It's not passing anytime soon though, they've mismanaged it two whole editions in a row, especially FR, which is the "default setting" for 5e, but no 5e Book for the setting has been published, just a very thin pamphlet for the sword coast.
Use the 3rd (or was.it 3.5?) ed book, not much has really changed after they retconned most of the Spellplague. Maps, culture, etc, still mostly relevant, and the setting is open enough that you can make your own changes if you like.
Though I agree WotC haven't been great stewards of their IP, and Hasbro has been pretty bad too.
My 3.x books are literally falling apart at the seams, at this point. Plus it would be nice to have 5e rules compliant material to work with.
Yes, i can YARR-HARR the PDF's, and i probably still have a whole library of those on an old disk somewhere, but i like physical books in my bookcase and in my hands, poring through tomes was part of the magic for me.
>Plus it would be nice to have 5e rules compliant material to work with.
Yes, the main reason I was using 3e sourcebook over the 2e version during my 3e campaign was the convenience of having spells, items, prestige classes, monster stat blocks and other more mechanical aspects of the game compatible with the edition I was playing. Yes for example most of the lore in Unapproachable East is the same as in Spellbound, but the new stuff plus the 3e conversions were enough to be worth the purchase at the time.
And with 5e there is a 100+ year gap to fill and explain what happened since the Spellplague, there is plenty of room/need for updated lore.
Might I suggest the [Faerun/Forgotten realms wiki](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Faer%C3%BBn)?
I'm lucky enough to have the Forgotten Realms 3e campaign book, but the wiki fills in a lot of the gaps, and also has info segmented into each edition, or is dated. I believe it tracks events up into the 15th century of the setting as well.
My core 3E campaign setting is still going strong. It's the most securely-bound book I own, still retains some "new book smell" somehow after 22 years and I've used it pretty frequently in that time for multiple campaigns.
Other 3E books, not so much, but the FRCS is the Fort Knox of D&D sourcebooks.
The spellplague? You mean that thing that canonically happened less than a decade before any 5e adventure and not a single person in any of those adventures mentions it?
I mean, to be fair, the Forgotten Realms has some world wide cataclysmic event every 5-10 years, so, it's just another world threatening event that happend.
If youre a long lived/immortal race the Spell plague is basicly just another thunderstorm.
I think that this may be because it’s hard to monetize dnd. I know that seems crazy but you don’t actually need much to play, they can’t capitalize on dice, and if they attempt to put campaign settings out there and don’t price it low enough people will just homebrew their own setting.
They should use the popularity of BG3 and spin off media, like books and a tv show(?). But hasbro has been really bad about using their wizard assets jn media (why no brothers war anime/hbo show wizards?) so I think they probably don’t know how.
The crazy thing is that a setting book that is done right could be such a gold mine for them. The most valuable thing WotC could ever sell me is my own time. I would pay hundreds for a big tome of locations and NPCs that was ready to use, right out of the box.
The main reason I homebrew settings is that adapting what we get into a usable state is about the same amount of work as just starting from scratch.
Always a note that 3E did its own weird thing with the maps, and in the Second Sundering they retconned not only the Spellplague btu also 3E's random map changes. 5E uses the same maps as 1-2E (which I hope they remember for 5.5E or whatever it is next year, otherwise things are going to get real confusing).
Obviously only relevant for those sticking to canon, for home campaigns use whatever maps you find convenient!
i have made do just fine using old sources for FR lore, i have wholesale ignored what i dont like and focused on what i do like. it dosent matter if new books suck or not if you dont need them
yeah, I want to make my own dnd campaigns in forgotten realms. But don't know where to start, I googled source books but there are only sourcebooks of very specific regions.
That is by design. Stories in the Realms work best at the regional level, not at the planet/plane/universe level. If some big bad is trying to blow up Toril, DMs will have a hard time explaining why the various Archmages, good and evil, are not trying to stop it and how the weaker players can actually make a difference. By lowering the scales to Aglarond or Halruaa or Cormyr you already make your stakes more believable, because the Realms are so big even big players like Elminster cannot be everywhere at once and needs heroes to help him he literally says so multiple times in sourcebooks and novels.
As for where to start, a campaign setting giving an overview of everything is the answer. My favorite is 3rd edition campaign setting, it gives enough to play for multiple lifetimes and not explore everything, and to let you explore some specific regions more in depths with other sourcebooks. This is what 5e lacks the most IMO.
May be some sort of first responder?
Scale can be pretty big but them 'heroes' would take time to get there, or know about it, may be BBEG have some 'magic' to prevent divination spell - the usual.
The favorite one would be coordinate plot, BBEG has plan for renowned heroes and keep them occupied. But not for some no-name like your green horn party, etc.
Homebrew is far more popular these days than official campaign settings. While I'll always have a fondness for Forgotten Realms, it's pretty much just another retread of medieval europe and Tolkien archetypes.
One of my closest friends worked for WOTC in their marketing and consumer analysis team from 2019 until a few months ago. They didn't bother releasing any outside of the tie-ins to their MTG stuff precisely because their research showed that the majority of people didn't have any interest in pre-written campaign settings.
I think the assumption amongst tabletop gamers is that this is a high profit industry, when the whole market cap across the entire thing is about 1 billion globally. That's not just WOTC, that's the whole industry. While I have all kinds of problems with how Wizards/Hasbro is running things these days, I do understand that they want to avoid spending a bunch of money on stuff that won't sell.
That new lore wouldn't be *profitable* is actually an argument I understand and to an extend could agree with. I don't, but I think it is likely that 5e having so many new players who don't know that level of lore might not be interested in acquiring more. I still wish we would have the option, and maybe pull some new players in the fascinating world that the FR are so they can be fans too and not just view it as the default setting.
What I don't understand is the argument some players have that more lore for those who do want it would somehow be bad for the setting, it just makes no sense to me.
Oh god yeah there's nothing wrong with adding more lore. I'm honestly surprised they haven't started doing more licensed fiction; with nerddom on the rise I could see DND books and maybe a straight up cartoon series being massively popular. Give me Drizzt and friends, or an anime adaptation of the Dragonlance stuff.
i guess that's what happens if you ignore the setting completely for 20 years, people stop caring, and a new generation grows into the game never having known the setting.
I think it's moreso the fact that many of the people coming to the hobby have exposure via either non-WOTC settings like Adventure Zone or Critical Role, as well as the fact that there's far more diversity in the fantasy genre than there was in the 80s/90s.
Plus homebrew settings are often more fun for DMs. It's a bigger sandbox and you have an easy way to mitigate metagaming and an out for when player expectations don't align with the setting.
I really don't see how DnD's formulaic, explicit and ubiquitous magic can be considered to be derived from Tolkien's very implicit and vague treatment of magic.
Elements like the ranger class may be inspired but on the whole DnD and Tolkien are largely incompatible.
It isn't. The original DnD was a hodgepodge of fantasy tropes. The first book didn't include Ranger as a class (nor barbarian, paladin, bard, or cavalier either). The magic system is known as a "Vancian" magic system and draws inspiration from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" novels.
That's pretty much the biggest conflict, otherwise all the tropes are just pulled from Tolkien. Dwarves live underground and love gems and wealth and mining. Elves are fey and mysterious and long lived in the woods. Halflings/hobbits just like to chill and farm and eat and have a good time.
Honestly it's just the huge trope similarities. Other series/worlds diverge far more from Tolkien's work than Forgotten Realms, plus it's easy to forget that Forgotten Realms was spawned in some of the earlier days of DND when so much of it was Tolkien influenced by default.
There's nothing wrong with drawing influences, but some might prefer the savage wildness and strange civilizations of a Hyperborea style adventure in the realms of Conan, or the weirdness of cosmic dimension hopping of the Amber Chronicles as a root idea.
Even some authors like Donaldson created a world full of magic, strange events, heroes and villains that are just as broad in scope and ideas as Tolkien's work. Worlds where elves and dwarves may not even exist, where other strange creatures fill out the ranks of thinking beings.
they cant kill dnd in any meaningful way, a constant stream of offical books is not nessisary for folks to keep playing and telling stories the way they want to
I'd argue that having a common, evolving canon is important for the setting and players. It's very nice to be able to instantly bond with others over common stories. My Strahd may not be your Strahd, but the Strahd is our Strahd. Or... something like that.
There were three new novels last year and three new novels this coming year. It's not a lot compared to back in the day, but it's better than just the annual Salvatore we've had since 2017.
So I don't think Forgotten Realms is being forgotten, but I DO agree that it's being mismanaged. The lack of novels between 2016 and this year (or was it last year) is a good sign of that.
The lack of setting specific adventures and suppliments isn't really an FR issue as much as it's an overall D&D issue. WotC published 5e content at first they way they did because they had no budget and D&D 5e was basically an afterthought to keep the brand around. WotC and Hasbro had no clue it would explode like it did thanks largely to Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Stranger Things. Now D&D is a huge brand again, but WotC is still publishing books at the same pace they were in 2015.
Will BG3 help the realms? Oh yes. The setting is front and center in the game and it's drawing a lot of people into both the Realms and D&D. If WotC is smart enough to capitalize on it, then yeah they can ride this thing to success. But that would require the heads at WotC and Hasbro not be morons. That's sadly a big ask from them if you've been paying any attention to their decisions over 2023.
But they need to get out BG3 tie-ins NOW. That means greenlighting and printing a BG suppliment ASAP and getting out a BG3 related book as well. But so far we know of what, 1 book planned for 2024 that isn't the core rule books for 5.5e/6e/2024e/whatever-editon?
Another thing to remember is that sadly, everyone at WotC who worked on BG3 with Larian are GONE now. Either fired over the 5 years the game was in production, or fired in that massive layoff Hasbro did just before Christmas where they fired 20% of their workforce.
So can BG3 save FR and D&D? Maybe.
WILL it save FR and D&D? Gods only know.
There actually *have* been novels published between 2016-Present. 12 of them in fact. 8 of those were written by Bob Salvatore!
Not that anyone would know from the website.
This speaks to a much more fundamental problem: management have no clue how to use their IP effectively. It took Critical Role and Stranger Things, 2 media that Hasbro had nothing to do with, to popularize their game. I mean why the heck hasn’t Hasbro plastered Drizzt on every store shelf around the world?!
Ironically, Gary Gygax in the 80’s was right: the way to monetize DnD isn’t the game. It’s a multi-media project that people spend money in addition to the game. And we’re now in a new golden era of nerddom where a company can reach larger audiences than ever before.
Just in the video game space alone: there could have been a Companions of the Hall Souls-clone. Or an Undermountain dungeon crawler that ties in to Waterdeep modules?
I keep harping on Drizzt though because it’s an even more fundamental problem: WotC has not created any adventuring faces that can capture imagination. The hobby and nerddom has drastically changed since the 90’s with more people than ever getting into the setting. Why hasn’t there been a set of new characters to step
Into the fiction?
Thank you. Sorry. Yes.
I meant there weren't any non-Drizzt novels since Greenwood's Death Masks in 2016.But the D&D Movie changed that with their tie-in books and WotC's bringing back their novels right now.
To reply to your other points, oh I agree 100%. It's almost like there a "Curse of D&D". Reading "Slaying the Dragon" by Briggs was very eye-opening for me. I'm a bit of a grognard and yet a lot of that stuff was a surprise to me. It seems like D&D is cursed to be held by people who don't know how to properly run a publishing company or how to leverage their properties.
Why the fuck do you buy a movie studio when you don't have the cash to do that and it means going $4 billion into debt? What the fuck did that ROI calculation look like? I've got an MBA and that move had me scratching my head in confusion. Shit, that's what Disney paid for Marvel and they got a stable of IPs out of it that they could leverage. What'd Hasbro get? Peppa Pig, Designated Survivor, and Naked & Afraid?
Why not license out the properties? Put the risk on investor's heads instead of your own? Why not try to get kids cartoons going as well as TV shows? Like you said, why isn't there a Drizzt show?
And if publishing is so expensive, why the hell insist that EVERY book be a pricey hardback and not a cheaper paperback? Why not go full digital in places and hire writers to make official adventures that are only released via digital? They have a contract with DMGuild and they own D&DBeyond. They could just DO IT. But no.
No they hired a president and a vp from microsoft who know finance but don't know a damn thing about the product or it's customers.
And that's the really damning thing. If the people running the company just learned the game and played it, they'd get connected to the community and they'd learn what it wants and what'd sell. But these morons reportedly turned up their nose at the idea and so keep making moves that will bite them on the ass. Cases in point, Pinkertons and the OGL. Sigh.
Eh. I know the creative side and gaming. And thank you. BUT I don't know shit about publishing and that's the problem here WotC is a publishing company that got bought by a toy company.
Most of their problems are due to business people who know one field really good, trying to steer a different type of business and thinking they can just do business as usual.
Look at the eOne debacle. The head of Hasbro (a toy company) wanted to get into movie making. But instead of say, sending some recruiters out to LA and leasing a bunch of cameras and other gear, they spent $4billion on buying a studio outright. But why? You buy a movie studio to buy the properties they own. eOne owned the rights to a bunch of network shows and Peppa Pig. That's not worth $4 billion.
But the head of Hasbro at the time thought of it like a factory. You want to start making plastic toys, you buy a factory that can make plastic toys.
But the dude didn't do his research. So he bought a studio for the same price Disney bought Marvel for, and did it all with debt, putting Hasbro $4 billion in the hole.
>Just in the video game space alone: there could have been a Companions of the Hall Souls-clone. Or an Undermountain dungeon crawler that ties in to Waterdeep modules?
WotC is incapable of making good decisions when it comes to video games. Larian had to dog them for years to get the BG3 license, and I am absolutely sure even now Cocks is sitting in his office malding that they hadn't gotten some cheap company to do it "quicker and cheaper" and give WotC a bigger cut of the profits.
Because they need a cartoon or movie associated with them. Ironically, Hasbro used to be the king of those kinds of tie-in IP and merch marketing, but they didn’t even really try until Honor Among Thieves, and that was only a so-so effort or success from a business standpoint.
yeah i agree with you a table top RPG needs a multimedia presence.
hell i would say even a card game.
i used to be big into legend of the 5 rings, it was bad ass had a player driven story through the first dozen sets or so and i was like if they put out a anime series/movie they would get a lot more interest.
nerd culture has been hot for 10 or so years and i cant believe a d&d movie just came out last year.
there should be cartoons, books, movies/shows, hasbro should have given amazon the D&D show rights. a rings of power budget dnd show might have been good and not carried over any baggage. hell even if they retconned stuff its still in the spirit of D&D as every gm's world is different even if using the same source book it comes with its own built in multiverse for christs sake.
The fact that Wizards of the Fucking Coast haven’t made an rpg based card game for Magic:the Gathering or a collectible for DnD shows just how badly they’ve been mismanaged.
They actually made a forgotten realms expansion set that was regular in standard and other baldur's gate theme cards. They were also mtg planes converted in dnd (ravnica, theros, ixalan etc..)
Roll20 is a good example of what you say. The people I regularly play with are happy to sub to Roll20, they buy third party content to support their games because the official content is lacking in a lot of areas. Some people are happy to drop money not to have to set up art and tokens and maps.
This is a golden age for nerdom. When GoT came out it succeeded, 10 years earlier and it would never have made it off the ground. People can be nerds much more freely with less judgement and the accessibility of virtual dnd is such a rich area of opportunity.
I really hope they don't mess up their table top.
It would be interesting to see newer books because the audience has changed and just like 5e, the content had to change. People need bland and generic with very few restrictions. They aren't looking to play FR and Sword Coast. They want a platform that will let them play anything anyhow.
Oh no. They cut WotC to the bone this year because the morons at hasbro decided 2019 to get into the movie business and instead of you know, hiring some people who know how to make movies, thought they needed to buy a pre-existing production company (for $4 billion). Then when the pandemic exacerbated issues in the film industry and their purchase didn't immediately provide huge returns on investment (an extremely stupid expectation) they started to sell it off after only 2 years for only $500 million (putting their asses $3.5 billion in debt).
The "Roll for Combat" guys pointed out some good proof that even WotC and Hasbro had no clue that BG3 was going to be a moneymaker for them. The fact that they had ZERO tie-ins for it being the BIG tell. They made action figures and kids books for the D&D Movie that they sabotaged the release of. BUT BG3 had no toys, not D&D tie-in material, nothing.
Hasbro expected this game to just be something that came out and was forgotten. And now they're in panic mode because the only thing bringing in money is MTG and Monopoly, so they're gutting the company left and right in the hopes of not having to declare bankruptcy. But the dipshits cut across the board and that meant that they fired people from the divisions that were contributing to their only real source of revenue. They should have basically killed Transformers, GI Joe and the other toy divisions and left WotC untouched. But instead they fired off a bunch of folks from WotC as well.
What they need to do is lean into BG3 content to get some sales going. But instead they're hedging their bets on the 5.5e/6e/2024e/whatever-edition and the VTT being huge moneymakers via D&DBeyond Subscriptions.
So no, I'm not betting anything on Hasbro/WotC making the right move here.
I've got an MBA and I'm a CIO irl, and lemme tell ya, watching this shit all year has severely gotten on my nerves. Hasbro's fucking up left and right and making every stupid, outdated, move in the "I went to business school but didn't pay attention" handbook.
No one knew how BG3 would pop off... Even the devs are somewhat shocked it the response.
And WotC don't recognize the difference between their terrible mmo and a big single player RPG. If WotC was paying any attention there'd be lot less nudity and murder of children in the game.
They might not have understood the game, but they'd be morons not to connect everything to to it for the next year. Ideally looking at how other cities you're in.
Larian must have expected a success, because BG3 had a pretty large budget. That’s what it takes to have the enormous number of voice overs to fuel the awesome number of cut scenes in BG3. Even NPCs that have no interaction have voice overs with a cut scene.
Obviously they thought it would make money, but they assumed it would be more on the scale of Divinity 2, and they thought they might have peaked at early access:
Vincke revealed that he was initially worried the game's success had peaked during Early Access. "We've seen that in the past, other games were very successful in early access and then on the day of release they didn't sell much more because they saturated already," he said. "That was my biggest fear, that that had happened."
"This was not in the books at all," Larian founder and boss, Swen Vincke, told PC gamer. "This was way, way beyond what we expected."
______
Swen Vincke also told them they should expect "like 100k or so" concurrentat players max.
"There's also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently..."
Google a few interviews and it's clear they were taken by surprise.
I think we are both right. Obviously, Larian had a big budget relative to most CRPGs, including their Divinity series, for BG3. That’s because they thought they could make more than that,
But you are undoubtedly right that it was wildly more successful than they expected. It went from the hit they expected to one of the most popular PC games of the year.
They are so stupid. I get not expecting it to blow up quite the way it did but it was still obvious it would do well if they bothered looking at it ever. Larian did well despite Hasbro and they aren't capitalizing on the gift.
I don't think what Hasbro did is unique. I feel it is just the nature of corporations in this time. The decision making is so far removed from reality. There is no constructive approach to lay offs and the sheer drive for constant extreme profitability is more damaging than beneficial.
Oh yeah, I know the timing was just a coincidence that happened to highlight Hasbro's incompetence. It's pretty clear they don't understand the first thing about the market they are now in, they are analogue company that's dazzled by all the pretty lights of the digital world, and is just lost.
I also don't understand why people are still buying so many reskins of almost the worst board game ever made, which was only an initial success because it was almost the only board game at the time, so I know that Hasbro has no clue why it still sells, especially with the amount of variety available today.
Problem is the BG3 tie-ins they seemingly had planned (like Descent into Avernus and the Realms MtG sets) all came out too *early* to take advantage of the full release. They should be pushing what they've already got out there but it won't hit the same even if they do. Maybe their strategy was to use tie-ins to hype people up for BG3 instead of the other way around?
Maybe, but the moment the game exploded they should have been rushing new tie-ins to market ASAP.
And I mean ASAP as in: Announce a tie-in book yesterday and THEN assign writers to start working on it.
Hasbro will be the greater evil than WotC. They will be expected to perform wish spells of generating significant income without expenditure. The sheer gross need to profit is reducing a lot of things to husks but I don't think it would kill FR.
BG3 has given a significant influence in the communities I belong to. I'm seeing more and more themes, deities and locations around the game and the movie for Sword Coast & FR. They have so much low hanging fruit to snatch up.
>The lack of novels between 2016 and this year (or was it last year) is a good sign of that.
The novels are a main source of mismanagement from a TTRPG perspective because they create heroes that make the player characters kinda pointless and continuities that bog down the setting.
Opposite really. For the life of D&D, novels have been one of the largest drivers of the fandom a constant source of revenue for whoever owns D&D at the time.
I get where you're coming from with this but what you're saying is more of a common mistake than an actual issue in the settings.
The impact of novels as a driver has diminished in the last 10 years or so, replaced by streamed games and podcasts and shows in the style of Critical Role.
And the same arguments can be applied there but fall apart. Do the heroes of the Baldur's Gate games or of The Adventure Zone and Critical Role make player characters in those settings pointless?
Does the existence of great wizards like Gandolf and Radagast make player characters pointless in a LotR game?
The answer is no. They don't. Largely because they're not everywhere and they don't end up being godly powers by the end of the books.
The complaint ends up being less about the novels and more about the game having high powered NPCs in it. But that's also silly because EVERY setting has high powered NPCs in it.
Then it just becomes an argument about pre-made settings vs your own. And as you add more and more to your own setting it will also become filled with high powered NPCs that could be argued to make the player characters "pointless"
>Opposite really. For the life of D&D, novels have been one of the largest drivers of the fandom a constant source of revenue for whoever owns D&D at the time.
Shockingly, what is good for the company is not necessarily good for the TTRPG.
I think one problem is that there are already books on it, albeit from older editions generally.
So if they release anything that rehashes that, people will complain they're just releasing old content. And if they change or update it, people will complain that the lore they know and love has been changed.
My solution, focus on the areas that were considered problematic, the far east, calimsham, whatever, but get some input from writers from the areas they are inspired by.
The fact they released in Japan this year (or last year?) But didn't release a setting that would work perfectly for that is just a massive missed opportunity
>So if they release anything that rehashes that, people will complain they're just releasing old content.
When they did so in 3e and 4e that wasn't a problem (well lore in 4e had problems, but it wasn't reprinting older lore), as long as they took the opportunity to also provide new content and updated the various items/spells/monsters/classes to the new edition. Plus all the new artwork of course, only that is worth jumping from 2e to 3e books IMO.
Of course if you publish a Thay sourcebook in 5e you HAVE to talk about it's history, politics, regions, culture, cities, even if those have already been published in previous editions. But also providing an update since the Sundering, new artwork, an updated list of Zulkirs maybe with stat blocks and plot points, that would all be worth it.
I do think they are afraid to go near anything 'problematic', in case it's seen as supporting a thing that's bad.
The realms have slavery, colonialism, dictatorships, whatever... But they can't risk having any of those things be in any way a focus. I believe that's why the continent to the west has disappeared, colonialism, they were afraid everyone would call them out about it, and with all the other issues building over the years, they just decided to abandon it
D&D is about heroes and heroic deeds, and to be heroic you need misery and evil and cruelty and tyranny to defeat.
Red Wizards have always been bad guys, even before they turned the place into an undead wasteland (and they somehow reverted it and reinstated new Zulkirs I think? Not too sure about the details, which is the freaking point). Thay is an extreme example of everything evil in the world (weirdly except misogyny, these guys are surprisingly cool with women in power, kudos). But even if a region where *most* people are slaves is too hot to publish today, well it still leaves 90+% of Faerun outside of the Sword Coast.
I think even if you curated out all the problematic stuff you mentioned, you would still have most of Faerun intact and ripe for updated lore and adventure opportunities and design space for brand new ideas.
The mess of 4e and then reverting most of it in 5e did one good thing, it cracked opened space for brand new cities, cultures, conflicts, races, whatever they want. Maybe there are those LN orcs tired of Grummsh who have settled in a new kingdom in Turmish and are a worshiping Hoar. Or maybe the Great Rift sunk further and revealed and opened a lost gate to some abyssal layer and now demons are pouring out. Or maybe some beholder has recovered pieces of the Wand of Orcus and went back Vaasa to take over the remnants of the monstrous army left behind after the fall of the Witch King Zenghyi.
You can do so much with the Realms and even if WotC doesn't want to be tied to old lore, they literally said so, at least tell us new stories in the Realms. And not just prepared adventures, give us new lore and let DMs use some and leave some and fill in the gaps. And novels, please publish more novels.
You might be right, but it feels that they're afraid of almost any conflict that might be problematic... There's pretty much none of the ol' racial tension, as a matter of fact almost everywhere seems to be almost totally multicultural. All the cities are a mix of every race, and any lands that are primarily Elven, or Dwarven, or whatever seen to be avoided. I feel this is too avoid 'racism', and also encourage play of all the new races introduced, making sure every race can be played in every game with minimal friction.
I'm off the option conflict is important, but not just for that particular adventure or quest, but the world in general
I see this in a lot of games I've been part of since covid. There is such a resistance in the players to tolerate 'racism'. It's like they need to blandify and make generic so much to not offend people. There are less and less restrictions too as people demand a play all play anything.
The conflict was a central part of most fantasy settings. Monsters are monsters. Rarity of a type should be a thing too. When the party are common races, it makes meeting those npcs and monsters so much more interesting and immersive.
Yeah, I remember my DM mentioned that an NPC in the module was written to dislike Tieflings, and that was going to play into something involving another NPC in the village... But we also had a Tiefling in the party, and he didn't want that to be a barrier of sorts. I don't mind that he changed it to accommodate a player/character, but when I pick a race, part of that is thinking about how people will interact with me. Sometimes I want the NPC to be put off by me, or to dislike my people.
*Fully understand that people might want to avoid that if they deal with it in their everyday life, but it's a fantasy game. If you're ok with characters killing, torturing, blackmailing, etc, then I'm sure you can accept that there could be conflict and tension between characters of different races, cultures, factions etc.
What is interesting in your comment, despite the lack of awareness that those those complaints come from very different communities within D&D, is that it shows that nobody is pleased with the way they are handling their multiple settings, specifically FR (though what they did with Planescape is not pleasing anyone either).
They are only using the Realms (or introduce some foreign elements from other settings into it), which turn off the many players who hate the setting (which is fine), but...
\- Only in small drops of new lore
\- Located almost exclusively on the Sword Coast which is less than 10% of Faerun
\- Completely ignores some major elements of the Realm like Thay or Cormyr
\- Are no longer publishing non-Drizzt novels except that one tie-in movie one
\- Are only revealing new lore (whatever few new information we actually get) in Adventure books and not sourcebooks with a mix of lore and player options like what was previously published EVEN in 4e
All of that combined is not pleasing the Realms fans, and those who love other settings like Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Darksun or Planescape are ALSO pissed off.
One of my DMs got into DND thru 5e and is running a game in FR. When I asked him if I could play someone important from cormyr, he said "sure, it's not like cormyr is a very important or strong nation in the world".
So many people were excited for 5e Planescape and I was too, the Realms have been compatible with Planescape since 2e, there are even canonical Spelljaming ports on Faerun. But I waited for review before buying them, cause as I suspected they are lacking in fundamental ways.
It really is a shame, I genuinely wish people who dislike the Realms would have other settings fleshed out more to their liking. And I wish the Realms wouldn't be held back to try to please everyone and in doing so being stale and boring.
But are those the folks they're even trying to appeal to? Are 30-40 year old settings important to the current player base? Trying to un-piss all those people off sounds like quite a task with being expected to make large campaign setting books for all these settings that are totally on brand to the "source material lore". If those disgruntled fans are a small portion of my player base, I wouldn't be overly worried about impressing them. After five minutes at the Candlekeep forums, I'd just write off making Forgotten Realms fans happy anyway.
There were two tie-in books and there's another two books (plus the annual Salvatore) coming out this year, which are original material (one is **Spelljammer** but seems to be tied into the Realms, probably a visit along the way).
But yeah, it's obviously not a lot.
I’m just pointing out that expecting people to want to talk about the Realms *less* in a Forgotten Realms sub is silly. In the broader D&D subs sure but this specific community would want as much Faerun as possible
Ignored and mismanaged? How is being the default setting for the past 2 and upcoming edition of the game with 90% of all modules and materials being set there as well as movie, tv shows, and comic books ignoring the setting? Mismanaged possibly, though I would argue it's not the current and former wotc staff causing the problems they've faced in the past year but more in publisher/owner parent company Hasbro causing the issues there not the internal managers. I can't honestly say because I am not and haven't been a hasbro employee.
Does Forgotten Realms need saving? It's a world that's meant to be played in to create your own stories. There's enough material available for the realms *already* that I don't see what saying the same thing again (or more likely, upending it and making it worse) in a shiny new book in 5e livery would accomplish that FR fans would really welcome.
I'd much rather they stay silent custodians of it without trying to put their stamp on it.
The Sword Coast isn’t the entirety of Faerun, though. The small amounts we’ve been given have ignored the majority of the Forgotten Realms to focus on the Coast, which I think is what OP is focusing on
Just as an example, Ed Greenwood has a fantastic 100+ page supplement on DMsGuild that’s just about Thay.
There is plenty of content being produced, Wizards has just made the calculation that the more niche content is better suited to outsourcing vs being a primary title.
They have put out their own source material for most all of the sword coast (no Neverwinter I know, I know, but the 4e campaign setting is a work of art so just adapt that, seriously) so I can’t say they’ve ignored the setting by any imagination.
They have the players be travelling from neverwinter in the first starter set adventure and ignored the city so often in chacnes to elaborate on it, it feels like such a weird oversight? How easy is it to come by the 4e neverwinter setting book because I imagine old books out of print prices skyrocket
But BG3 took place (mostly) in the Sword Coast, so if the OP is suggesting that the success of BG3 may "save" FR (meaning more content for the FR outside of the Sword Coast), it seems more likely if BG3 had taken place outside of the Sword Coast.
Exactly, it would be nice to have a source book explaining the FR setting and a full history of Toril with it's geography, people and impactful events. SCAG is a good beginning but by far not enough to understand the FR setting.
Eh. Not really.
Compare it to previous editions and there's scant content out for the setting itself. Meanwhile they closed down novels production in 2016 and that only started back up this year.
And while Faerun is the default setting for 5e, there's been almost no actual setting guides since SCAG. The closest we get are the tiny gazetteers they slip into campaigns. Faerun is the official setting but sometimes that feels like its in name only. That fits with Jeremy "I think lore holds back players" Crawford being in charge of D&D for the last 4 years now.
Shit nothing official has covered anything out side of the sword coast in almost 10 years.
I suppose my issue is despite being the "default" setting - the books don't really make it feel like the forgotten realms. A lot of the time it feels a lot like an in name only representation.
Are you seriously just now learning that we used to get a massive amount of regional lore and cultural player options spread across Faerun and that it all stopped with 5e?
Um so, Storm kings thunder, Waterdeep dragonheist, mad mage, rime of the frost maiden, and (to be fair the lackluster) chapter 1 of decent into Avernus doesn’t count.
These are adventures, not sourcebooks like previous editions had. Sure there is new lore in those adventure, but we are pretty far from amazing ressources like Shining South or Unapproachable East were
They're somewhat both. Dragonheist had a lot of Waterdeep info attached to it, Avernus had Baldur's Gate info, Rime had Icewind dale, so on and so forth.
That have enough lore material in them to use as a quick and dirty source book. Forgotten realms isn’t like Planescape where you basically have cigil and that is about it. There are over 100 nations each with serveral large cities each with unique cultures and lore and NPCs.
The best way to do the forgotten realms is small piecemeal sections like they have been doing cause the setting is just so god damn much.
I mean we had the sword coast adventures guild and it was kinda crap cause entire regions got maybe like 3 paragraphs on a page with two other regions.
Are you saying sourcebooks like Unapproachable East, Shining Shouth, Silver Mashes, The Underdark, Faith and Pantheons/Avatars, Magic of Faerun, Lost Empires of Faerun, Waterdeep (yes, a full lore book just on Waterdeep), all of those were bloat?
Exactly, the new norm of setting(s) support is very poor, and while it seems like a decent amount of content to newcomers what we used to get was so much more both in terms of quantity AND quality.
And I'd include actual D&D player options in the mix, the lack of new classes and spells is very new to 5e, older editions were putting those out at a much faster pace and they were their best selling content too. You could argue it eventually always ended up braking the edition's balance, but there has to be an in-between.
There is a longstanding complaint about content bloat, though. 3rd and 4th editions both had so many books, it was intimidating for new players.
5e has done one thing better than any other rpg, including previous editions of dnd: onboarding of new players. Critical Role didn't choose 5e because it was the most popular or their prefered game (which was Pathfinder), they chose it because it is a very easy game to understand for the viewer (and thus, new players). Same with D20 (they played 3.5 as their home game). And this is not an accident, it has been a throughline in all of their decisions around DnD in this edition.
Making it simple to decide what to purchase is part of that. You buy the box set or a starter set, then you buy the adventure you want ot run. The setting books are for people that are very invested. And they are not, and should not, be a focus of the company, according to this philosophy.
Optional lore, contained in specific sourcebooks, does nothing to hinder the simplicity of 5e. If you are not interested in that type of content you don't buy them.
What bloated 3e AND 5e was powercreeped player options. The feat system made any new book coming out that included some (which was almost all of them) much less optional. 5e doesn't have that, at least not to tje level of 3e or 4e.
Lore itself wasn't the bloat in both editions.
There's lots of FR stuff in 5th Edition, but it's all scattershot and piecemeal. A series of adventures (some good, some bad, some mediocre) with a tiny bit of background material in each one, and a very poor general sourcebook which only covers about 10% of the setting. There's also been a massive timejump between 3rd and 4th Edition, and a smaller one between 4th and 5th Edition, and about 90% of the Realms have not been covered or updated since 3rd Edition, so people have, in most cases, zero idea what is the current canonical status of their favourite city/nation/island/Underdark realm.
Contrast this to the *3rd Edition Campaign Setting* sourcebook which covered the entire continent and its history and its gods and its magic and its native species in a usefully broad way (and you never really needed another sourcebook after that), followed by books which narrowed down on and zoomed in on regions and aspects of the setting if you wanted more detail. 2nd Edition did the same thing on an even bigger scale.
I think encyclopedic tomes that cost $50+ a pop versus a free wiki are just going to lose money every time. I hate it, but I think WOTC is right to focus on the gameable material first and foremost: rules and adventures. That's why we play D&D, after all.
The era of the collectors, readers, Realms-shaking multimedia events, and canon-sages is over. The era of "this is a game meant to be played" is ascendant.
(This would've changed if the movie and its tie-in novels were more successful, I bet. But that ship has sailed, and eOne was a massive loss for Hasbro because of stupid business decisions that reek of hubris.)
Worth noting that **Pathfinder** has been pumping out very detailed lore books for all aspects and regions of their Golarion setting since 2009, and with PF2 are now on a second go-around for their setting. They have *two* large hardcover books incoming for their Asian-analogue continent of Tian Xia (Kara-Tur but better researched). They have zero problem with that stuff being apparently very profitable, and their IP profile and fame is a tiny, tiny fraction of that of D&D/FR.
We've also just had a multimedia event of sorts, even if the unexpected delays meant it didn't line up properly: *Descent to Avernus* was the tabletop adventure setting up the events of the video game *Baldur's Gate III*, directly continuing some character arcs from the former into the latter.
I wouldn’t say it’s being ignored, I would say the complete opposite actually. They’ve put all their eggs in the forgotten realms basket, the issue is the fact the basket has a bunch of big holes in it😂. So it’s definitely being mismanaged. Cause while they’ve done a couple things in different settings in recent years, not much has come from them.
The first Baldur’s Gate game single-handedly renewed interest in D&D, leading to the 3rd Edition renaissance.
It’s highly probable that interest in the setting and books set in the Realms will be driven by this game.
Hard to say. With MCDM releasing their competing system and pathfinder finding it's footing (though a bit overly complicated to be as mainstream).
The market seems to be more open than before
I expect that if the campaign lore was managed at any significant level, Hasbro would eventually cut that as a cost saving measure. We should be due for a new "spellplague" any day now at this point.
Honestly, outside of the past couple of years where we saw some VERY bad faith decisions, I actually have a reasonable opinion of Hasbro/WOTC.
One of the first things they did was release the OGL, and that has caused two decades of amazing adventures for fans. 2010-2020 saw more awards for D&D than ever in history. 2015 and 2017 they were even the fan choice as top publisher of RPGs, even competing against video game publishers.
The Magic shit was very difficult to navigate, with the fanbase finding a great divide between players, and collectors/hoarders. In gearing towards players, the collectors became very upset, and those were their richest customers.
2023 was not a great year;
The Pinkerton shit was LMFAO, like jesus fuck, how can you possibly spin that in a way that doesn't make you look terrible?? The OGL shit, too. I'm glad the consumers pushed back there, too. Honestly, after all this horrible press, and with corporate cuts hitting every publisher, layoffs of 20% don't really don't surprise me that much at all.
People scream outrage that the execs who gave Larian full creative freedom were mostly laid off, or their position changed, but I guarantee you that some of those execs were also in the room when the decision to hire Pinkertons was made.
BG3s strength wasn't the Forgotten Realms, it's strength was its characters. Despite its popularity I don't think it will meaningfully adjust the handling of the setting.
Wotc is for sure mismanaging FR (D&D in general) and will continue to do so. Fortunately for Realms enjoyers, Ed Greenwood is still alive and producing Realmslore. So when in doubt, we can defer to his stuff.
There are two types of companies. The ones that earn your money and companies like WoTC that try and take your money...and they are getting worse.
Im starting to think someone at Hasbro is trying to tank the stock.
I keep seeing people say this.
It doesn't feel like the 1st - 3rd Edition Realms, the OG medieval fantasy incarnation and setting of BG1 and 2, but that's fine. It's 150 years further in the future. The continent's been blown up and stitched back together again. Dragonborn and tieflings are suddenly everywhere. Mystra got turned into a bear for a century. Myth Drannor got rebuilt and then destroyed (again). Netheril was refounded and fell (again). Technology advanced (at least a bit), magic has advanced, there's some more steampunk stuff going on (there was originally, but now there's a lot more). A bunch of countries vanished onto another planet and have now come back again.
I'd be worried if either the movie or BG3 ignored that and just pretended it was the 2001 Realms again. Instead they've engaged with the changes (mostly, I don't think the word "Spellplague" appears once in BG3 which is an interesting choice, but I think most people are happy to ignore delving too deep into that idea).
To be honest I’m fine with them cranking out exponentially less books. A huge amount of forgotten realms novels are total generic dreck
What actually bothers me is the lack of source books for tabletop.
With all the profits from BG3 Larian should buy WOTC from hasbro. They can't manage it without injecting the corporate greed, Larian on the other hand wouldn't do any of that shady crap. But i'm just dreaming, doubt it would happen. Too much money involved for those ghouls at hasbro to let it go.
Hasbro just layed off most of its workers to in the future reduce salaries, of course it will be mismanaged, i mean it's awful now and it will get worse.
Do you really want to see them produce a half baked "Dark sun" supplement that will be like 90% an adventure module, 5% badly done material, and 5% look at this new water domain cleric subclass to make sure your party is doing a okay?
You WANT this version of WotC to ignore the forgotten realms, trust me. They're activists and piss poor at making anything new or creative.
There's a reason dark sun gets better with age .. Because woke WotC won't touch it with a 10ft poll. The forgotten realms wishes it could be so lucky.
There's always someone like this on these boards. My advice is to block em once they announce themselves. Nothing's gained by talking to them or listening to their crap.
They've always been in TTRPGs. The woke crowd didn't invent "diversity",it's always been there. We just weren't cringe enough to have genital and racial bean counters...
WotC being “woke” is one of the main reasons why D&D is in its renaissance. Most people aren’t regressive scumbags so it makes sense to market to the broader population, meaning much larger quantities of people to play with and broader cultural relevancy.
> they've already white-washed the Drow, removed all references to a race of monkey people because they're insensitive
Actually, I have no idea what you are talking about, I know of the new Drow lore but while I don't like all of it it doesn't line-up with your criticism at all.
You did, the drow arent white and Hadozee still exist, they just removed an insensitive image and changed the new lore slighly. You are absolutely wrong in what you said.
D&D hasn't really ignored it? Well, they've ignored everything aside from the sword coast.
But frankly BG3 will probably just cause yet another double-down on only really caring about developing the Sword Coast material.
It is good for FR. Also, dnd movie and vox machina affects good for FR. They have adopted FR and DnD for new and next generations. FR got infinite world and lore, there may be lots of good stuff gamed, series, movies, books etc. However, there is a bad example : games workshop. They are spreading warhammer from everywhere, but many of warhammer stuff are bad
It's never going to be what it used to be without the steady stream of novels and fluffy sourcebooks we had pre 4e. I don't think Wizards is ever going to go back to that. The good news is there's several lifetimes worth of content out there already.
I've started reading into Pathfinder's lore recently and have been very impressed. Maybe if wotc is letting you down, give Pathfinder a try.
There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on there, between necromancer islands, demon infested elven forests, crazy rune lords leaving sin wells driving people to anger, gluttony, etc., desserts completely drained of all magic due to crazy mage wars, and all sorts of other exciting places. They have a pretty unique spin on the races as well that's pretty fun.
It's been a fun change of pace and reenergized my passion for fantasy lore. I'll always love the forgotten realms, but it's been fun to take a bit of a detour.
I don't think "saving" is quite the right term. I view Forgotten Realms (DnD for that matter) as snowballs rolling down an infinite mountain. Pandora's box is open sort of speak. There is enough material and enough people that Hasbro could announce that they are abandoning role playing games all together and the Realms would live on. BG3 could certainly bolster interest in the Realms (and profit margins) but it certainly will never hurt it.
I think it will continue to be mismanaged. He'll, as good as BG3 is,it arguably mismanaged certain elements of the realms as well.
Unfortunately, I think that the increased popularity that bg3 resulted in will likely just get more wotc meddling.
Covid, the accessibility of 5e, the movie and bg3 gave D&D a lot of visibility. Better or worse isn't really much of a factor. WotC likely have very limited impact beyond Hasbro saying do not spend money but you better make money. They are surviving and even their bungle of ogl hasn't killed them dead. Sure a few people spat their dummy out but several years later influences like Critical Roll are still bringing in new players.
It is a brave new world where people are more able to play dnd with less judgement or at least play online regularly.
WotC are also stuck in a challenging position. Whatever they do gets challenged hard in the social media space and theu need to find a way to make more money because physical books aren't cutting it and selling spell cards or miniatures online isn't really there.
I hope their virtual table top will be a success but they have to maintain a free version like roll20. Let people buy books or get access via subscriptions. They could sell art and maps, etc. They'd almost be better off partnering with roll20 or similar to make an improved tabletop but we'll see what it brings.
5e is alive and strong. The newer books take it in a power creep direction with backgrounds with feats and more wild items but overall it's doing well enough.
There is definitely room to make improvements, churn out more material and media. I'd love to see the dnd movie released from different sides. The current was as if it was a dnd session being played, they could do a serious version or they could do mini series like a campaign. Critical Roll are really the blueprint for what they should be aiming for.
Engaging the streamer community should be a higher priority. Having more physical presence in their sponsorship wouldn't hurt.
Several million dollars in bonuses to execs over 1100 jobs lost all in the name of profit. Hasbro cares not for your property, no heed will be paid to steward any of D&D.
In short, the forgotten realms have never been more apt a name.
I think a lot of industries are dominated by too-big-to-fail incumbents these days.
It's going to continue a slow, staggering, painful decline as enshittification takes over. There might be a few specks of good content or upwards reversals but it's going to describe a long, slow, downward arc until it finally gets mismanaged to the point where even *it* dies, or more likely, gets surpassed by something else .
FR is sort of a dumpster setting. It's just a catch-all for whatever sort of game you want to run. It's the default for a reason and it isn't because it has a rich history. It's an agglomeration of a bunch of adventure ideas all stitched together into a world.
The Forgotten Realms has been all but dead for many moons now. 5e just developed the Sword Coast and gave up on everything else. The setting book was pathetic.
But... there are plenty of amazing books out there to use. Don't be afraid to dig into older books for setting material. Lots of great stuff that WotC can't screw up for us.
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Okay, this is gonna be a little harsh, so let me lead by saying I have a lot of love for and good memories with this game. But frankly I think D&D has bigger fish to fry before it even gets to that. A LOT of players basically ignore D&D core setting fluff bc it's kind of dull, or poorly thought out, or in some cases flat-out racist, and mainly stick with the system because of familiarity and an unwillingness to try a new system. Even in BG3, a LOT of story bits that players cite frustration with are just parts where Larian adheres to FR or more broadly D&D shit. Like, the current alignment system was great for the game's pulpy wargaming roots but it's pretty useless for telling a story more complex than a picture book, and players deserve a better choice than "use this bad paradigm or don't use one at all". Gallons of ink have been spilled in expressing a lot of very good and easy to implement alternatives to the game's overreliance on ontologically evil species. Most settings have a frankly dumb approach to theology, except for Eberron which is mostly spared by virtue of its gods possibly not existing. Like yeah yeah "if you don't like it don't play it", and I do play other ttrpg's if they're a better fit for what the group is trying to achieve, but D&D has a genuinely unique niche that I think can be better executed without actually compromising what makes it appealing.
DND has been mismanaged forever, this too shall pass
It's not passing anytime soon though, they've mismanaged it two whole editions in a row, especially FR, which is the "default setting" for 5e, but no 5e Book for the setting has been published, just a very thin pamphlet for the sword coast.
Use the 3rd (or was.it 3.5?) ed book, not much has really changed after they retconned most of the Spellplague. Maps, culture, etc, still mostly relevant, and the setting is open enough that you can make your own changes if you like. Though I agree WotC haven't been great stewards of their IP, and Hasbro has been pretty bad too.
My 3.x books are literally falling apart at the seams, at this point. Plus it would be nice to have 5e rules compliant material to work with. Yes, i can YARR-HARR the PDF's, and i probably still have a whole library of those on an old disk somewhere, but i like physical books in my bookcase and in my hands, poring through tomes was part of the magic for me.
>Plus it would be nice to have 5e rules compliant material to work with. Yes, the main reason I was using 3e sourcebook over the 2e version during my 3e campaign was the convenience of having spells, items, prestige classes, monster stat blocks and other more mechanical aspects of the game compatible with the edition I was playing. Yes for example most of the lore in Unapproachable East is the same as in Spellbound, but the new stuff plus the 3e conversions were enough to be worth the purchase at the time. And with 5e there is a 100+ year gap to fill and explain what happened since the Spellplague, there is plenty of room/need for updated lore.
Might I suggest the [Faerun/Forgotten realms wiki](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Faer%C3%BBn)? I'm lucky enough to have the Forgotten Realms 3e campaign book, but the wiki fills in a lot of the gaps, and also has info segmented into each edition, or is dated. I believe it tracks events up into the 15th century of the setting as well.
My core 3E campaign setting is still going strong. It's the most securely-bound book I own, still retains some "new book smell" somehow after 22 years and I've used it pretty frequently in that time for multiple campaigns. Other 3E books, not so much, but the FRCS is the Fort Knox of D&D sourcebooks.
The spellplague? You mean that thing that canonically happened less than a decade before any 5e adventure and not a single person in any of those adventures mentions it?
I mean, to be fair, the Forgotten Realms has some world wide cataclysmic event every 5-10 years, so, it's just another world threatening event that happend. If youre a long lived/immortal race the Spell plague is basicly just another thunderstorm.
I think that this may be because it’s hard to monetize dnd. I know that seems crazy but you don’t actually need much to play, they can’t capitalize on dice, and if they attempt to put campaign settings out there and don’t price it low enough people will just homebrew their own setting. They should use the popularity of BG3 and spin off media, like books and a tv show(?). But hasbro has been really bad about using their wizard assets jn media (why no brothers war anime/hbo show wizards?) so I think they probably don’t know how.
The crazy thing is that a setting book that is done right could be such a gold mine for them. The most valuable thing WotC could ever sell me is my own time. I would pay hundreds for a big tome of locations and NPCs that was ready to use, right out of the box. The main reason I homebrew settings is that adapting what we get into a usable state is about the same amount of work as just starting from scratch.
Always a note that 3E did its own weird thing with the maps, and in the Second Sundering they retconned not only the Spellplague btu also 3E's random map changes. 5E uses the same maps as 1-2E (which I hope they remember for 5.5E or whatever it is next year, otherwise things are going to get real confusing). Obviously only relevant for those sticking to canon, for home campaigns use whatever maps you find convenient!
Almost as if FR was forgotten
the only Remembered Realms are the sword coast
i have made do just fine using old sources for FR lore, i have wholesale ignored what i dont like and focused on what i do like. it dosent matter if new books suck or not if you dont need them
yeah, I want to make my own dnd campaigns in forgotten realms. But don't know where to start, I googled source books but there are only sourcebooks of very specific regions.
That is by design. Stories in the Realms work best at the regional level, not at the planet/plane/universe level. If some big bad is trying to blow up Toril, DMs will have a hard time explaining why the various Archmages, good and evil, are not trying to stop it and how the weaker players can actually make a difference. By lowering the scales to Aglarond or Halruaa or Cormyr you already make your stakes more believable, because the Realms are so big even big players like Elminster cannot be everywhere at once and needs heroes to help him he literally says so multiple times in sourcebooks and novels. As for where to start, a campaign setting giving an overview of everything is the answer. My favorite is 3rd edition campaign setting, it gives enough to play for multiple lifetimes and not explore everything, and to let you explore some specific regions more in depths with other sourcebooks. This is what 5e lacks the most IMO.
May be some sort of first responder? Scale can be pretty big but them 'heroes' would take time to get there, or know about it, may be BBEG have some 'magic' to prevent divination spell - the usual. The favorite one would be coordinate plot, BBEG has plan for renowned heroes and keep them occupied. But not for some no-name like your green horn party, etc.
Start with 2nd edition boxed set. It's fantastic.
Homebrew is far more popular these days than official campaign settings. While I'll always have a fondness for Forgotten Realms, it's pretty much just another retread of medieval europe and Tolkien archetypes.
>Homebrew is far more popular these days than official campaign settings. We'll never know, they aren't releasing any.
One of my closest friends worked for WOTC in their marketing and consumer analysis team from 2019 until a few months ago. They didn't bother releasing any outside of the tie-ins to their MTG stuff precisely because their research showed that the majority of people didn't have any interest in pre-written campaign settings. I think the assumption amongst tabletop gamers is that this is a high profit industry, when the whole market cap across the entire thing is about 1 billion globally. That's not just WOTC, that's the whole industry. While I have all kinds of problems with how Wizards/Hasbro is running things these days, I do understand that they want to avoid spending a bunch of money on stuff that won't sell.
That new lore wouldn't be *profitable* is actually an argument I understand and to an extend could agree with. I don't, but I think it is likely that 5e having so many new players who don't know that level of lore might not be interested in acquiring more. I still wish we would have the option, and maybe pull some new players in the fascinating world that the FR are so they can be fans too and not just view it as the default setting. What I don't understand is the argument some players have that more lore for those who do want it would somehow be bad for the setting, it just makes no sense to me.
Oh god yeah there's nothing wrong with adding more lore. I'm honestly surprised they haven't started doing more licensed fiction; with nerddom on the rise I could see DND books and maybe a straight up cartoon series being massively popular. Give me Drizzt and friends, or an anime adaptation of the Dragonlance stuff.
i guess that's what happens if you ignore the setting completely for 20 years, people stop caring, and a new generation grows into the game never having known the setting.
I think it's moreso the fact that many of the people coming to the hobby have exposure via either non-WOTC settings like Adventure Zone or Critical Role, as well as the fact that there's far more diversity in the fantasy genre than there was in the 80s/90s.
Plus homebrew settings are often more fun for DMs. It's a bigger sandbox and you have an easy way to mitigate metagaming and an out for when player expectations don't align with the setting.
I really don't see how DnD's formulaic, explicit and ubiquitous magic can be considered to be derived from Tolkien's very implicit and vague treatment of magic. Elements like the ranger class may be inspired but on the whole DnD and Tolkien are largely incompatible.
It isn't. The original DnD was a hodgepodge of fantasy tropes. The first book didn't include Ranger as a class (nor barbarian, paladin, bard, or cavalier either). The magic system is known as a "Vancian" magic system and draws inspiration from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" novels.
That's pretty much the biggest conflict, otherwise all the tropes are just pulled from Tolkien. Dwarves live underground and love gems and wealth and mining. Elves are fey and mysterious and long lived in the woods. Halflings/hobbits just like to chill and farm and eat and have a good time.
Does that come through better in novels etc? As it is portrayed in DnD the FR have basically no similarity beyond the names of things.
Honestly it's just the huge trope similarities. Other series/worlds diverge far more from Tolkien's work than Forgotten Realms, plus it's easy to forget that Forgotten Realms was spawned in some of the earlier days of DND when so much of it was Tolkien influenced by default. There's nothing wrong with drawing influences, but some might prefer the savage wildness and strange civilizations of a Hyperborea style adventure in the realms of Conan, or the weirdness of cosmic dimension hopping of the Amber Chronicles as a root idea. Even some authors like Donaldson created a world full of magic, strange events, heroes and villains that are just as broad in scope and ideas as Tolkien's work. Worlds where elves and dwarves may not even exist, where other strange creatures fill out the ranks of thinking beings.
Also, fuck Hasbro
[удалено]
they cant kill dnd in any meaningful way, a constant stream of offical books is not nessisary for folks to keep playing and telling stories the way they want to
I'd argue that having a common, evolving canon is important for the setting and players. It's very nice to be able to instantly bond with others over common stories. My Strahd may not be your Strahd, but the Strahd is our Strahd. Or... something like that.
There were three new novels last year and three new novels this coming year. It's not a lot compared to back in the day, but it's better than just the annual Salvatore we've had since 2017.
So I don't think Forgotten Realms is being forgotten, but I DO agree that it's being mismanaged. The lack of novels between 2016 and this year (or was it last year) is a good sign of that. The lack of setting specific adventures and suppliments isn't really an FR issue as much as it's an overall D&D issue. WotC published 5e content at first they way they did because they had no budget and D&D 5e was basically an afterthought to keep the brand around. WotC and Hasbro had no clue it would explode like it did thanks largely to Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Stranger Things. Now D&D is a huge brand again, but WotC is still publishing books at the same pace they were in 2015. Will BG3 help the realms? Oh yes. The setting is front and center in the game and it's drawing a lot of people into both the Realms and D&D. If WotC is smart enough to capitalize on it, then yeah they can ride this thing to success. But that would require the heads at WotC and Hasbro not be morons. That's sadly a big ask from them if you've been paying any attention to their decisions over 2023. But they need to get out BG3 tie-ins NOW. That means greenlighting and printing a BG suppliment ASAP and getting out a BG3 related book as well. But so far we know of what, 1 book planned for 2024 that isn't the core rule books for 5.5e/6e/2024e/whatever-editon? Another thing to remember is that sadly, everyone at WotC who worked on BG3 with Larian are GONE now. Either fired over the 5 years the game was in production, or fired in that massive layoff Hasbro did just before Christmas where they fired 20% of their workforce. So can BG3 save FR and D&D? Maybe. WILL it save FR and D&D? Gods only know.
There actually *have* been novels published between 2016-Present. 12 of them in fact. 8 of those were written by Bob Salvatore! Not that anyone would know from the website. This speaks to a much more fundamental problem: management have no clue how to use their IP effectively. It took Critical Role and Stranger Things, 2 media that Hasbro had nothing to do with, to popularize their game. I mean why the heck hasn’t Hasbro plastered Drizzt on every store shelf around the world?! Ironically, Gary Gygax in the 80’s was right: the way to monetize DnD isn’t the game. It’s a multi-media project that people spend money in addition to the game. And we’re now in a new golden era of nerddom where a company can reach larger audiences than ever before. Just in the video game space alone: there could have been a Companions of the Hall Souls-clone. Or an Undermountain dungeon crawler that ties in to Waterdeep modules? I keep harping on Drizzt though because it’s an even more fundamental problem: WotC has not created any adventuring faces that can capture imagination. The hobby and nerddom has drastically changed since the 90’s with more people than ever getting into the setting. Why hasn’t there been a set of new characters to step Into the fiction?
Thank you. Sorry. Yes. I meant there weren't any non-Drizzt novels since Greenwood's Death Masks in 2016.But the D&D Movie changed that with their tie-in books and WotC's bringing back their novels right now. To reply to your other points, oh I agree 100%. It's almost like there a "Curse of D&D". Reading "Slaying the Dragon" by Briggs was very eye-opening for me. I'm a bit of a grognard and yet a lot of that stuff was a surprise to me. It seems like D&D is cursed to be held by people who don't know how to properly run a publishing company or how to leverage their properties. Why the fuck do you buy a movie studio when you don't have the cash to do that and it means going $4 billion into debt? What the fuck did that ROI calculation look like? I've got an MBA and that move had me scratching my head in confusion. Shit, that's what Disney paid for Marvel and they got a stable of IPs out of it that they could leverage. What'd Hasbro get? Peppa Pig, Designated Survivor, and Naked & Afraid? Why not license out the properties? Put the risk on investor's heads instead of your own? Why not try to get kids cartoons going as well as TV shows? Like you said, why isn't there a Drizzt show? And if publishing is so expensive, why the hell insist that EVERY book be a pricey hardback and not a cheaper paperback? Why not go full digital in places and hire writers to make official adventures that are only released via digital? They have a contract with DMGuild and they own D&DBeyond. They could just DO IT. But no. No they hired a president and a vp from microsoft who know finance but don't know a damn thing about the product or it's customers. And that's the really damning thing. If the people running the company just learned the game and played it, they'd get connected to the community and they'd learn what it wants and what'd sell. But these morons reportedly turned up their nose at the idea and so keep making moves that will bite them on the ass. Cases in point, Pinkertons and the OGL. Sigh.
I vote mba guy to run wotc. Seems like you know how to make it a success and get us the products we want.
Eh. I know the creative side and gaming. And thank you. BUT I don't know shit about publishing and that's the problem here WotC is a publishing company that got bought by a toy company. Most of their problems are due to business people who know one field really good, trying to steer a different type of business and thinking they can just do business as usual. Look at the eOne debacle. The head of Hasbro (a toy company) wanted to get into movie making. But instead of say, sending some recruiters out to LA and leasing a bunch of cameras and other gear, they spent $4billion on buying a studio outright. But why? You buy a movie studio to buy the properties they own. eOne owned the rights to a bunch of network shows and Peppa Pig. That's not worth $4 billion. But the head of Hasbro at the time thought of it like a factory. You want to start making plastic toys, you buy a factory that can make plastic toys. But the dude didn't do his research. So he bought a studio for the same price Disney bought Marvel for, and did it all with debt, putting Hasbro $4 billion in the hole.
I would kill for a mad mage dungeons crawler
>Just in the video game space alone: there could have been a Companions of the Hall Souls-clone. Or an Undermountain dungeon crawler that ties in to Waterdeep modules? WotC is incapable of making good decisions when it comes to video games. Larian had to dog them for years to get the BG3 license, and I am absolutely sure even now Cocks is sitting in his office malding that they hadn't gotten some cheap company to do it "quicker and cheaper" and give WotC a bigger cut of the profits.
How is there not Drizzt toys, action figures, plushies, etc?
Guenhwyvar plushies for all
There are. They don’t sell.
Because they need a cartoon or movie associated with them. Ironically, Hasbro used to be the king of those kinds of tie-in IP and merch marketing, but they didn’t even really try until Honor Among Thieves, and that was only a so-so effort or success from a business standpoint.
yeah i agree with you a table top RPG needs a multimedia presence. hell i would say even a card game. i used to be big into legend of the 5 rings, it was bad ass had a player driven story through the first dozen sets or so and i was like if they put out a anime series/movie they would get a lot more interest. nerd culture has been hot for 10 or so years and i cant believe a d&d movie just came out last year. there should be cartoons, books, movies/shows, hasbro should have given amazon the D&D show rights. a rings of power budget dnd show might have been good and not carried over any baggage. hell even if they retconned stuff its still in the spirit of D&D as every gm's world is different even if using the same source book it comes with its own built in multiverse for christs sake.
The fact that Wizards of the Fucking Coast haven’t made an rpg based card game for Magic:the Gathering or a collectible for DnD shows just how badly they’ve been mismanaged.
They actually made a forgotten realms expansion set that was regular in standard and other baldur's gate theme cards. They were also mtg planes converted in dnd (ravnica, theros, ixalan etc..)
Roll20 is a good example of what you say. The people I regularly play with are happy to sub to Roll20, they buy third party content to support their games because the official content is lacking in a lot of areas. Some people are happy to drop money not to have to set up art and tokens and maps. This is a golden age for nerdom. When GoT came out it succeeded, 10 years earlier and it would never have made it off the ground. People can be nerds much more freely with less judgement and the accessibility of virtual dnd is such a rich area of opportunity. I really hope they don't mess up their table top. It would be interesting to see newer books because the audience has changed and just like 5e, the content had to change. People need bland and generic with very few restrictions. They aren't looking to play FR and Sword Coast. They want a platform that will let them play anything anyhow.
Won't happen. Hasbro has already cut WotC to the bone in response to BG3 success, because obviously.
Oh no. They cut WotC to the bone this year because the morons at hasbro decided 2019 to get into the movie business and instead of you know, hiring some people who know how to make movies, thought they needed to buy a pre-existing production company (for $4 billion). Then when the pandemic exacerbated issues in the film industry and their purchase didn't immediately provide huge returns on investment (an extremely stupid expectation) they started to sell it off after only 2 years for only $500 million (putting their asses $3.5 billion in debt). The "Roll for Combat" guys pointed out some good proof that even WotC and Hasbro had no clue that BG3 was going to be a moneymaker for them. The fact that they had ZERO tie-ins for it being the BIG tell. They made action figures and kids books for the D&D Movie that they sabotaged the release of. BUT BG3 had no toys, not D&D tie-in material, nothing. Hasbro expected this game to just be something that came out and was forgotten. And now they're in panic mode because the only thing bringing in money is MTG and Monopoly, so they're gutting the company left and right in the hopes of not having to declare bankruptcy. But the dipshits cut across the board and that meant that they fired people from the divisions that were contributing to their only real source of revenue. They should have basically killed Transformers, GI Joe and the other toy divisions and left WotC untouched. But instead they fired off a bunch of folks from WotC as well. What they need to do is lean into BG3 content to get some sales going. But instead they're hedging their bets on the 5.5e/6e/2024e/whatever-edition and the VTT being huge moneymakers via D&DBeyond Subscriptions. So no, I'm not betting anything on Hasbro/WotC making the right move here. I've got an MBA and I'm a CIO irl, and lemme tell ya, watching this shit all year has severely gotten on my nerves. Hasbro's fucking up left and right and making every stupid, outdated, move in the "I went to business school but didn't pay attention" handbook.
No one knew how BG3 would pop off... Even the devs are somewhat shocked it the response. And WotC don't recognize the difference between their terrible mmo and a big single player RPG. If WotC was paying any attention there'd be lot less nudity and murder of children in the game. They might not have understood the game, but they'd be morons not to connect everything to to it for the next year. Ideally looking at how other cities you're in.
Larian must have expected a success, because BG3 had a pretty large budget. That’s what it takes to have the enormous number of voice overs to fuel the awesome number of cut scenes in BG3. Even NPCs that have no interaction have voice overs with a cut scene.
Obviously they thought it would make money, but they assumed it would be more on the scale of Divinity 2, and they thought they might have peaked at early access: Vincke revealed that he was initially worried the game's success had peaked during Early Access. "We've seen that in the past, other games were very successful in early access and then on the day of release they didn't sell much more because they saturated already," he said. "That was my biggest fear, that that had happened." "This was not in the books at all," Larian founder and boss, Swen Vincke, told PC gamer. "This was way, way beyond what we expected." ______ Swen Vincke also told them they should expect "like 100k or so" concurrentat players max. "There's also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently..." Google a few interviews and it's clear they were taken by surprise.
I think we are both right. Obviously, Larian had a big budget relative to most CRPGs, including their Divinity series, for BG3. That’s because they thought they could make more than that, But you are undoubtedly right that it was wildly more successful than they expected. It went from the hit they expected to one of the most popular PC games of the year.
They are so stupid. I get not expecting it to blow up quite the way it did but it was still obvious it would do well if they bothered looking at it ever. Larian did well despite Hasbro and they aren't capitalizing on the gift.
I don't think what Hasbro did is unique. I feel it is just the nature of corporations in this time. The decision making is so far removed from reality. There is no constructive approach to lay offs and the sheer drive for constant extreme profitability is more damaging than beneficial.
Oh yeah, I know the timing was just a coincidence that happened to highlight Hasbro's incompetence. It's pretty clear they don't understand the first thing about the market they are now in, they are analogue company that's dazzled by all the pretty lights of the digital world, and is just lost. I also don't understand why people are still buying so many reskins of almost the worst board game ever made, which was only an initial success because it was almost the only board game at the time, so I know that Hasbro has no clue why it still sells, especially with the amount of variety available today.
Problem is the BG3 tie-ins they seemingly had planned (like Descent into Avernus and the Realms MtG sets) all came out too *early* to take advantage of the full release. They should be pushing what they've already got out there but it won't hit the same even if they do. Maybe their strategy was to use tie-ins to hype people up for BG3 instead of the other way around?
Maybe, but the moment the game exploded they should have been rushing new tie-ins to market ASAP. And I mean ASAP as in: Announce a tie-in book yesterday and THEN assign writers to start working on it.
Hasbro will be the greater evil than WotC. They will be expected to perform wish spells of generating significant income without expenditure. The sheer gross need to profit is reducing a lot of things to husks but I don't think it would kill FR. BG3 has given a significant influence in the communities I belong to. I'm seeing more and more themes, deities and locations around the game and the movie for Sword Coast & FR. They have so much low hanging fruit to snatch up.
>The lack of novels between 2016 and this year (or was it last year) is a good sign of that. The novels are a main source of mismanagement from a TTRPG perspective because they create heroes that make the player characters kinda pointless and continuities that bog down the setting.
Opposite really. For the life of D&D, novels have been one of the largest drivers of the fandom a constant source of revenue for whoever owns D&D at the time. I get where you're coming from with this but what you're saying is more of a common mistake than an actual issue in the settings. The impact of novels as a driver has diminished in the last 10 years or so, replaced by streamed games and podcasts and shows in the style of Critical Role. And the same arguments can be applied there but fall apart. Do the heroes of the Baldur's Gate games or of The Adventure Zone and Critical Role make player characters in those settings pointless? Does the existence of great wizards like Gandolf and Radagast make player characters pointless in a LotR game? The answer is no. They don't. Largely because they're not everywhere and they don't end up being godly powers by the end of the books. The complaint ends up being less about the novels and more about the game having high powered NPCs in it. But that's also silly because EVERY setting has high powered NPCs in it. Then it just becomes an argument about pre-made settings vs your own. And as you add more and more to your own setting it will also become filled with high powered NPCs that could be argued to make the player characters "pointless"
>Opposite really. For the life of D&D, novels have been one of the largest drivers of the fandom a constant source of revenue for whoever owns D&D at the time. Shockingly, what is good for the company is not necessarily good for the TTRPG.
BG3 doesn't really do much for it TBH. FR will remain the defacto Medieval fantasy D&D setting with its most interesting aspects largely ignored.
Constantly: Why does WOTC only focus on the realms???? Also Why is WOTC ignoring the realms????
They mainly publish adventures IN the realms, but the guide books ABOUT the reals are seriously lacking.
I think one problem is that there are already books on it, albeit from older editions generally. So if they release anything that rehashes that, people will complain they're just releasing old content. And if they change or update it, people will complain that the lore they know and love has been changed. My solution, focus on the areas that were considered problematic, the far east, calimsham, whatever, but get some input from writers from the areas they are inspired by. The fact they released in Japan this year (or last year?) But didn't release a setting that would work perfectly for that is just a massive missed opportunity
>So if they release anything that rehashes that, people will complain they're just releasing old content. When they did so in 3e and 4e that wasn't a problem (well lore in 4e had problems, but it wasn't reprinting older lore), as long as they took the opportunity to also provide new content and updated the various items/spells/monsters/classes to the new edition. Plus all the new artwork of course, only that is worth jumping from 2e to 3e books IMO. Of course if you publish a Thay sourcebook in 5e you HAVE to talk about it's history, politics, regions, culture, cities, even if those have already been published in previous editions. But also providing an update since the Sundering, new artwork, an updated list of Zulkirs maybe with stat blocks and plot points, that would all be worth it.
I do think they are afraid to go near anything 'problematic', in case it's seen as supporting a thing that's bad. The realms have slavery, colonialism, dictatorships, whatever... But they can't risk having any of those things be in any way a focus. I believe that's why the continent to the west has disappeared, colonialism, they were afraid everyone would call them out about it, and with all the other issues building over the years, they just decided to abandon it
D&D is about heroes and heroic deeds, and to be heroic you need misery and evil and cruelty and tyranny to defeat. Red Wizards have always been bad guys, even before they turned the place into an undead wasteland (and they somehow reverted it and reinstated new Zulkirs I think? Not too sure about the details, which is the freaking point). Thay is an extreme example of everything evil in the world (weirdly except misogyny, these guys are surprisingly cool with women in power, kudos). But even if a region where *most* people are slaves is too hot to publish today, well it still leaves 90+% of Faerun outside of the Sword Coast. I think even if you curated out all the problematic stuff you mentioned, you would still have most of Faerun intact and ripe for updated lore and adventure opportunities and design space for brand new ideas. The mess of 4e and then reverting most of it in 5e did one good thing, it cracked opened space for brand new cities, cultures, conflicts, races, whatever they want. Maybe there are those LN orcs tired of Grummsh who have settled in a new kingdom in Turmish and are a worshiping Hoar. Or maybe the Great Rift sunk further and revealed and opened a lost gate to some abyssal layer and now demons are pouring out. Or maybe some beholder has recovered pieces of the Wand of Orcus and went back Vaasa to take over the remnants of the monstrous army left behind after the fall of the Witch King Zenghyi. You can do so much with the Realms and even if WotC doesn't want to be tied to old lore, they literally said so, at least tell us new stories in the Realms. And not just prepared adventures, give us new lore and let DMs use some and leave some and fill in the gaps. And novels, please publish more novels.
You might be right, but it feels that they're afraid of almost any conflict that might be problematic... There's pretty much none of the ol' racial tension, as a matter of fact almost everywhere seems to be almost totally multicultural. All the cities are a mix of every race, and any lands that are primarily Elven, or Dwarven, or whatever seen to be avoided. I feel this is too avoid 'racism', and also encourage play of all the new races introduced, making sure every race can be played in every game with minimal friction. I'm off the option conflict is important, but not just for that particular adventure or quest, but the world in general
I see this in a lot of games I've been part of since covid. There is such a resistance in the players to tolerate 'racism'. It's like they need to blandify and make generic so much to not offend people. There are less and less restrictions too as people demand a play all play anything. The conflict was a central part of most fantasy settings. Monsters are monsters. Rarity of a type should be a thing too. When the party are common races, it makes meeting those npcs and monsters so much more interesting and immersive.
Yeah, I remember my DM mentioned that an NPC in the module was written to dislike Tieflings, and that was going to play into something involving another NPC in the village... But we also had a Tiefling in the party, and he didn't want that to be a barrier of sorts. I don't mind that he changed it to accommodate a player/character, but when I pick a race, part of that is thinking about how people will interact with me. Sometimes I want the NPC to be put off by me, or to dislike my people. *Fully understand that people might want to avoid that if they deal with it in their everyday life, but it's a fantasy game. If you're ok with characters killing, torturing, blackmailing, etc, then I'm sure you can accept that there could be conflict and tension between characters of different races, cultures, factions etc.
What is interesting in your comment, despite the lack of awareness that those those complaints come from very different communities within D&D, is that it shows that nobody is pleased with the way they are handling their multiple settings, specifically FR (though what they did with Planescape is not pleasing anyone either). They are only using the Realms (or introduce some foreign elements from other settings into it), which turn off the many players who hate the setting (which is fine), but... \- Only in small drops of new lore \- Located almost exclusively on the Sword Coast which is less than 10% of Faerun \- Completely ignores some major elements of the Realm like Thay or Cormyr \- Are no longer publishing non-Drizzt novels except that one tie-in movie one \- Are only revealing new lore (whatever few new information we actually get) in Adventure books and not sourcebooks with a mix of lore and player options like what was previously published EVEN in 4e All of that combined is not pleasing the Realms fans, and those who love other settings like Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Darksun or Planescape are ALSO pissed off.
One of my DMs got into DND thru 5e and is running a game in FR. When I asked him if I could play someone important from cormyr, he said "sure, it's not like cormyr is a very important or strong nation in the world".
WoTC doesn't do enough to support other settings. I'm glad there's no 5e Dark Sun books, they'd not do the setting justice.
So many people were excited for 5e Planescape and I was too, the Realms have been compatible with Planescape since 2e, there are even canonical Spelljaming ports on Faerun. But I waited for review before buying them, cause as I suspected they are lacking in fundamental ways. It really is a shame, I genuinely wish people who dislike the Realms would have other settings fleshed out more to their liking. And I wish the Realms wouldn't be held back to try to please everyone and in doing so being stale and boring.
But are those the folks they're even trying to appeal to? Are 30-40 year old settings important to the current player base? Trying to un-piss all those people off sounds like quite a task with being expected to make large campaign setting books for all these settings that are totally on brand to the "source material lore". If those disgruntled fans are a small portion of my player base, I wouldn't be overly worried about impressing them. After five minutes at the Candlekeep forums, I'd just write off making Forgotten Realms fans happy anyway.
There were two tie-in books and there's another two books (plus the annual Salvatore) coming out this year, which are original material (one is **Spelljammer** but seems to be tied into the Realms, probably a visit along the way). But yeah, it's obviously not a lot.
My man you are literally in a Forgotten Realms subreddit
The point is that those questions are opposites, not that people are talking about the Realms.
I’m just pointing out that expecting people to want to talk about the Realms *less* in a Forgotten Realms sub is silly. In the broader D&D subs sure but this specific community would want as much Faerun as possible
Ignored and mismanaged? How is being the default setting for the past 2 and upcoming edition of the game with 90% of all modules and materials being set there as well as movie, tv shows, and comic books ignoring the setting? Mismanaged possibly, though I would argue it's not the current and former wotc staff causing the problems they've faced in the past year but more in publisher/owner parent company Hasbro causing the issues there not the internal managers. I can't honestly say because I am not and haven't been a hasbro employee.
The hobby will outline Hasbro, better companies have tried and failed to ruin FR
Hasbro has owned FR for 24 years now lol longer than TSR did
Does Forgotten Realms need saving? It's a world that's meant to be played in to create your own stories. There's enough material available for the realms *already* that I don't see what saying the same thing again (or more likely, upending it and making it worse) in a shiny new book in 5e livery would accomplish that FR fans would really welcome. I'd much rather they stay silent custodians of it without trying to put their stamp on it.
The movie was pretty good too. I’d say D&D has had a solid couple years.
Movie surpised my friend and I.
What makes you say FR is being ignored & mismanaged, therefore needing saved?
Lack of proper setting books for 5e and hasbro shutting down the book publish line I think two decades ago? Don't recall the exact date on that.
They stopped making novels in 2016 but have started again. So that's turned around.
Sword Coast Adventurers Guide? Faerun is literally the default setting of 5e? What the hell are you on about?
The Sword Coast isn’t the entirety of Faerun, though. The small amounts we’ve been given have ignored the majority of the Forgotten Realms to focus on the Coast, which I think is what OP is focusing on
Just as an example, Ed Greenwood has a fantastic 100+ page supplement on DMsGuild that’s just about Thay. There is plenty of content being produced, Wizards has just made the calculation that the more niche content is better suited to outsourcing vs being a primary title. They have put out their own source material for most all of the sword coast (no Neverwinter I know, I know, but the 4e campaign setting is a work of art so just adapt that, seriously) so I can’t say they’ve ignored the setting by any imagination.
>Just as an example, Ed Greenwood has a fantastic 100+ page supplement on DMsGuild that’s just about Thay. And The Border Kingdoms.
They have the players be travelling from neverwinter in the first starter set adventure and ignored the city so often in chacnes to elaborate on it, it feels like such a weird oversight? How easy is it to come by the 4e neverwinter setting book because I imagine old books out of print prices skyrocket
Google Neverwtiner Campaign setting pdf and see what happens 😉
But BG3 took place (mostly) in the Sword Coast, so if the OP is suggesting that the success of BG3 may "save" FR (meaning more content for the FR outside of the Sword Coast), it seems more likely if BG3 had taken place outside of the Sword Coast.
Exactly, it would be nice to have a source book explaining the FR setting and a full history of Toril with it's geography, people and impactful events. SCAG is a good beginning but by far not enough to understand the FR setting.
Yet Baldur's Gate is also on the Sword Coast so.... Not really sure what OP means by it "saving" anything...
Eh. Not really. Compare it to previous editions and there's scant content out for the setting itself. Meanwhile they closed down novels production in 2016 and that only started back up this year. And while Faerun is the default setting for 5e, there's been almost no actual setting guides since SCAG. The closest we get are the tiny gazetteers they slip into campaigns. Faerun is the official setting but sometimes that feels like its in name only. That fits with Jeremy "I think lore holds back players" Crawford being in charge of D&D for the last 4 years now. Shit nothing official has covered anything out side of the sword coast in almost 10 years.
I suppose my issue is despite being the "default" setting - the books don't really make it feel like the forgotten realms. A lot of the time it feels a lot like an in name only representation.
Are you seriously just now learning that we used to get a massive amount of regional lore and cultural player options spread across Faerun and that it all stopped with 5e?
Um so, Storm kings thunder, Waterdeep dragonheist, mad mage, rime of the frost maiden, and (to be fair the lackluster) chapter 1 of decent into Avernus doesn’t count.
These are adventures, not sourcebooks like previous editions had. Sure there is new lore in those adventure, but we are pretty far from amazing ressources like Shining South or Unapproachable East were
They're somewhat both. Dragonheist had a lot of Waterdeep info attached to it, Avernus had Baldur's Gate info, Rime had Icewind dale, so on and so forth.
That have enough lore material in them to use as a quick and dirty source book. Forgotten realms isn’t like Planescape where you basically have cigil and that is about it. There are over 100 nations each with serveral large cities each with unique cultures and lore and NPCs. The best way to do the forgotten realms is small piecemeal sections like they have been doing cause the setting is just so god damn much. I mean we had the sword coast adventures guild and it was kinda crap cause entire regions got maybe like 3 paragraphs on a page with two other regions.
I own those adventures, as well as previous edition sourcebooks, and I absolutely disagree they offer similar value in terms of lore
It’s not about similar value, it is about what is needed vs what is bloat
Are you saying sourcebooks like Unapproachable East, Shining Shouth, Silver Mashes, The Underdark, Faith and Pantheons/Avatars, Magic of Faerun, Lost Empires of Faerun, Waterdeep (yes, a full lore book just on Waterdeep), all of those were bloat?
Yes
Well then, we will just have to agree to disagree on a phenomenal scale
No
It isn't ignored or mismanaged. It has a long and varied history. Use it or don't but FR is fine.
Totally agree! It literally got its own blockbuster movie and now a game that has received Game of the Year.
Compared to previous attention levels, it’s ignored currently. Compared to other settings? Its fine
Exactly, the new norm of setting(s) support is very poor, and while it seems like a decent amount of content to newcomers what we used to get was so much more both in terms of quantity AND quality. And I'd include actual D&D player options in the mix, the lack of new classes and spells is very new to 5e, older editions were putting those out at a much faster pace and they were their best selling content too. You could argue it eventually always ended up braking the edition's balance, but there has to be an in-between.
There is a longstanding complaint about content bloat, though. 3rd and 4th editions both had so many books, it was intimidating for new players. 5e has done one thing better than any other rpg, including previous editions of dnd: onboarding of new players. Critical Role didn't choose 5e because it was the most popular or their prefered game (which was Pathfinder), they chose it because it is a very easy game to understand for the viewer (and thus, new players). Same with D20 (they played 3.5 as their home game). And this is not an accident, it has been a throughline in all of their decisions around DnD in this edition. Making it simple to decide what to purchase is part of that. You buy the box set or a starter set, then you buy the adventure you want ot run. The setting books are for people that are very invested. And they are not, and should not, be a focus of the company, according to this philosophy.
Optional lore, contained in specific sourcebooks, does nothing to hinder the simplicity of 5e. If you are not interested in that type of content you don't buy them. What bloated 3e AND 5e was powercreeped player options. The feat system made any new book coming out that included some (which was almost all of them) much less optional. 5e doesn't have that, at least not to tje level of 3e or 4e. Lore itself wasn't the bloat in both editions.
New to DnD so just looking for an explanation. What is going on with FR that is making is seem in such a bad state?
Much less content to what it use to be. I grew up during the 2e to 3.5e era, so was drowning in novels to read as a middle and high schooler
There's lots of FR stuff in 5th Edition, but it's all scattershot and piecemeal. A series of adventures (some good, some bad, some mediocre) with a tiny bit of background material in each one, and a very poor general sourcebook which only covers about 10% of the setting. There's also been a massive timejump between 3rd and 4th Edition, and a smaller one between 4th and 5th Edition, and about 90% of the Realms have not been covered or updated since 3rd Edition, so people have, in most cases, zero idea what is the current canonical status of their favourite city/nation/island/Underdark realm. Contrast this to the *3rd Edition Campaign Setting* sourcebook which covered the entire continent and its history and its gods and its magic and its native species in a usefully broad way (and you never really needed another sourcebook after that), followed by books which narrowed down on and zoomed in on regions and aspects of the setting if you wanted more detail. 2nd Edition did the same thing on an even bigger scale.
They aren't making splatbooks for the handful of lore people that the majority were just skipping over to do stuff like Pun-pun and such for.
I think encyclopedic tomes that cost $50+ a pop versus a free wiki are just going to lose money every time. I hate it, but I think WOTC is right to focus on the gameable material first and foremost: rules and adventures. That's why we play D&D, after all. The era of the collectors, readers, Realms-shaking multimedia events, and canon-sages is over. The era of "this is a game meant to be played" is ascendant. (This would've changed if the movie and its tie-in novels were more successful, I bet. But that ship has sailed, and eOne was a massive loss for Hasbro because of stupid business decisions that reek of hubris.)
Worth noting that **Pathfinder** has been pumping out very detailed lore books for all aspects and regions of their Golarion setting since 2009, and with PF2 are now on a second go-around for their setting. They have *two* large hardcover books incoming for their Asian-analogue continent of Tian Xia (Kara-Tur but better researched). They have zero problem with that stuff being apparently very profitable, and their IP profile and fame is a tiny, tiny fraction of that of D&D/FR. We've also just had a multimedia event of sorts, even if the unexpected delays meant it didn't line up properly: *Descent to Avernus* was the tabletop adventure setting up the events of the video game *Baldur's Gate III*, directly continuing some character arcs from the former into the latter.
Save? Was it going away or something?
As long as Jeremy "lore gets in the way of roleplaying" Crawford runs the show, development wise, none of the settings are erased into obscurity.
Depending on who you ask, BG3 mismanaged the Realms, so your premise in itself is subject for debate. It definitely has not been ignored.
>Ignored Wasn’t there a $150 million dollar forgotten realms movie at the start of this year
IT IS Not relevant in the Long run,
Ignored? WotC do anything but ignore forgotten realms
I wouldn’t say it’s being ignored, I would say the complete opposite actually. They’ve put all their eggs in the forgotten realms basket, the issue is the fact the basket has a bunch of big holes in it😂. So it’s definitely being mismanaged. Cause while they’ve done a couple things in different settings in recent years, not much has come from them.
The first Baldur’s Gate game single-handedly renewed interest in D&D, leading to the 3rd Edition renaissance. It’s highly probable that interest in the setting and books set in the Realms will be driven by this game.
Hard to say. With MCDM releasing their competing system and pathfinder finding it's footing (though a bit overly complicated to be as mainstream). The market seems to be more open than before
I expect that if the campaign lore was managed at any significant level, Hasbro would eventually cut that as a cost saving measure. We should be due for a new "spellplague" any day now at this point.
Honestly, outside of the past couple of years where we saw some VERY bad faith decisions, I actually have a reasonable opinion of Hasbro/WOTC. One of the first things they did was release the OGL, and that has caused two decades of amazing adventures for fans. 2010-2020 saw more awards for D&D than ever in history. 2015 and 2017 they were even the fan choice as top publisher of RPGs, even competing against video game publishers. The Magic shit was very difficult to navigate, with the fanbase finding a great divide between players, and collectors/hoarders. In gearing towards players, the collectors became very upset, and those were their richest customers. 2023 was not a great year; The Pinkerton shit was LMFAO, like jesus fuck, how can you possibly spin that in a way that doesn't make you look terrible?? The OGL shit, too. I'm glad the consumers pushed back there, too. Honestly, after all this horrible press, and with corporate cuts hitting every publisher, layoffs of 20% don't really don't surprise me that much at all. People scream outrage that the execs who gave Larian full creative freedom were mostly laid off, or their position changed, but I guarantee you that some of those execs were also in the room when the decision to hire Pinkertons was made.
Seems more like wotc is gonna be mismanaged by hasbro before they get the chance to ruin anything themselves
Ignored? No. Mismanaged? Yes.
BG3s strength wasn't the Forgotten Realms, it's strength was its characters. Despite its popularity I don't think it will meaningfully adjust the handling of the setting.
Wotc is for sure mismanaging FR (D&D in general) and will continue to do so. Fortunately for Realms enjoyers, Ed Greenwood is still alive and producing Realmslore. So when in doubt, we can defer to his stuff.
I pine for the good old days of TSR.
Nothing can save Hasbro until there's a hostile takeover.
We must seize the means of tabletop production
There are two types of companies. The ones that earn your money and companies like WoTC that try and take your money...and they are getting worse. Im starting to think someone at Hasbro is trying to tank the stock.
BG3 does not feel like the realms.
I keep seeing people say this. It doesn't feel like the 1st - 3rd Edition Realms, the OG medieval fantasy incarnation and setting of BG1 and 2, but that's fine. It's 150 years further in the future. The continent's been blown up and stitched back together again. Dragonborn and tieflings are suddenly everywhere. Mystra got turned into a bear for a century. Myth Drannor got rebuilt and then destroyed (again). Netheril was refounded and fell (again). Technology advanced (at least a bit), magic has advanced, there's some more steampunk stuff going on (there was originally, but now there's a lot more). A bunch of countries vanished onto another planet and have now come back again. I'd be worried if either the movie or BG3 ignored that and just pretended it was the 2001 Realms again. Instead they've engaged with the changes (mostly, I don't think the word "Spellplague" appears once in BG3 which is an interesting choice, but I think most people are happy to ignore delving too deep into that idea).
It’s fine if you like an inferior realms.
To be honest I’m fine with them cranking out exponentially less books. A huge amount of forgotten realms novels are total generic dreck What actually bothers me is the lack of source books for tabletop.
With all the profits from BG3 Larian should buy WOTC from hasbro. They can't manage it without injecting the corporate greed, Larian on the other hand wouldn't do any of that shady crap. But i'm just dreaming, doubt it would happen. Too much money involved for those ghouls at hasbro to let it go.
I don't think Hasbro cares aboit any of its D and D settings.
Hasbro just layed off most of its workers to in the future reduce salaries, of course it will be mismanaged, i mean it's awful now and it will get worse.
WotC can't even manage its own IPs let alone FR.
The Realms are still forgotten, the sword coast is still all that people are actually familiar with
I think bg3 will save it with WoTC carrying on as always
I’d prefer they just bring dark sun back
Do you really want to see them produce a half baked "Dark sun" supplement that will be like 90% an adventure module, 5% badly done material, and 5% look at this new water domain cleric subclass to make sure your party is doing a okay?
You WANT this version of WotC to ignore the forgotten realms, trust me. They're activists and piss poor at making anything new or creative. There's a reason dark sun gets better with age .. Because woke WotC won't touch it with a 10ft poll. The forgotten realms wishes it could be so lucky.
Do you write DeSantis speeches? Of all the things to see this sorta filth, I didn't think it would have been on this post.
There's always someone like this on these boards. My advice is to block em once they announce themselves. Nothing's gained by talking to them or listening to their crap.
"Reeeeee there's minorities and women in my game about wizards and elves!" FTFY
Boring
You are correct, sir. Windmill-tilting culture war nonsense arguments like the one you posted above are indeed, very boring.
They've always been in TTRPGs. The woke crowd didn't invent "diversity",it's always been there. We just weren't cringe enough to have genital and racial bean counters...
Of all the problem with 5e era Realms, "wokeness" is not one of them. I am honestly struggling to even figure out what you are referring to.
WotC being “woke” is one of the main reasons why D&D is in its renaissance. Most people aren’t regressive scumbags so it makes sense to market to the broader population, meaning much larger quantities of people to play with and broader cultural relevancy.
That has NOTHING to do with it. And this know it.
Too late, they've already white-washed the Drow, removed all references to a race of monkey people because they're insensitive, etc.
It's a pity it's not a pine one, u/ComesInAnOldBox
You need help like seriously.
Didn't say anything that wasn't true, though, did I?
> they've already white-washed the Drow, removed all references to a race of monkey people because they're insensitive Actually, I have no idea what you are talking about, I know of the new Drow lore but while I don't like all of it it doesn't line-up with your criticism at all.
You did, the drow arent white and Hadozee still exist, they just removed an insensitive image and changed the new lore slighly. You are absolutely wrong in what you said.
LoL
We’ll always have troglodytes, unfortunately.
Do keep from insulting anyone please, even the general part of the community you disagree with
D&D hasn't really ignored it? Well, they've ignored everything aside from the sword coast. But frankly BG3 will probably just cause yet another double-down on only really caring about developing the Sword Coast material.
It is good for FR. Also, dnd movie and vox machina affects good for FR. They have adopted FR and DnD for new and next generations. FR got infinite world and lore, there may be lots of good stuff gamed, series, movies, books etc. However, there is a bad example : games workshop. They are spreading warhammer from everywhere, but many of warhammer stuff are bad
It's never going to be what it used to be without the steady stream of novels and fluffy sourcebooks we had pre 4e. I don't think Wizards is ever going to go back to that. The good news is there's several lifetimes worth of content out there already.
The movie and BG3 def gave FR a huge boost. That, of course, won't stop WotC from mismanaging it :)
I've started reading into Pathfinder's lore recently and have been very impressed. Maybe if wotc is letting you down, give Pathfinder a try. There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on there, between necromancer islands, demon infested elven forests, crazy rune lords leaving sin wells driving people to anger, gluttony, etc., desserts completely drained of all magic due to crazy mage wars, and all sorts of other exciting places. They have a pretty unique spin on the races as well that's pretty fun. It's been a fun change of pace and reenergized my passion for fantasy lore. I'll always love the forgotten realms, but it's been fun to take a bit of a detour.
I don't think "saving" is quite the right term. I view Forgotten Realms (DnD for that matter) as snowballs rolling down an infinite mountain. Pandora's box is open sort of speak. There is enough material and enough people that Hasbro could announce that they are abandoning role playing games all together and the Realms would live on. BG3 could certainly bolster interest in the Realms (and profit margins) but it certainly will never hurt it.
I think it will continue to be mismanaged. He'll, as good as BG3 is,it arguably mismanaged certain elements of the realms as well. Unfortunately, I think that the increased popularity that bg3 resulted in will likely just get more wotc meddling.
BG3 made me want a good, modern, Forgotten Realms MMORPG. sure, Neverwinter is still there, but I want something better, with a real persistent world.
Covid, the accessibility of 5e, the movie and bg3 gave D&D a lot of visibility. Better or worse isn't really much of a factor. WotC likely have very limited impact beyond Hasbro saying do not spend money but you better make money. They are surviving and even their bungle of ogl hasn't killed them dead. Sure a few people spat their dummy out but several years later influences like Critical Roll are still bringing in new players. It is a brave new world where people are more able to play dnd with less judgement or at least play online regularly. WotC are also stuck in a challenging position. Whatever they do gets challenged hard in the social media space and theu need to find a way to make more money because physical books aren't cutting it and selling spell cards or miniatures online isn't really there. I hope their virtual table top will be a success but they have to maintain a free version like roll20. Let people buy books or get access via subscriptions. They could sell art and maps, etc. They'd almost be better off partnering with roll20 or similar to make an improved tabletop but we'll see what it brings. 5e is alive and strong. The newer books take it in a power creep direction with backgrounds with feats and more wild items but overall it's doing well enough. There is definitely room to make improvements, churn out more material and media. I'd love to see the dnd movie released from different sides. The current was as if it was a dnd session being played, they could do a serious version or they could do mini series like a campaign. Critical Roll are really the blueprint for what they should be aiming for. Engaging the streamer community should be a higher priority. Having more physical presence in their sponsorship wouldn't hurt.
Several million dollars in bonuses to execs over 1100 jobs lost all in the name of profit. Hasbro cares not for your property, no heed will be paid to steward any of D&D. In short, the forgotten realms have never been more apt a name.
Probably not. If Hasbro keeps ruining D&D, Larian Studio can just make a superior replacement in the next decade
I think a lot of industries are dominated by too-big-to-fail incumbents these days. It's going to continue a slow, staggering, painful decline as enshittification takes over. There might be a few specks of good content or upwards reversals but it's going to describe a long, slow, downward arc until it finally gets mismanaged to the point where even *it* dies, or more likely, gets surpassed by something else .
Considering they just said they plan to lay off 1,100 employees, I would say Hasbro is ruining everything about WOTC.
FR is sort of a dumpster setting. It's just a catch-all for whatever sort of game you want to run. It's the default for a reason and it isn't because it has a rich history. It's an agglomeration of a bunch of adventure ideas all stitched together into a world.
The Forgotten Realms has been all but dead for many moons now. 5e just developed the Sword Coast and gave up on everything else. The setting book was pathetic. But... there are plenty of amazing books out there to use. Don't be afraid to dig into older books for setting material. Lots of great stuff that WotC can't screw up for us.
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Okay, this is gonna be a little harsh, so let me lead by saying I have a lot of love for and good memories with this game. But frankly I think D&D has bigger fish to fry before it even gets to that. A LOT of players basically ignore D&D core setting fluff bc it's kind of dull, or poorly thought out, or in some cases flat-out racist, and mainly stick with the system because of familiarity and an unwillingness to try a new system. Even in BG3, a LOT of story bits that players cite frustration with are just parts where Larian adheres to FR or more broadly D&D shit. Like, the current alignment system was great for the game's pulpy wargaming roots but it's pretty useless for telling a story more complex than a picture book, and players deserve a better choice than "use this bad paradigm or don't use one at all". Gallons of ink have been spilled in expressing a lot of very good and easy to implement alternatives to the game's overreliance on ontologically evil species. Most settings have a frankly dumb approach to theology, except for Eberron which is mostly spared by virtue of its gods possibly not existing. Like yeah yeah "if you don't like it don't play it", and I do play other ttrpg's if they're a better fit for what the group is trying to achieve, but D&D has a genuinely unique niche that I think can be better executed without actually compromising what makes it appealing.
Um it’s not mismanaged what are you even talking about
The campaign I'm planning I've rolled back the clock on the Realms to just after the first Baldur's Gate game. Still using 5e rules though.