I hate FR so much bros.
It’s been forced so hard that when I DM for newbies and it isn’t FR they’re confused because they think it’s “the DND setting.” Make it stop.
I hate FR so much bros.
I hate FR so much bros.
It’s been forced so hard that when I DM for newbies and it isn’t FR they’re confused because they think it’s “the DND setting.” Make it stop.
Bullshit. New players don't know what FR is.
Depends on where they're coming from. A lot of players think Forgotten Realms lore is just DnD lore. So whatever is in BG3 is DnD lore to them. They're half right I guess.
This.
I made a homebrew setting for a DnD game, and the BG3 player just assumed all the lore and dieties from FR carried over.
In my experience that's what a lot of DMs do when they make their homebrew worlds, which doesn't help the situation. Basically just take the Forgotten Realms framework (Gods, races etc.) and port it over to another generic fantasy world. I imagine because it's the path of least resistance. DnD players in general seem way averse against settings that shake things up and that put restrictions on what they can play as.
No... Surprisingly I've found many do know what it is. In my ... decades? of RPGs I've never knows a single motherfricking newbie RPer to pay attention to a "Setting" let alone the default setting, but 5e? Fricking Bland DUNGEONS & DRAGONS managed to do it with their BLENDEST settings.
They cracked the NewbieVsLore code. If only i could understand how they did it for my table
Fr fr, no cap
Literally no one joined the FR Subreddit or Candlekeep because of Honor Among Thieves.
It wasn't until a solid three weeks after BG3 had its full release that the subreddit got flooded with newbies, and Candlekeep is still only getting a trickle.
Most D&D players don't know what FR is and don't care to learn about it even if they've heard of it.
Nobody has cared about Candlekeep for over a decade anyway, it exists for half a dozen to a dozen people to circlejerk over the good old days. And hasn't had a decent codebase update for twice that time.
alas
>implying anyone, ever, bothered or bothers with pre-definied settings when playing and especially running DnD
L M A O
O
L
Dude, premade settings are great.
I'm a forever GM and premade settings make like so much easier, I can focus on actually GMing instead of "world building". I'm not trying to shit on world building; if you like it, good for you. But I save so much time and effort not having to make up a dozen shitty countries for people to be from.
World building is what a shitty GM strokes himself over. Too many moronic GMs who gush and explain to you why their shitty homebrew setting is so cool.
You hear that guys, Anon has spoken! Never question your products, never attempt to make anything better yourself, never try to use your own imagination in a game involving your imagination, only CONSUME!
>GMs should focus on GMing instead of autistic worldbuilding
>literally pic related
I like doing a mix. Give me something premade and I can work with the PCs to fit their characters into it and we make some additions changes as we go. Good fun time.
premade settings are nice and give you and your players an established groundwork. Its easier to pick something out of a world you know from vidya and novels instead of reading 20 pages of C tier homebrew stuff.
Yeah I think FR is good for games with newer players who most likely are getting into D&D from the movie or D&D.
My only issue is that loads of people want their D&D experience to be really zany and funny because of those two recent things being a bit whacky so it can’t be hard to set a decent tone.
I'm in my 40s with two kids. Why would I waste time making a setting no one wants to play in, when I can download an existing setting with brand recognition and tweak it to personal taste in a fraction of the time?
You could argue the other way. Just as many run a vague homebrew not too dissimilar to FR, but don’t have the time or energy to be accurate to any pre-established setting.
It's easier when you can look up answers instead of having to make them up when your players ask bizarrely specific questions.
No one's saying you have to stick 100% to FR, but it's really nice to have everything conveniently made.
if a setting is original enough to be worth writing about and reading about it will certainly be a poor fit for dnd. no reason to make your own dnd setting unless you're planning to do extensive homebrewing.
My friend runs an NWN Persistent World server with a fairly decent population (around 30 people a day which isn’t Arelith by any means but still pretty impressive)
And the biggest complaint he gets from newbies is the setting being an OC instead of Forgotten Realms.
i like Forgotten Realms and want more of it
Me too. I've got a game for friends where we tear around in Realmspace, the Spelljammer spin on the setting. OP doesn't play games, they're too busy being a bitter, miserable c**t.
Nobody wants to play your shitty homebrew setting anon
I'm perfectly fine with it as long as it's actually in a usable state.
Forgotten Realms *IS* the d&d setting. Has been for an entire fricking decade now officially and de facto since the mid 90's. Get over it.
>Implying Nentir Vale had anything to do with FR
>I am an idiot who doesn't know what words mean
Nentir Vale isn't a setting, it's "here's where we'd put a setting if we could be fricked to do our jobs".
brainlet identified
Dude. It's been almost 9+ years since 5e released. If someone is just rounding up that last year and calling it a "Decade" that linguistically fine if not factually correct.
Or... Do you not realize it's been that long?
COVID fricked with all of us. We all lost years of our lives but it felt like a few months. Hardly surprising many people have a distorted memory of time now.
Only in published modules, and even these tell you alternative hooks if you want to port them to other worlds, or lean into the multiverse stuff where all D&D worlds are connected. The core rulebooks don't have a setting, just a couple of examples.
>officially and de facto since the mid 90's
Try early 2000's the 3.5 handbooks all set Greyhawk as the default D & D setting.
early 2000s. That is important part. I started with 3rd edition and books were mostly free of any lore. I remember only that Greyhawk gods were used in player's handbook and maybe few spells had names for some wizards. But even then people around me and everywhere I read it was Drizzt this, Drizzt that. Elminister bla bla bla. no talk about Greyhawk or Dragonlance.
Yeah, Greyhawk may have been the "Official main" but they only gave you the gods and some Wizard names, no maps etc. You got more info on the important Outer Planes than you did on Greyhawk, and FR just benefited from having more and older Fiction, which created celebrity characters that encouraged everyone licensing the game to set their Vidya there so they could have cameos, which created a vicious cycle.
Hiring a creepy furry pervert who fixated on Pixie ass to write several of their main attempts at Greyhawk Fiction including killing Lolth in her own home plane with a portable hole full of Holy water was also probably a mistake.
>Hiring a creepy furry pervert who fixated on Pixie ass
QRD?
Rob Schneider wrote for wotc for a brief period.
You're thinking of Dan Schneider. You can remember this because Dan Rhymes with "Get in the Van"
Paul Kidd, now when the mood strikes him "Pauli(Or was it Paula?) Kidd." Now some weird pervert who talks about sex ed and how kids should be raised while just being an open perv. Also a communist.
Back then just a furvert who put a bit too much detail into the Pixie girl's ass. Wrote the novelizations of White Plume Mountain, I think Journey beneath, and Demonweb Pits.
> You got more info on the important Outer Planes than you did on Greyhawk
Don't greyhawk and forgotten realms have different cosmologies? or is it like all the same outer planes but arranged differently or the other planes are a bit different, I really don't know much about FR
They both use the Great Wheel in 2e and are linked by Planescape and Spelljammer.
In 3e they tried to use the Great Tree and diverge Forgotten Realms for some reason. I'm not sure why, it mostly just seemed to eat up word count in books that could have been better spent on other things.
In 4e they moved everything to the 4e cosmology, which everybody hated. Even most 4egays I know hated it.
In 5e they moved FR back to the Great Wheel. It's interesting to observe, because if you watched twitch streaming like Dice Camera Action (which had Chris Perkins DMing), or other 5e multimedia stuff (Acquisitions Incorporated, the various "stream game on twitch DnD channel" stuff) they went functionally total 2e Planescape and in some cases did a pretty deep dive into it, things you wouldn't know with just a cursory glance. But there was a conflict between the Wizards DnD team it seems, because over time more and more of the 4e cosmology has been ported back in under Jeremy Crawford's direction (Crawford joined WotC in 2007 and did most of his teeth-cutting on 4e, so he evidently has a strong preference for it over the older 2e and 3e material that Perkins uses).
It's fricking amazing how hard 4e poisoned the well. It's like the Spellplague extended beyond fiction itself, spilling into reality.
The post says defacto, not default in the core books. You can cry about it all you want, but when the majority of people think about d&d, they are thinking about FR.
>Forgotten Realms
>literally fricking everyone remembers them
Forgotten by *Earth* you silly billy. The conceit is that at one time our worlds were connected with extradimensional portals and various Earth cultures and gods migrated through, along with mythological creatures. Then the portals closed and we forgot about them. It's canon that Archmages still come to Earth sometimes - Elminster loves Aussie beer, there's a copy of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea in the Moonshaes, etc.
>it is just western isekai
I knew there was a reason it annoyed me.
Just play Greyhawk and don't tell them.
WotC don't want you to know this but the parts of settings you like are free you can take them home I have a homebrew setting made of 458 different "official" settings.
The real problem is they seem to forget that there's an entire world outside of the Swords Coast/Faerûn. Every single fricking adventure is on the coast.
What alternative do you have to FR?
Dragonlance is old and busted and from the 80s.
Ebberon is niche for its weird magitekpunk vibes.
it just werks. The problem is
I just merge everything together. I merged the Empire of Iuz with Thay, Perrenland is the more civilised part of Rashemen, they have the Mournland in between them from an old magical war and laterally both border the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The Hyperborian age
France
Just play 2nd Edition. They made so many settings they bankrupted the company.
I play Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Ravnica, Greyhawk, and Planescape. I also just ran a one shot in Dragonlance less than 2 weeks ago.
Except Rime of the Frostmaiden.
And Curse of Strahd.
And The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.
And Tomb of Annihilation.
And I’d argue Storm King’s Thunder since it’s the Savage Frontier more than then Swore Coast.
And Ghosts if Saltmarsh.
And Call of the Netherdeep.
And Shadow of the Dragon Queen.
Curse, Wild, Call, and Shadow are all non-FR entirely. Arguably Ghosts but it is setting neutral.
People calling Salt Marsh setting neutral. Really feels like calling Curse of Strahd. Setting neutral.
It's a major-major locale in greyhawk, but if someone isn't even aware of greyhawk? I guess their brain just defaults to "Must be setting neutral"
Unfortunately Crawford has tainted Curse of Strahd by inserting his Faerun headcanons onto it on Twatter and saying they're 5e canon, one example being that Barovia's morninglord is defacto Lathander.
And isn't Annihilation just badly ported Tomb of Horrors (Greyhawk) with its name changed to lampshade the most infamous trap?.
It's set up to be different to the Tomb of Horrors, canonically, but with the same creator (Acererak). It's basically a private hobby project he started just to see what would happen and if he could do it (raise an atropal to divinity by screwing over an entire crystal sphere).
That's why when he appears at the end of the module, he's an extremely easy encounter with non-specialised spells set up and only carrying a couple of his favourite magic items (staff, sphere, talisman of the sphere). You basically caught him by surprise/in the bath, and he's doing the equivalent of an annoyed checking under the desk to see what rat ate through the power cable of his undead-godling server farm.
Not for my group. I tend to enjoy the sword coast but in our last planning session before our current campaign they said they wanted to stay as far away from the SC as possible so we're in Tymanther/Mulhorand right now.
Because WotC has a dearth of creativity and only knows how to chase what's seen as the most popular. Shitters only know Drizzt and Minsc, maybe the likes of Elminster and the Zhentarim to move a little further to the Dales and Moonsea, so that's what they get.
Ed Greenwood is still making good content for the rest of FR like his book on Thay that's even canon for 5e but 90% of the current playerbase doesn't even know who the frick that is. So you get the current situation where a setting that isn't actually generic or set up to handle everything that D&D turned into is functioning as the default, generic setting just because it's got the headlines and historic sales numbers. It's fricked and a recipe for the disintegrating culture we're seeing.
As late as 3rd edition, Faerun felt like an opinionated setting as opposed to a kitchen sink that everything in D&D has to somehow fit.
It has some of THE most ASS lore I've ever read, it astounds me that anyone can take it seriously.
Where do I go to get some old FR campaign guides and adventures?
DMsguild, if you dont play to pirate them
I'd rather not give homierds of the Coast money, so pirating is preferable.
Ask in the sharethread?
Forgotten Realms fricking sucks so much.
3rd edition era Kitchen Sink Greyhawk was somehow unironically less bad, at least there you could just do anything and ignore any parts you didn't like because no one really knew what was going on anyway.
I'm thankful I have a decent group who don't care about this dogwater setting, I can't imagine the utter despair of playing with a bunch of newbies drawn in by BG3 who all want to know where Elminster and Karlach are.
It's literally just the (current) default setting, no reason you have to use it.
You're better off reducing setting baggage as much as possible. Consider instead giving the players a list of 5-10 relevant things about the local setting that are common knowledge to everyone living and be ready to answer questions players ask what their PC's know about things or what locals would tell them (like "we don't ask questions about X b/c the sages of the Kingdom of Wherever were obsessed with it and look what happened to them").
To be fair, 5e distorted Faerun around its mechanics in a way that I found quite dissonant.
In what way? And is it worse than 4e disappearing and destroying whole nations and having a Dragonborn great exchange to fit its mechanics?
4e did a Realms Shattering Event that's easy enough to ignore. 5e changes things while pretending they've stayed the same; thankfully just for the Sword Coast.
The introduction of Tieflings and dragonborn as common races that are just all over the place now is really far more impactful than the Spellplague.
>Tieflings
Planetouched weren't common, but they were never exactly rare. And honestly, having them be pretty in common even fits decently in places like the Thay, Unther, and Mulhorand. Maybe even places like Dambrath and Zhentil Keep? I dunno. Places with lots of magic and/or evil.
That western coastline is weird as frick.
>Make setting primer
>Homebrew all of your races
>Tell them you aren't running an official setting and they need to read the primer
>????
>Profit
>and they need to read the primer
They won't do that.
If your players are too lazy to read two paragraphs of text, find another group.
im good up to 3e, cant do realms after that tho, cant really do realms up to that anymore either knowing you have a cutoff event. same problem with dragonlance really, players want nothing changed except all the shit that comes after the war.
Just set it in forgotten realms and then once your main plot or whatever kicks in move the action to a large demiplane, a demiplane large enough to have countries may be a little unusual but you can make it work
Had a fun time dumping the group's mid level (7-9) characters from Dark Sun into Faerun. A lot of this went beyond "jacked up mega Chads mog the nerds" because we were a pretty RP heavy group and the culture shock really never wore off but was entertaining.
>"Is this like FR?"
>"No, it's a different world, I explain the details if you want"
Why Is /tg/ always angry about shit it takes two seconds talking like a human being to fix?
it wouldn't be so bad if they went somewhere besides the Sword Coast more than like 3 times in ten years
they have a whole planet and practically everything takes place in a region the size of California
Kara Tur
the Moon Sea