Why do we hate the Forgotten Realms again?

white people

Various places. The con thing was floating around the net after it happened, you can probably still find some references out there.
The Elminster thing is from one of the books, I forget which.
Everything else is just from what Ed himself writes on the internet. Oh, all his replies on the Candlekeep forum are written by someone who is certainly not Ed, but rather a mysterious woman who plays in his games and responds to questions for him but chooses to be unidentified and is totally not Ed playing pretend, so shut up. "She" writes under the nickname "the Hooded Lady" -- which is a reference to the clitoris! How fun, right?

...

It's basically fantasy super-heroes.

Sounds like a real piece of work

All the reasons that I've seen are easily worked around if your DM chooses to not include Elmy or Jizzt. It's a fine High Fantasy adventure setting as long as you're not trying to work every world shattering event into your campaign.

Ed belongs on Veeky Forums more than you do, tee bee aych. Desu.

I can't argue with that, but would like remind everyone that "belonging on Veeky Forums" is not a good thing.

Or you can just keep the setting which is incredibly robust if not generic and remove all those characters from it.

Likewise this is arguably a problem any homebrew world will have if it has any powerful characters in it at all.

Because after it overthrew Mystara, overshadowed Spelljammer and Planescape, and got far too many novels, TSR decided to just keep treating it the same way any corporation treats an IP that shits money to the point that even Greenwood has gone on record to say when he DMs he doesn't even treat the Time of Troubles as canon let alone most of the other stuff that happened when the setting moved to 2e.
He even had a volo's guide where Volo mentions that most novels/pre-written adventures are non-canon shit, but TSR didn't like that. And then let's not get started on the whole bullshit that happened to Netheril.

>but would like remind everyone that "belonging on Veeky Forums" is not a good thing if you're a normalfag
Fix'd. For those who prefer avoiding Facebook and other normalscum shit, this place is still pretty alright, even despite the recent invasions every time Fox or some such report on the "hackers on steroids".

It is average.

Faults that haven't been mentioned:
>hides away its more interesting lore in favor of generic material
>clings to areas already exhaustively described
>doesn't utilize its many fantasy races to their potential, most areas are predominantly human
>hints at monster societies but never explores them or lets them interact with human ones
>cloned environments, every country has virtually the same druid forest
>adventurer centric writing tone
>prone to getting other settings stuck in itself

I do hate that wall and everything attached to it. It's not that it's fundamentally unfair, I'm fine with settings that have a great injustice at the center, it's the fact that gods and other characters that are objectively Good and Lawful agree with it. If you disagree with the wall, you are wrong: book said so. It's like a tedious alignment argument baked into the setting.

And that's a real shame, because the 5e Faerun book talks about religions in a way that makes sense for a polytheistic setting. It describes people worshipping whatever god would be most relevant to their current situation, which is what people did in historical polytheistic societies. Tymora when you want to win at cards, Beshaba when you don't want the rope to snap while you're climbing it. Except, nope, the writers were monotheists, if you worship any god but your patron you get damned for all eternity in the City of the Faithless.

It's bad writing, it gets in the way of interesting writing, and it's only still around because status quo is the true Overgod.

Don't remind me; for all the havoc 4e wreaked, at least they actually let the orcs try and better themselves with the Kingdom of Many-Arrows - they were actually starting to be trusted. We even had a Dragon article dedicated to talking about half-orcs from the Many-Arrows tribes.

And of course we can't have morally ambiguous non-NeoTolkienian races in Faerun, so it gets wiped out with barely even a mention in 5e. Bleh!

>Fantasy equivalent of fundamentalist Christianity ("Worship my god or you'll go to Hell!")
>Fine

>Ed Greenwood is one creepy old nerd, like George R.R. Martin without the talent.
So like George R.R. Martin then?

It's not "my god", it's "any god". And since FR has a god for literally everyone (and you don't even have to actually worship one for them to take you to their afterlife), you have to be literally /r/atheism-tier to end up in the Wall. In which case, good fucking riddance.

>So like George R.R. Martin then?

Ebin, my good sir, upvoted.

Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger

They tried that for 4e and people lost their minds.

Just use points of light or something else.

Don't get me wrong, I've been here for years and probably will be forever, but I have no illusions. While there are some good folks here, and some corners of this place are pretty nice, overall this place is actually a shithole full of repulsive mutants and nutjobs, and I wouldn't willingly tell people IRL I go to Veeky Forums, ever. Being here is bad enough, if someone told me "You BELONG on Veeky Forums" I'd be as offended as if it was pic related.

Say what you like about GRRM, he's still way more talented than Greenwood. Try reading a book from each and you'll see what I mean.

>Pic related is r/atheism tier
She believed in the gods and even followed one of them, and she still thought it was bullshit for people to be condemned to the Wall for not sucking the gods' dicks enough.

>good fucking riddance
The fact that you'd say that about other human beings makes you more deserving of the Wall than anyone. No one deserves any kind of eternal punishment or the annihilation of ones soul. No one. No. Fucking. One. Even you.

I don't know FR very well. Why should you set a campaign in it if you're going to take out the stuff from the novels? With Spelljammer you can take out 95% of the lore and it still works as Spelljammer. With Faerun, it seems like the details are the whole point. I'm sure there's cool ideas to play with, but isn't it just a generic high fantasy world at that point?

>No one deserves any kind of eternal punishment
First of all, wrong. Secondly, the punishment isn't actually eternal.

>First of all, wrong.
No.

>Secondly, the punishment isn't actually eternal.
Yes, because eventually the person entirely ceases to exist, hence the second part of my statement about how no one deserves that, either.

>keep the setting
>proceeds to remove from the setting

>being offended
Not enough years, you haven't.

>I wouldn't willingly tell people IRL
Well, no shit. Meatspace and cyberspace should be separate.

>No.
Yes.

>wrong

Whoa, someone call the philosophy department at Oxford, tell them this internet tough guy right here is handing out easy answers to deep, intractable moral questions! They oughtta get right on that!

Is it okay if I send them your headshot, here?

>Not enough years, you haven't.

>if you're here long enough, you'll be dead inside

You're not really countering my point, user.

Because it is the best fantasy setting and its cool to be different.

To be fair 1e Realms had loads of references to orcish society and half-orcs being fairly common in a number of areas due to two cultures mingling as they tend to do. Hells, even the first waterdeep book lists a random every day encounter in the city involving ogres who work for some noble walking through, but TSR hated that so much that they pushed most of it away in 2e and even printed a new subspecies of Orc to explain that good orcs aren't actually orcs because as you said, can't have that in muh D&D.
WotC unfortunately continued this trend quite severely with 3e, 4e bucked it a tiny bit, then 5e brought it back.

But I'm also a faggot who loves the older lore and digging through the shoddy generic material for the actual interesting stuff.

5e's take on religion is more or less how it was meant to be in the Realms, hell even the wall as I recall was initially established because the older gods of death in the setting were either Jergal, a dude who believes that all things must come to an end even the eternal soul, and Myrkul, an asshole who just likes suffering, the wall existing as their creations/domain kind of fit. It being retconned into a necessary evil for the whole bloodwar thing was eh but sure why not, then it becoming without reason but everyone agrees it is a good thing is just shit writing.

As I recall early days of the wall were even easily avoided by saying "Yeah I think Helm is a pretty cool dude." at some point in your life.

>Jergal, a dude who believes that all things must come to an end even the eternal soul
And yet he didn't seem to apply that rule to himself.

In my personal opinion, it's just so bland. The only significant thing I can think of that makes it stand out from every other painfully generic high fantasy are the Drow. That's it. I felt that out of all the TSR settings, FR was the weakest yet oddly, it's blandness led to it being popular. I presume the same works for World of Warcraft.

Greyhawk, I'm not too familiar with. Seems like Proto-FR.

Birthright had kings and nobles have supernatural powers bound by bloodlines.

Dragonlance had dragons out the whazoo, not to mention the brave attempt at 5th age card game.

Ravenloft was gothic horror done in a time where the horror giants were Lovecraftian CoC or White Wolf's modern horror WoD.

Dark Sun was badarse Conan the Barbarian styled survival.

Planescape had everyone as dimension hopping demi-gods and Spelljammer was just completely bonkers.

I may be missing one or two, but each and every one of these settings had that quirk, that spark of difference that made them different from ye generic tolkenish high fantasy. FR just feels stagnant, but I do concour that perhaps it is this blandness that makes it easy to understand and get into.

Yet he does, as far as he is concerned once everything comes to an end it will be his turn to off himself since his job of cataloging it all will be complete.

How convenient that that event also happens to be so far in the future as to be irrelevant, if it ever even happens at all.

>repulsive mutants and nutjobs
Going on Veeky Forums as even a semi-normal person is kinda like leaning over the clouds of heaven and laughing at tormented sinners writhing in hell.

Wizards has turned it into the face of D&D settings and practically forsaken all others.

Which fits with him more or less being the god of irrelevancy. Sure he was supposed to preside over death but he was so impartial and aloof about it that he didn't cause it to happen randomly the way Myrkul enjoyed, and if the wall is to be blamed on him it only impacts the soul after it can serve no relevant purpose as it is not being resurrected and not being converted into something else by a god or planar essence.

I think that's only because they fucked it up so hard that they focused on "fixing" it this edition. Eberron was the "face" for a while.

Like said, the problem with the Realms is a lack of identity and personality. WotC is just making it worse by releasing more and more stuff. Everything feels very generic. The same happens with PF's Golarion.

>leaning over the clouds of heaven and laughing at tormented sinners writhing in hell
People who would do that don't belong in Heaven.

Because at some point they need to do a kickstarter to stop Ed Greenwood from writing about Elminster

That's what me and my group did. Though there was a bit where we were going to use the Hero of Neverwinter, but it never got to that point.

God, is this what we've been reduced to?

I can tell you're from one of those candy-assed reformed churches.

who do I give my money to?

>just keep treating it the same way any corporation treats an IP that shits money to the point that even Greenwood has gone on record to say when he DMs he doesn't even treat the Time of Troubles as canon let alone most of the other stuff that happened when the setting moved to 2e.

Drow are from Greyhawk originally. And its basically FR without overpowered NPCS in each fucking town and all of Greenwood`s sexual shenanigans, only Gygax`s.

How would you rate the all different official D&D settings?

Mystara > 1e FR > Al Qadim > Spelljammer > Dark Sun > Eberron > Dragonlance > Greyhawk

Those are the ones I played in anyway

> that any sort of threat created by the DM could simply be solved by those NPCs

It's explicitly stated in the very book posted by OP that the high-level NPCs have their own shit to do.

> why Elminster and the other walking plot destroyers can't be around to just punch the evil plan in the dick while laughing at it.

Because Elminster is one guy who lives in one part of a continent the size of most of North America. He's got shit to do, doesn't feel like always doing everything, isn't always home (the guy literally hangs on on Earth in his spare time) and any time he tries to get anything major done it's inevitable that Szass Tam or Larloch or someone will act against him just to spite him - and he knows this because HE acts against THEM whenever they try to get shit done for the same reason.

And no, you DON'T have to detail precisely what Elminster's doing that keeps him so busy, because it's not like he goes around just telling people.

IF your campaign takes place in the Dalelands and IF the heroes are in Shadowdale and IF you don't want them to meet Elminster, then the solution is as simple as, when they go to knock on his front door, he just doesn't answer, and forcing the door open just reveals a perfectly ordinary, empty cottage inside.

There, problem solved.

The world is a big place. It doesn't revolve around the PCs and their precious little problems. Try and make your PCs realize this, it makes for a fuller world when the setting doesn't seem to constantly hinge on their every action.

>Greyhawk

A more boring setting that was actually designed for D&D cannot be named.

What is it that make Mystara the best? Why is Greyhawk the worst? Aren't both related?

>Lolth
What's wrong with Spide waifu?

Greyhawk is the worst because it is basically a diet version of the Forgotten Realms. The only reason why it doesn't have asaninely-powerful NPCs is because it's not as popular and so doesn't have a many published books. Even then, it still has Mordenkainen and his ilk, so it's not like it's lacking in overpowered, arrogant archwizards.

Speaking of, Greyhawk is THE world of the psychopathic True Neutral; that is, the guy who will fight for one side one day and the switch sides the next day to "keep the balance". The guy who, if he saves someone today, he might feel he "needs" to kill an innocent tomorrow. Mordenkainen is one of these people, actively working against "Good" and "Evil" becoming too powerful (presumably he does the same for Law and Chaos, but it doesn't come up as much).

This is retarded.

Not to mention, Greyhawk defined the idea that "proper D&D" is "Neo-Medieval Europe Setting".

Mystara, by comparison, was a pulp-themed gonzo setting, with a hollow earth full of prehistoric cultures, a moon inhabitated by samurai catgirls who rode flying sabertoothed tigers to battle, a society of elf-ogre hybrids, and a magocracy that lived on a peninsula of floating islands; and those are some of the less crazy aspects of the setting.

>Mystara, by comparison, was a pulp-themed gonzo setting, with a hollow earth full of prehistoric cultures, a moon inhabitated by samurai catgirls who rode flying sabertoothed tigers to battle, a society of elf-ogre hybrids, and a magocracy that lived on a peninsula of floating islands; and those are some of the less crazy aspects of the setting.
Truly, cringe culture and muh realism were a mistake

Don't get me wrong, Mystara had its flaws, like an overreliance on "real world culture X with the names changed to sound more fantastical" - the Hollow World subsetting as home to necromancer-priest jackal-people, 18" tall dinosaur hunting amazons, neanderthals, cowboy orcs and Frazetta Men, but it also had what were blatantly vikings, egyptians, aztecs and olmecs.

...

>They tried that for 4e and people lost their minds.

>All these super-powerful NPCs just hanging around doesn't really fit in with the campaign I'm running, so I just omit them.

>Same with all these ill-fitting locations, countries, classes, organizations, etc...

>Players keep asking where it all went.

>"this isn't FR at all!"

They wonder why I homebrew.

They wonder why I hate being foreverGM

All that genderswap shit didn't tip you off?

Wow, I thought all those comments about WotC hating any sort of nuance or depth were just memes.

Why are WotC actively opposed to the concept of monstrous humanoids being anything but hostile wilderness XP-pinatas?

To be honest, if I was forced to guess, it's because D&D is primarily marketed at teenagers, and WotC wants to preempt soccer moms screaming bloody murder about, well, bloody murder.

If the players are just killing monsters, it's fine. If they're killing actual people, that could cause problems that WotC just doesn't want to deal with.

Here's the thing; it's not that WoTC hates the idea of monstrous humanoids having nice things - remember, WoTC DID make 4e, and monsters had it really good in that edition; gnolls got their best fluff rewrite ever, hobgoblins got a sympthetic makeover, minotaurs made it into the third PHB, tieflings made it into the first PHB, bladelings got their first PC writeup ever, goblins and kobolds were official printed-book PC options (Dungeon Survival Guide), werebeast PCs were a thing, abyssal genasi were a thing, shadar-kai were a thing...

The problem is all the screaming idiots who asserted "That's not D&D!"

5e was made specifially to appeal to the AD&D grognards who had raged so hard about 4e's changes. That meant forcing orcs and gnolls and goblinoids back into the Always Evil box, amongst other changes.

As said, due to the weird way that violence is often viewed, especially in the US, murdering adult always-evil monsters is perfectly fine as long as it's not marketed towards little kids and there's no descriptions of blood, organs, or agonizing demise, while murdering kids or people who actually have faces and personalities is strictly adult territory and sick and disgusting.

Do you have to read a shit ton of lore books to understand the FR campaign setting?

Legit question, I've got the 3.5 FR campaign setting book but it seems to go way in depth about shit like trade routes and dynasties, but when it comes to actually talking about towns and caves there's only about 1 to 2 paragraphs.

Are most places in this setting just not really that important, or do I have to read a shit ton of sourcebooks to get into this setting?

That just reminds me of how much of a shame it was TSR hated this stuff.
Just looking at Faerun:
Gnolls were fairly common in the unapproachable east, iirc they were even most of the police force in Thay.
Hobgoblins were pretty important in the bloodstone lands and implied to be pawns in a massive game of keeping war going in that region
Minotaurs sadly only really get mentioned as living in a fairly secluded area of the north where due to a lack of humans to breed with they started breeding with demons or something, not much is written there.
Tieflings (or rather Cambions, Tanarukk, Fey'ri, and Demon-blooded people in general) were not only the evil people of Hellgate keep! but also suggested to be fairly common in the lands of the north east due to the fallen demon-summoning empires of the past, so demon-blood kind of became something that one just sees every so often there.
And Lythari were introduced in elves of evermeet iirc.

Depends on what you're trying to understand, some people love the FRCS for its neat and tidy black and white descriptions of things others hate it for its focus in odd areas.
If you want a crash course and don't mind it not being very modern I would suggest mega.nz/#!sA8WlDyC!irMqAote4OEo33ElRUZcF5T3VKuOiNc2IVapY9942b8

If you're looking to understand the entire setting as a whole though you're asking for far more homework than it's worth, especially given that even within the community of hardcore nerds for the realms there are constant arguments over what should and shouldn't be canon, where Greenwood's notes should take precedent, and at what edition you should stop reading.
Then there's a whole bunch of noise about the novels and people who hate them while others love them.

I don't hate FR but I don't like it either.

Why? Because FR falls under what I call Ren Fair Fantasy. What do you usually see at a Ren Fair? A bunch of facades and actors creating a simulation of a fantasy world. Fat chicks dressed up as Elves. A dad in a pirate costume coralling his kids towards the petting zoo. Maybe that one weird faggot in Dr. Who cosplay. But mostly you just see a bunch of weird tourists milling around and absorbing the spectacle of a fake fantasy world. Then you go sit down at Ye Old Mutton Shoppe, where you get to see some fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt and dad shorts munching on a plate of chicken wings. Then a barmaid with a Midwestern accent asks you if you want Diet or Regular Coke. And that's who this world exists for. Not the people living in it, but you. The fat, greasy disappointment who payed forty dollars to see this shit.

And that's what FR feels like. I know it's got deeper lore but that's never what the writers or GMs use. It doesn't feel lived in, or real. You don't feel like you'd want to actually explore this world. It just feels like an artificial collection of things you like, displayed for your enjoyment.

A fucking theme park.

>FR falls under what I call Ren Fair Fantasy
So does that mean every NPC is into BDSM?

Was it WoTC or TSR who had a country called, I think it was Thesk, where the Thayans sent an army of orcs to stop the Tuigan Horde (aka, the Not!Mongols under Not!Genghis Khan) from murdering everybody and then abandoned them there, so the locals took them in and have welcomed them as saviours who've since turned into great neighbors?

Thanks user, I was afraid that just getting a general feel for this setting would still require me to read a shit ton of books.

I mostly play Eberron anyway cause of how lax it is with the lore, but WotC keeps pushing FR so I'm just gonna learn it as my backup D&D setting.

These are a pastebin, but have links to the Hooded One

pastebin.com/hEVadYsN

pastebin.com/1MuQ6wFt

The Horde campaign started in the TSR days and established that the orcs were sent to the region to cause trouble. Later in 2e (still TSR) they said that there were conflicts between the orcs in the region and the humans. Greenwood's notes described that despite orders to start shit most of the orcs just wanted to stop being jerked around since they were promised lands for assisting in the war effort so they started to settle and become part of the communities despite the fact the main cities really hated this. 3e (wotc) as I recall has a short reference saying that Greenwood's notes are in fact true.

Not in its original form before post-Gygax TSR scrubbed all the interesting parts. Removing all the Gygax bit from a setting that is basically "Gary's home campaign world" doesn't leave you much in the way of selling points.
Besides, Greyhawk has the coolest D&D video game, pic related.

STICKS

TO

SNAKES

>the AD&D grognards who had raged so hard about 4e

You mean the 3aboos. AD&D guys had already gone through that shit twice, and weren't so up in arms about the 3e whippersnappers getting a taste of their own medicine.

Essentially WoW then?

It's funny because the 3aboos recycled a lot of the shit grogs said about 3e to sling at 4e.

I dunno, I forgot.

I don't care for its cosmology (planes, gods, etc.) and I find the setting itself too cluttered to be much use.

I prefer to make my own settings with more of an ancient/classical vibe to them, borrowing platonic theology.

The cycle of abuse continues.

4e grogs mostly just used the same insults they had used towards Pathfinder players in regards to 5e.

That's not a cycle, though. To be a cycle the 4e guys would have to use the 3e guys' arguments against 5e, not reiterate their retorts to said 3e guys' arguments.

Why do people get so triggered by the wall. It's one of the more interesting factoids about the setting.
>boohoo if I play an edgy godhater in this world my character will get a bad afterlife
You may think that's unfair but how does that make it a bad setting? Does everything have to be sunshine and lollipops to get your approval? Do the deities not have a progressive enough stance on atheists for you?

>it makes for a fuller world when the setting doesn't seem to constantly hinge on their every action.
Yeah, it instead hinges on a bunch of Mary Sues more powerful than the party will ever be, who must be imagined to be always busy in things more important than whatever the party is doing, or just plain unable, unwilling or disinterested in intervening

I'd personally just say they don't exist. I don't need to deal with another writer's godly wizard Gary Stu self-insert

I'm not familiar with the lore, but wouldn't something bad probably happen if you tried to break in to that guy's house?

I was pointing out that it basically ended with 3.5.

>still implying the Dove was an "edgy atheist"

See and >the wall as I recall was initially established because the older gods of death in the setting were either Jergal, a dude who believes that all things must come to an end even the eternal soul, and Myrkul, an asshole who just likes suffering, the wall existing as their creations/domain kind of fit. It being retconned into a necessary evil for the whole bloodwar thing was eh but sure why not, then [it comes into being] without reason but everyone agrees it is a good thing is just shit writing.

This is a universe where the goods are objectively good, in a system where good is associated with altruism and compassion. It's very out of place that these objectively good gods in a system where good is associated with compassion and altruism would allow good people that don't worship them to be tortured for an eternity for not worshiping them.

>The fact that you'd say that about other human beings makes you more deserving of the Wall than anyone. No one deserves any kind of eternal punishment or the annihilation of ones soul. No one. No. Fucking. One. Even you.
Do you not like w40k? Some existential darkness in a setting can be cool. I mean, the whole setting has some pretty dark stuff in it, though I would be remiss in defending FR in its entirety. It seems like an acceptable work around for the whole scenario because the gods are a super obvious presence at all times, there is literally no room for faith because they're just hanging around (which is my problem with the divinity structure).

It's not real nigga, damn.

>the goods are objectively good
Therefore things are "good" merely because because they are loved by gods. Compassion and altruism has little to do with the sovereign arbitration of cosmic superheroes with divine rank.