See I'd argue the opposite; since there is so much lore it actually causes the setting to be far more cosmopolitan and "Anything goes" as a general rule of thumb and pretty much anything that has been released for any of the settings or splat books would be able to credibly fit into a campaign with a little effort.
If they just burned the map and published a lot of the same locations as "here's a piece you can conveniently chunk into your world if you want it" the result would be a significantly more useful. Honestly, the only parts of the sword coast that need to exist to keep the existing politics reasonably coherent is the coastline from Candlekeep to Luskan.
9 pages in and I don't think anyone has addressed the fact that "amoral" means having nothing to do with morality while "immoral" means against morality, or bad?
Amoral = lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.
So? That has nothing to do with the issues in the OP, or the the following conversation, which has gone in some bizarre directions IMO.
I'm just saying that the OP is clearly saying this is a bad thing and probably should have used the word "immoral" rather than "amoral." It's just an observation.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Not sure where you heard that, but as someone who was a subscriber through the transition and an occasional freelancer for Paizo at the time published in Dragon magazine, I assure you this is 100% false.
Golarion was never published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines. The setting was created specifically in response to WotC ending Paizo's license to publish Dungeon & Dragon magazines. Finding themselves suddenly without their primary income stream, they started the Pathfinder adventure paths (then just the name of the product line, not a separate RPG until 4e) as well as adventure modules and *in those* started to build out the world of Golarion individual bits and pieces at a time. Paizo never included any of that in Dungeon or Dragon magazines and only started publishing material for it after they no longer published the official magazines.
Pretty sure that some of their earlier adventures published in Dragon got reworked into Pathfinder after the split.
Nope.
Paizo did not own the rights to anything published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines.
Paizo did not own the rights to anything published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines.
I think you missed this word. Reworked means you can take an idea you don't own, rework it so it no longer infringes on copyright, and publish it. But the important thing is Pathfinder and it's setting is comparable to Critical Role and their setting. Neither are official D&D, both use D&D rules, or modified D&D rules.
Paizo did not own the rights to anything published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines.
I think you missed this word. Reworked means you can take an idea you don't own, rework it so it no longer infringes on copyright, and publish it. But the important thing is Pathfinder and it's setting is comparable to Critical Role and their setting. Neither are official D&D, both use D&D rules, or modified D&D rules.
Uh, no. I did not miss that.
I'm not going to bother any longer since it's way off tangent, and between the goal post moving and the repeated references to "I'm pretty sure this is the case" with zero actual cited examples, there's no point.
I just wanted to clear the historical record for anyone else who is not familiar - Nothing of Golarion was published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines. Ever.
It simply wasn't. Nothing was reworked. It was built entirely new because they lost the license and needed an IP of their own they could work with. I was both a fan buying their products and a freelancer getting published by them at the time. I saw all of this happen as it happened. Golarion was built entirely from the SRD, public domain, and their new ideas. None of it was ever in any Dragon or Dungeon magazine ever - which is the point I was discussing. If you want to move the goalposts to a different point, whatever.
See I'd argue the opposite; since there is so much lore it actually causes the setting to be far more cosmopolitan and "Anything goes" as a general rule of thumb and pretty much anything that has been released for any of the settings or splat books would be able to credibly fit into a campaign with a little effort. True, some GM's and/or players may feel intimidated by the sheer volume of it, but the biggest thing I'd tell people is to focus on using what you need without having to internalize the whole of it; Like if you are a cormyrian noble then the most you'd really need to know is that it's an old, well established human nation founded and led by the obarskyr dynasty, that it's much more "civilized" then the sword coast and that it's a hot bed of intrigue.
You don't need to know the full genealogy of the crown silvers, the main exports of arabel, how many orcs are buried in dead orc pass, or what the fourth king did during the 5th year of his reign because frankly most of that is trivia that isn't terribly applicable to you or the campaign as a whole.
And as a GM having a dragon's treasure trove of lore to access means that I have *thousands* of sources of inspiration for campaigns and characters and villains and heroes to draw upon along with a setting that players can look into on their own if they so choose or not; I ran an entire adventure based out of the island of Snowdown that was inspired by novels written decades ago combined with the current status of the island as being occupied territory by Amn and my players were surprised and delighted to go back and see how I'd tied together all of this keeping in mind that they had virtually no knowledge of the setting's lore prior to this since most of them were relatively new.
For myself, If I was going into someone doing a homebrew FR campaign that diverged I'd probably note the difference but as long as it didn't inexplicbly just change things (IE the great western sea is now an endless desert and everyone is a gun slinging cyborg cow boy) I'd just go "huh" and see where it goes because at the end of the day I'm not the one GMing and this person might be able to give me a fresh perspective on something else (IE life in Menzoberranzan or Shou Lung or amongst the Tuigan). I'm sure there are some FR lore enthusiasts who are completely intractable but I suspect that they're far less common then folks here abouts would seem to think.
Pantagruel is correct. Were I to start DMing a game next week, I would be incapable of running it in the Forgotten Realms. Oh sure, I could invent a homebrew world and call it "the Forgotten Realms", but because I don't know nearly fifty years of obtuse, difficult to research, constantly self-contradictory Back Lore to 'The Real Forgotten Realms', I would never be able to create a game in the Realms that a lorehound would accept. the Realms have no more mysteries. They have no more grey areas. There's no more 'here there be monsters' realms left undrawn on the maps. Every last single stone, leaf, brick, and puddle in the Forgotten Realms has been exhaustively mapped out, cross-referenced, cataloged, categorized, and recorded in the Annals of True Lore, and if I deviate from any of that information in the slightest, any Forgotten Realms lore hounds who happen to be at my table will stop my game on the spot to dispute and castigate me for Getting It Wrong.
In what universe would I ever want to inflict that on myself? And even if I did, the people I actually run games for don't know any of the Realms anyways so using all the old names has as much meaning to them as using random names I got off of an Internet name generator. the phrase "Cormyrian nobility" ahs as much meaning and impact for my table as the phrase "Duncrags tribal lord", which is to say the meaning I choose to assign it and nothing else.
And here's the thing. I have a dragon's treasure trove of inspiration for my games. It's the many hundreds of fiction novels I've read in my day, the myriad endless stories I've absorbed. The video games I've played that had really cool ideas in them, the movies I've watched that left me wowed and excited, the games I've played at other people's tables where the DM shows me an awesome trick, or another player does something super memorable. I don't need my inspiration spoon-fed to me in prewritten R5e form, I can adapt any of the infinite spiraling tales in my brainhole to the table.
Unless I'm playing in the Forgotten Realms, where all the Great Heroes have already been born, all the Great Stories have already been told, all the Lurking Threats have been found and dealt with, and there's simply no room left anymore for anyone to squeeze an adventuring party in edgewise.
9 pages in and I don't think anyone has addressed the fact that "amoral" means having nothing to do with morality while "immoral" means against morality, or bad?
Amoral = lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.
So? That has nothing to do with the issues in the OP, or the the following conversation, which has gone in some bizarre directions IMO.
I'm just saying that the OP is clearly saying this is a bad thing and probably should have used the word "immoral" rather than "amoral." It's just an observation.
Ironically, they ended up being correct: editing a book is an amoral act.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
9 pages in and I don't think anyone has addressed the fact that "amoral" means having nothing to do with morality while "immoral" means against morality, or bad?
Amoral = lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.
So? That has nothing to do with the issues in the OP, or the the following conversation, which has gone in some bizarre directions IMO.
I'm just saying that the OP is clearly saying this is a bad thing and probably should have used the word "immoral" rather than "amoral." It's just an observation.
Ironically, they ended up being correct: editing a book is an amoral act.
In a vacuum, yes, but it depends on the edit and why it's being edited. :)
By defending your anecdotal position over Wizards' data-based position, you are, in effect, saying your personal views on the issue should control and your minority opinion justifies the further promulgation of something data suggests is problematic to a wider audience and the greater expansion of the game itself. You will have to pardon me if I find your anecdotes less compelling than a data-based drive to benefit the greatest number of pocketbooks players.
You know, you've talked a great deal about How WotC has been responding to feedback and making Data based decisions but going by their most recent release of Spelljammer I'm seriously questioning their ability to do so because ~in my anecdotal expierience~ no one wanted:
A setting devoid of any compelling reason to engage with it.
Vehicle rules that are stunningly incomplete in a setting that is ostensibly about space travel.
A module that looks more like a rough draft or something that could have been pulled from a web-ring circa 1995 that hosts a plethora of GMing taboos.
The Hadozee getting brand new lore written and then published with the company only acknowledging it was an issue well after release despite the fact that anyone with a half functioning brain could have seen that it was deeply problematic.
All of this for 40% more then previous materials had been released at.
So yeah: I'm going to question the judgement of the company and you'd be a fool not to.
9 pages in and I don't think anyone has addressed the fact that "amoral" means having nothing to do with morality while "immoral" means against morality, or bad?
I mean the OP is nonsensical screed and the bulk of the nine pages are completely off topic, so why bother with pedantics?
See I'd argue the opposite; since there is so much lore it actually causes the setting to be far more cosmopolitan and "Anything goes" as a general rule of thumb and pretty much anything that has been released for any of the settings or splat books would be able to credibly fit into a campaign with a little effort.
If they just burned the map and published a lot of the same locations as "here's a piece you can conveniently chunk into your world if you want it" the result would be a significantly more useful. Honestly, the only parts of the sword coast that need to exist to keep the existing politics reasonably coherent is the coastline from Candlekeep to Luskan.
I'm pretty sure that's what they're doing. They did that with Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel and Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
I tried to run Saltmarsh, back when it was new. They sold me on a rollicking high seas ghost pirate adventure, pre-release. What I got was lizard politics in a crap-ass swamp, uppity fishmen, a bunch of assumptions that I knew Greyhawk world lore by heart and could supply the geopolitical backdrop of the area to fuel all their barely-coherent story hooks, and precisely zero involvement of ghosts, pirates, or ghost pirates.
Which is a problem. The Forgotten Realms should not be the "base setting" of D&D because a) 90% of the Forgotten Realms is absolute crap and b) D&D should not have a base setting. Every setting should be supported with the base game's mechanics and lore. And if it is going to have a base setting, it shouldn't be the Forgotten Realms.
Putting aside you're personal taste (which the bolded absolutely is) FR is the most established and most profitable setting that TSR or Wizards of the coast has had under their belt by an order of magnitude; the only two that have ever come close to challenging it have been Ebberon and to a lesser extent wildemont (which isn't technically an official setting), but both of those are a far cry from being able to act as a base line.
Further, having a common touchstone is good for players since it allows for them to be working from a base understanding as opposed to everyone having their own unique snowflake perception of the universe that becomes incompatible immediately on contact with another player.
There are over 300 Forgotten Realms novels, dozens of video games, several dozen adventures and sourcebooks, hundreds of gods, and nearly 50,000 pages on the Forgotten Realms Wiki. Of all fantasy settings ever created, it is the single most detailed and explored in history. I can guarantee you that there is not a single person in the world, not even Ed Greenwood the creator of the setting, that knows everything official about the setting. It would take probably centuries to learn all there is to know about the setting, and thus it is impossible to actually play in the Forgotten Realms. No matter what, you're going to be playing in some homebrew parallel world with some common aspects of the Forgotten Realms, but it's not the true one. And 90% of all of the content written for it is crap. Sturgeon's Law. The setting is so bloated, detailed, and impossibly large that it's both impossible to fully comprehend and filled with so much absolute garbage (like the lore about why pregnant drow never have twins) that finding the actually really good parts (Karsus and Netheril, Thay, the core concept of Undermountain and the Yawning Portal) takes dozens of hours of wiki-searching and book-reading to discover.
And that's a problem. How is a new DM supposed to handle all of that? That is too much. No setting should have that much detail. "Kitchen sink" does not even begin to explain how incredibly bloated the Forgotten Realms are.
Base settings, if D&D even should have them (which I don't think it should), should be relatively simple and easy for new DMs to understand. If you cannot fully detail a single continent in the setting in one source book (like Eberron and Wildemount/Tal'dorei do), you have too much setting. The Forgotten Realms so far has needed 1 source book explaining just a single coast in the world and around a dozen full adventure books describing cities and regions (many of which the SCAG lightly touched on) to explain. If your setting has over a few dozen core deities/religions, it has too many. If your setting has a fantasy equivalent of Australia and has refused to detail it in the slightest, you have committed a sin so terrible that you should be forbidden from writing fantasy ever again.
This last complaint is mostly a joke, but if Osse (yes, that's its real name) ever got a source book in a way that was actually respectful to real Australia's history and cultures, I might have to run a campaign there.
If you want a common touchstone for the identities of different races and classes in the game that new DMs and players can use to get some idea what D&D is like, the Forgotten Realms is not the solution. It's too big. It's been around too long. It has too many problems and 4e at least had the right idea with trying to blow it up to modernize it (even if the execution wasn't great). Exandria would be better (if WotC could get the rights for it, which I doubt). Nentir Vale if it actually got a source book would be better. Eberron might even be better, so long as they ignore the non-Kanon "official" sourcebooks published in 3.5e that tried to bloat it as much as the FR. A completely new setting that used the main tropes and ideas of D&D in a simple, relatively small world (compared to Toril) would be better.
Spelljammer is different from the other settings. Technically, it is basically every other setting in D&D (at least, it's every one that takes place on the Material Plane and isn't shielded from the rest of the Multiverse, like Dark Sun and Eberron are), so a Spelljammer book has to support the lore of every setting . . . which means that it really can't have much setting-specific lore in it, unless it covers a lot of possible locations (just read Boo's Astral Menagerie and you'll see that most of the monsters are unique to the Astral Sea or Wildspace, not any specific world).
Son, there are whole stellar empires and cultures that were established specifically for the Spelljammer setting that had their own stories and lore that were wholly independent of any other setting; Elven and orcish empires vying for power and control, the Giff mercenary companies, Mercantile Illithids offering access to rare goods, Star hives of Beholders... all of these were very much a thing and would have given players reasons to get invested in spelljammer as a setting as opposed to now where I can't think of a single reason to ever get on one of those flying boats.
Yeah. One of my main complaints about the official 5e Spelljammer set is that it refused to detail any of the spacefaring factions that were in 2e spelljammer. However, my point that Spelljammer has to make way for practically every other setting in D&D still stands.
Spelljammer not having much lore is kind of understandable for the setting. It's not preferable, but their other fairly recent actual setting books (Theros, Wildemount, Ravenloft) did have a lot of lore and they were good books. Ravenloft didn't give different lore for the base races because it is also like Spelljammer in that any setting has a place in it, but it had lore for its new races. I don't like the Theros setting much as a D&D world that much and it's definitely low on my list of "official settings I want to play/DM in", but the book is a really, really good setting book for Theros. And Wildemount is definitely the 2nd best setting book in all of 5e, just behind Eberron: Rising from the Last War. Theros, Wildemount, and Eberron all had setting-specific lore for the races that appeared in those settings. And it was good lore, for the most part. They clearly have the ability to make good setting lore for 5e settings. The "will" is a different question, but they have shown the will to do that in the past.
Oh they've put some effort in in the past to be sure, But as I'd already pointed out Spelljammer very much had a lot of lore to draw upon and they used... almost none of it.
And since that's the most recent product that they've released (and given the number of promos they did on youtube for it they seemed to think they were onto something) it is the standard by which I will hold them to since it was a setting where they had so much freedom to work with and used... none of it.
The next two settings that they're announcing a release for are Dragonlance and planescape, and both of those are considerably higher bars to clear then spelljammer so yeah: I seriously question their ability to deliver on this.
Spelljammer and Strixhaven are currently just two exceptions to the typically good setting books in 5e (Wildemount, Eberron, Ravnica, Theros, Ravenloft). The SCAG was also bad, but that was back before WotC discovered how to design setting books in 5e. We'll see how Planescape and Dragonlance look to see if the sky is actually falling or they just had a couple of failed experiments lately (they did say that the Spelljammer format was experimental, after all).
If Planescape comes and doesn't detail the different factions and planes of existence, then I'll be convinced. But for now, I'm mildly worried and hopeful for the setting books coming in the next couple of years.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
I tried to run Saltmarsh, back when it was new. They sold me on a rollicking high seas ghost pirate adventure, pre-release. What I got was lizard politics in a crap-ass swamp, uppity fishmen, a bunch of assumptions that I knew Greyhawk world lore by heart and could supply the geopolitical backdrop of the area to fuel all their barely-coherent story hooks, and precisely zero involvement of ghosts, pirates, or ghost pirates.
F@#$ that book and everything in it.
This is exactly the reason I have opened Ghosts of Saltmarsh once and then put it on my shelf. Then WizKids had the audacity to try and sell me miniature sets for this thing...
See I'd argue the opposite; since there is so much lore it actually causes the setting to be far more cosmopolitan and "Anything goes" as a general rule of thumb and pretty much anything that has been released for any of the settings or splat books would be able to credibly fit into a campaign with a little effort. True, some GM's and/or players may feel intimidated by the sheer volume of it, but the biggest thing I'd tell people is to focus on using what you need without having to internalize the whole of it; Like if you are a cormyrian noble then the most you'd really need to know is that it's an old, well established human nation founded and led by the obarskyr dynasty, that it's much more "civilized" then the sword coast and that it's a hot bed of intrigue.
You don't need to know the full genealogy of the crown silvers, the main exports of arabel, how many orcs are buried in dead orc pass, or what the fourth king did during the 5th year of his reign because frankly most of that is trivia that isn't terribly applicable to you or the campaign as a whole.
And as a GM having a dragon's treasure trove of lore to access means that I have *thousands* of sources of inspiration for campaigns and characters and villains and heroes to draw upon along with a setting that players can look into on their own if they so choose or not; I ran an entire adventure based out of the island of Snowdown that was inspired by novels written decades ago combined with the current status of the island as being occupied territory by Amn and my players were surprised and delighted to go back and see how I'd tied together all of this keeping in mind that they had virtually no knowledge of the setting's lore prior to this since most of them were relatively new.
For myself, If I was going into someone doing a homebrew FR campaign that diverged I'd probably note the difference but as long as it didn't inexplicbly just change things (IE the great western sea is now an endless desert and everyone is a gun slinging cyborg cow boy) I'd just go "huh" and see where it goes because at the end of the day I'm not the one GMing and this person might be able to give me a fresh perspective on something else (IE life in Menzoberranzan or Shou Lung or amongst the Tuigan). I'm sure there are some FR lore enthusiasts who are completely intractable but I suspect that they're far less common then folks here abouts would seem to think.
the Realms have no more mysteries. They have no more grey areas. There's no more 'here there be monsters' realms left undrawn on the maps. Every last single stone, leaf, brick, and puddle in the Forgotten Realms has been exhaustively mapped out, cross-referenced, cataloged, categorized, and recorded in the Annals of True Lore, and if I deviate from any of that information in the slightest, any Forgotten Realms lore hounds who happen to be at my table will stop my game on the spot to dispute and castigate me for Getting It Wrong.
Then the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide lied then, because it literally said that there is no information about what is out there beyond the Trackless Sea.
If you want a common touchstone for the identities of different races and classes in the game that new DMs and players can use to get some idea what D&D is like, the Forgotten Realms is not the solution. It's too big. It's been around too long. It has too many problems and 4e at least had the right idea with trying to blow it up to modernize it (even if the execution wasn't great). Exandria would be better (if WotC could get the rights for it, which I doubt). Nentir Vale if it actually got a source book would be better. Eberron might even be better, so long as they ignore the non-Kanon "official" sourcebooks published in 3.5e that tried to bloat it as much as the FR. A completely new setting that used the main tropes and ideas of D&D in a simple, relatively small world (compared to Toril) would be better.
So, I disagree with you about Forgotten Realms on a few factors, but that is from the perspective of someone that enjoys FR and has read a majority of the literature on it. One of my current groups is playing RotFM, and they have little snippets of FR Lore they know, and its been enjoyable working that into the story. That being said, I don't think anyone has to use everything from FR to use some of FR. I don't think there is a "right" way to play in Faerun, I think its just as detailed or as deep as you want.
Nentir Vale was a great great idea that never really got the attention it deserved, at least in my opinion.
And 90% of all of the content written for it is crap. Sturgeon's Law. The setting is so bloated, detailed, and impossibly large that it's both impossible to fully comprehend and filled with so much absolute garbage (like the lore about why pregnant drow never have twins) that finding the actually really good parts (Karsus and Netheril, Thay, the core concept of Undermountain and the Yawning Portal) takes dozens of hours of wiki-searching and book-reading to discover.
The stuff about Karsus and company was some of the first lore about the setting I was actually exposed to, because the lore about it in 5e directed my attention to that first. I imagine WoTC deliberately hand-picked which parts of the setting to show to DMs in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide so they can look into those specific parts of it themselves.
I do agree that the setting is pretty bloated and requires an encyclopaedia's worth of knowledge to even scratch the surface. Which is actually one of the reasons I said it's more Earth-like than other settings. Because the same is true for Earth itself.
See I'd argue the opposite; since there is so much lore it actually causes the setting to be far more cosmopolitan and "Anything goes" as a general rule of thumb and pretty much anything that has been released for any of the settings or splat books would be able to credibly fit into a campaign with a little effort. True, some GM's and/or players may feel intimidated by the sheer volume of it, but the biggest thing I'd tell people is to focus on using what you need without having to internalize the whole of it; Like if you are a cormyrian noble then the most you'd really need to know is that it's an old, well established human nation founded and led by the obarskyr dynasty, that it's much more "civilized" then the sword coast and that it's a hot bed of intrigue.
You don't need to know the full genealogy of the crown silvers, the main exports of arabel, how many orcs are buried in dead orc pass, or what the fourth king did during the 5th year of his reign because frankly most of that is trivia that isn't terribly applicable to you or the campaign as a whole.
And as a GM having a dragon's treasure trove of lore to access means that I have *thousands* of sources of inspiration for campaigns and characters and villains and heroes to draw upon along with a setting that players can look into on their own if they so choose or not; I ran an entire adventure based out of the island of Snowdown that was inspired by novels written decades ago combined with the current status of the island as being occupied territory by Amn and my players were surprised and delighted to go back and see how I'd tied together all of this keeping in mind that they had virtually no knowledge of the setting's lore prior to this since most of them were relatively new.
For myself, If I was going into someone doing a homebrew FR campaign that diverged I'd probably note the difference but as long as it didn't inexplicbly just change things (IE the great western sea is now an endless desert and everyone is a gun slinging cyborg cow boy) I'd just go "huh" and see where it goes because at the end of the day I'm not the one GMing and this person might be able to give me a fresh perspective on something else (IE life in Menzoberranzan or Shou Lung or amongst the Tuigan). I'm sure there are some FR lore enthusiasts who are completely intractable but I suspect that they're far less common then folks here abouts would seem to think.
the Realms have no more mysteries. They have no more grey areas. There's no more 'here there be monsters' realms left undrawn on the maps. Every last single stone, leaf, brick, and puddle in the Forgotten Realms has been exhaustively mapped out, cross-referenced, cataloged, categorized, and recorded in the Annals of True Lore, and if I deviate from any of that information in the slightest, any Forgotten Realms lore hounds who happen to be at my table will stop my game on the spot to dispute and castigate me for Getting It Wrong.
Then the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide lied then, because it literally said that there is no information about what is out there beyond the Trackless Sea.
That describes a whole other problem, where officially, everything pre-2014 is not canon. So you’ll have some people pulling out obscure lore from earlier editions, but it’s not “official” anymore, and conflicts with stuff in SCAG and other sources. It just opens up all new cans of contradictions.
I tried to run Saltmarsh, back when it was new. They sold me on a rollicking high seas ghost pirate adventure, pre-release. What I got was lizard politics in a crap-ass swamp, uppity fishmen, a bunch of assumptions that I knew Greyhawk world lore by heart and could supply the geopolitical backdrop of the area to fuel all their barely-coherent story hooks, and precisely zero involvement of ghosts, pirates, or ghost pirates.
F@#$ that book and everything in it.
Well I agree as well. It's not a very good representation of Greyhawk, in fact they picked a corner of the map that was basically unused and so far away from everything that it could have been set anywhere.
FYI to others, the Saltmarsh is set on the western coast of the Azure sea, which if you look at a map of Eurasia That little pocket in the armpit of east Russia above Japan would be the equivalent area.
In terms of content written for that setting in the past, not much had bee done. it exsisted, and that was about it, as the Campaign setting typically revolved around the goings on of the west central parts of the map.
Then the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide lied then, because it literally said that there is no information about what is out there beyond the Trackless Sea.
Not going to say I know what exactly is past the Trackless sea...but...
That describes a whole other problem, where officially, everything pre-2014 is not canon. So you’ll have some people pulling out obscure lore from earlier editions, but it’s not “official” anymore, and conflicts with stuff in SCAG and other sources. It just opens up all new cans of contradictions.
Basically, the old content is there for use until something new comes along and changes it. They have the right to change the lore, and update it, but the old lore is true until it is changed.
I personally use all D&D books to run games, and use all the lore from 1st to 5th to come up with story and game ideas. Because it's all out there. And useable.
Another way to look at it, the old lore is canon to a portion of the population of the NPCs and player characters, even if changed with new rule books, just like some people believe the world is 6k years old in the modern era. Grab a science book from 1950 and they will describe the cosmos very differently than how it is described today.
In our real world, different people will see history and facts differently than others. Why can't this be true in a TTRPG setting.
If they just burned the map and published a lot of the same locations as "here's a piece you can conveniently chunk into your world if you want it" the result would be a significantly more useful. Honestly, the only parts of the sword coast that need to exist to keep the existing politics reasonably coherent is the coastline from Candlekeep to Luskan.
I'm just saying that the OP is clearly saying this is a bad thing and probably should have used the word "immoral" rather than "amoral." It's just an observation.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Nope.
Paizo did not own the rights to anything published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines.
I think you missed this word. Reworked means you can take an idea you don't own, rework it so it no longer infringes on copyright, and publish it. But the important thing is Pathfinder and it's setting is comparable to Critical Role and their setting. Neither are official D&D, both use D&D rules, or modified D&D rules.
Uh, no. I did not miss that.
I'm not going to bother any longer since it's way off tangent, and between the goal post moving and the repeated references to "I'm pretty sure this is the case" with zero actual cited examples, there's no point.
I just wanted to clear the historical record for anyone else who is not familiar - Nothing of Golarion was published in Dragon or Dungeon magazines. Ever.
It simply wasn't. Nothing was reworked. It was built entirely new because they lost the license and needed an IP of their own they could work with. I was both a fan buying their products and a freelancer getting published by them at the time. I saw all of this happen as it happened. Golarion was built entirely from the SRD, public domain, and their new ideas. None of it was ever in any Dragon or Dungeon magazine ever - which is the point I was discussing. If you want to move the goalposts to a different point, whatever.
Pantagruel is correct. Were I to start DMing a game next week, I would be incapable of running it in the Forgotten Realms. Oh sure, I could invent a homebrew world and call it "the Forgotten Realms", but because I don't know nearly fifty years of obtuse, difficult to research, constantly self-contradictory Back Lore to 'The Real Forgotten Realms', I would never be able to create a game in the Realms that a lorehound would accept. the Realms have no more mysteries. They have no more grey areas. There's no more 'here there be monsters' realms left undrawn on the maps. Every last single stone, leaf, brick, and puddle in the Forgotten Realms has been exhaustively mapped out, cross-referenced, cataloged, categorized, and recorded in the Annals of True Lore, and if I deviate from any of that information in the slightest, any Forgotten Realms lore hounds who happen to be at my table will stop my game on the spot to dispute and castigate me for Getting It Wrong.
In what universe would I ever want to inflict that on myself? And even if I did, the people I actually run games for don't know any of the Realms anyways so using all the old names has as much meaning to them as using random names I got off of an Internet name generator. the phrase "Cormyrian nobility" ahs as much meaning and impact for my table as the phrase "Duncrags tribal lord", which is to say the meaning I choose to assign it and nothing else.
And here's the thing. I have a dragon's treasure trove of inspiration for my games. It's the many hundreds of fiction novels I've read in my day, the myriad endless stories I've absorbed. The video games I've played that had really cool ideas in them, the movies I've watched that left me wowed and excited, the games I've played at other people's tables where the DM shows me an awesome trick, or another player does something super memorable. I don't need my inspiration spoon-fed to me in prewritten R5e form, I can adapt any of the infinite spiraling tales in my brainhole to the table.
Unless I'm playing in the Forgotten Realms, where all the Great Heroes have already been born, all the Great Stories have already been told, all the Lurking Threats have been found and dealt with, and there's simply no room left anymore for anyone to squeeze an adventuring party in edgewise.
Please do not contact or message me.
Ironically, they ended up being correct: editing a book is an amoral act.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
In a vacuum, yes, but it depends on the edit and why it's being edited. :)
You know, you've talked a great deal about How WotC has been responding to feedback and making Data based decisions but going by their most recent release of Spelljammer I'm seriously questioning their ability to do so because ~in my anecdotal expierience~ no one wanted:
So yeah: I'm going to question the judgement of the company and you'd be a fool not to.
I mean the OP is nonsensical screed and the bulk of the nine pages are completely off topic, so why bother with pedantics?
I'm pretty sure that's what they're doing. They did that with Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel and Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I tried to run Saltmarsh, back when it was new. They sold me on a rollicking high seas ghost pirate adventure, pre-release. What I got was lizard politics in a crap-ass swamp, uppity fishmen, a bunch of assumptions that I knew Greyhawk world lore by heart and could supply the geopolitical backdrop of the area to fuel all their barely-coherent story hooks, and precisely zero involvement of ghosts, pirates, or ghost pirates.
F@#$ that book and everything in it.
Please do not contact or message me.
There are over 300 Forgotten Realms novels, dozens of video games, several dozen adventures and sourcebooks, hundreds of gods, and nearly 50,000 pages on the Forgotten Realms Wiki. Of all fantasy settings ever created, it is the single most detailed and explored in history. I can guarantee you that there is not a single person in the world, not even Ed Greenwood the creator of the setting, that knows everything official about the setting. It would take probably centuries to learn all there is to know about the setting, and thus it is impossible to actually play in the Forgotten Realms. No matter what, you're going to be playing in some homebrew parallel world with some common aspects of the Forgotten Realms, but it's not the true one. And 90% of all of the content written for it is crap. Sturgeon's Law. The setting is so bloated, detailed, and impossibly large that it's both impossible to fully comprehend and filled with so much absolute garbage (like the lore about why pregnant drow never have twins) that finding the actually really good parts (Karsus and Netheril, Thay, the core concept of Undermountain and the Yawning Portal) takes dozens of hours of wiki-searching and book-reading to discover.
And that's a problem. How is a new DM supposed to handle all of that? That is too much. No setting should have that much detail. "Kitchen sink" does not even begin to explain how incredibly bloated the Forgotten Realms are.
Base settings, if D&D even should have them (which I don't think it should), should be relatively simple and easy for new DMs to understand. If you cannot fully detail a single continent in the setting in one source book (like Eberron and Wildemount/Tal'dorei do), you have too much setting. The Forgotten Realms so far has needed 1 source book explaining just a single coast in the world and around a dozen full adventure books describing cities and regions (many of which the SCAG lightly touched on) to explain. If your setting has over a few dozen core deities/religions, it has too many. If your setting has a fantasy equivalent of Australia and has refused to detail it in the slightest, you have committed a sin so terrible that you should be forbidden from writing fantasy ever again.
This last complaint is mostly a joke, but if Osse (yes, that's its real name) ever got a source book in a way that was actually respectful to real Australia's history and cultures, I might have to run a campaign there.
If you want a common touchstone for the identities of different races and classes in the game that new DMs and players can use to get some idea what D&D is like, the Forgotten Realms is not the solution. It's too big. It's been around too long. It has too many problems and 4e at least had the right idea with trying to blow it up to modernize it (even if the execution wasn't great). Exandria would be better (if WotC could get the rights for it, which I doubt). Nentir Vale if it actually got a source book would be better. Eberron might even be better, so long as they ignore the non-Kanon "official" sourcebooks published in 3.5e that tried to bloat it as much as the FR. A completely new setting that used the main tropes and ideas of D&D in a simple, relatively small world (compared to Toril) would be better.
Yeah. One of my main complaints about the official 5e Spelljammer set is that it refused to detail any of the spacefaring factions that were in 2e spelljammer. However, my point that Spelljammer has to make way for practically every other setting in D&D still stands.
Spelljammer and Strixhaven are currently just two exceptions to the typically good setting books in 5e (Wildemount, Eberron, Ravnica, Theros, Ravenloft). The SCAG was also bad, but that was back before WotC discovered how to design setting books in 5e. We'll see how Planescape and Dragonlance look to see if the sky is actually falling or they just had a couple of failed experiments lately (they did say that the Spelljammer format was experimental, after all).
If Planescape comes and doesn't detail the different factions and planes of existence, then I'll be convinced. But for now, I'm mildly worried and hopeful for the setting books coming in the next couple of years.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
This is exactly the reason I have opened Ghosts of Saltmarsh once and then put it on my shelf. Then WizKids had the audacity to try and sell me miniature sets for this thing...
Then the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide lied then, because it literally said that there is no information about what is out there beyond the Trackless Sea.
So, I disagree with you about Forgotten Realms on a few factors, but that is from the perspective of someone that enjoys FR and has read a majority of the literature on it. One of my current groups is playing RotFM, and they have little snippets of FR Lore they know, and its been enjoyable working that into the story. That being said, I don't think anyone has to use everything from FR to use some of FR. I don't think there is a "right" way to play in Faerun, I think its just as detailed or as deep as you want.
Nentir Vale was a great great idea that never really got the attention it deserved, at least in my opinion.
The stuff about Karsus and company was some of the first lore about the setting I was actually exposed to, because the lore about it in 5e directed my attention to that first. I imagine WoTC deliberately hand-picked which parts of the setting to show to DMs in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide so they can look into those specific parts of it themselves.
I do agree that the setting is pretty bloated and requires an encyclopaedia's worth of knowledge to even scratch the surface. Which is actually one of the reasons I said it's more Earth-like than other settings. Because the same is true for Earth itself.
That describes a whole other problem, where officially, everything pre-2014 is not canon. So you’ll have some people pulling out obscure lore from earlier editions, but it’s not “official” anymore, and conflicts with stuff in SCAG and other sources. It just opens up all new cans of contradictions.
Well I agree as well. It's not a very good representation of Greyhawk, in fact they picked a corner of the map that was basically unused and so far away from everything that it could have been set anywhere.
FYI to others, the Saltmarsh is set on the western coast of the Azure sea, which if you look at a map of Eurasia That little pocket in the armpit of east Russia above Japan would be the equivalent area.
See:
https://external-preview.redd.it/d3BJRKJEFwd8xbs0voKqGhUrtN2JM_dtMpBwU40E3s0.jpg?auto=webp&s=7c414d4400419932cb2859ca0e614758c016f2bf
In terms of content written for that setting in the past, not much had bee done. it exsisted, and that was about it, as the Campaign setting typically revolved around the goings on of the west central parts of the map.
Not going to say I know what exactly is past the Trackless sea...but...
Well... https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Toril?file=Toril-3e.jpg
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Maztica?file=Immortal_era_Maztica.png
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Maztica
they did have some books at one time that covered the "New World"
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Anchorome
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Katashaka
Basically, the old content is there for use until something new comes along and changes it. They have the right to change the lore, and update it, but the old lore is true until it is changed.
I personally use all D&D books to run games, and use all the lore from 1st to 5th to come up with story and game ideas. Because it's all out there. And useable.
Another way to look at it, the old lore is canon to a portion of the population of the NPCs and player characters, even if changed with new rule books, just like some people believe the world is 6k years old in the modern era. Grab a science book from 1950 and they will describe the cosmos very differently than how it is described today.
In our real world, different people will see history and facts differently than others. Why can't this be true in a TTRPG setting.