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Knight of the Gate
Senior Scribe
USA
624 Posts |
 Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 02:27:31
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| You need (make that NEED) Cloak and Dagger. There are actually a bunch of great 2e sourcebooks for download for free on WotC (wooly has the link). All the volo's guides, for instance. |
How can life be so bountiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity? -Umberto Ecco |
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Wooly Rupert
Master of Mischief
USA
36805 Posts |
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wintermute27
Learned Scribe
USA
179 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 04:12:20
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| Yeah, I've grabbed all of the PDFs there (and purchased a few others when they were still for sale), but there is just something about a print copy that I love. Also, I do a lot of my game writing at the library, and since I don't have a laptop, I need to take the books there with me. |
My Current Campaign: The Adventures of the Stonelanders |
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Jakk
Great Reader
Canada
2165 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 04:24:07
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quote:
Originally posted by Knight of the Gate
<snip>
As I've said elsewhere, it's not the setting that I object to: If this was 'The Spellscarred lands', or if they did this to Eberrwhatever, I might have even been interested enough to play it. Alas, instead, they visited all this change on the most fully-realized fantasy world ever published, invalidating the work and dreams of more than 3 decades.
Again, YMMV, this is just my take.
Not just yours... mine too.  I guess we'll see how well it's really been received when the ENnie results are in; if you haven't voted, please do so here. It's telling to me that the 4E FR setting was nominated only for its cover art, which I thought was far better than what was between the covers (with the exception of Laerakond, which I fully plan to use in my 3.x/Pathfinder Realms). |
Playing in the Realms since the Old Grey Box (1987)... and *still* having fun with material published before 2008, despite the NDA'd lore.
If it's comparable in power with non-magical abilities, it's not magic. |
Edited by - Jakk on 31 Jul 2009 04:25:36 |
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Jorkens
Great Reader
Norway
2950 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 09:17:40
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quote:
Originally posted by wintermute27
quote:
Originally posted by Faraer
What differences and similarities have you noticed between how the 1987 and 2008 settings are written and put together?
The more I get my hands on earlier materials (1e/2e) the more I've fallen in love with the early realms. As I said in my original post here, once I got my hands on the "old gray box" and started reading it, I knew that this was where I wanted to tell my next story. I can sit down and read the 1e DM Sourcebook and Cyclopedia like a novel and it holds my attention, I find that the 3.x/4e core books fail to do this for me.
A bit off topic, but in your collective opinions, which 1e/2e materials would you recommend for a new collector of realmslore? I already have the 1e/2e Core Box Sets, City System, Waterdeep and the North, Realmspace, and Spellbound.
Lets see, of the top of my head: Anything by Greenwood is a good way to start. All the Volo guides, Dwarves Deep, Forgotten Realms Adventures (don't be fooled by the title)and Anauroch are essential. The Seven Sisters, Code of the Harpers, Ruins of Myth Drannor and Drow of the Underdark are pretty good follow-ups. The Fonstad Atlas is a must and the 2ed. Campaign setting is a pretty good back-up to the Grey box.
After that its a matter of taste. The Three god books are great, but I am finding myself moving more and more away from them personally. The 2ed. Shining South is a personal favourite, as is Skullport and Elves of Evermeet. Lands of Intrigue, Empires of the Shining Sea, the Waterdeep bos and Drizzts guide to the Underdark are great books, but I don't use them all that much any more.
One thing I would do is take it a bit slowly, so you can let each book sink in and think about what you want and what to leave out. Personalize the setting somewhat. Some of the later 2ed. books actually became to lore heavy in a way that didn't really fit for me.
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Ayunken-vanzan
Senior Scribe
Germany
657 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 11:33:33
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quote:
Originally posted by Jorkens
[...]The Fonstad Atlas is a must and the 2ed. [...]
Fonstad? The same Fonstad as in "The Atlas of Middle Earth"? |
"What mattered our lives now? When our world had been torn from us? Folk wept, or drank, or stood staring out over the land, wondering what new horror each dawn would bring."
Elender Stormfall of Suzail
"Anyone can kill deities, cause plagues, or destroy organizations. It takes real skill to make them live on."
Varl
FR/D&D-Links • 2ed Downloads |
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Jorkens
Great Reader
Norway
2950 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 11:51:01
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| Jepp, Karen Wynn Fonstad, author of the atlases to Pern, The Land, Middle Earth, Dragonlance and Faerun. The Realms Atlas is the greatest map resource for the Realms ever made in my opinion. I can hardly remember looking at other Realms maps since I acquired this book. |
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Uzzy
Senior Scribe
United Kingdom
618 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 13:30:12
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| With any luck the FRCG's nomination for "Best Cover Art" will be beaten by Paizo's Howl of the Carrion King, in the same category. Mainly as I thought the FRCG's cover was quite atrocious. |
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Darkmeer
Senior Scribe
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 31 Jul 2009 : 23:20:15
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My realms started with 2e, after the Avatar Crisis. I was a boxed set collector, primarily being a DL/Planescape fan at the time. They lost me with the change to 5th age... but I digress.
Rereading the information in the boxed set, as well as the Faiths & Avatars book (thanks KnightErrantJR and Foghorn for letting me borrow your copies). There was soooo much information, and it all was put into a wonderful context. That's what made the realms special to me. The Avatar trilogy and Dark Elf trilogy were the primary sources of inspiration and were the novels I really liked. That and Tymora's Luck (which is on my list of Favorite Realms crossover books).
There's a great deal of information around and surrounding the Realms up to 3.x. This really doesn't include all of the information and wonderful tidbits that are found in the novels (of which I've read a total of eight). These game references are wonderful, and help add a lot of flavor, with so many organizations and everything working towards a cohesive "real" feeling world.
With the changes from the Spellplague, all of that feels like its been lost. I really had hoped that wasn't the case, but it just feels that way to me. I do like pieces of the new realms. I like the idea of an alternate placement for the "returned Abeir," and I even want to see that integrated in my 3.5 realms, minus the whole plague debacle. I'd even go so far as to say that the nations of Shou or Wa "discover" these new parts of the realms, opening up for more adventures than before. A nation of Dragons and Clockwork Soldiers (hmm... something Gond has been hiding, perhaps?) that wants to come out of seclusion, showing the rest of the Realms what they are. Certainly you could integrate the "new" races, such as the Warforged, shifters, changelings, and even the new dragonborn (not to be confused with the current ones) just by integrating a new continent for adventure in the Realms! Within 10-20 "Realms years" you could even have a good trade going on with them.
Overall, to me, the post-spellplague Realms feels... sanitized. Not in a good way either (kinda like rubbing alcohol and salt in the wounds type of sanitation). Sure there are some good ideas, but I think they could have been integrated into the Realms as they are, rather than eliminating vast areas of the continents (ahem: the Tashalar, which happens to be one of MY favorite places to run games is gone).
I see so much vitriol from both sides, and really, we're all playing a game. Play it the way you enjoy, and the rest of the world can play it the way they want to, as long as everyone's having fun. I'm disappointed with the "official" direction, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't play it if you like it. I just don't have to.
/d |
"These people are my family, not just friends, and if you want to get to them you gotta go through ME." |
Edited by - Darkmeer on 31 Jul 2009 23:20:55 |
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Lady Kazandra
Senior Scribe
Australia
921 Posts |
Posted - 01 Aug 2009 : 05:14:17
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I'm going to approach this topic a little differently.
quote:
Originally posted by Mr_Miscellany
It's easy to look back on the Time of Troubles and say, "Oh, it didn't really change much."
But if you were a player who gamed heavily in the Realms and read the novels when the ToT came about, it was a different and -for some- harder experience.
I find myself agreeing with this.
I know from my own experiences with the Time of Troubles (and just for the purposes of this discussion, I'll note that the ToT doesn't feature in the Sage's Realms) that I was left flabbergasted by the portrayals and gross caricatures of the primary deities involved in the story. They were something of a deviation of what I'd come to expect or read about when learning more about the Realms pantheons. And that was a big enough change for me.
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"Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'." -- The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett |
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MerrikCale
Senior Scribe
USA
947 Posts |
Posted - 01 Aug 2009 : 14:39:41
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| I didn't give up on the Realms with the Time of Troubles. Thats a difference |
When hinges creak in doorless chambers and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls, whenever candlelights flicker where the air is deathly still, that is the time when ghosts are present, practicing their terror with ghoulish delight. |
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sfdragon
Great Reader
2285 Posts |
Posted - 01 Aug 2009 : 20:10:24
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the 100 yr time jump for me was easiest to get over.
the spell plague and the following not so much.
sinceless death of helm and eilistraee( assuming she is a dead and just didnt just give up her godhood), the ultimate realmsian cliche of killing mystra, saying that deity x was actuakky an aspect of deity y.
destruction of hulruaa, and anything else that I cant think of right now becuase Ishould be cleaning the bathroom instead of posting here
sugar coated no matter how sweet is just as bitter |
why is being a wizard like being a drow? both are likely to find a dagger in the back from a rival or one looking to further his own goals, fame and power
My FR fan fiction
Magister's GAmbit
http://steelfiredragon.deviantart.com/gallery/33539234 |
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Apex
Learned Scribe
USA
229 Posts |
Posted - 03 Aug 2009 : 14:26:29
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| The ToT happened about 6 months or so after we started playing the Realms with the gray box. We read the trilogy (bought the adventures, but never played them) and got the FR Adventures book (which is still one of my favorites), but never made the "transition". And that's the thing, with ToT you could ignore it completely and it almost never comes up in play and when it does it takes a bout 3 seconds to change back. And that's the big difference. The ToT can be almost completely ignored with a negligible effect on your game, while the spellplague is completely incompatible with most past lore. |
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Old Man Harpell
Senior Scribe
USA
495 Posts |
Posted - 03 Aug 2009 : 18:24:59
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Thinking back to the ToT, I remember the souls I was guiding through the Realms had lost their cleric (the player had joined the military), thus insulating all of us who remained (somewhat) from the issues of dead gods and whatnot. Second edition rules did not differ from First all that much, really, and the players managed to update without even blinking. I remember thinking that some of the changes wrought by the event were rather bizarre, and I remember really not liking Cyric (foreshadowing?), but because divine spells had been inaccessible to the party before ToT even started, I was able to view it as change defined by a story, rather than the reverse.
Third Edition affected the Realms more than the ToT, in my opinion - it was like having a couple of your most favorite apples in a bowl on the table, then all of a sudden having someone dump the contents of the entire produce section from the local grocery on top of the apple bowl. It wasn't so much the Realms themselves, it was what Third edition did to the Realms. It wasn't necessarily bad - but to continue the analogy, it would have behooved you to really, really like produce - of every conceivable variety.
Now we have Fourth Edition, and IMHO, the actual rules carry little, if any, of the blame of what happened to the Realms. With a couple of exceptions (such as 'healing surges', which I am house-ruling to death), I actually find the game system useful.
I must also say that the jump across a century, along with the massed deicide, is what was mishandled. The Spellplague in and of itself is not a bad idea per se - it was stated that something had to explain the Realm's shift in magic to bring it into Fourth Edition's paradigm - it was what happened after the Weave went ka-blooie that makes the Realms of a century later seem like a pale mockery of the world I spent many a long dreaming hour traversing, whether in a Greenwood novel, at the gaming table, or simply perusing a gaming book and letting my mind wander.
The Time of Troubles could not stop my mind from wandering through the Realms. I just had to figure out where my next step would take me, because if I looked around me, it was still the Realms I had always known. I cannot tread the year of 1479 DR - my mind simply cannot fathom finishing stepping through the time portal, because the world that lies there is not the one I walked when I stepped through - it is a desolate alien landscape that mocks me from the first turn of the page. |
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bladeinAmn
Learned Scribe
199 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2009 : 09:27:40
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quote:
Originally posted by Faraer
I think so, in that as a secondary world Realms-2008 is a stitched-together compromise without the Realms' accustomed creative particularity, richness, density, and much of its long-term subtext. But the reason I don't like it is that it's ended, for now, Ed's project of cumulatively detailing the Realms, as conceived from 1967 to 2007, in print.
quote:
Originally posted by Knight of the Gate
Alas, instead, they visited all this change on the most fully-realized fantasy world ever published, invalidating the work and dreams of more than 3 decades. Again, YMMV, this is just my take.
From these two posts, what I bolded n coloured in blue is what I wholeheartedly beleive is the heart of the matter.
First hand, I've seen hostile business moves in many industries (sports, entertainment, hardware, and here in gaming/hobby), and the arrogancy that WotC displayed in making the 4E FRCG is a shining example of it. I sincerely believe the 4E FRCG was specifically designed to throw Ed and others under the bus.
What's more, I felt this way even before the 4E books came out. Look no further than Ed's non-FR book, "Dark Lord", which I'm sure he would've rather set in FR, but seeing they're tryna muzzle him, he couldn't.
It all leads me to conclude that 4E wasn't done w/creative intent, so much as it was made w/destructive intent, towards the person who brought it to us, as well as folk like R.A. Salvatore, and even to folk like Bioware (the BG series for PC is widely known as the best fantasy C-RPG of all-time...you would think WotC would make an attempt to capitalize on this, and make more storylines or products that have some threads of the story or places in the BG series).
quote:
Originally posted by wintermute27
The more I get my hands on earlier materials (1e/2e) the more I've fallen in love with the early realms. As I said in my original post here, once I got my hands on the "old gray box" and started reading it, I knew that this was where I wanted to tell my next story. I can sit down and read the 1e DM Sourcebook and Cyclopedia like a novel and it holds my attention, I find that the 3.x/4e core books fail to do this for me.
A bit off topic, but in your collective opinions, which 1e/2e materials would you recommend for a new collector of realmslore? I already have the 1e/2e Core Box Sets, City System, Waterdeep and the North, Realmspace, and Spellbound.
Ha! So I'm not the only one! And I only got heavily into FR and AD&D 6yrs ago, when 3E was being pushed!
My recommendations are:
- 1159 Lands of Intrigue, which is available in PDF from the WotC old edition downloads....my favourite sourcebook ever
- 1085 FRCG (2E)
- The Volo's Guides series, especially 9535 Volo's Guide to All Things Magical, and even Volo's Guide to Baldur's Gate II. It's not as "commercial" as the title implies.
- 9233 Savage Frontier
- 9297 Draconomicon
- 9351 The Great Glacier
- 9388 The Shining South
- 9492 Wizards and Rogues of the Realms
- 9509 Warriors and Priests of the Realms
- 9547 Cult of the Dragon
- 11348 Skullport
- 11509 Drizzt Do'urden's Guide to the Underdark
LOL! I juss listed all the ones that I own!
And honest to God, the stories don't stop man! I can be a DM forever w/the books I got! The stories juss pour out of me man! |
Edited by - bladeinAmn on 09 Aug 2009 09:28:36 |
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glitter
Acolyte
France
45 Posts |
Posted - 11 Aug 2009 : 15:58:27
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quote:
Originally posted by wintermute27
I recently re-read the Forgotten Realms Adventures book cover to cover, and it got me thinking, why is there so much hate for the Spellplague and not for the Time of Troubles? Both include Realms shaking events that serve no other purpose than to explain the "updated" rules (eg "Mystra's dead, here's a new one. That's why magic's kinda different" vs "Mystra's dead, there is no more Mystra. That's why magic's really different"). Is it because the Time of Troubles led into an acceptable set of rules, while the Spellplague leads us into the dreaded 4th edition?
Being a (relatively) new DM, I've only recently fallen in love with the Realms and all they have to offer me.
I discovered the D&D after the 3Ed, so the tot wasn't a problem for me, and for the oldest player of dungeons around me, transitions from 2nd to 3 and 3.5 edition were without hurt.
For me, there is one main difference between the ToT and the speelplague. The first one is driven by the story itself and everything seem to fit together while the speelplague looks more like a puppet writen "Wizards of the coast" on the head (and I won't repeat again my opinion of all the stupididies related to it).
Well, perhaps it's because I wasn't a player at the time of the Tot, perhaps I'm more cynical since I'm older but it's the feeling I have.
But it's obvious that the 4Ed is more revolutionnary than the 3Ed and had to go thought a simplification to try to find new customers.
We are in 2009, the situation is very different than during the 80's so I DON'T BLAME WotC, they must try to find solution against the time-consuming aspect of rpg and competitors such like electronic RPG.
My own opinion. |
-The black knight is invincible!
- You’re a looney. |
Edited by - glitter on 11 Aug 2009 16:02:14 |
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Nefarious
Acolyte
USA
21 Posts |
Posted - 11 Aug 2009 : 16:19:13
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quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
And here is that link! 
the Wizards downloads page
Fantastic! There were quite a few I did not already have. |
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Time of Troubles vs Spellplague
