Is Faerun an objectively bad setting?

Meme answer.
Forgotten Realm has issues as a setting, as said.

Massive tectonic-plate-splitting hole created by the Spellplague that punched a giant fucking abyss in the face of the planet, going all the way from the surface to the Underdark.

>if Superman is so powerful, why does the Justice League exist?

This is unironically a problem with superhero universes though
>street-level vigilante struggling to take down a mob boss
>why doesn't the super fast guy just run in and solve everything, then get back to whatever he was doing?

Sometimes he does, I distinctly remember a comic where Superman shows up in Gotham when a blimp is about to crash and explode in a second Hindenburg thing and removes it from the scene.

Or other times he might be living his life, because he's not a video game character who doesn't eat, sleep, or shit existing solely to serve as an "insert problem, receive solution" machine.

>the Border Kingdoms
Or the Great Dale.
Or the Vilhon Reach.
Or Thar.
Or the Bloodstone Lands.

Yes, or the multitude of other places that aren't Waterdeep/Shadowdale/Cormyr, I know. I just happen to like the Border Kingdoms.

Yes, it's exactly the same problem with mainstream superhero worlds too. Two problems don't make everything alright.

The biggest problem with Forgotten Realms is that it basically lacks an identity and tone. It's a generic kitchen sink of a setting that's built to encompass anything and everything.

>The rather lame crutch that FR tries to rely upon is that the Gods are supposedly very interventionist to stop that sort of thing,
It also uses the "if you try anything, possibly including leaving the area of your house, the other high-level guys will jump all over you, so get some low-level dudes to go do it" excuse.

And removing or ignoring the interesting bits of the setting.

Supes isn't even the major problem.

The Flash, and specifically Barry Allen are. It is established how busted his speedforce powers are, as he can perceive and react to time at a rate that we cannot even measure with our current understanding of the universe.

World peace should be an afterthought with him around. And shit like the infinite mass punch should basically solve all martial conflicts.

And yet...

What happened in Ascelhorn?

What happens in Ascelhorn stays in Ascelhorn.

Real talk, did it get fucked by the Netherese or did it fuck itself? I heard two conflicting stories.

Wulgreth, a Netherese wizard, summoned devils to the city in 820 DR. In 880 DR, this prompted other wizards, with the guidance of the fey'ri, to summon demons to counteract the devils and in 882 DR the demons won the battle and subsequently conquered the city. The demons continued their rampage, destroying Eaerlann and Ammarindar.[3]

That's off the FR Wiki, the reference is Lost Empires of Faerun. Is there a different story in the Hellgate Keep module?

These days?
Yes.

This is why there is endless debate among Realms nerds about the best way to run the Realms and what books/sources should be included.

Original FR, and even some 2e FR if you ignore the novels are some of the best setting stuff you get in all of D&D.

However with TSR shitting down Greenwood's neck on some of their decisions, with the decision that EVERYTHING EVER PRINTED FOR FR IS CANON, and the fact WotC chose to water the setting down even moreso than TSR tried to, it just became a WoW-like setting where you have a million super powered people to counter the million super powered people on the other side.

Ascalhorn’s Fall & the Rise of Hellgate Keep

Wulgreth, a lesser Ascalhi wizard, summoned baatezu into the town in
secret to grant him the power to overcome his social and magical rivals.
Despite his power and precautions, the baatezu he summoned were
never fully controlled, and thus they insinuated themselves into the
power plays of many wizards, steering them covertly with hidden plots
within the wizards overt power games. While the fact that baatezu were
present in the town was kept quiet, many folk began to feel ill-at-ease
due either to the unconscious influences of the baatezu or the growing
problems among the warring wizards, whose social battles flooded the
streets with magic at least twice a tenday. Folk uninvolved in these feuds
or power groups began migrating out of Ascalhorn, leaving behind only
the power-mad.

After a few decades of servitude, a few baatezu convinced their masters to accept lichdom as a path to power. Once their masters became undead, the baatezu slowly began taking control of the town through their
former controllers. Within a few short decades, baatezu dominated Ascalhorn openly, and few people were beyond their control. In desperation,
the few wizards left alive summoned the baatezus ancient enemiesthe
tanarriinto Ascalhorn and sought to bind them into saving the town.
The tanarri saved the town from the baatezu, but slaughtered nearly
everyone within the fortress, dominating the site and declaring it their
territory. (This territorial claim was almost mandated by the lack of wizards to send the tanarri back to the Blood War and their homeland.)
Maerstar, a bard among the few humans who escaped the battles of the
Horns Fall and fled to safety, rechristened the town Hellgate Keep in one
of his songs.

>>cont'd

Grintharke, a balor and greatest of the tanarri commanders, immediately brought more of his kin over to Faerßn to reinforce his position. By
late summer, Grintharkes plans to ally with the orc hordes to bring down
both Ammarindar and Eaerlann were in full swing. Given the fall of their
northernmost defense into fiendish hands, both the elven realm of Eaerlann and the dwarven kingdom of Ammarindar were ill-prepared to repel
both a massive orc horde and the consolidated fiends of Hellgate Keep
from their borders. Thus, within months of the fall of Ascalhorn, the last
great demihuman empires of the North also fell. Hellgate Keeps reputation as a center of great evil seemed permanently etched in the minds of
all the survivors, the refugees, and the peoples of nearby lands.

>Then there's a line about how Hellgate should have conquered all of the north but an alliance of various powerful wizards, mystra's chosen, and other groups managed to create a ward to seal them into the keep

That seems to say the same thing, just in more detail and without the mention of the fey'ri.

Thank you, that makes much more sense, so basically a Netherese wizard fucked it from inside. Then Eaerlanni wizards tried to un-fuck it but fucked it even more.

The differences seem to be:
Wulgreth wasn't Netherese in the original version (Netheril fell over 40 years prior to the devil summoning)
Fey'ri didn't exist in Ascalhorn until after the event, the family of elven-cambions (changed to Fey'ri in later texts), were from Cormanthyr, and had escaped to Ascalhorn amidst the chaos.

Actually correction on , the Dlardrageths (the house that would become the Fey'ri), were to all be slaughtered, but managed to escape to Eaerlann and from there made a few hidey holes and so on nearby.
High mages eventually found out about their escape, chased them down, killed a few in a huge battle, but since killing them was seen as too easy by the high mage in charge, the mages time-stopped them but made it so they'd be mentally aware during the time stop.

However, since the Dlardrageths had been playing the nobility game a bit while hiding their demonic taint, a number of noble houses they allied with were going HOLY SHIT THE HIGH MAGES OF EAERLANN JUST CAME IN AND PERFORMED VIGILANTE JUSTICE ON A NOBLE GOLD ELF HOUSE, THIS IS AN ACT OF WAR.

Seven Citadels; War happened, the high mages who timestopped the demon-elves died, no one knew the unbinding ritual, etc etc.

Then many years later when hellgate keep's ward was broken they were also released because their binding magic was near enough to the explosion from the gatekeeper crystal.

>wizard summons an army of devils
>other wizards think that because of the Blood War the obvious counter is to summon an army of demons
No sense of right or wrong.

As much as I would love to say "yes," that's an incredibly leading question and you should feel bad for asking it.

>we have a devil infestation
>should we summon angels or other good-aligned extraplanar entities?
>nah, these half-demon blokes seem trustworthy when they tell us to summon demons
Nobody in that fortress had a WIS above 5.

Objective truth doesn’t exist.

1 = 1

Wisdom is for the scrubs who need to beg spells from gods, obviously nothing could possibly go wrong with summoning chaotic evil creatures who will do everything they can to break free and then cause devastation and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

Summoning angels is surprisingly uncommon in Forgotten Realms, despite the relative ease of doing it in D&D.

I actually can't think of many times that angels have been summoned in FR. On that bent I went and looked to see if there were any reasonably well known ones, and the only things that seem to come up are times when angels are called, agree to come, and are then trapped to have their power drained, used in a sacrifice, tortured, forced to fall, or various other unpleasant fates.

So I guess one reason that angels don't show up that much is that the people summoning them are always assholes and they aren't willing to take the risk any more.

Yes.
But it's perfect for new players who have a very modern, vanilla understanding of fantasy.

I'm running a 5e game in FR right now, and the party is awe struck at all the details, big NPC's gods, etc. Even though many of them are creative professionals, they have never interacted with something on the sheer scale of FR, and so getting into shenanigans all around is something they love. And while they are eager to try home brew worlds where they can have more direct impact, or something weird like Planescape or Dark Sun, they really took to Faerun's particularly weird brand of Olympic Fantasy as one of the players put it.

FR is the setting you use for totally new players and then get them into something better after one campaign.

Some parts are good.
Some parts are bad.

So what's Veeky Forums's favorite region of FR?
I've always thought Rasheman was cool.
tfw no qt nubian immigrant witch to protect on your dajemma

Dragon Coast, more specifically Elversult, is pretty dope.

No, but it's decently complicated. I don't use it because it feels like homework whereas making my own setting does not.

It's almost exclusively because of BG2, but I have taken an extreme liking to Amn, since it takes all the shenanigans of the Sword Coast and brings it in to one place.

>Some parts are bad.
>Some parts are worse.
fixed

All those god dam random placed mountains, dear lord why.

Why use the new map?

Yes. The hyper rationalist True Good-in-Itself game police will be coming to the home of everyone who used it, enjoyed it, didn't enjoy it, touched it, or is related to anyone who has, and execute them.

Cmon man, use the full world map from the Forgotten Realms Atlas program.

I would if I could ever get it running on my new computer.

I remember it working alright on my Win10 laptop.

Here's a version I found on the Spelljammer wiki with a fan-defined continent.

>I don't like that there are special snowflakes more powerful than my special snowflake: the post

It's uneven as hell, but there's some fun bits. I'm personally a fan of Zakharra and Rashemen. Generally speaking, the less likely an area is to be used in books, the better it is.

I've played D&D for a decade and haven't played a campaign in Forgotten Realms desu. Athas, Eberron, Golarion? Yes. FR? No.

Not sure why not. I'm sure it's not terrible.

1) That is a full map of Faerûn, a continent roughly the size of North America.

2) There full, official maps of the continents of Zakhara and Kara-tur, which share the same supercontinent that Faerûn is on.

3) There are official full world Abeir-Toril maps, but they're mostly irrelevent since the overwhelmingly most popular setting on Abeir-Toril is Faerûn.

Do you have a reading problem, or a thinking problem? That has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. ANY setting which has the combination of high levels of D&D style magic, no oversight for said magic-users, and a proliferation of them has to ask why a cataclysm doesn't happen every week. FR deals with the problem in about the most hamfisted method there is.

/thread

That's hilarious.

What about the weird fucking dragon continent that got colony dropped in 4e?

Retconned back to its own parallel plane because Greenwood despised it being added without his editorial input. I don't blame him.

That map's from the very end of 2e.

Lame. I took pleasure in Greenwood's suffering.

>FR deals with the problem in about the most hamfisted method there is.

Ah. Well, I apologize, yes, I misinterpreted your stupid point.

The "crutch" is not that the gods intervene, it's that the other high-level characters do, or might, enforcing a MAD situation. Szass Tam doesn't take over the world with undead because Elminster, Larloch, Khelben, and others actively work against him, and those guys work against all the others.

I mean, Elminster keeps all his stuff in the Realms, he isn't going to let it get destroyed.

Lame, FR needed a good destroying to shake up the staleness that had set in since 2nd edition and had become fully entrenched by 3rd.

As a place full of stories, it's awful. As a setting to place your games when you don't feel like building your own world, it works pretty well. It fulfills its purpose, but don't expect it to make sense at the end of the day.

Honestly, the stuff that went down in the Underdark in Out of the Abyss was pretty major, it just wasn't on the surface. Taken together, all the Season 7 AL stuff for 5th edition was huge, too. Temporary but irreversible loss of access to the afterlife on the entire planet Toril? Ao Overgod physically manifesting, even for only a few seconds? A drow goddess who was temporarily removed from existence trying to assume a physical body and getting personally stopped by the rest of the Pantheon? Season 7 has seen some real shit go down.

It's made after the 1960s and it has scale IN MILES. Of course it's objectively bad.

Is it just me or does this look like a warped earth?

It ain't just you.

Given that, by its lore, Faerun is actually full of portals TO Earth - for example, the fantasy!Egyptians region is actually populated by the descendants of real Egyptians kidnapped from Earth to serve as slave labor - it's probably deliberate.

Thanks, that makes sense. I don't know a lot about it

>That is a full map of Faerûn, a continent roughly the size of North America.
The map is not full it cuts out a significant portion of the landmass

If I wanted to run a Greenwood FR game, with only the material from the Greybox and supplements, would there be no Zakhara or Kara-Tur?

That’s mostly post 3e, sadly.
WotC strikes again.

That one chick was only African-looking because the portrait art for BG1 one was garbage. This IS the game that had the drow woman’s picture be a Caucasian human without even bothering to give her pointy ears if you recall.
Rasheman is more like the Kieran Rus, with longhouses and mead and axes and shit. So basically Russia.

That map he used hasn’t been accurate since 5e came out, so it’s not even that new.

Literally the memest and dumbest answer possible. Good job.

Sembia.

>This IS the game that had the drow woman’s picture be a Caucasian human without even bothering to give her pointy ears if you recall

Um...only if CHARNAME was using her portrait. Viconia's BG1 portrait is pic, which is not caucasian and has pointed ears.

Her BG2 portrait is also clearly not a caucasian woman. I'll admit we don't know the status of her ears, but only because she's wearing a hood.

Read comics and not just random snippets from /co/ and a wiki please

Chessenta

What Faerun you're talking about, given that there are multiple radically different versions of the setting, depending on edition and timeline?

That said, no. The original OD&D supplements were amazing. And the first 3.0 campaign setting book, despite having to deal with the Realms powercreep that occurred throughout AD&D run is one of the, if not THE most competently written RPG setting book ever.

The eventually accumulating problem with Faerun was both powercreep in general, with dragons, and beholders, and giants, and liches, and magical empires, and shit in every corner, until the original picture of a savage world, where things revolve around survival, money, and trade, was completely obscured. And then of the fact that what the authors thought high-level character could do and what they actually could do were entirely different things.

In Superman's case, there's only one of him. This is different from Forgotten Realms which has assloads of epic level characters running around. Also in many depictions of the Justice League he's not so powerful as to make the rest of the League irrelevant.

Most of The Forgotten Realms isn't that bad
Faerun is mostly shit with some cool stuff
The Sword Coast should have all material related to it burned except for maybe Baldur's Gate 2

>You have super-high level characters in every corner of the globe, so many that you often don't hear about the level 15-20 guys the next country over because you're too busy dealing with the same leveled guys in your own backyard.

This tired argument has been rebuked every time, I am surprised there are still people retarded enough on Veeky Forums to legitimately use it.

Which leads in m next question: Are you autistic, user?

Sword Coast became bad the moment the stopped treating it as THE FANTASY-FRONTIER but instead as the main setting to everything.

It doesn’t matter anyway.
Idiot OP started a meme thread about a memed to fuck and back setting that most actual players are familiar with maybe like 10% of due to basically just listening to Veeky Forums and quitting past that point all to get (you)’s, which he now has plenty of.
He even fucking used the map from a book literally written over a decade ago now rather then the current map as if just to drive home how zero-effort his attempt to get attention was, and thus stupid fucking collective of morons gave it to him anyway without even the decency to sage with their posts.

Everyone on this thread who couldn’t even be bothered to sage should legitimately be castrated to remove any chances of them passing their genes and increase their chances of suicide. That’s how stupid they are.

Where is it rebuked? I remember reading at some point the idea that there was a wizard cold war going on where high level people were frozen into impotent inaction by watching other high level people.

Ya’ll seem pretty mad there user.

No. Just tired. Very, very tired. It’s remarkable I even visit Veeky Forums anymore due to how awful it’s gotten, but occasionally I find some solid art so I check up on it.
Maybe it’s not even that Veeky Forums has gotten bad, maybe I’m just too old for Veeky Forums and any joy this site gives me is long since used up, I dunno.

In the comics he can run faster then the speed of light, but also be tripped by a guy with no super powers sticking his leg out, do a pratfall and knock himself out.

The flash makes no sense. It's more enjoyable when you embrace that.

Anyone who thinks cape comics are consistent certainly needs to actually read more of them rather then just browse online for panels so they can seem smart without doing their homework.

Where in any of the Handbooks does it explicitly tell you have you have to incorporate every single High-Level Character into your Faerun campaign?

Again: Are you autistic? Because you seem to be legitimately retarded enough to think that writers throwing in IDEAS for your GM is the same as being forced to use them.
Shit, you weren't a blithering autistic faggot and actually opened a campaign setting book before you might even remember that there was a time where the the book outright told this to you: TO use the things you like and dont use the things you dont like in it.

The entirety of Veeky Forums is that stupid nowadays - they can't be bothered to think for themselves, and just spit out regurgitated tripe and nonsense, especially when they are dealing with anything D&D related. The idea that your GM can limit options and chose not to use material offends them.

The question wasn't retorical, and I'm not that guy. I was seriously asking where it's rebuked that FR has high level PCs that could do any given quest easier and faster then most PC groups.

It's not a trick question or a trap, sweetheart. It's a serious question about how to solve a problem with the setting.

You should go to bed Ed Greenwood, you are drunk.

>no no see the unrealistic thing IN THAT PIECE OF FICTION ABOUT A SOLAR-POWERED SUPERHUMAN ALIEN WHO CAME TO EARTH TO PREVENT CRIME IS THAT HE DOESNT PREVENT ALL THE CRIME EVUR, YEAH

Have you cancer-lords actually considered that FICTION might not be for you and that you should read telephone-books or user manuals for fun or something like that?

>. I was seriously asking where it's rebuked that FR has high level PCs that could do any given quest easier and faster then most PC groups.

I just explained it to you.

>It's not a trick question or a trap, sweetheart. It's a serious question about how to solve a problem with the setting.
Which has been explained in every OHMAHGAH WHY IS FARUN SO BAD-Thread so far. You can even use the archive to check it in-between huffing your own farts.

You legit need to start treating that autism of yours. How do you even function on normal society?

Limiting options works fine for a feat or background. It works less well for NPCs in the setting. If your FR dosn't have Drizzet, Elminster, Blackstack, Cockgoblin and Bob The Author Self Insert you sort of have to explain why that change is made, especially if your players are used to FR from other games, the books, ect and would reasonably ask "why don't we ask an OP NPC to help us?"

It's like setting a game in the DC universe and saying that people can just never call Superman because that option is limited. It works for a GM, but raises the question why you bothered using that setting at all.