition that one just couldn't properly understand magic until one has been a woman for a while and got properly dicked (this part wasn't explicitly in the book but obviously implied)
was a some proper troony propaganda. apparently all the archmages that existed in d&d prior were 'doing to wrong'.
didn't like Elminster's trilogy - it didn't nearly epic enough to justify his fame.
I forget - what exactly did he do to earn Mystara's special affection?
>I forget - what exactly did he do to earn Mystara's special affection?
that thing with his tongue, sembian pudding packer or gnomish nuttswaggle or whatever.
Id say that actually has roots in mythology. Odin and Tiresias come to mind pretty quickly.
And Odin and Tiresias are transhomosexuals too. Men are men, and women are inferior and that's the way it is, period. Anyone arguing against that is a troony.
It seems you are inferior
Why because your emotions say so? Control yourself man, get a grip.
>(this part wasn't explicitly in the book but obviously implied)
You continue with your weird tendency of making shit up in the books that was never there.
I dont know why you do that, maybe you have a weird oversexed imagination and need to jack off before you post but I never got the feeling that this was implied anywhere.
>didn't like Elminster's trilogy - it didn't nearly epic enough to justify his fame.
Thats because the creation of Elminster was such a long time ago that most people have forgotten why he got famous in the first place.
Elminster started out essentially as a meme-character, to frick with Min/Maxing-Players and powerful player characters who the players took way too seriously (like that guy who would ride through cities and just kill NPCs with his Mage for no reason, dont remember his name).
So whenever player thought he was more powerful than a king or a ruler and demanded that a kingdom should show him respect for being the all-powerful epic level Warrior Elminster would pop and humble him by ridiculing him.
Since at that time everyone had dealt with these Proto-THATGUYs the people reading Dragonmagazine took to his character very well.
When the character got popular TSR smelled money and demanded Greenwood to write more about him, eventually commissioning some novels.
>When the character got popular TSR smelled money and demanded Greenwood to write more about him, eventually commissioning some novels.
This.
It's worth remembering that Elminster is also supposed to be the official narrator of anything not specifically narrated by anyone else, so the fact that everything in the setting makes him look good is part of the joke, but TSR wanted to make him a serious character.
he has his origins in Dragon magazine?
That era passed me by so I've only recently started reading through them, am on issue 14 right now.
>(this part wasn't explicitly in the book but obviously implied)
this was mostly a joke because I don't remember the book describing any actual reason of how being turned into a woman improved his understanding of magic
At one point Greenwood started writing about his own story setting for dragon magazine and translating some ideas to the D&D game.
Elminster was a reoccuring character because most of the stories were from Elminster's perspective or retold by him from things he learned from his friends.
>apparently all the archmages that existed in d&d prior were 'doing to wrong'
Mordenkainen and other archmages on other worlds don’t mean shit in that example, because Mystra runs magic in Realmspace. So Mystra decides it - in that context, Elminster was given time as a woman to understand magic. But it is notable that he was also made a woman because he kept back talking Mystra when she tried to recruit him, so she decided to make him a woman for a while. She very noticeably turned him back before making him a Chosen, which involved fricking him.
rent free
But i approve
>everybody always laughing about wanting to be the little girl
>old men turning themselves into sultry young sorceresses to get fricked
>somebody in DND actually does it
>they recoil in horror
magical pery old man doing magical pervy old man things =/= Elminster says TRANS RIGHTS!!!111111
Learn the difference, it might save your dick.
Elminster turned into a big nosed hag instead of a cute little girl, what a failure. I bet Manshoon would've done it better.
True. If you've never looked through the Candlekeep forum archives i highly recommend it.
>appreciation thread
appreciate deez nuts
I've never actually played a campaign set in FR, only exposure has been the old CRPGs and skimming through the FRCS once or twice.
It seemed like a setting that had some cool places to adventure in (Sword Coast is obviously the classic generic fantasy but you've also got Rashemen, Thay, Calimshan which are different enough to be interesting but with a clear theme/style so they didn't like they were being different just for the sake of it).
On the other hand all the highly active gods and high-level NPCs of the setting turned me off a bit. I'd be inclined to retcon some of them into non-existence if I ran ever ran FR campaign.
This is all from my fairly superficial understanding of the setting.
How does it actually pan out in practice?
>How does it actually pan out in practice?
FR is designed around the idea that there are thousands of adventures for thousands of adventuring types based on the kind of game you want to run/play, as a result it varies wildly.
It's worth remembering that in 3e a lot of the troubles and weirdness of previous editions were reduced to make the setting easier to approach, even though part of the fun was that you could accidentally happen into a conflict that seems small at first but balloons into being connected to a huge conspiratorial/racial/political issue that had been brewing over the years.
As to the NPCs and gods, that's one of the most anecdotal things about the setting.
I have heard some DMs wanking off the high leveled background stuff.
I have had some players who specifically wanted to interact with some of the higher level established characters.
I know for my DMing gods preferred to act through visions and blessings, where their followers could sometimes be acting as the god wanted and sometimes acting on their own desires for profit with a divine excuse, meanwhile the high level NPCs more served as just an idea that "if you want to lay siege to castle cormyr, you'll need a way to deal with Azoun" but he's got his own shit to do so unless you're appearing at cormyrian noble parties all of the time you're probably never going to see him
I’ve played in it several times with three different DMs, and never met the high level NPCs more than once. And that once barely even counts, as it was at a distance during a big festival in Waterdeep when Khelben Blackstaff and a Paladin Open Lord were doing some public appearance and speech.
It’s not a thing, and a DM who makes it one is suffering a lack of imagination.
I grew up on the Gold Box games so I appreciate FR even if it’s not the best or my favourite setting. It has history and a fleshed out world that makes sense, with plenty of places for wild adventure.
I'm legitimately a huge fan of the 4e take on the setting. 3e-era FR is nothing but a bunch of peaceful kingdoms and republics grown fat off trade with one another, with few other beats to hit - it's fun enough for autistic lore-diving (I like a lot of that stuff!), but it's dull as shit for door-kicking adventuring. The world needed to be in more peril.
I like the gonzo stuff, too: blue fire turning people into X-Men and Chaos Spawn is great, Dragonborn-as-atheist-aliens is still the best identity they've ever had, and the returned Shadovar make great baddies. That Neverwinter book is a masterpiece, too.
I think 4e overcorrected hard on 3e.
One of the examples I tend to look towards is Cormyr.
In 2e it was a legitimate police state where the common peasants would report you to the authorities if you asked too many questions and they had wizards trained specifically for reading people's minds without making it obvious.
Hell, being a cormyrian rebel was a class kit back then.
Then 3e removed the police state entirely, broke the control system that had almost every wizard of power within the land under control of the government, reduced the paranoia, and put less defense at their borders that were regularly fricked with in previous editions.
The fact that none of this caused ANY issues whatsoever could have been used to point out that the previous monarch was overbearing and we could see the effects on people who either refuse to cope with that or are angry about that.
Instead it was used to say Cormyr is just generic fantasy kingdom where nothing bad ever happens.
Then 4e comes along and throws out everything related to any of that to establish its own set of issues with the shadovar and the scrappy rebels resisting shadovar rule.
Which of these prominent 4e elements caused the greatest amount of upset among FR fans:
Dragonborn
Tieflings
Gensai
Oof.
Personally I think the Genasi fricked with me harder, because they were mostly suddenly appearing in areas that used to have high half-orc populations, almost like WotC wanted to retcon orcs and humans having peaceful relationships.
However, prior to 4e Genasi were there in small numbers, and Tieflings were there in relatively large numbers since 2e just in parts of the FR most adventurers weren't based in, so I would imagine Dragonborn peeved off the most people.
4e dragonborn are BULLSHIT
tieflings are supposed to be evil by nature and from other lower planes, but aside from that, they havent changed too much.
I pretty much ignore dragonborn lore and character design, I just use the stats to represent dragon-blooded people (who have never been a mainline PHB race), but that's true in any setting. Similarly, purple hellboys are boring, but 3e tiefling were way cooler and there's nothing wrong with the 4e statline.
I decided I didn't care about 4e FR when I heard about the spellplague, it just seemed clear to me that 4e was the wrong system for this setting, such that it took bad writing to make it work.
>I just use the stats to represent dragon-blooded people (who have never been a mainline PHB race)
Bro, you draconic lineage sorcerers? Silverbrow humans? Half-dragons?
What pissed me off the post is that the old dragonborn were awesome. Humanoids who were "born again" in the form of a dragon due to the services rendered to good and metallic dragonkind.
That's fair, can you elaborate on the differences between 3e and 4e dragonborn? I was kinda tuned out of late 3e because I was paying attention to Pathfinder.
My setting's 'dragonborn' and dragon sorcerers were basically the same thing, if you inherit a lot of physical features then you're a dragonborn, if you inherit magic you're a sorcerer, one sibling might get both while the next gets neither. But if I were going to run FR today I would just use my 3e-era books with 5e rules and forget that 4e happened.
4e dragonborn used to live in Abeir, the planet that crashed into Toril and the realities converged. They are just scaly people with affinity to dragons...
3.5 dragonborn are exactly what I said: Regular people who achieved some notable feat and got rewarded with a transformation into dragonkind.
What pissed me off was that 4e Dragonborn silently replaced the more interesting "Dragonkin" that already existed.
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Dragonkin
Also, Half Dragon and Draconic templates were already a thing. I saw lots of Half Dragon PCs in the 3e era.
Dragonborn in 4e were made to wrap all the different part-dragon races D&D had produced into one package.
And had the cultures and history/worldbuilding and physiology of none of them. I'm a realms fan. The history/worldbuilding *is* the major appeal.
The 4e team decided they could sellfaerun better by melting it down to sell the scraps to people who don't want a fleshed out campaign setting. Unsurprisingly, they still didn't want it, and neither did the former realms customers.
Then WotC realised they didn’t need a setting at all. Just MtG lore notes.
They were made as a race that could be copyrighted. You can't copyright generic dragonfolk, dragonkin exist elsewhere, and so on and so forth. But, "dragonborn", dragon people with dumb lizard tail dreadlocks, fufill the criteria the law laid down for the race to qualify as part of Product Identity.
Same thing with Tieflings (with an established appearance) and Eladrin (elves that D&D could copyright).
Dragonkin - kinda dumb tribal 9.5 foot tall winged bipedal dragons with wings and the ability to detect magic items and a psychological urge to hoard treasure that are manipulated by the cult of the dragon
Were distinct enough to copyright already. It wasn't that.
The name was already in use, and the unfortunate rule of copyright law is that if WoW uses it, either they already have it copyrighted or it's something that can't be copyrighted.
>"Already in use"
1994 was the same year wc1 came out and they weren't in wc1. Safe to say they were in D&D before Warcraft.
>"Name too generic to trademark"
That's possible.
They could have changed the name without replacing the whole species with the PoL / "returned abeir" nonsense version.
>Safe to say they were in D&D before Warcraft.
My general guess is that "Animal/Monster-kin" have been a staple of the fantasy genre for decades before either D&D or Warcraft, but hell if I'm going to do that research now.
In any case, what Warcraft did do was have one impressive team of lawyers. The Blizzard Legal team is one hell of a monster itself, and their actions and arguments to protect things like the Draenei made legal teams like Habro's wet between the legs. The quality of a game isn't necessarily what determines its ultimate value to a company, and with game rules themselves not being eligible to be copyrighted it's really no surprise they put so much attention on what elements they could establish as part of product identity.
Sure.
I understand there's value in exclusive trademarks. I'm just saying they already knew the FR customer base trend towards a "worldbuilding is the appeal, retcons and worldbuilding destruction make us angry" view on the product.
They knew that "blow it all up and start over" was going to go over like a lead balloon, and did it anyways.
It is what it is. Forgotten Realms is effectively a completed / closed set. It never really recovered after 2008. I mean. There are a few novels, until they stopped those too. Now all that's left is drizzt.
It's funny that 3e was supposed to have a "blow it all up" event, but last minute the ideas was canned.
I wonder who first thought that was a good idea and why it came back for 4e
>D&D blew it all up for 4e
>Heroes of Might and Magic blew it all up for HoMM IV
What is it with 4th iterations?
Marketing schools across the US teach you that 4 is a dangerous number and no series or franchise should ever reach the 4th one without a major reset or change that gives reason for the 4th to also be the first of a new generation.
Is this sarcasm, or serious? I took business MGMT, and took a couple marketing classes (Canada) and heard no such warnings - but that doesn't mean it doesn't come up later if you go all marketing.
SR4 is *also* a big shift from SR1-3.
Three is a archetypal number therefore, 4 is the start of a new beginning.
>Dragonborn
Scaley bait that's there to be scaley bait. I say that as a lizardman fan by the way. Dragonkin were much better.
>Tieflings
The worst of the worst. Tieflings used to look like a normal person, just with very slight Demonic characteristics that most people would miss at first glance. They were essentially Damian from the Omen or depending on which canon you're reading, Merlin from the Arthurian mythos. Now they're just brightly colored demon people who totes aren't evil because. BGIII really dived in at their role in modern RPGs: perpetual victims who're always getting oppressed because.
>Genasi
Just blue guys, red guys, green guys, galore.
>3e-era FR is nothing but a bunch of peaceful kingdoms and republics grown fat off trade with one another
You don't know what you're talking about.
Other than introducing the empire of shade an antagonistic nation, expanding upon background material already existing, updating current events to convey the understanding of being a non static campaign setting and the usual Drizzt wank and associated dross, 3 edition era realms is largely an extension of 2nd edition realms where your concept of peaceful kingdoms and republics grown fat off trade with one another is probably coming from. 1st edition realms was noticeably different from 2nd in that it had a more unknown and unexplored element to it particularly supplements such as savage frontier.
>I'm legitimately a huge fan of the 4e take on the setting. 3e-era FR is nothing but a bunch of peaceful kingdoms and republics grown fat off trade with one another, with few other beats to hit - it's fun enough for autistic lore-diving (I like a lot of that stuff!), but it's dull as shit for door-kicking adventuring. The world needed to be in more peril.
What?
3e Faerun had a massive invasion by demon-elves who escaped from their long forgotten prison; A bunch of drow coming to the surface (routine, but more frequent); a massive netherese invasion; a war between the humans of sembia and the elves of Cormanthor; The Archlich Szass Tam overthrew the Thayan government; Another big fricking war in Halruaa; A dragon rampage (and Dragonkin still existed rather than silently disappearing to be replaced with less interesting dragon people); A regular plague in the north; A zombie plague in the western heartlands; and then some.
Just how much more fricking conflict would it take before it stops being "3e-era FR is nothing but a bunch of peaceful kingdoms and republics grown fat off trade with one another"? Like holy shit.
The peaceful part of 3e is basically just the first month of the edition, covered by the FRCS, before everything devolves into chaos.
I totally missed the zombie plague; what was that from?
Scions of Arrabar Trilogy.
All the 3e novels introduced massive conflicts you could muck about with. > Assume the bad guy events happened setting the problems up
> Remove the nobody novel protagonists from the picture.
Cue awesome campaign.
IMO how 3e is different is they just stopped converting any of the novel plots into adventure paths and selling them as both novels and adventures.
The only positive experience I ever had with forgotten realms was Sir Schmoopy.
If you were going to start a new campaign in the FR what age would you set it in?
The post second sundering setting is interesting, but WOTC hasn't released a comprehensive campaign setting for 5E, so you would have to read R. A. Salvatore and a million adventure guides to get the details to fill in the big picture.
I want to run a sandbox and provide my players with plenty of potential plot lines to follow. I need a wealth of information on whatever city they plan on traveling too, and the factions they will interact with.
What FR era would you use?
I would use 1e era because I know enough off hand to use it how I want and modify it for what my players would like.
If you want a wealth of information and loads of factions that are interacting with each other and potentially the players, I would recommend 2e with the caveat that Cloak & Dagger, while advertised as a guide to factions, was written when WotC already took over so it flanderizes and tames quite a few of the factions listed.
>If you were going to start a new campaign in the FR what age would you set it in?
1340 DR+ with possibly some moving the time line forward time travelling hi jink to the 1370's DR.
I would do the past, in 3rd edition. Either before the elf and dwarf realms fell (so about 1000 years ago give or take), or somewhat more recently, like 1100-1300 DR. I always thought it would be kind of neat to have the players meet, for instance, Bruenor Battlehammers dad or grandpa, without knowing that they were dwarf royalty, or visiting the seclusive settlement of Dwarvendarrow without knowing it was a front for the secret Mithril Hall, or visiting the area of Kelvin's Cairn before the ten towns existed. That kind of stuff.
However, the realms before human dominance also seem pretty kino too, back when elves and dwarves were the major players.
>before the elf and dwarf realms fell
You’re gonna need to be way more specific given then number of elf and dwarf realms that have fallen over time. Like, specific name of realm levels of accuracy.
>Before the elf and dwarf realms fell.
>Not before the rise of human dominance.
I think he means Cormanthyr Empire of Elves + Fall of Myth Drannor + Evermeet + Book of Elves (set before the Fall of Myth Drannor)
So somewhere between probably 0DR and ~700DR
Look at what Alaundo the Seer named the years and see which one you like best. (Was it Alaundo? Might have been another sage.)
The mid 1370s.
But the 1360s would be good too, as would the Age of Netheril and era surrounding the Fall of Myth Drannor.
I recently started a fresh campaign myself, which I decided to start in the Inner East. Sources are scarce, 70% are from a half-comedy turn-based strategy from '98. Decided to pick 1382 to gradually move on to Spellplague.
Got any recommendations for done-in-one Forgotten Realms novels? I'm reading Drizzt Exile and it's not as good as Homeland.
elminster the making of a mage is probably my favorite novel period
theres five I generally recommend, homeland is one
elfshadow, forsaken house, and dissolution are all good
they're all the first of their own series, but also the best of those series
Awesome, thanks anon! Once I'm done with a few other books I'll check those out.
Any reason? Exile seems a bit too thin to me. Homeland had a lot of world building and backstabbing, but Exile seems like a road trip without many new things being learned. Just finished chapter 14 and the villains still haven't done much.
That's funny, I'm on exile now and I like it more than Homeland
The first Brimstone Angels is pretty standalone. Try it and see if you like it.
One and Done? City of Splendors Waterdeep by Elaine Cunningham's alright.
Evermeet was alright too. Also Cunningham.
Most of them are trilogies though.
Haunted Lands was a fun trilogy.
I've read Counselors & Kings a couple times.
Sembia was a fun Septology, and it leads to the Erevis Cale novels which were great.
Last Mythal was a lot of Fun.
I liked Spellfire, although it was later turned into a trilogy the first book is a good standalone.
My favourite books in Forgotten Realms was the Shadow of the Avatar trilogy, if you find you want more to read. I've re-read them many times, they are fun.
technically not standalone but The Wyvern's Spur was great when I read it as a teen and couldn't track down the others
>lived through the Battle of Britain
Shit, I didn’t realise how old he or his wife were. Thought he was an early boomer era.
Wikipedia says he's 62. So maybe he got together with a late 30's woman in his early 20's? Which would also explain her dying first.
Also didn't he name his daughter Alustriel? I remember that bit of info floating around during the wild west era of the internet so it might not be true.
That's sad. My condolences to Ed. Love FR or hate it, he created one of the most memorable and popular campaign settings to exist, and deserves credit for it.
I picked up a beat up used copy of Spellfire at a local comic shop years ago and the rest is history. What an icon.
Imagining getting to play these games in the early 90's. Lots of roadtrips to conventions, no cell phones distracting your group, no fake geeks who learned about DnD from Critical Role, chatting with other players on Usenet...
I was, unironically, born in the wrong generation.
I've always loved this setting, I just wish they didn't trash it with every new edition. Time of Troubles was okay but we could have just stopped there.
Would most FR players be amenable to short campaigns in a specific locale?
I really like the idea of doing something specific like protecting the Dalelands and then doing the finale at level 10. And then after a break the next campaign could be urban adventures in Waterdeep or doing some tombs and caravans in Zakhara. I've always hated high-level DnD and don't have a lot of interest in metaplot.
I'm sure lots of players would love that anon.
This is the best possible art for that character.
Also your basic approach is based and is guaranteed to produce way more good adventures (including campaign-ending adventures) than someone wanking over metaplots.
>yea, I'm a wizard/sorcerer
>Would most FR players be amenable to short campaigns in a specific locale?
That's how I usually DM.
Cormyr, Vaasa, Phlan et.c.
There's a learning curve, but once you cross it, you can make the lore work for you, and there's plenty of plot threads to sew into your stories and characters.
I HAVE THIS BOX IT'S SO COOL LMAO
For some reason I was reminded of the adventure book with the weird charcoal drawings that felt thrown in there at the last minute. I should try to find a PDF of that.
The coolest part about FR is the Mongols/Huns that exist in it. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Barbarian_lands_(Utter_East)
Also vikings are cool too. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Northlander
I honestly wish that they would have expanded on Birthright a lot more. Just playing the computer game for Gorgon's Alliance, it felt like there was a ton of potential for fun there.
The best thing about Forgotten Realms is Al-Qadim, and it just got lumped into the setting.
>and it just got lumped into the setting
You could say the same about a lot of the setting. Places like mulhorand and the other nations east of the sea of fallen stars would be completely alien to players who only know about the sword coast centric 5e.
It's funny to think of what the FR would look like if it weren't for TSR just shoving shit into it
From what we know, the Moonshae, Mulhorand, Unther, Al-Qadim/Zakhara, Kara-Tur/Hordelands, and Anauroch would all be drastically different.
Kara-Tur is specially funny because its just Rokugan ripped from L5R, lmao.
Many of these regions have been completely abandoned since the spellplague, too. Like, the entire south of faerun except for halruua, and only because of their rivalry with thay.
Uhh, Kara-Tur came first, my friend. 1st ed AD&D.
It annoys me how many parts of FR that people praise are actually things that had nothing to do with FR but were lazily grafted to the setting, like Thay and Kara-Tur. Still love FR though.
Where did Thay originate?
Why do people say "lumped"?
I always just took it as general regions of settlement. Like how one publication might focused on middle ages europe and another on middle ages middle east. then later some suplemental stuff uses both. theye are just relatively isolated regions.
Because originally it wasn't there.
Given the Drow have loads of ships off of the south of Faerun you would think they would have encountered Zakharans enough to have influence going both ways.
They don't because Al Qadim got dumped into the setting after the fact.
The fact Halruaa has sky ships that do massive world tours looking for arcane artifacts would also mean there's more trade/info about places moving around.
You have stuff like the Moonshaes which don't really make much sense within setting, Kara-Tur which brought loads of retcons with it, Al Qadim which might as well be in a bubble, Maztica which really mischaracterized Helm and his clergy just for the sake of having holy conquistadors, and Konigheim which is not only nonsensical but barely exists.
Then the shit that TSR did to the Anauroch and the high ice are also terribad and part of why we can't ever know what the cold wastes were supposed to have or what Sossal is really supposed to be like.
>You have stuff like the Moonshaes which don't really make much sense within setting
Can you elaborate? I'm reading about the Moonshaes a little bit and so far it seems like Vikings invading Scotland/Ireland.
Them being turbo isolated seems a little weird but it'd be based if you answered and didn't just tell me to frick off.
The Moonshaes problems come in a few areas
>Religion/Spiritual-Power
The whole earthmother thing, the giant monster that kept flipflopping between being a servant of bhaal and being a servant of malar depending on the writer, the moonwells implying that this is one of the most important places around, etc. I would say it feels like it's for a different setting, but it literally was for a different setting.
>The isolationism
For a place that is literally just off of the coast of the largest port city on the fricking continent, it's treated more like a far off place where only a few outsiders ever come through, despite its apparent magical and spiritual significance.
It's arguably made worse when races are brought into account
>The races
The big ones that stick out are the firbolgs and elves. The firbolgs here, technically the first depiction of them in Faerun, are just bloodthirsty savages like you'd expect from old myths, at stark contrast with the notes Greenwood had for firbolgs and as they would later be published in Giantcraft. Meanwhile the elves are just kind of rare forest people that are half-legend, etc, etc, which again would fit another setting better, because with the location of the islands and the fact the elven retreat has been ongoing for over 500 years at this point, the Moonshaes would see A LOT of elven boats passing by their islands.
1/2
>The Ffolk and the Northmen
I'm mostly bothered by how lazy these ethnic groups feel, and how the moonshae writing can't decide if there's vitriolic hatred and distrust between the groups or if it's just localized conflicts. Because in one area it'll mention northmen regularly raiding the ffolk, and long wars, and how it took a king of kings to stop this, etc.
Then in another section it mentions that waterdhavians regularly trade with the people of callidyrr (which apparently has no impact on the islands themselves), but also most waterdhavian traders are more familiar with the northmen who shouldn't be anywhere near callidyrr.
In general it feels like a mess, but that makes complete sense when you remember that the islands were written to be their own setting and then were jammed into being a part of the FR just a few months before the FR's launch, when that original setting project sank before it even launched.
Which perhaps goes to show TSR should have just accepted that no one wanted a half-assed king arthur setting at the time, either go whole hog or not at all, but we're talking TSR, they never accepted that a project was a failure until well after it lost them all of the money.
Or in some cases never accepted that a project was a success until well after they cancelled it.
For me, it is The Horde
Who is the true god of prostitutes? Sune, Lliira, Bast, Sharess?
Sharess.
Sune does it for free.
Lliira is more about dancing and fun.
Bast is half of Sharess
Sharess has the specific portfolio of festhalls, meaning brothels. If it’s any of those it would be her.
Festhalls or feasthalls? Aren't they both?
Festhalls specifically.
sharess
sune is teh goddess of *love*, not sex
liira is the god of family
Shiallia and Chauntea are family.
Lliira is just having fun and picnics and night clubs.
I appreciate Forgotten Realms....FOR ME TO POOP ON!!!!
But in all seriousness, frick off Ed Greenwood. And no, I don't have to explain why FR is trash. That's on you to research before making such a terrible post..
I quite like Forgotten Realms as generally published by TSR and early WotC, even if I'm not a fan of this weirdness. It's pretty great.
So, if homosexual Black folk like you don't want to talk about things, is there even a point to /tg/ beyond 40K containment and coomer threads?
It's fricking ludicrous how homosexual Black folk high off their own jism think answering a basic question is spoonfeeding and that someone should read 40+ years of material . . .
Are you just booty blasted because /lgbt/ told you to go back because you're too fricking gay for them?
The eyes of the Omnissiah are ever upon us.
-- Fabricator General Plutonis
bro take a joke, yeesh
The worst part of the realms is how people take Greenwood's of the cuff ramblings as Canon. Most Greenwood quotes seem to contradict the published material.
Ignoring any sex stuff people are talking about upthread:
Whether it's his "magic is hyper rare and most citizens have never seen a wizard before" (the various published text and 40 years of novels strongly suggest various mages are far more common than that), or it's his 192h/mo jobs ("4 on 1 off shift work with 12h shifts") compared to the published "30 hours per tenday" which comes out to 90 a month. It seems every time I see a Greenwood quote it's made up on the spot, contradicts the published material, and assumes a much lower standard of living / societal development more akin to 1200-1600 historical Europe, and has a much rarer use of magic. And like. That's *fine* to make a setting like that. But that's not the setting presented in published material. These things don't go together for shit.
It's also worth noting that Sharess was subservient to Shar until very recently, she represented selfish hedonism as a path towards spiritual oblivion, her redemption happened during the Time of Troubles and represents a kind of sexual liberation for Faerun.
Of course, Sharess is just one minor goddess, it's not like Faerun's prostitutehouses begin or end with her.
As a DM who has been trying to make a setting that combines elements from the most famous existing settings (yes i know its like turning on sprinklers in a thunderstorm, but I hope to someday publish our adventure as a novel and I don't want to get copyright struck)
Anyway, in attempt to justify the demographics, the economy, the customs - it just naturally started forming as a 'points of light' setting.
So, i try not to magical realm my players any more than they beg for, but in the background I had to wrestle with the question of how do I make this world dangerous and gloomy, but justify humanity still enduring.
The answer i had to settle on is that everyone has to breed like 4+ kids per woman. I've lowered the marriage age to 15 for women, the cultural assumption that 13 to 15 is the period for looking for suitable husband, where in most cases the search is done by parents. In general I assume that between 16 and 25 an average married woman will spend producing 3 to 6 kids. Also I assume that twins are a lot more common than in the real world today and that almost every remotely civilized settlement will have customs for taking in orphans and abandoned kids from prostitutes and the like.
It's not exactly magical realm, it more of the numbers just don't work out otherwise for the level of attrition from all the monsters and wars that I am aiming at.
Honestly not quite sure how far this puts me from history - I've dug into my family tree and in the 1920s it seems like 3 kids was the norm in Eastern Europe
Tl,DR - i wonder if promiscuity and orgies are just natural for DnD settings when you try to go for 'medieval world... but also every monster is real'
Well it depends. Arguably in "points of light" people shouldn't be facing ridiculous levels of attrition while within the realms of light, but have issues whenever they try to move out, so the traveling merchant probably has three wives and loads of kids, but most people are fine with 2-3.
The promiscuity of FR is however noted as partly for population purposes, which is why Greenwood mentioned that you don't really see chastity oaths anywhere, since it's hard to maintain follower numbers if people can't breed a new generation of priests/worshippers, and when most of the fun festivals are just an excuse to party and spend all night making more kids with the wife (or with the girl you've got a crush on, since often times such pregnancies led to marriage anyway).
>Tl,DR - i wonder if promiscuity and orgies are just natural for DnD settings when you try to go for 'medieval world... but also every monster is real'
No, it's the other way around. Orgies and promiscuity are for rich, advanced civilizations, and then mostly for the elites. Poorer societies absolutely do not tolerate hippie free love and random pregnancy because it makes establishing paternity impossible, and having extra mouths to feed who are not your genetic offspring can be literally fatal to you and your related family in a low-food/famine situation (which was common in medieval times). Especially if you're competing for food/resources with hordes of monsters everywhere.
Having numerous offspring would certainly be common but only via tight patrilineal lineage with strict inheritance rules (eg, primogeniture instead of plot-splitting). Unless you make your setting have abundant food and resources via magic but then player suspension of disbelief may suffer.
Now incest, on the other hand, might be more common if there are so many races that "racial purity" becomes a major concern for clans/tribes/societies under siege by outsiders, especially if the dysgenic effects are nonexistent... or if incest is eugenic for magic bloodlines, for example.
you have a point there.
In my setting i try to have it both ways.
On the one hand, very strong emphasis on marriage and fidelity among all humanoids
On the other hand attrition through violence tends to cause significant gender dis-balance which makes prostitution and sexual competition among women rampant. (that's the reasoning, but I also have the kind of players who expect every tavern maid to be a prostitute too and had no problem humoring that expectation)
>Be dwarf
>Reach surface
>Humans aren't all that bad excOH GOD THEY'RE ALL FRICKING AT ONCE
>Decide that this is not grudge-worthy, but I am still disturbed
>Discourage promiscuity and group sex and herbal contraceptives because I don't want my people acting like surface-dwellers
>Our numbers decline steadily for century after century as we're outbred by hostile races, how could this be happening to us?
>Somewhere, a hammer strikes a shield, and Moradin's voice rings through my soul: "BOGO ON BABIES"
>Haela's bright laughter fills the room as Berronar Truesilver scolds me for neglecting my wife
>The hammer strikes again, and my heart vibrates, and my dick becomes adamant
>The hammer strikes a third time, and the Allfather's voice fills my mind: "HAVE SEX YOU LITTLE SHITS"
I really like the idea of the dwarven pantheon getting increasingly angry at their creations for being more interested in smithing than fricking
Was the thunder blessing actually a retcon? I thought it was a 3e-era event, there was no thunder blessing in 2e because it hadn't happened yet, that's not a retcon.
Dwarves-don't-have-enough-sex goes back to Tolkien, he wrote that female dwarves were always scorning their suitors, because they always had their eyes on the greatest dwarven men who were too rich and too important for them, and they were too proud to settle for less. They're like walking autism.
That's not autism. That's regular dating trends in 2022. Women everywhere thinking they can land a pretty buff billionaire who has all the time in the world to dote on them and definitely won't toss them to the curb. Dwarves just got online dating and unreasonable expectations a little early.
lol
have sex
Just had a kid this week. Making Moradin proud.
Doesn't make the dating scene not terrible, and comments from friends tell me it hasn't changed for the better since 2017.
Anyways. That trend isn't dwarf autism. Dwarf autism would involve rigorously evaluating yourself and your partner, not thinking you can land the dwarf king because you're unique and special for reasons you can't actually point out.
I don't get why everyone's so defensive of the current dating scene. If you complain about it you get compared to crazy incels planning to blow up their schools because they don't have girlfriends. But clearly tons of people of both sexes are totally miserable and lonely.
The Thunder Blessing was a retcon because 3e happens 10 years after 2e, yet all of the twins (and triplets) born from the Thunder Blessing are already adults by the time 3e comes around.
>were always scorning their suitors, because they always had their eyes on the greatest dwarven men who were too rich and too important for them, and they were too proud to settle for less.
hey, this sounds familiar!
So, the same as human women?
According to Dwarves Deep, it was causing internal issues with the fact that the only dwarves who were having sex and making more dwarves were the ones living among humans in cities (who also learned that they can breed with humans and halflings), while the dwarves who insisted on smithing, fighting, and dying for the old fallen holds were just dying out.
A shame 3e retconned that to have THE THUNDER BLESSING.
What do people think of pic related as a campaign setting book? Is it still valid and D&D 5E and does it have good info?
Also want to know. I want to run a 5E FR sandbox, but WOTC hasn't released a comprehensive guide for 5E yet.
The last campaign setting was released at the tail end of 4e/DnD Next, when 5e was already in playtest. Its probably not too far off.
>Fr sandbox
3e frcs
Demihuman Deities
Faiths & Avatars
Powers and Pantheons
Those are my go to suggestions for such a thing. FRCS for your realmcyclopedia. And the three religion books so you can see how all the different religions and priesthoods and churches work.
Then skim the frcs for a region you like and grab the relevant 2e book. Look them up on the FR wiki and see what sources talk about them so you know where you can get more info. Also, the wiki will summarize and include relevant events from the novels that aren't mentioned in boxed sets that came before the novels.
Then set your game in the 1350s to 1378 depending on what you want going on as recent events and current history.
IMO Halruaa, Sembia, and Thay are great. Aglarond is good if you want to play as Thay's neighbors.
>Halruaa, Sembia, and Thay
I can't tell if you don't like elves or just like places where magic rules.
>Aglarond
Oh okay.
Though to be more serious, I would 100% recommend using 2e Halruaa over 3e Halruaa even if the 3e Shining South book is prettier than the AD&D Shining South book.
3e Halruaa reduced the amount of magic users by a frick ton and even reduced the level of the average users since you no longer have little kids becoming level 1 wizards.
I like elves lots. I just can't think of a good elf sandbox book for 2e or 3e. There's Cormanthyr and fall of myth Drannor, but the former is ancient history in relatively low detail, and the latter has a rather pushy metaplot if you're not regarding it as "events in a couple centuries". And evermeet is not a super adventure-heavy locale. And "Prepping from novel plots" is a FR technique I wouldn't recommend to beginners.
Is there a better "elfy sandbox" book that I'm overlooking?
Aglarond and Evereska are probably the best for elf sandboxes, though Aglarond is mix elves and humans, while Evereska is proper elf supremacy.
Aglarond is detailed in spellbound, right?
Is there a good single Evereska source to hand to a new GM? I've only seen snippets about it in sourcebooks about other stuff and in novels.
Spellbound and if I remember right it's given a quick overview in Dreams of the Red Wizards.
Evereska has no good sourcebooks, the closest you get in the 2e era is probably Volo's Guide to the Sword Coast which highly details the area around Evereska and makes very clear how he was not allowed to even get close enough to see inside of the walls because humans can go frick themselves.
It's still alright. Personally I think it spends too long establishing FR specific spells and talking about spell rarity and such though. While the one in OP (TSR 1085 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (Revised)) spends a great deal more pages on a lot more fluff. Unfortunately due the FRCS name being reused in 3rd edition it's annoyingly hard to find if you aren't specific in your googling.
https://usa1lib (.) org/book/21373805/bdf473
Here you go buddy. Any book you want can be found on this site.
Wait, people actually like Forgotten Realms?
I've spent significantly more on forgotten realms novels, audiobooks, comics, and videogames over my gaming career than I have in d&d game books (less than all my gaming combined though). Though Greenwood's stuff specifically isn't my favorite, the rest of it's great.
Yeah - that's why I didn't mention Evereska. I was pretty sure there was no good sourcebook focused on the place.
And Aglarond was a bit of an afterthought because I forgot about spellbound.
But if you get spellbound and dreams of red wizards, you have the stuff for a thayan or aglarondan sandbox, as much as aglarond is supported.
Anywho. It's not that I dislike the elf fluff. I just don't think there's an all in one convenient elf location fluff package to recommend to a new FR GM looking to run a game easily. It's spread across a bunch of game books that aren't a ready to go campaign sandbox locale, and a bunch of novels.
i want to use ALL the lore but how ?
What do you mean? There's no way to make it all relevant to a single game any more than you could make a single campaign that includes all the details of all Earth's history.
yes that is rub, how do incorporated as much lore in a campaign
I mean. I guess...
Start with characters during the reign of the creator races, and work your way forward through history, with the players getting a new (local and socially important) character every couple of sessions, as you jump to different places and times and embroil them in that place and time's politics.
It basically needs to be some sort of campaign montage. Past to future probably makes the most sense, but you could jump around if you can find another more coherent way to do it.
Maybe the main characters can be doing an Assassin's Creed thing and living out memories of history.
It would take some doing to tie it together in a way that makes sense, and it would take a very long campaign.
Back when D&D had soul, i guess 5e really did ruin everything huh
4e blew it up in 2008. 5e "repaired" it to a superficially similar but hollow and lifeless facade of what people liked before.
5e's mechanically similar enough that you can make it work using 5e rules and 2e/3e books (mostly). But you need a bunch of dms guild (or diy) conversions for missing species if you want stats for them (like the shades), because there's no official 5e write-up.
But of all you see about faerun is what's in SCAG and the published 5e adventures and the PHB - everything there was to like is absent, and it's just bland grey mush.
for me, 3rd was the approach to the peak, Pathfinder 1e early years was perfection itself. Early Paizo seemed to have cast off all creative limits and kept trying to go for maximum fun.
But the rot was already in there.
You can find cringy writers publicly sucking SJW wieners already in 3rd edition material. ie I remember Book of Exalted deeds already droning on about patriarchy and privilege.
Truthfully though I think D&D and Tabletop in general has no less soul today than it ever had. and just like always that soul is among the niche. The only change is that now there is a parallel mainstream grotesque parody of the hobby going forth.
Book of Exalted Deeds may be the single worst D&D book ever printed. Which is ironic, because the Book of Vile Darkness is one of the better ones.
There's nothing more embarassing then taking a Monte Cook book, where all the mechanics and flavor work seamlessly, and then just trying to cover all the mechanics with a coat of paint in the opposite flavor.
SJW bullshit and Game-breaking ineptitude (like the Vow of Poverty) aside, the BoED will probably always remain as the single best collection of all the stupidest RPG design mistakes someone could make.
I am sure you dumb wienersuckers could find "SJW" stuff in books earlier than 3e because whining about "SJW" is the only reason you are in /tg/
The BoED famously has a picture of a paladin standing with a sword before two embracing succubi, with a caption that says he is torn between fulfilling his duty to destroy evil and respecting love.
It is so fricking stupid, only the biggest homosexual in the world would think that the demons being gay would make a paladin even hesitate in destroying them. Hell, you are probably pretty close to being the biggest homosexual in the world for trying to complain about people complaining about SJW shit, but I bet even you can see how dumb it is.
>you are probably pretty close to being the biggest homosexual in the world
Nice projection
>no u
Nice attempt to dodge the point.
Implying you had a point.
>homosexual is so shaken by the argument that he's down to "no u" and "nuh uh".
Maybe stick to /lgbt/ if you can't handle simple discourse.
So the reason you are here is because you were kicked out of /tgbt/ for being too much of a homosexual?
>I think D&D and Tabletop in general has no less soul today than it ever had. and just like always that soul is among the niche. The only change is that now there is a parallel mainstream grotesque parody of the hobby going forth.
Based.
5e was ok at the start, it had many old-school sensibilities and was close to being a legit AD&D 3e. But then Cr*tical R*le showed up, introduced a bunch of theatre kid homosexuals to the hobby, and they became WotC's new target audience.
>and was close to being a legit AD&D 3e.
That is a massive exaggeration. The core game is passable and playable but it's still based on 3e, not actual D&D.
>and was close to being a legit AD&D 3e
adnd 3e already exists though. It was released in, like, 1994.
I would say 1995's 2e revised was still the same game. But ymmv.
I'm so grateful my introduction to D&D was through internet nobodies.
That second minotaur looks like a domesticated cow.
The former appeals to people who want to play as beasts to brutalize and gore their opponets. The latter appeals to people who want to frick cattle.
Furries sometimes commission art from me and they want all their animal people looking cool, not like some fantasy Starbucks latte drinker. There's no way they'd want the right over the left.
Most furries I've talked to complain about how soft and pathetic (and usually ugly) new art of furry races or creatures are.
The cats movie being an example of one that had them wondering why anyone would think that's appealing to someone with a fur fetihs.
The Forgotten realms is by far my favorite setting, I've dabbled in everything spanning from 2nd, 3rd/3.5, 4th and 5e. Played through some of the Old Bladur's gate games, and neverwinter. Listening to the all those big time Podcast's by people who worked on the books, like aq inc, and more. Read dozens of the old classics and some of the iffy new stuff. Its been an absolute BLAST for me!
I've gotten to run a slightly high magic settlement game for the last 11 months, filling it with some of my favorite aspects. Over the top NPC's, Bringing back Magic items/spells from older edition, Making call backs to named character and places from some of the other source materials, Working ALL of the old modules together, and letting the players spend their months of downtime to build up their settlement with items, structures, and so much more.
I am Genuinely excited to play every week, Getting my players to bring up the lore of the setting without me prompting is like no Gming experience I've had before. Every week they flood me with new ideas or ask if i've heard some piece of obscure lore from some tucked away part of the setting. I am thankful for such a rich setting for letting me enjoy every week.
I am still hoping that WotC will at one point remind themselves that Eilistraee exists.
>Eilistraee and Sharess are both banished forever to horny jail
It's not fair
Weirdly enough, Salvatore mentions Eilistraee in his upcoming book, as one of the deities worshipped by his new drow cultures. So Eilistraee got a pass, I guess, but maybe they threw clothes on her. Guess they would gouge their eyes out if they visited an acient Greeks museum.
I would be a crisp new 50 that that's only due to the complaints about her being so obviously missing from the setting and how many complaints Salvatore got over the last two books about his obvious hatred of gods.
>but maybe they threw clothes on her.
They did, way back when in that one Waterdeep module. Crawford is gay, you know and the sight of female boobies terrifies him to no end. I am not even joking here.
>as one of the deities worshipped by his new drow cultures.
Frick off with that asspull. How can the entire universe just FORGET ABOUT ENTIRE DROW CULTURES? And knowing Salvatore, he's going to shit on her something awful, because he really hates how she makes his special snowflake Drizzt less special.
>Frick off with that asspull. How can the entire universe just FORGET ABOUT ENTIRE DROW CULTURES?
Agreed, it's idiotic writing.
>And knowing Salvatore, he's going to shit on her something awful, because he really hates how she makes his special snowflake Drizzt less special.
Nah, he just drops a mention of her to throw a bone to people, then he forgets about her.
Salvatore hates Drizzt at this point. Hates him with fervor.
Imagine, being a writer chained eternally to a character you stopped caring about two decades ago. And every time you try to move past the character, everyone tells you to stop, so you just keep going around in the same circles while quietly waiting for death.
I dunno, I think he just hated what the psychopaths did to the setting with 4e.
>gay troll thinks anyone would keep biting at his bait at this point
How fricking lonely do you need to be to troll so shamelessly, just to have someone to talk to.
What is even going on currently in 5e FR? I've checked out after the nonsense that was Mordenkainen Tome of Foes, that casually torpedoed almost every single setting. Is the setting even still standing?
Officially all old lore no longer exists unless the 5e team specifically mentions it in a 5e product.
Unofficially everyone has basically stopped giving a frick about what WotC says about the FR, and the wiki every so often has internal fights about incorporating 5e fluff into FR articles.
For example the Firbolg article has loads of passive aggressive notes throughout it about how Volo's Guide to Monsters makes 0 sense within the previously established lore of Firbolgs within several books and novels.
>Officially all old lore no longer exists unless the 5e team specifically mentions it in a 5e product.
I wonder how Greenwood feels about it.
And yeah, I expected it was bad, but I didn't think it was this bad. MToF pretty much stealthily retconned the entire lore without giving a damn about any continuity (halfway through the edition's lifespan, mind you) and it seems that WotC has doubled down on their "new and improved (and more inclusive) versions" of every D&D setting. I guess I'll stick to 3.5e.
Greenwood doesn't like to criticize TSR/WotC
In the past he has openly said that if it weren't for TSR FR would have never become as spread as it was, but he has also said in recent years that his ideal situation would be to wipe the slate clean and pick his 4 or 5 favorite Realms writers to help him rewrite the setting, so it's clear he doesn't like how things have gone.
Not him, but they rewrote a lot of divine cosmology.
The Lolth/Corellon conflict is now, unironically, because Lolth refuses to support trans elves, while Corellon says all elves should be able to be the gender of their choice.
I wish I was kidding.
Forgotten realms had a pretty good run for the 20 years before they killed it.
The only FR content worth looking at after summer 2008 are novels that are a the ends of stories started before 2008.
They lured some of us back in 5e with a "we support all the settings! Look! You can totally run faerun in 5e! Here's something to get you started (SCAG)... And then.... Nothing useful, and they went back to shitting on it with their retcon and bullshit.
I mean. If you want to use 5e rules and 2e and 3e fluff you can, but you're probably going to want 5e write-ups of a lot of stuff that has no official write-ups. Before I stopped running 5e I was up to over a thousand pages of FR DMs guild conversions.
If you like the system for 3e, just use 3e.
So - I'm rereading songs and swords. And the brothels get casually mentioned way more than I remembered. And random side characters in what appear to be committed relationships talk about going to festhalls for "massages, and perhaps something more" - in addition to talk of the temples of pleasure and healing. I forgot how often the brothels come up. I dunno if nobody cares about loyalty in relationships or if it's just that rich people are hedonists, or maybe like Japan "it's not cheating if you paid for it". The people going all have no shortage of coin.
>I dunno if nobody cares about loyalty in relationships or if it's just that rich people are hedonists, or maybe like Japan "it's not cheating if you paid for it". The people going all have no shortage of coin.
Generally the view shown in the FR is if you're piss poor you care about being monogamous, if you're well off or living the adventurer life style the only sex that really matters is the stuff that leads to pregnancy, everything else is just like drinking booze, you probably shouldn't but no one is going to be upset if you're not a wiener about it
>Generally the view shown in the FR
Where?
Mostly Candlekeep posts that talk about marriage rituals.
Drow of the Underdark for AD&D also mentions most Drow relationships aren't expected to be monogamous or last long.
The existence of Sharess and how the Raven's Bluff books mention her religion spreading like wildfire also suggests there's some truth there without spelling it out.
>Mostly Candlekeep posts that talk about marriage rituals.
So its the same non-canon shit already mentioned, gotcha.
>Drow of the Underdark for AD&D also mentions most Drow relationships aren't expected to be monogamous or last long.
Which makes sense because they are Drow.
>The existence of Sharess and how the Raven's Bluff books mention her religion spreading like wildfire also suggests there's some truth there without spelling it out.
>goddess of sex being popular is proofs
Yeah nah.
Nevermind that many novels completely forget about Sharess existence and instead use Sune for supposedly same purpose.
I vaguely remember only clerics of Sune being explicitly mentioned to not be monogamous in one of the Erevis Cale books.
Again, makes sense that a goddess of love, passions etc etc clergy wouldn't bind themselves to one person.
If what you said is true Danilo Thann being upset when Whatshername confesses she fricked some random elf wouldnt make sense.
Neither would it make sense for Whatshername being jealous of Danilo being flirty towards other women.
>Now that someone has provided well sourced Greenwood quotes I insisted didn't exist last thread, I've decided Greenwood quotes don't count anymore.
>b-b-but its c-c-c-canon!
Prove it then.
>Lalalalalalala no quotes happened!
So where does it say that its canon?
Where was it ever officially published?
I wont be holding my breath waiting for you to provide that evidence.
>What says what Greenwood's word is Canon?
The forgotten realms contract. Which WotC inherited. They can stick to the terms, or they can give it back.
Disregarding for a moment your goalpost-moving bullshit, have some sources.
https://twitter.com/theedverse/status/1260974930814029830
https://www.enworld.org/threads/asmodeus-in-5e-faerun.458294/page-4#post-6642334
*Should* Greenwood's unpublished ramblings be Canon? I don't think so. But that's not the point. Historical fact is historical fact.
So. What goalpost will you move next?
The whole concept of appeal-to-contract-authority canon is bullshit. But if you're going to go for that can of worms (as opposed to something like an "appeal to published historical precedent", where the earlierst published source always takes precedence and later contradictions are to be disregarded and if they cant work without it the whole source is discarded), the contract is the contract.
Per that contract, if Greenwood says it's normal in Faerun to grow up taking herbal contraceptives and fricking your parents and marrying and having a family with your aunts or uncles, then that's normal in Faerun unless TSR or WotC comes along later and specifically contradicts it.
So. We have an official canon source saying it's normal. Now it's on you to find a newer source that specifically says Greenwood's incest fetish isn't A normal family upbringing in Faerun. Good luck, I'm not going to hold my breath that you'll find anything.
>Just prove a negative bro!
Thanks for confirming that from the get-go you argued in bad faith, no I can plainly disregard you as a moron.
>They can stick to the terms, or they can give it back.
Alright. Make them. Then I will accept Greenwoods wild ride as canon.
Good Luck!
>Disregarding for a moment your goalpost-moving bullshit, have some sources.
>So. What goalpost will you move next?
The fact that you consider asking for proof that non-canon ramblings as canon despite them being omitted in any official publication isnt goalpost-moving, its you projecting your own bad-faith-argument onto me.
Last thread you acknowledged his ramblings but said they didn't add pervy shit.
This thread someone shared a specific source adding pervy shit.
Then you claimed Ed's ramblings aren't canon unless published and demanded proof
That's moving the goalposts given your previous arguments. But I still provided that proof. Ed's ramblings (all of them) are canon until wotc contradicts them in a newer published product. That's the contract.
You're making bold claims about canon And you keep being wrong about it Whereas I'm one of the people saying "Canon is bullshit, use what fits together and discard what you don't like". Faerun's official canon is shitty. Between Hasbro's wild contradictions and Greenwood's online rambling as setting-errata, it's a fricking mess. It's been a fricking mess for 15+ years. Stick to the ad&d sources and ad&d novels and it's much better. The 3e stuff is okay. But you're better off if you pick and choose what 3e stuff to include because it's already starting to be inconsistent. And then just discard the 4e and 5e writing and discard Ed's ramblings.
>I'll accept Greenwood's wild ride as canon! Good luck.
There you go. Now you can either roll with it, or stop giving a shit about the canon and just cherry pick sources by their content quality and cross compatibiliry rather than their contract authority. I recommend disregarding canon and prioritizing historical continuity, personally.
>"Bad faith"
No no. That's what you've been doing. Changing the argument standards when you're aren't getting the outcome you want.
>Prove a negative
We proved a positive. To disprove, you need a newer positive that contradicts it. I'm pretty sure none exists, but you're welcome to look, or to cite one if you recall seeing anything that contradicts it.
>Last thread you acknowledged his ramblings but said they didn't add pervy shit.
Well now I know that you are a schizoid.
>This thread someone shared a specific source adding pervy shit.
Where?
You mean that shit that you still cannot prove is canon?
>hen you claimed Ed's ramblings aren't canon unless published and demanded proof
Because thats how it works. I know this makes you seethe in your impotent redditardrage but I cannot help you with that.
> But I still provided that proof.
No you didn't. You essentially wrote what amounts to "its proof because its proof".
>That's the contract.
Dont care, its nowhere in the material.
>You're making bold claims about canon
How is the irony not killing you?
>There you go. There you go. Now you can either roll with it
Oh lawdy, its another case of someone just reading what they want to read.
>No no. That's what you've been doing.
>"no u"
Ah man, I guess I got outsmarted.
..Oh wait: No u!
>We proved a positive
Nope, still waiting.
>To disprove, you need a newer positive that contradicts it. I'm pretty sure none exists, but you're welcome to look, or to cite one if you recall seeing anything that contradicts it.
Twisting it around doesn't change the fact that you are asking to prove a negative.
The 2/10 still stands.
> "Still waiting"
> "Spoon-feed me a screenshot I'm too dumb to click links"
Here comes the choo choo train.
>And the brothels get casually mentioned way more than I remembered. And random side characters in what appear to be committed relationships talk about going to festhalls for "massages, and perhaps something more" - in addition to talk of the temples of pleasure and healing. I forgot how often the brothels come up. I dunno if nobody cares about loyalty in relationships or if it's just that rich people are hedonists, or maybe like Japan "it's not cheating if you paid for it". The people going all have no shortage of coin.
Yeah nah, thats a load of bullshit.
I have the series from Elfshadow to Thornhold and apart from one place mentioning a bunch of Thugs hired by whatshisname-evil-rogue-elf enjoying both male and female prostitutes nothing you mentioned shows up.
> thats a load of bullshit.
> I have the series from Elfshadow to Thornhold and apart from one place mentioning a bunch of Thugs hired by whatshisname-evil-rogue-elf enjoying both male and female prostitutes nothing you mentioned shows up.
> “Elfsong doesn’t have any hints of sexual content and there’s no mention of prostitutes or prostitutehouses in the whole book!!!! You’re lying! It’s got the Amish stamp of approval for children under 11!”
Here’s what I found with some quick ctrl+F in like 2 minutes. Have you *READ* the books of which you’re claiming nobody else knows what they’re talking about?
>>Ch4
> A high class prostitute recalling all the secrets she got her Jon to disclose the night prior. Usually she loves being a prostitute, but not today. ... And then she tries to use her call-girl seduction skills to try to save her maid and propositions the guy who broke into her house and killed her guards, before being beaten and gibbled.
> A rich bawd going for a happy ending massage because she’s in a good mood after realizing her boytoy is one of the lords of waterdeep.
>>Ch6
> Danilo telling the story of a Sune Priest having a fricking competition with a bunch of Satyrs.
>>Ch7
> The rich bawd fricking a guildmaster so he’s too distracted to notice the inconsistencies in her phony self-defense story after she murdered a guy.
Epilogue.
> One of the party members (the riddlemaster) is hinted to have developed an excessive habit of fricking prostitutes at the pleasure-temple. (lololol)
Here’s the original text. It’s more than 2k characters, so its in a paste.
zerobin<dot>net/?50491ab0bfaac11d#LeYnWPyHGfkBCq49gb6G5uf5eWCr7lGlGzCTztIh6uI=
>Have you *READ* the books of which you’re claiming nobody else knows what they’re talking about?
Have you even read what you claimed and what you actually provided sources for?
>> A high class prostitute recalling all the secrets she got her Jon to disclose the night prior. Usually she loves being a prostitute, but not today. ... And then she tries to use her call-girl seduction skills to try to save her maid and propositions the guy who broke into her house and killed her guards, before being beaten and gibbled.
> A rich bawd going for a happy ending massage because she’s in a good mood after realizing her boytoy is one of the lords of waterdeep.
Compare that to
>> “Elfsong doesn’t have any hints of sexual content and there’s no mention of prostitutes or prostitutehouses in the whole book!!!! You’re lying! It’s got the Amish stamp of approval for children under 11!”
Misrepresenting what I wrote and strawmaning the shit out of what I said doesn't prove what you claimed, it just shows how desperate you are.
2/10, see me after class.
> The rich bawd fricking a guildmaster so he’s too distracted to notice the inconsistencies in her phony self-defense story after she murdered a guy.
Can you show me exactly where I claimed that rich bawds and prostitutes do not exist?
When you are done you can maybe stop with your autism and actually address what I said, not what you claim I ve said in your righteous tardrage, that would have saved you a lot of time.
You said there was only one mention of prostitutes in the series and that no side characters in what looks like it's supposed to be a committed relationship goes to a neither, and called the idea that there was whoring around mentioned in the novel "a load of bullshit". I addressed exactly what you said. Stop telling pointlesslt ridiculous lies about easily verifiable book contents and we won't be able to debunk your shit so easily.
>You said there was only one mention of prostitutes in the series
Show me where.
Please quote me.
>that no side characters in what looks like it's supposed to be a committed relationship goes to a neither,
Show me.
Show me the quote where I said exactly that.
> and called the idea that there was whoring around mentioned in the novel "a load of bullshit"
Same as the above.
>I addressed exactly what you said
No, as embarrassing as your reading comprehension is even after me asking you directly you cannot even correctly repeat what I wrote.
Instead you write what you took away from it.
I cant tell whether you just suck this much at reading comprehension or simply are an ESL-moron, because it boils down to the same issue: If you have a hard time understanding what people tell you and instead make up in your mind what you think they told you, you should stay the frick away from message boards.
>Stop telling pointlesslt ridiculous lies about easily verifiable book contents and we won't be able to debunk your shit so easily.
Its like I am arguing with a legitimate moron.
Go reread what I have actually said.
And the reread it again.
I will even provide you some help:
You claimed that "brothels get casually mentioned way more than I remembered".
I called that bullshit.
You provided exactly ONE instance of the very same loose character talking about it.
One.
>And random side characters in what appear to be committed relationships talk about going to festhalls for "massages, and perhaps something more
Again, you have ONE character despite claiming multiple instances of this occurrence who by your own admission is a bawd.
One.
And from one character you somehow extrapolated that everyone is a degenerate and monogamous relationships are non-existent.
Thats why I called bullshit.
And you then tell me I am lying?
Get a grip on reality or on the english language, you moron.
I pointed out the brothels and bawds in the story, which were more common than I remembered, in this post.
You said it was bullshit in this post.
I quoted your response word for word in this post, and then pointed out how ridiculous your rebuttal was, and then gave you ebook quotes to support my original statement that you called bullshit in this post.
And then you denied ever responding to
.
And that's been our discussion. A straight reply chain started from you calling me a liar all the way up to you saying you never called me a liar after I provided quotes. But it's all right there.
>But it's all right there.
Where are the quotes I asked for?
So I can accept your concession of you not being able to read?
Even after I pointed it out in another post and beat you over the head with it you still pretend you dont see the difference between what you claim I said and what I actually said?
>Spoon-feed me my post text again I can't click a link, and I'm just going to claim I never said what I said!
Seriously?
Here's exactly what I said was in the book that I didn't remember being so forward.
>And the brothels get casually mentioned way more than I remembered. And random side characters in what appear to be committed relationships talk about going to festhalls for "massages, and perhaps something more" - in addition to talk of the temples of pleasure and healing. I forgot how often the brothels came up.
Here's your word for word quoted response
>Yeah nah, thats a load of bullshit.
>Apart from one place mentioning a bunch of Thugs hired by whatshisname-evil-rogue-elf enjoying both male and female prostitutes nothing you mentioned shows up.
...
>Can you show me exactly where I claimed that rich bawds and prostitutes do not exist?
Right there. Right where you claimed that the casual inclusion of rich bawds and prostitutes I mentioned showing up in the book 'never show up'.
But they do in fact talk about the festhalls and prostitutes and she does in fact go for a happy ending massage, and it is handled in casually, just like I was talking about. Ergo, all the things I mentioned being in the book 'showed up'.
You didn't "point out" a damn thing, you just lied about what you said. You said the casual inclusion of rich bawds and prostitutes didnt show up. Then after I showed you otherwise you said you never said that. And started this bullshit back and forth nonsense. Why play this headgame at all? There's logs of the whole thing.
I don't even know what you'll twist this time. Start redefining what "nothing" and "bullshit" mean maybe?
Hey now you ESL illiterate half-wit! For the thousandth time! "Nothing you mentioned shows up" clearly means *everything you mentioned shows up and he's nitpicking something else now, which is *definitely* what he was nitpicking the whole time. Obviously. Sheesh. Come on.
>The Lolth/Corellon conflict is now, unironically, because Lolth refuses to support trans elves, while Corellon says all elves should be able to be the gender of their choice.
Thanks for the answer. I wish you were kidding too.
It's actually infinately worse, because Crawford can't help himself (now being trans is a blessing and every elf who isn't trans is barred from Arvandor, cursed to reincarnate every time, until they stop being such bigots and learn their lesson).
Plus the entire 30 years cosmology has been scrapped and replaced with some nonsense. You can now have Vulkoor in FR and Lolth in Dragonlance. But Dragonlance doesn't have the drow, you say? We'll it does now, they just don't know it yet.
This is the kind of horseshit you have to deal with.
>Lolth refuses to support trans elves
Isn't she supposed to be the evil one?
It's oddly Lawful of her as well.
She probably realized that if she allowed that shit, her matriarchy of hot elf girls would quickly turn into a disgusting drag show... and than, since the Dark Elves actually have threats and enemies all around them, the homosexual rot would quickly undermine their defences and most of her worshipers would be wiped out.
On another note...
this is not exactly FR, but I am trying to aim at that era of the game
So given access to Planar Inquiry and Lesser Planar Ally, and aiming specifically at the Djinn races... How difficult would it be to procure a full Ring of Three Wishes? Would it be just a matter of summoning stuff until you can get a Lawful Djinn and giving it ~150k worth of gold and magic items?
>Mind running an errand to the City of Brass, or wherever you shop for this kind of stuff? you should of course keep the change for your trouble.
Probably easiest to just get a yakman to force a dao to do it for you since in AD&D the dao were bound to do whatever the yakmen wanted.
>I've checked out after the nonsense that was Mordenkainen Tome of Foes, that casually torpedoed almost every single setting
I've been out of the loop. Bring me in?
OLD GOOD
NEW BAD
Yes.
The original FR grey box makes a good OSR setting if you remove the Moonshaes and any other "addendum" TSR stuck on Ed's world.
looks like the movie is set in Forgotten Realms
if those are Red Wizards of Thay
They announced a year or two ago that it was going to be mostly in/around Waterdeep
More importantly, how will they make sure it sucks?
Black Afro action womyn as protagonist?
troony Scott as Scriptwriter?
They already showed comedic white guy lead, strong black guy ranger doing the monster slaying, hispanic dwarf lady beating up humans, that really pale skinned black guy who is safe to market to china because he's not dark enough to offend chinks as the sorcerer/wizard, and a cute tiefling girl who will always be fully dressed.
It's probably going to suck just because the writers/director aren't known for anything particularly great, just the kind of shitty comedy shlock expected to make its money back and a bit extra, but never be rewatched
its gonna be GOTG but fantasy
they'll all be jokey
Likely, I don't plan to watch it though.
I haven't seen the trailer and don't intend to see the movie. I already know it'll be Marvelshit.
Damn red wizards look like that?
They do now.
Their old description
>The nobility is almost entirely comprised of the slim, sallow, folk from Mulhorand, but a few of the lower classes have managed to impress some wizards with their magical ability and be elevated to the rank of wizard's apprentice. Some of the Rashemi have now become members of the Red Wizards.
>Traditionally, nobles of Thay disdain and abhor body hair (something of a trial for those of Rashemi descent). Men are known to grow facial hair even as they shave their heads. Women commonly shave their heads and decorate their shaved pates with artistic designs. Sometimes the designs are permanent tatoos, but most are just body paint, and frequently changed. This custom is mainly honored among the Tharchions and Tharchionesses, though most Red Wizards also follow the style when they have the time.
>Presumed Red Wizards have been seen outside of Thay with beards and normal body hair. Most of these are obviously of Rashemi descent (part of a program of proving their worthiness by taking on missions to foreign lands), but even Mulani have been seen in such condition. It is thought that, without their specially-trained slave barbers, Red Wizards would rather grow their hair than risk cutting it by themselves or entrusting their heads to local barbers.
While the rashemi people looked like
>The basic lower and middle class stock of Thay consists of short, hairy, swarthy, sturdy folk; the same stock found in neighboring Rashemen. This body type, called the Rashemi, can be found in the lower free classes and among the slowly-growing middle class of the country.
It's funny how the thayans have been whitewashed as frick though.
Remember when they looked like that?
I remember it being interesting that Edwin is a hairy mother fricker while Minsc is hairless and tall.
Given the descriptions that would suggest that Minsc is actually descended from noble thayan stock that moved to Rashemen, while Edwin is from lower class blood that was elevated
This isn't the most interestingt part
Now remember her?
Not really, but it's not like Chultans haven't been seen in other parts of Faerun.
One of the fighting monk priests of Candlekeep (who isn't in BG) is a chultan dude who used to be a mercenary. He retired to take up book learning and then dedicated his life to Oghma, and became a priest there.
Other chultans having settled in other parts of Faerun is a possibility, but I'd be curious if there's some story behind how they got to the opposite side of the continent.
She ain't chultan dude
I don't doubt that, but ethnically speaking she would be from somewhere in the south, so I assumed Chult, and I wondered if there would be an interesting history to migrations of ethnic groups to Rashemen, or if her family was one of the rare few.
What's a good standalone 3rd edition or PF1 adventure for level 8-9 party to tackle that involves messing up lots of undead and/or demons?
No one ran adventure modules back in the day, they just ripped them off for the maps. I dont know.