Well Ed has now confirmed that Halruaa got so fricked in the Spellplauge that post second sundering the nation has devolved into a frontier level territory guarded by a handful of surviving elders who live in caves with stockpiled arsenals of magic and mounted militias using magic missile wands.
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Also Forgotten Realms thread
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Make an adventure based on Alamut, but with Wizards or a Cleric of Azuth based on the Hassan-I-Sabbah.
>Chult based Zhents hire a group of adventurers to investigate a series of assassinations and deal with the source
>This leads the party to Halruaa which is mostly frontier lands covered with magic ruins.
>Cave dwelling Archmage has been training apprentices in illusory magic and sending them off to deal with threats.
>Zhents are preparing a raid into the interior to pillage and unattended magic artifacts
>Party can then either try and kill the Archmage completing their initial quest,or side with the Archmage who appreciates their skills in getting this far and will train them in arcane secrets for turning on the Zhents and wiping out their forward party instead.
Kino but Wizards would never do it because its not on the Sword Coast or some other world.
Not on my Toril. I ignored all Spellplague nonsense, and just kept going.
Halruaa was always awesome, but it also never really fit the setting. They could have made it some sort of counterweight to Thay, but instead they made it a bunch of people who hide behind their giant mountains and don't do jack shit aside from enjoying the highest standard of living outside of Evermeet.
So this change is nice because it makes the place more "accessible", but it's also sad because it could have been much cooler.
But also
>Erase all powerful spellcasters
>Erase all powerful magic items
>No longer an interesting and inaccessible exotic foreign land of high magic
>Just another random landscape where uncreative newcomers can randomly set a generic adventure at without having to read up on any lore because that'd be hard.
Pretty much just going to ignore this lore update just like I ignored the Spellplague stuff and 4e in general.
Its really obvious this was done solely to wipe clean more of what makes FR an interesting setting so it can just be black and white factions of Harpers and Zhents against Thay.
Can't really blame Greenwood for it, its just what 5e FR is in general.
Based
I don't think WotC knows or gives a frick what he rambles about on Twitter or DM Guild these days. If they ever decided to do something with the place, and they probably won't for years if ever, they'd do what they want. It's their IP. The days when he was intimately interwoven with the designers WotC employed are long gone, because all those designers no longer work there. They represent a dwindling caucus who don't bring in anything because they don't buy 5e products. They spend more time complaining about it, so it's negative publicity.
>It's their IP.
To some extent. He has specific perpetual creative control rights baked into the licence he sold them. Quite literally if he says its canon, it is. They have been breaking that licence for the past while, and clearly he hasn't challenged them over it with lawyers, just continuing to post to YouTube according to the terms of the licence.
There's a reason why the FR wiki doesn't follow what Hasbro says is canon and has a different set of rules it follows - same with Candlekeep. If Hasbro contradicts Ed, Ed's right.
>If Hasbro contradicts Ed, Ed's right
Its actually the other way around
The original agreement was basically that whatever Ed said goes unless contradicted by the IP owner otherwise the Spellplague never would of happened.
Wizards just gives so little fricks about the realms outside of using the Sword Coast as a dumping ground that Ed is basically given free reign do do whatever he wants.
Ed in turn respects this and works the lore around whatever info comes out because he is very obsessed about keeping his word and appreciates others wanting to contribute to the Realms even if that's been for the worse recently.
Their is however Ed's personal variant of the Realms which only shows up at his table and is apparently different from the published version, how I don't know.
There's a video where he said they lack the ability to decanonize the novels or previous editions, per the licence.
But I mostly stopped being interested in what Hasbro does with it in 2008 (a few of the novels were alright).
>If Hasbro contradicts Ed, Ed's right.
No, it goes to court if they feel like it. He hasn't challenged it and just talks online because talk is cheap, lawyers are not, he doesn't have the money to fight them in court and he knows it.
>muh lawyers.
He doesn't need to lawyer up. He'll just self publish better content on DMs Guild, mention the licence for those who don't already know his self published work is canon, with the best selling freelance designers handling the game mechanics for him while he just does the setting stuff.
And Hasbro is too busy gutting the company after stupidly buying a multimedia company for way more than it was worth, and then selling it for a fraction of what they stupidly paid for it, and now they're being hollowed out trying to meet their debt payments and paying out fat bonuses and dividends they can't possibly afford. Hasbro has way bigger problems than Ed self publishing content he can legally say is canon because licenses from 37-38 years ago they inherited from TSR, that most of the community already acknowledge as canon and has done for 37-38 years (hence the FR wiki canon policies). Frankly, I'll be surprised if Hasbro is anything more than a bunch of licences other companies do stuff with in a few years. They really set their paper house on fire this time.
So what do we know about the 1E/Ed’s versions of Mulhorand, Chessenta and Unther?
I know that 2E made them pastiche of human cultures but what difference do they have from the source.
Unther
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Cool
Waiiitt. What? I thought the diviner king (Zaor?) had he foresight to planeshift the country out beforehand to avoid the badstuff, like Thultanthar did with the fall of the Netherese empire.
Is this from a YouTube video, or a new self published DMs Guild setting book?
New vid
Basically when they shifted the country is killed/burned out most of the elders in the process and that combined with the madness effects of the Spellplague caused the citizens to being to distrust the remaining Casters.
Then over the century of exile in the wilds of Aber when they rebuilt it was with a "magic is useful but also dangerous in excess" mindset instead of a "magic fricking rocks, lets use it for everything" mindset.
Also seeing Ed be involved with FR Agenda Posting (anime meme shit) is something...
How does Faerun differ from Greyhawk anyway?
Faerun is more magic than Greyhawk.
Greyhawk was Gary's personal setting informed by his tastes. Overall the world in comparison is more brutal and untamed in general with vast tracts of unexplored territory, a much more classical eye for an eye morality, and being much lighter on the details. Closer to Conan than Lord of the Rings (The LotR type setting is Dragonlance btw)
It was first and foremost "a place to put the campaign ideas without internal conflict".
The Realms while being Ed's personal setting is also by his wishes the playground for multiple creators and serves more as the adaptable to whatever the owners need D&D setting.
The focus is less on big heroes looting tombs and more on smaller scale stop the local crime lord stuff. Add in that Ed has been working on the setting since before D&D was a thing, his GM style is Immersive RP heavy, and his love of fleshing out cultures (he is one of those "what do they eat?" guys) and you have a much warmer more lore dense late medieval proto-renansance setting.
Its first and foremost a "place for telling stories"
Forgotten Realms is also horny as frick, filled to the brim with Ed's fetishes. Like, unironically a cursory glance beneath the surface-level lore reveals borderline Corruption of Champions.
The combo of Childhood trauma over losing his mom early, an absentee glowie father, and being raised by his free love hippy aunts, all before starting to codify his setting as a horny 17 year old does a number on the shape of a setting.
It's very different.
Greyhawk is basically a frontier dungeon exploration setting, and Forgotten Realms is a developed early renaissance fantasy setting with fleshed out civilisations.
Greyhawk makes more sense in a dungeon crawl and wilderness exploration context, and Forgotten Realms is more about faction conflict, with room for *some* dungeons but if you suddenly build a city-state, you will need to deal politically with existing powers in the region.
Greyhawk: players fight monsters.
Forgotten Realms: players fight or ally with NPCs. fighting monsters happens but is not the main event. You can run Faerûn in a "OSR-ish" 'player agency' focused gameplay style, but it'll be agency in a world filled with characters, not a world of low-int monsters in tombs.
Oh-also the level demographics in the 3e DMG match Greyhawk, but are much lower than the world presented in the novels and adventure books and place books imply. I tend to run FR with significantly more level 5-10 NPCs than the 3e DMG suggests as a result.
You can prefer either, but they'll give you different kinds of gameplay.
So, uh. Elminster is Ed's self-insert, right? But he's always been an old man. Has Ed always been an old man?
Ed has always seen himself as a wise old man, yes.
He denies it but after writing so many books with Elminster as the main POV the two have basically become the same with Elminster being best described as an idealized Id.
Ed has basically mantled Elminster. When. He was younger his sell insert was Mort the Moneylender, and Elminster was just an NPC to bail out his players occasionally, and provide an excuse for where all the magic crap comes from.
Bleh. Strictly worse. Old Halruaa was too detached from the world, and still managed to be my second favourite place in the setting (the first being the Moonsea). Making them have to actually engage with other nations would have been good, but I really liked the "attempted benevolent industrialised wizard dictatorship"
Fricking auto correct.
Its wild seeing Ed do a QnA where he basically says "when I put this hat on your talking to Elminster" and answer quests as if he were actually Elminster.
I also found it charming how most of the questioners cared more about Ed's thoughts than "Elminster"
The earliest appearances of Forgotten Realms were articles in early Dragon Magazine; the premise of those articles was Ed being visited by Elminster, who would tell him stories of Faerun that he could stat up and pass along to people.
He is his self insert, yes. Mystra is a stand in for his mother (she died when Greenwood was very young, his father was a NATO communications intelligence officer who was never around at home so he was raised by his aunts, who he based the Seven Sisters on).
Who cares? Forgotten realms is a shit setting and always was.
Literally hundreds of better settings are out there and I frankly prefer DMs who completely ignore most premade settings in general, especially popular ones like forgotten realms. It's better to have more knowledge about settings than anyone else at the table.
It's also, btw, why the sword Coast got so much focus. Originally little content, so videogame devs (effectively DMs) could go wild there and no one could really contradict them.
>shit setting.
Best d&d setting. Dark Sun and Spelljammer are alright. I guess Krynn and Mystara can stay too.
>hundreds of better settings.
There are some. Not that match d&d's mechanics though.
>ignore premade settings
So no preexisting player investment or familiarity with the setting then.
If I'm not running an existing setting I'm interested in that my players can reference a wiki for, I definitely don't want all the d&d setting baggage. Here's 13 home brewed playable alien species, 9 home brewed gods, and the custom magic system rules. That means I'm running GURPS of course. That, or I'd need to homebrew basically a whole game system.
contd
Oh. And a 50 page outline of some of the cultures of the alien species, and their religions and some recent history, or course. Summarised to highlight what's most relevant, but still enough for you guys to make characters capable of reasonably interacting with the world.
Wait. Now you aren't interested in a homebrew? So would you prefer a published fictional setting like Star Wars or Faerûn, or a historical one like 1350s Florence?
Painfully midwit take.
>removes a cool nation of wizards and replaces them with nothing
>Dambrath looses the cool half-drow crinti and reverts to a bunch of horse lords & peasants under the thumb of werewolves
This is why we should never leave the sword coast. Everything interesting or unique has to be removed.
I think Ed took the issues people like
have with the setting to heart and has begun to pull away from high magic NPC heavy aspects and is trying to make it into a "timeless adventure setting" before his eventual death in like 5-10 years
Please, can you imagine anyone after the 90s actually DOING anything with a nation of black-n-brown half-elf amazons who worship the Goddesses of BDSM? Even more so in current year?
They're grey, are they not?
Crinti are from the Shining South, which is basically Faerun's Africa areas. The Dambrathians are characterized as dark brown skinned. And when you crossbreed dark brown humans with stone grey to bluish black elves, you tend to get black and brown half-elves.
>stone grey
Is the typical half-drow skin tone as depicted in artwork, but I don't recall if they also have a writer-artist mismatch. The drow themselves are always described as pitch black "like polished obsidian", regardless of whether the artist draws that.
But yeah, I can see the logic of the Crinti picking up skin tones from the Dambrathi humans, even if in practice none of the Crinti art I've seen had that look. And again, artist-writer mismatch is an obnoxious habit with D&D.
Some day, I'll publish a setting.
It shall become popular in certain circles.
The setting's history will progress.
There will be new developments every year.
The way the setting grows will be enjoyed by many.
Years shall pass thusly.
Suddenly the most popular region of the setting will be completely destroyed in a cataclysmic event of nigh-cosmic proportions.
There shall be much salt.
Based
>infinite magic energy!
>it's group festhall time, friends!
>here's your complimentary anti-pregnancy spell
>yes, for the men too, obviously
Honestly, it's worth it to track down a pdf of the original Realms box and read through it.
Yeah, there's no rhyme or reason to the layout and order of the articles, but it's still an interesting little setting.