I’ve never been much of a Realms fan. Well, I take it back, I’ve never really been a fan of PLAYING in the Forgotten Realms. When I was younger, I read every FR book that my two local libraries had, and still own quite a few paperbacks of Realms stories. I especially enjoyed the Avatar trilogy despite already knowing the spoiler that Cyric would turn into an evil god.
When it actually came to playing there, however, it was a different story. The regions, peoples, empires… always way too overwhelming for me. Everytime I played, it was with someone who had clearly mastered the Realms, and was quick to shut down my character concept because it “didn’t make sense” in the region we were playing in. I was content to play D&D in my own worlds, and leave the realms to novels, and video games (Curse of the Azure Bonds and Pools of Radiance being early favorites, with Neverwinter Nights coming much, much later.)
Well now, WotC is releasing the 4e verson of the Forgotten Realms. They’ve specifically stated that their goal was to make it more accessible to players (like myself) who felt overwhelmed before, and to reduce the impact of uber-NPCs (which never came up in the games I was in, but has always seemed like it could be a problem.) However, that’s not what has really won me over.
This week’s “August and Beyond” preview column features a few tidbits from the core campaign setting being released this month, as well as the player’s guide next month (and a schedule of regular updates.) Therein, they provide some new crunch in the form of monsters (Ghost Shuriken-throwing Monks!), a description of a new Warlock pact (Dark Pact, which harms your friends to harm your foes), and more. Though Dragon has provided some excellent new 4e crunch, FR is going to be the first major infusion of new options into 4e, something both D&D groups I’m in right now desperately want.
We’re also looking forward to Adventurer’s Vault, especially with today’s preview of the bag of tricks (and some potential rules for animal companions, which are almost exactly the rules I would have guessed for them.)
The other update is the huge list of WotC employees who will be there at GenCon. Boy, are we going to be busy!
I’m glad you’ve finally come over to the dark side. 😉 I’ve heard a lot of folks with the same complaint; that they never played in FR because of the impact the NPCs had on the world. Honestly, that never bothered me because, when I ran in or played in FR, I never let them become an issue. I think people got too wrapped up in the mythology of the Realms to just let folks wander and do their own thing and not have to worry about the uber-NPCs. I guess I never once thought that it had to be run a certain way simply because of the history of the Realms. I’m glad WotC is doing that now, too. 🙂
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Yeah, that issue didn’t crop up too much, but I see where it’s coming from. I mean, even just coming from the novels, it’s all about Drizzt (which actually, I never read any books he starred in oddly enough), Elminster, whats-her-name with Spellfire, etc. All powerful characters driving the action.
While I am looking forward to 4e Forgotten Realms (despite my general ambivalence toward 4e), the promise of making FR “more accessible” and (especially) the claim that they intend to “reduce the impact of uber-NPCs” is exactly the promise WotC made when 3e Forgotten Realms was released. The fact that the 4e Realms core book appears to have Drizzt all over the cover leaves me skeptical. I would say I’ll believe it when I see it, but frankly, I won’t believe it until they cancel their many lines of FR novels and kill off Elminster and Drizzt for good.
LOL! Drizzt hate, gotta love it. Don’t hate HIM per se, as the endless array of clones he’s got.
I liked the epic feel of the setting, but it WAS too established. I felt like I was messing with someone elses game whenver I DMed there. Too big, with too much fluff.
I’m curious about the “new” realms. The new eberron too.
I ran a long-time campaign set in a heavily hacked version of the Vilhon Reach where we re-imagined it as a set of Italian City states surrounded by suitably Italian countryside. That worked pretty well, and I’d love to revisit that setting sometime.
Aside from that foray, count me in as one of folks who was turned off by the Realms. It felt far too much like a setting we were borrowing rather than one that belonged to us. It’s no fun playing in a setting where it feels like your adventures can be invalidated by the whim of an author or editor. At least the Reach was rarely travelled by such folks 🙂
If they manage to fix that perception (and it does look like they’re making a concerted effort), I’ll be taking a closer look.
Jeff: I think that’s a fuck-up in their marketing department- from what we were been told, Drizzt is not on the cover of the campaign setting or the player’s guide, that cover being a rejected one. A quick Amazon search seems to confirm that. (Why it keeps coming up in their own official pages is beyond me)
Donny: Exactly, and the DMs that I played it with tended to be enforcers of the continuity of the world instead of running a fun game.
Dave,
I can relate about the overwhelming nature of FR. While I personally always liked Drizzt, the who world was just to much for me to actually try and enjoy. The one DM I found that wanted to run FR, was like the ones you encounter. Instead of trying to help make my concept fit, they were to confined to the concept of what the book said.
It’s a shame too. FR was the setting that got me fired up about gaming 😉
The uber NPC argument makes some sense, but why is this a problem moerso in the Realms? Is it just the prevalence of Drizzit Munchkinsim? I have been in settings that would seem to have this problem with even greater pronouncement (New Jedi Order Era Star Wars, Wheel of Time) and NOT had this problem, nor did I expect to.
As someone who started getting into FR during the 3.x era as a DM, it was also overwhelming trying to run the setting!
There were so much background info and fluff that I missed out during the 2E, which wasn’t explained properly in the future 3.x boooks or sometimes not even mentioned at all, that I felt I was breaking some law of continuity or canon everytime I try to lay down a plot and predict my NPCs / organizations’ reactions when my PCs did so and so.
Another thing that frustrated me as well during my time in the 3.x era was that some of the great ideas you had for a campaign could get cannonised in a different way than you envisioned it and it became pointless to run that campaign because somebody ‘official’ has already done it. For example, when the 3.0 FRCS just came out, I had a visionary campaign of trying to revivie Myth Drannor where my PC accidentally stumble upon a elven kiira that reveals to them every lost and ancient lore about the city and the methods of reviving it.
It took me several years to do the research and backtracking to 2E books to see if there’s anything I missed out. Came 3.5 then came the Mythal trilogy and it was over. WoTC beat me to it and that campaign isn’t probably going to see the light of day in front of FR fan/players who have already read the novels (including myself).
Then I tried to focus my attention to less popular regions so that WoTC wouldn’t start stamping out my ideas. As I look back at 2E fluff, I’m kept waiting to see a 3E update of the region and it never comes! On one hand, there were too much information and details in one region and there were too little to run another. With only vague descriptions, it becomes difficult to bring a setting alive as it should be.
When I think of it this way, I’m glad that WoTC pushed the big retcon/reset button as a DM but it did kill the heart in me as a fan who had spent time and money to track down printed out 2E material and novels, which is leaving me dishearten.
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I have always seen FR as the archetype of generic D&D fantasy settings; a total kitchen sink with no theme, nothing to make it distinct from other places, nothing special. Just a huge mash-up of everything and far too high magic levels and NPC power levels.
The antithesis of an interesting setting, at least for me.
Hey guys, that’s a lot of controversial opinions on the realms just in the comments so far… For my part the realms have always been (since Curse of the Azure Bonds) a favorite setting, though I have to admit that in my eyes the setting has lost a lot since the 2nd edition. Especially with the saurials losing importance more and more it was driven by as many stated before me high-level npcs.
Still I don’t think this is going to change with the 4th edition. So our workaround in our campaigns was to leave high-level npcs mostly out of the game. Maybe someone has heard of Khelben, Elminster and the Simbul but for sure those are characters that I would hardly ever take into account for an actual npc in the game.
I have to admit I don’t agree with you on the later Tommi. The realms have a lot of different climates, they have a pretty good concept behind different regions and loads of easily-usable organisations. Maybe it’s just my little advantage, that my players take just a few descriptions from books they read and not necessarily characters or plotlines from books to the game….
Furthermore I am actually pretty sad for what they did to the realms with the fourth edition setting. Agreed the spellplague and ease of the new setting might be great, but it will once again lead to the same picture in the end, does anyone doubt that?
We got the Forgotten Realms on one side – and a lot of (pretty good) authors that create stories in there.
Especially stories of epic nature has been released “lately” – Archwizards Trilogy, The Wizards Series, Realms at War and more stuff – so who is going to doubt that with 4e and the new realms released there will follow a lot of stories with beyond-paragorn path adventures as well?
So they just ruined the continuity with their activities and really used the worst reasons around for killing a few gods. (Which is what I really hated about this whole Grand History of the Realms – which was on the other hand a pretty good fanbook…)
But enough of the rant, I hope you enjoy the new setting Dave.
Hi Lemming.
I can agree with that. There probably are lots of interesting and very usable ideas in the setting. Taking any given region and adding a few relevant organisations would likely create good setting. But the whole, with all the stuff thrown in, is just bland. IMO.
I have a copy of the 3e Realms book. I’ve read it several times, enjoyed reading it, and even found some ideas in there that I used to create my own adventures in my own world.
I’ve never run a campaign in the Realms, and never managed to play in one for very long.
My feelings are the same as Tommi’s — the Realms has a little something of any setting you might ask for, but somehow the end result is a whole lot of nothing, or at least nothing very interesting.
I don’t think the NPCs were part of that (though I wasn’t terribly fond of any of the “big names”). It might have been the magic. Not the fact of it; I tend to run high-powered games. Just the combined ubiquity and banality of it. So many ideas, so little execution.
I’ll pick up the 4e book, though, for much the same reasons I did the 3e one.
But I’d rather see Greyhawk and Mystara. I might even use one of those settings.
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Been playing in FR since the grey box version with the nifty clear perspex sheets for calculating the overland travel distances in hexes (remember them!). I skipped the 2nd edition update of the core book, but picked up many supplements and did pick up the 3rd edition core so that I could help convert the party to that edition. Magic of Faerun was also a popular book at the gaming table. Dabbled otherwise. But for me the Time of Troubles never happened, so Bane never had to disappear and reappear, though I do have a thread of the Shadovar coming back as I always wanted to do something with the Great Desert. So I’ll probably pick up the new version to see how they structure things and pull feats and classes etc. from it without changing my own campaign too much. It’s my FR, no one else’s! 🙂
A new Planescape book, now that would be excellent.
If I ever do end up playing in a FR game, I’m just going to try and come up with the most annoying things possible to piss off people who know more about the setting than I do.
“Hi, my name is Drizzle, I’m the half-gnome child of Drizzt and I like to ride ponies!”
You know, I’m pretty well versed in fantasy jargon, but reading the commments of people familiar with the Realms… i have no clue what they’re talking about in terms of fluff. I think that means WOTC is doing the right thing and brining back down to normal.
Drizz Master T!
He’s either a rapper or a porn start with a special “happy ending.”
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To the best of my recollection, never played with a Drizzt clone, or had Drizzt show up in a game. But I do distinctly recall a FR game where there was some big threat we had to stop, and the players just asked “Uhh, why doesn’t Elminster just stop it?” And there was some lame excuse.
NPC’s never really kept me away – the amount of history that made me feel like I was in my friggin’ school uniform when trying to read through the bulk of it (even a “glancing over” is ridiculously long – especially for a world that had little “advancing” through module/boxed-set releases). It was just too much drama to deal with learning the ins and outs of this and that to a sufficient level where you wouldn’t be treated like a junior high kid at the high schooler’s lunch table!