Forgotten Realms General?

Wasn't a fan mostly because they blew up all the cool shit. Maztica, for example.

And then did things like "oh, it flows around large concentrations of magic" (explaining why Waterdeep didn't explode), and then went on to say "but Halruaa blew up" when Halruaa is probably the most magically concentrated place in the setting.

Yeah, that was retarded. They had really shit ideas that were implementated.

>Volo's Guide to All Things Magical was fantastic.
Was it? I'll have to read that one.

No thanks OP. Those are realms I generally try to forget about

Volo's is generally good. Also get Volo's Guide to Monsters.

No idea what Realms op is even referring to.

I just wrote a short story set in the Forgotten Realms. My character died this past Sunday, but the death offered up a chance to explore a side of her that I otherwise wouldn't be able to.

I guess this is as good a place as any to post it.

Did you name yourself after the goddess?

Not to my knowledge...is there a goddess named Iliira? Or Avaunya? Never heard of them if there is.

I don't know exactly what that user's referring to, but there's a FR goddess called Lliira.

Yeah, iirc Lliira is the goddes of joy, festivities, happiness, dancing.

Good story.

Speaking of which, favorite gods?

Oh, right, her! I forgot about her.

No, the name's similarity is a coincidence; I have no idea where I came up with the name Iliira, though I know that I hadn't heard of Lliira yet. Iliira started as my Baldur's Gate character in the late 90s (though only recently have I gotten a chance to play her in PnP), and the only gods I knew of at the time were the ones mentioned in original BG. I can't remember Lliira being mentioned at all in the original BG, and if she was, it was very, very obscure.

Tymora and Besheba both, as I like the good luck/bad luck dichotomy.

Bhaal, due to a childhood love of Baldur's Gate.

Umberlee, because I like that she doesn't even pretend to not be a bitch.

The entire Mulhorandi pantheon, because I like Egypt.

Bhaal was great, it's good he's coming back.

I must admit the shalarin are strangely attractive for some reason..

Nein.

They basically are the perfect mix between sea elves and sahuagins. They also have the most advanced civilization among undersea races, if my memory serves me right..

Nah, sea elves or tritons is where it's at, brah.

Tritons confuse me. In the Monster Manual they are described as having the lower part of their bodies ending in a fish tail (which would basically make them no different from the merfolk), yet their illusration blatantly expose two scaly legs.

Which MM? Weren't tritons always bipedal with leg fins and the merfolk were the ones with the fish tails?

3.5

The forgotten realms should stay forgotten

Was a good setting up until WotC started aggressively trying to use it to promote their products. And without hiring someone and telling them, "Look, you've got to unify this setting somehow. Dozens of independent authors have been adding onto this thing over the years and it's become a patchwork monstrosity with too many low level characters in some places and too many high level characters in others. Fix it."

The first actually good campaign I ever played in was Forgotten Realms.

Thanks brah.

Oh, had a look. Finned legs, man, not fish tails.

I told you. D&D makes them too vague and inconsistent.

>D&D makes them too vague and inconsistent.
>inconsistent
Tritons have had finned legs ever since they were introduced, what's inconsistent about that?

It literally says in their description: this being is roughly human-sized. Its lower half ends in two finned legs, while its torso, head and arms are human.

Legs not tail. Else the description would have spelled out a tail. That's not vague at all. Their illustration matches that description perfectly.

Some descriptions here and there giving them actual fish tails.

I'm pretty sure I read fish tail. Maybe it was a mistake in the translation of the MM to my language, I don'know.

Yeah, that could be a mistranslation, especially if the translator is shit.

>OP opens a Thread avout FR
>WOW LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH SHIT THING I DONT LIKE IS
>WOW IN THIS THREAD ABOUT X WHY ARENT WE TALKING ABOUT Y INSTEAD

Veeky Forums is literally turning into /v/.2 where autists shit up a thread completely because they dont like. Jesus fucking christ. I have been here too long.

I liked all of Volo´s Guides because they were choke full of fluff and plothooks.
Aside from that they also had campaign setting books not only for different regions but also for like more or less know cities and towns like Baldurs Gate, Daggerford, Neverwinter, Calimport, etc etc. that had TONS of NPCs and shit.

Talos would like to have a word with you.

Fuck the retard who suggested he was Gruumsh. Completely fuck that.

Just ignore the fuckers, mang.

I liked Cyric when he still was insane in AD&D since he was basically the evil god of doing it for the Lulz.

Generally I noticed FR lacks a decent evil deity of fucking around with people because you can.

I guess I always liked the concept of Ilmater and Eldath though for sooe reason the novels usually portrayed followers of both as batshit insane.

Have to agree, Cyric is best deity.

The followers of Eldath are absolutely retarded though, they basically invite death to themselves.

Followers of Ilmater are basically masochists but are good aligned.

The FR Deities line had the best illustrations bar none.

Great books, but the classes are overpowered as fuck. I prefer the fluff and spells from them with Warriors & Priests kits, because the kits were nicely flavored and mostly balanced.

>tfw Mystra
I'd solve those mysteries.

What did you think of the deity avatars? A nice addition to the supplements or mostly superfluous?

Yeah, didn't really bother with the class myself.

Ace choice brah.

Is there a way to get maps for all of Thay's main cities?

There's already a hi-res map of Thay, but I'm looking for something more specific, like a map of Bezantur or Eltabbar or shit.

What edition, man? There's a few pdf readers where you can pull the images off of the pages. You might like to try to hunt down Unapproachable East.

Any edition's good, is that tome from 2e or 1e?

3e/3.5e. Do you have the snipping tool, because you can crib them that way.
I'm not sure if Thay's main cities get maps dedicated to them though. google.com.au/search?q=maps of the cities of thay&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiquJDjjqvQAhXIJZQKHXMxApEQ_AUICCgB&biw=1366&bih=631#imgrc=QlxoVbYzNVWobM:

Hmm, seems like the only maps are of Bezantur unfortunately.

When it comes to gods I always like Amaunator/Lathander and the Three-Faced Sun "heresy".

Lathander is remarkably based, but he's also a colossal dick.

Is the Moradin (and other racial deities) in the Forgotten Realms the same Moradin that the other settings have? Can a god be in two settings at once?

Yes, it's the same Moradin.

Multi-setting deities, on entering Toril's sphere, have to agree to certain stipulations that Ao sets on their ability to affect matters within Realmspace, as well as portfolio limitations (i.e. can't be more than a demipower if you have the same portfolio as a full deity).

So a god, let's say Bahamut, can be an extremely powerful deity outside Realmspace, but as soon as he steps within, he has to play by Ao's rules in how much influence and power he possesses, meaning he might be reverted back to a lesser deity, or even a demipower, while acting within Realmspace.

The Dwarf and Elf pantheons don't seem to have that sort of power differential for the most part, and are fairly uniform across the multiverse, though there's also Angarradh (however you spell it), who on Toril is a fusion of three deities, but beyond Toril functionally doesn't exist at all.

Cool. I asked because the Book of Exalted Deeds had a section on really minor gods of really Good concepts, and one of them is basically Ilmater. Also, I really want to play a cleric of Moradin who got sent to the FR from Greyhawk or somewhere in a magical accident, and hasn't realized he's on another plane.

>in a magical accident

You mean a spelljammer accident.

Some gods spread themselves over multiple spheres, others prefer to concentrate on a single sphere. Shar, for example, is a fully single-sphere goddess. Moradin, Tyr, Bahamut (he also goes by Marduk in Realmspace), Tiamat, Corellon, Lolth (to an extent), are multispheric deities.

Some single-sphere deities also interact with deities from other spheres. Mystra is a very good friend of Wee Jas, and I think Waukeen used to hang out with a couple of the gods from Aebrynis (Birthright).

Gods have also done favours for other gods if they have a follower who somehow lands on a Prime world that they don't have influence on, but a god they know and are allies with has a church there. So the allied god might feed the follower with power if they're a cleric, or generally watch over them as a favour, in expectation that they get the same from their ally on other worlds.

>posts Lathander taking down a rogue archmage
>doesn't post the Dawn Cataclysm

Nigga, you done fucked up. It's the single biggest example of Lathander fuckery there is, considering it led to the death of several gods and several knock-on effects in the shape of mortal mass disasters and cataclysms.

Waukeen's blingy priest never fails to make me smile. You're serving the goddess of wealth, why NOT pull out the cloth-of-gold and the ermine for your kit.

Also check out Shar's priestess in the sensible "cute art teacher" clothes staring daggers at the fabulous Selunite. It's like the artist wanted a catfight to happen.

Lliira. For a deity to worship, you can't go with the one who's the goddess of fun.

>that priestess
Loviatar is basically the goddess of S&M, right?

Less S&M, more like people such as torturers and sadists, if I remember F&A correctly.

It's funny that very few evil clerics go for the sexy look aside from Loviatar's ones. Auril's priestess wears a princess ballgown and a cheap hammer from B&Q, Beshaba's shows a little leg and Umberlee's has a tight jumpsuit, but the rest (especially Shar's and Iyachtu Xvim's) are downright prudish compared to, say, Lathander's, Sune's and Mystra's.

Also I want that sweet hat the beholder cultist wears.

How do you guys come up with ideas for a Forgotten Realms campaign?

Do you come up with a history and get on drawing the maps and writing the scenarios or do you start with a big dungeon and build off from there or you just start with a city and let everything come up at the table in a more sandbox-y style?

My campaign is taking place in it right now, lots of fun for us.
I only recently got into it but godDAMN are the old 2e books awesome resources.
WotC basically ruined the Realms almost, I can't even believe how much.

So, just the goddess of S, then.

Lolth's priestesses tend to go for that look too, if I recall correctly.

I actually base it more off the characters that the PC's make themselves and then use FR as the backdrop for their adventures.
So far our group has been awesome about that sort of thing, making interesting story-driven characters.

How do you deal with making dungeons and coming up with maps and NPCs for the cities they visit or the quests they become involved with?

I find the avatars totally superfluous, because I have never had any reason to use them. I ignore the Spellplague and most FR NPCs of note like Elminster or other crap. But I particularly liked the FR sourcebook on demihuman deities, for its description of the clergy. All the clergy fluff is spectacular in those books, though. It's just the classes were too tailored to the priest's handbook way of creating specialist priests, rather than the kit method. And that's not super bad as long as you're using the handbooks. But I like to limit classes to the PhB + the kit books and, if you throw in the religion series priest classes with PhB+kits, balance is a joke--those priests can whoop a standard fighter whose fluff gives him a +1 versus bears, or whatever.

A lot of major cities in Faerun HAVE simple maps dating back to second edition, and for dungeons I just wing it or design it in a non-gamey fashion.

A trick to designing memorable dungeons is to NOT treat it like a board game with traps and rewards and secret doors and shit; dungeons are or were once a building filled with actual people that had actual reasons for being there, thus creating a interlocked set of tiles and rooms filled with traps and monsters and shit basically only work with dungeons that are explicitly designed to be death traps for adventures like Undermountain, so I design a dungeon by designing an actual facility and THEN filling it with traps.

Still, a dungeon is nice but they don't make memorable games by themselves unless there's nothing else about the game that's memorable in the long-term; think more flexibly and not in rigid gaming fashions. Even if the rules to D&D are very gamey you don't necessarily need to think in the straight lines it seems to suggest that you should think in.

I use the clergies of faiths fairly often but definitely not the gods themselves; if you wanna know what a god thinks you gotta ask their priesthood and there's often considerable variation even in that.

This makes the 3e confined Realms with their own planes all the more nonsensical and bizarre. That was a legitimately retarded decision.

Yeah, it was downright criminal how they basically wasted so much of the fantastic lore. Here's hoping the 5e team might do it some justice.

The Storm King's Wrath actually makes use of some old 2e shit; the Ring of Winter is mentioned (and will almost certainly be the focus of the next major Adventure), and TWO of the Great Wyrms of the North show up in person, including Klauth himself!

Torrent the TSR complete D&D. Start perusing them until something catches your eye. Then start reading about it. You'll have a game in mind by the time you finish. Don't be afraid to change anything and everything that does not suit your interests, particularly the NPCs--always disregard the stats of NPCs in anything connected to Forgotten Realms. It is just fucking littered with people who are on a demi-god power level. That backwoods town of 400 in the middle of nowhere? Yeah: the mayor is a level 17 paladin.

If torrent is too slow or doesn't work, Mega that gloriousness.

I'm the opposite of that, seeing the stats of the gods were great.

It's neat fluff, for sure. I've just never found it to contribute mechanically to a game I've run or played.

Exactly.
Nice to know, not useful in-game. Even as fluff, because it's not fluff, it's crunch.

But is it really crunch if it's just there for completionist sake? If the rules are meant solely to provide background info, is it still crunch?

It's not useful backround info because they weren't using it in fluff to determine who "wins" fights, as that was determined by the needs of the plot.

Therefore it was rules for players, as if it's not fluff for backround stories or novels and it's not going to be used by any players then it really just takes up space to fill up space.

I find it to be excellent source material and while I haven't specifically used them as a part of my games, I do like looking at the stats.

They've been used somewhat to determine who wins in fluff, the trouncing of Sammaster by Lathander was driven both by plot advancement and their stats.

It's just right, even for completionists sake, as each god has fluff-and-portfolio-driven powers they can bring to bear.

Also every 3rd NPC is at the level PCs end their campaign at.
Really makes your own character feel pointless or redundant.

Kek. Though the PCs weren't really meant to meet the movers and shakers, only as quest givers or footnotes in their adventures. Kinda like what BG did.

That user is incorrect. FR has nothing to do with literature. It's a game setting, and has some novels published on the level of low-quality summer-reads, or high-quality fan-fics. It is nonsense to pretend it tried to do anything vaguely resembling high literature.

And you don't use the NPCs from the fluff. No one does, ever, unless running a published module containing them as background or support characters.

Is that necessarily bad? Like, I come at this as a Shadowrun player. You don't expect to meet Lofwyr or Fastjack or megacorporate CEOs, because you're out in the street dodging bullets and they're in their plasteel towers lording over you, or in the middle case making way more money than you doing way more high-end runs. Faerun seems to just have the same thing going on as a fantasy setting. You are not a big fish and that's ok.

It's a genre difference. Being the little guy is part of the feel of Shadowrun. It's what it tries to do. Becoming the mythical heroes is the game you're looking for, from D&D, same way that you're looking to feel like the little guy from Shadowrun. If you wanted to evoke the feel of Shadowrun, you'd play it. But when you play D&D, you kinda want that, instead.

If all RPGs just did the same thing, we wouldn't need more than one and GURPS would magically not be crap.

What about 5e where it's even lower powered?

Old Snarl himself?

Dunno. I don't care at all about non-TSR D&D.

What's the status of Psionics in Abil-Toril? Does it even exist?

I think it must, because mindflayers are a mayor underdark thing.

Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

For my part, I prefer that my world be large and for a lot of stuff to be happening in it - not all of it level appropriate.

>Becoming the mythical heroes

But that's the thing - you can DO that still. I remember playing Baldur's Gate. You meet Elminster at level 1 and he's literally unkillable. But then cut to Throne of Bhaal, and your character is playing at the same level as Elminster, and can even end the game MORE powerful than him and his pointy hat.

It was always there, but never prominent. 2e had Dark Sun for psionics, so it never got any coverage in Faerun, but was never not-present. Psionics were just optional to most campaigns, so it existed if your DM wanted to include it and didn't if he or she didn't want to. The exception was the Underdark stuff, where it existed by default and got some coverage in the Menzoberranzan campaign stuff.

>Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Agreed.

Yeah, there's also the House Oblodra (sp?) from Menzoberranzan.

Not to mention Realmspace and didn't Kara-Tur have psionics? Don't remember any in Zakhara, though.

But yeah: was just optional to the extent that it wasn't written in.