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Originally posted by WarlockII

Does Halruaa go boom there or the next year?.

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What was once called Halruaa detonated and was destroyed when every inscribed and prepared spell in the nation went off simultaneously. This explosion was partly to blame for destroying the land bridge between Chult and the Shining South—only a scattered archipelago remains.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
That or we've got another of those odd disconnects where an idea was discarded after its presentation.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

That or we've got another of those odd disconnects where an idea was discarded after its presentation.

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

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Originally posted by WarlockII

Does Halruaa go boom there or the next year?.

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Actually, it's not clear what happened to Halruaa... The "Magic In the Forgotten Realms" teaser article tells us that

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What was once called Halruaa detonated and was destroyed when every inscribed and prepared spell in the nation went off simultaneously. This explosion was partly to blame for destroying the land bridge between Chult and the Shining South�only a scattered archipelago remains.

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And yet, according to the FRCG, much of Halruaa's land remains. It's not all that hospitable, but it's still there. So it somehow blew up, caused geographic upheaval elsewhere, and was mostly unaffected by its own detonation.

That or we've got another of those odd disconnects where an idea was discarded after its presentation.

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Originally posted by scererar


I see it as quite jacked up with much of the land not intact Maybe the WOTC interpretation of 1/2 the land "dissolving" was meant to mean land features, not area mass.

There is also the Hulruaan Consumption that appears to keep most from ever finding out the full impact of the destruction that occurred here.

page 136 FRCG for some bits of 4E Hulruaa Lore

"Halruaa is now a wasteland of crumbling settlements, noxious waters, and unchecked magic. Pockets of active Spellplague dot the land with blue fire".

"The Spellplague was not kind to Halruaa, heir to the Netherese veneration of magic. Fully half of the land dissolved during the initial wave of blue fire. In the tsunamis, mudslides, and magical detonations that followed, the remainder of the nation was destroyed".

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Originally posted by Wooly Rupert

"The Spellplague was not kind to Halruaa, heir to the Netherese veneration of magic. Fully half of the land dissolved during the initial wave of blue fire. In the tsunamis, mudslides, and magical detonations that followed, the remainder of the nation was destroyed".

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Originally posted by Erik Scott de Bie
Basically, if you want to have the Spellplague happen in your game, you're going to have to improvise it to fit your campaign. If you want my opinion, I think the "initial wave" of Spellplague hit basically everywhere, and secondary/tertiary/etc waves flared up like aftershocks in random areas. Depending on locale of your game, focus on the known effects (like Halruaa being devastated by every spell/item/effect going off at once, or the statues of Waterdeep rampaging, etc.)

Cheers

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Originally posted by Richard Lee Byers

You can see the Spellplague hit Thay in my novel Undead.

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Originally posted by Richard Lee Byers
if you don't feel like reading the book, now or ever, you won't and shouldn't. It's just a piece of entertainment. There's no earthly reason for anyone to bother with it unless he wants to, and I would never dream of suggesting otherwise (except in jest.)

On the other hand, I don't see that I was in any way obligated to invest the time to write out a neat little synopsis of the aspect of the novel that does interest you, so I don't really understand why you got annoyed

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Cormyr is struck hard, but not so violently as many other nations. Roughly one third of all Wizards of War are slain, driven mad, or simply have gone missing in the year following Mystra's death

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The plague raged on and on in ever-widening spirals, leaving some places completely untouched (such as many northern lands of Faerûn, including Cormyr and the Swordcoast), and radically altering others (such as Muhorand, Unther, and points south).

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Originally posted by Richard Lee Byers

I had a free hand plotting the trilogy as long as Thay came out looking like it was supposed to look in 4e, and as long as Undead gave people a look at the Spellplague. So the story's pretty much all mine.

When I wrote the book, I did try hard to be consistent with all the information about the Spellplague that was available. The catch was that "all" was not much. I was writing the novel at the same time the Spellplague and the 4e Realms were being conceptualized, so the information WotC gave me was very sparse.

For that reason, things you read in the novel may not seem entirely consistent the way the Spellplague is portrayed elsewhere. But I like to think that my book is the final, definitive word about the way the disaster happened in Thay, After all, it was a chaotic, magical disaster. It makes sense that it might have manifested differently from place to place.

In the novel, walls of blue fire sweep across the land, altering everything they touch, even the landscape itself, killing living things more often than not, but sometimes mutating them in monsters. The Weave has collapsed, but magical energy still exists. As a result, arcane magic still works right some of the time, but not always. It may simply do nothing, or it may cause unpredictable effects.

I didn't depict mages simply dropping dead or going mad. This may have happened elsewhere, but it didn't happen to any great extent in Thay. In fact, the more accomplished mages make fairly rapid project getting themselves back up to speed. One thing they quickly learn is, the more basic the spell, the more likely it is to work properly.

Divine magic generally remains reliable throughout. So do the intrinsic supernatural abilities of outsiders, undead, elementals, and their ilk.

And, the Spellplague is happening in the middle of the Thayan civil war, which makes the disaster even more disastrous.

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Originally posted by Erik Scott de Bie

Jakk, this is going to be something of a quixotic post, as you've said clearly that the Spellplague doesn't work for you despite any attempts to make it make sense, but for the sake of everyone else reading this thread:

The Spellplague happened a hundred years ago, and most of the people in the setting don't remember it, much less have strict rules and mechanical knowledge of why it affected some places some way and not others. There might well be explanations that we just don't know about. Halruaa might have had certain wards in effect that fed the plague, like a forest full of dry tinder, as opposed to a damp rainforest like Myth Drannor. (Those are analogies--obviously Myth Drannor isn't a rainforest.)

And besides, the Spellplague was by definition inconsistent. Chaos. We're not *supposed* to understand it.

It's way outside my understanding of the Realms as a complex, magical world thriving on thousands of different tiny variations in how everything works to think that we need a single, all-inclusive explanation for this sort of magical apocalypse. And I think it cheapens the Realms to declare any magical event "impossible"--sure, there are *rules of logic* in the Realms, but I don't see the Spellplague as presented as violating any of those rules.

So sure, it might not work for you, but just because it doesn't--and just because we don't have all the facts to explain why it did what it did and didn't do what it didn't do--doesn't mean that it didn't work or doesn't make sense, at least in someone else's opinon.

Does that mean I don't want an absolute explanation of every event? No way! I would LOVE something like that (and would love to present that official explanation myself, by the by), but for now, I am fine with it being unexplained, just like I don't need every aspect of the Realms' history, sociology, and magic explained.

And if you do need those explained, well, there's not much else I can say. I hope you come up with an explanation that suits you. As I see it, the designers left it purposefully ambiguous to encourage you to fill in the gaps yourself--explain as much as you want.

Cheers

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Originally posted by Jakk
If I'm going to have to come up with all of the details myself, then I may as well just create my own world... which is more or less what I've done now with respect to canon anyway.

Apologies if I sound bitter; I'm doing my best not to, and I don't believe that bitterness serves any purpose other than to leave a bad taste in one's mouth. (Pun intended.) It's my belief that WotC could alleviate a great deal of that bitterness present in the Realms old guard if they simply made the unpublished pre-Spellplague lore available in some form independent of DDI (mostly because they have said that DDI's Realms content will be focused on the post-Spellplague Realms)... but I've said that before, including on WotC's own forums months before giving up and leaving that community over all the 3E-bashing (which experience was largely responsible for the tear of 4E-bashing I went on, for which I can now, as of some months ago, honestly apologize to Candlekeep), and nothing's changed yet.

Okay, I've said enough... and probably stated my case more clearly (certainly more verbosely) than in any other post in these scrolls. Again, thank you for your insight, Erik, and it has been less of a quixotic post than you might think. Anything that makes its readers think is ultimately accomplishing something.

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