So I really enjoy having a wide variety of character races and classes but my question is what are your thoughts on allowing characters that have description specified for other worlds being in the forgotten realms. Should I just recreate them for the forgotten realms. Any other ideas.
I'm guessing that you're talking about Warforged, Vedalken, or Simic Hybrids. And sure, you're absolutely allowed to make any PC race available in any campaign setting you'd like. Just change whatever fluff you need to to allow them to fit into that world.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
It's totally fine. WotC doesn't dispatch ninja hit squads to the house of any DM who deviates from What The Book Says - I stake my life on that, literally, since I deviate all the time. Your table, your rules, your version of the Forgotten Realms.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I've done that often. Sometimes a really enterprising DM will go ahead and think about races they want to add to a setting, but it usually happens as a conversation between the player who wants to use this non-standard race and the DM about how to incorporate this character into the setting. How many others are like them? What kind of society do they have - or do they just live in other societies? What is their cultural history? The original source's flavor text will often give some ideas to help flesh this out.
For example, shifters are really easy to port over. You know how dragonborn have some sort of strange racial affinity with dragons and tieflings with fiends? Shifters have their own nebulous racial connection with lycanthropes. They tend to be wild and mistrusted, but thus often live at the fringes of society, but can blend in when they want to.
Warforged in the FR would probably be a more unique character. Who made it, and how long ago? How did the character gain sentience - or is it a mystery or accident?
And, of course, extradimensional travel is possible in D&D, so you could always fall back on the race having come through a portal to another world and become trapped in Faerun. Depending on how long ago that happened and the lifespan of the race in question, the PC might be someone from that other world or the descendant of someone who came from there.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
It's totally fine. WotC doesn't dispatch ninja hit squads to the house of any DM who deviates from What The Book Says - I stake my life on that, literally, since I deviate all the time. Your table, your rules, your version of the Forgotten Realms.
It's totally fine. WotC doesn't dispatch ninja hit squads to the house of any DM who deviates from What The Book Says - I stake my life on that, literally, since I deviate all the time. Your table, your rules, your version of the Forgotten Realms.
WHAT?!?!
~Glances nervously over shoulder~
As long as I'm still posting, you should be fine. If you don't see any activity from this account for a couple of weeks, then maybe consider cleaning up your act just in case. ;)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
As long as I'm still posting, you should be fine. If you don't see any activity from this account for a couple of weeks, then maybe consider cleaning up your act just in case. ;)
I'm prepared to get shot for the principle of "no kenders."
It's totally fine. WotC doesn't dispatch ninja hit squads to the house of any DM who deviates from What The Book Says - I stake my life on that, literally, since I deviate all the time. Your table, your rules, your version of the Forgotten Realms.
WHAT?!?!
~Glances nervously over shoulder~
The Wizards of the Coast send their regards.
I was thinking Wizards would use something more like this:
As long as I'm still posting, you should be fine. If you don't see any activity from this account for a couple of weeks, then maybe consider cleaning up your act just in case. ;)
I'm prepared to get shot for the principle of "no kenders."
I'm prepared to shoot kender.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
As long as I'm still posting, you should be fine. If you don't see any activity from this account for a couple of weeks, then maybe consider cleaning up your act just in case. ;)
I'm prepared to get shot for the principle of "no kenders."
As long as I'm still posting, you should be fine. If you don't see any activity from this account for a couple of weeks, then maybe consider cleaning up your act just in case. ;)
I'm prepared to get shot for the principle of "no kenders."
I'm prepared to shoot kender.
So am I.
Just remember they taste great with BBQ on them lol
As far as "playing by the book" with Forgotten Realms, at least in 5e the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide has this passage on "Beyond the Trackless Sea" that I lean on heavily when incorporating races not officially located in Faerun:
Farther to the west, past even Evermeet, are untold, unknown lands beyond the Trackless Sea. Many explorers have visited such lands, and some have even returned, bearing tales that change from generation to generation about exotic locales, from island chains that are the sites of countless shipwrecks, to fearsome feather-clad warriors, and vast continents that suddenly appeared where nothing — or something very much different — had rested only seasons prior.
To me, that gives the DM really broad latitude in importing other races into an otherwise mainstream FR game. The Sword Coast is accustomed to "new arrivals" walking off ships returning from expeditions and wayward trading missions. DM has the latitude to make space in their game for that "far away land" to be visited by the party at some point, or leave it as a "you can't go home again" sort of write off.
I'd say everyone's WotC hit team would stand down, but I don't think they ever stood up. At least on these grounds, we're all playing in line with the books. If anything the notion of WotC hit teams is probably a disinformation psyop conducted by ENWorld, Paizo, and Kobold Press.
Re: Kender, while I've read the first Chronicles trilogy, I've never actually read a Krynn based game source book in any edition. Since Dragonlance is likely on the horizon for a hardcover inside the next two years, are Kender really that different from Halflings (aside from the "culture" that can prompt some pretty disruptive role playing in some players)? I mean Halflings have the Brave trait universally I believe, and that's the only really distinctive trait I remember Kender having outside the problematic "kleptomania culture."
Re: Kender, while I've read the first Chronicles trilogy, I've never actually read a Krynn based game source book in any edition. Since Dragonlance is likely on the horizon for a hardcover inside the next two years, are Kender really that different from Halflings (aside from the "culture" that can prompt some pretty disruptive role playing in some players)? I mean Halflings have the Brave trait universally I believe, and that's the only really distinctive trait I remember Kender having outside the problematic "kleptomania culture."
Wellll, yeah. You could find the AD&D stat block for them in the Dragonlance Sourcebook. And I don't know what they'd keep or leave if they bring them into 5e, obviously. But the last time the subject came up, I think halflings have Brave and Kender have: immune to condition frightened; auto-proficiency in Sleight-of-Hand; darkvision; and a save-or-suck taunt ability that would cause ANY opponent to stop whatever they were doing and physically attack the kender, which doesn't sound that bad, unless you ever use spell casters against your players. And those are the less broken features. This one is the piece-de-resistance:
"If there are kender in a party of adventurers, the DM needs to keep track of the items in the kender's pockets...this chart must have at least 100 spaces for entries. The first 92 are always filled. The first 82 positions on the chart are composed of relatively harmless items that a kender might pull out of his pockets (for 5e, let's say that's 82 rolls on the PHB trinket table). This is followed by 10 objects that start out as harmless items but they can be exchanged for more useful objects as the kender collects things on his adventures. Slots from 93 up are filled one at a time each time the kender goes up a level. These slots should be filled according to the following table:
01-20: Harmless Item (Trinket Table, italics mine); 21-60: Basic Equipment (mundane item from PHB list); 61-100 - Magical Item (determined randomly from the 1e DMG. In the interests of game balance, they suggest you reroll any artifacts your kender has picked up without noticing it).
The real thing isn't kenders; lots of people play gnomes or halflings basically the same way. The thing is that the rules were giving permission to the worst guy in the group to basically be Woody Woodpecker with the DM as the Walrus who was just trying to have a nice cookout.
And re: SCAG, I think that's a good way to do it. If you can, like, WandaVision Maztica in and out of existence, anything else could replace it in any given FR campaign.
The issue with kender was largely how much the Dragonlance books tried to portray kender as being such wonderful, magical little beings whom everyone but the most heartless of fiends loves on sight and cast them as being unconsciously prone to screwing the party by accident. Decent from a story-writing perspective but utterly terrible for use as player characters.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
Right, I forgot about the Taunting scene(s?) in the novels. I could see Halfling 5e bravery standing in for or rather replacing the fear immunity. I remember plenty of POV sections where Tasslehoff while not literally scared, was processing stress in a way that caused him to freeze up, a la someone with advantage failing both rolls on a difficult fear check, might as well have been scared.
As for the taunt, that's harder, maybe something like a built in vicious mockery, or sort of a reversal of dissonant whispers that doesn't drive the target off but compels the target to attack.
...I'm probably glossing over a lot and my gut's now telling me they'd probably be a problem to play in 5e as written in the original novels.
But yeah, to the original topic, I think that SCAG paragraph grants Mazteca fading in and out and plenty of other Brigadoon type places that pop up, in the FR and if its locals stray too far, they're stuck there now. Flying Dutchmen type ships from Krynn find themselves in the Sea of Fallen Stars etc. Heck you could have Toril basically be some sort of Bermuda Triangle like depository of various multiversal fluid spaces.
In all seriousness, even though it's totally fine, some “worlds” really settings are too closed off from the rest of the D&D universe for there to be easy travel between them. It could still happen, of course, but I would expect that character to be unique in the forgotten realms because to get there, they would have had to have suffered some form of calamity or have purposefully gone to a lot of trouble to travel there for a reason.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
But yeah, to the original topic, I think that SCAG paragraph grants Mazteca fading in and out and plenty of other Brigadoon type places that pop up, in the FR and if its locals stray too far, they're stuck there now. Flying Dutchmen type ships from Krynn find themselves in the Sea of Fallen Stars etc. Heck you could have Toril basically be some sort of Bermuda Triangle like depository of various multiversal fluid spaces.
In all seriousness, even though it's totally fine, some “worlds” really settings are too closed off from the rest of the D&D universe for there to be easy travel between them. It could still happen, of course, but I would expect that character to be unique in the forgotten realms because to get there, they would have had to have suffered some form of calamity or have purposefully gone to a lot of trouble to travel there for a reason.
I think your comment was already pre-affirmed. But the OP isn't so much asking for necessarily literal connections between game worlds. They were asking for mechanisms to incorporate races into the Forgotten Realms. The SCAG gives every DM an out here by saying while Faerun is pretty well defined, literally anything can be found out beyond the Trackless Sea. Sure Eberron or Exandria or whichever makes a big case in its lore to be NOT CONNECTED to the D&D multiverse is all well and good. Nothing in present guidance to DMs of the Forgotten Realms is really stopping a DM from taking races from those sealed off worlds and putting them somewhere on Toril, or homebrew races or 3rd party races etc. Sure the "story" of those people will likely have to take great liberties or departures from the lore binding them to a specific lore, but the point here is there's nothing about the Forgotten Realms that requires a DM to say "no, just no" to any race a PC proposes. The paragraph is a license to make the Forgotten Realms what the DM wants it to be.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
In all seriousness, even though it's totally fine, some “worlds” really settings are too closed off from the rest of the D&D universe for there to be easy travel between them. It could still happen, of course, but I would expect that character to be unique in the forgotten realms because to get there, they would have had to have suffered some form of calamity or have purposefully gone to a lot of trouble to travel there for a reason.
Or the DM just pretends the race was always part of the setting, creates a niche for it somewhere remote, and calls it good. Just because a race doesn't canonically exist in a setting doesn't mean it can't exist there in your version of that same setting.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I allow interdimensional travel in my campaign. I think it is both fun to have more diverse and interesting options, and as a GM, I simply do not want to go through the hassle of managing content. I justify it in game by having their patron be the head of an interdimensional company focusing on transporting goods, services, and people between worlds.
So I really enjoy having a wide variety of character races and classes but my question is what are your thoughts on allowing characters that have description specified for other worlds being in the forgotten realms. Should I just recreate them for the forgotten realms. Any other ideas.
Mythology Master
I'm guessing that you're talking about Warforged, Vedalken, or Simic Hybrids. And sure, you're absolutely allowed to make any PC race available in any campaign setting you'd like. Just change whatever fluff you need to to allow them to fit into that world.
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.
It's totally fine. WotC doesn't dispatch ninja hit squads to the house of any DM who deviates from What The Book Says - I stake my life on that, literally, since I deviate all the time. Your table, your rules, your version of the Forgotten Realms.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I've done that often. Sometimes a really enterprising DM will go ahead and think about races they want to add to a setting, but it usually happens as a conversation between the player who wants to use this non-standard race and the DM about how to incorporate this character into the setting. How many others are like them? What kind of society do they have - or do they just live in other societies? What is their cultural history? The original source's flavor text will often give some ideas to help flesh this out.
For example, shifters are really easy to port over. You know how dragonborn have some sort of strange racial affinity with dragons and tieflings with fiends? Shifters have their own nebulous racial connection with lycanthropes. They tend to be wild and mistrusted, but thus often live at the fringes of society, but can blend in when they want to.
Warforged in the FR would probably be a more unique character. Who made it, and how long ago? How did the character gain sentience - or is it a mystery or accident?
And, of course, extradimensional travel is possible in D&D, so you could always fall back on the race having come through a portal to another world and become trapped in Faerun. Depending on how long ago that happened and the lifespan of the race in question, the PC might be someone from that other world or the descendant of someone who came from there.
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.
The Wizards of the Coast send their regards.
Come participate in the Competition of the Finest Brews, Edition XXVIII?
My homebrew stuff:
Spells, Monsters, Magic Items, Feats, Subclasses.
I am an Archfey, but nobody seems to notice.
Extended Signature
As long as I'm still posting, you should be fine. If you don't see any activity from this account for a couple of weeks, then maybe consider cleaning up your act just in case. ;)
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I'm prepared to get shot for the principle of "no kenders."
I was thinking Wizards would use something more like this:
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
I'm prepared to shoot kender.
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.
So am I.
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
Just remember they taste great with BBQ on them lol
As far as "playing by the book" with Forgotten Realms, at least in 5e the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide has this passage on "Beyond the Trackless Sea" that I lean on heavily when incorporating races not officially located in Faerun:
To me, that gives the DM really broad latitude in importing other races into an otherwise mainstream FR game. The Sword Coast is accustomed to "new arrivals" walking off ships returning from expeditions and wayward trading missions. DM has the latitude to make space in their game for that "far away land" to be visited by the party at some point, or leave it as a "you can't go home again" sort of write off.
I'd say everyone's WotC hit team would stand down, but I don't think they ever stood up. At least on these grounds, we're all playing in line with the books. If anything the notion of WotC hit teams is probably a disinformation psyop conducted by ENWorld, Paizo, and Kobold Press.
Re: Kender, while I've read the first Chronicles trilogy, I've never actually read a Krynn based game source book in any edition. Since Dragonlance is likely on the horizon for a hardcover inside the next two years, are Kender really that different from Halflings (aside from the "culture" that can prompt some pretty disruptive role playing in some players)? I mean Halflings have the Brave trait universally I believe, and that's the only really distinctive trait I remember Kender having outside the problematic "kleptomania culture."
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Wellll, yeah. You could find the AD&D stat block for them in the Dragonlance Sourcebook. And I don't know what they'd keep or leave if they bring them into 5e, obviously. But the last time the subject came up, I think halflings have Brave and Kender have: immune to condition frightened; auto-proficiency in Sleight-of-Hand; darkvision; and a save-or-suck taunt ability that would cause ANY opponent to stop whatever they were doing and physically attack the kender, which doesn't sound that bad, unless you ever use spell casters against your players. And those are the less broken features. This one is the piece-de-resistance:
The real thing isn't kenders; lots of people play gnomes or halflings basically the same way. The thing is that the rules were giving permission to the worst guy in the group to basically be Woody Woodpecker with the DM as the Walrus who was just trying to have a nice cookout.
And re: SCAG, I think that's a good way to do it. If you can, like, WandaVision Maztica in and out of existence, anything else could replace it in any given FR campaign.
The issue with kender was largely how much the Dragonlance books tried to portray kender as being such wonderful, magical little beings whom everyone but the most heartless of fiends loves on sight and cast them as being unconsciously prone to screwing the party by accident. Decent from a story-writing perspective but utterly terrible for use as player characters.
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.
Right, I forgot about the Taunting scene(s?) in the novels. I could see Halfling 5e bravery standing in for or rather replacing the fear immunity. I remember plenty of POV sections where Tasslehoff while not literally scared, was processing stress in a way that caused him to freeze up, a la someone with advantage failing both rolls on a difficult fear check, might as well have been scared.
As for the taunt, that's harder, maybe something like a built in vicious mockery, or sort of a reversal of dissonant whispers that doesn't drive the target off but compels the target to attack.
...I'm probably glossing over a lot and my gut's now telling me they'd probably be a problem to play in 5e as written in the original novels.
But yeah, to the original topic, I think that SCAG paragraph grants Mazteca fading in and out and plenty of other Brigadoon type places that pop up, in the FR and if its locals stray too far, they're stuck there now. Flying Dutchmen type ships from Krynn find themselves in the Sea of Fallen Stars etc. Heck you could have Toril basically be some sort of Bermuda Triangle like depository of various multiversal fluid spaces.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
In all seriousness, even though it's totally fine, some “worlds” really settings are too closed off from the rest of the D&D universe for there to be easy travel between them. It could still happen, of course, but I would expect that character to be unique in the forgotten realms because to get there, they would have had to have suffered some form of calamity or have purposefully gone to a lot of trouble to travel there for a reason.
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
I think your comment was already pre-affirmed. But the OP isn't so much asking for necessarily literal connections between game worlds. They were asking for mechanisms to incorporate races into the Forgotten Realms. The SCAG gives every DM an out here by saying while Faerun is pretty well defined, literally anything can be found out beyond the Trackless Sea. Sure Eberron or Exandria or whichever makes a big case in its lore to be NOT CONNECTED to the D&D multiverse is all well and good. Nothing in present guidance to DMs of the Forgotten Realms is really stopping a DM from taking races from those sealed off worlds and putting them somewhere on Toril, or homebrew races or 3rd party races etc. Sure the "story" of those people will likely have to take great liberties or departures from the lore binding them to a specific lore, but the point here is there's nothing about the Forgotten Realms that requires a DM to say "no, just no" to any race a PC proposes. The paragraph is a license to make the Forgotten Realms what the DM wants it to be.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Or the DM just pretends the race was always part of the setting, creates a niche for it somewhere remote, and calls it good. Just because a race doesn't canonically exist in a setting doesn't mean it can't exist there in your version of that same setting.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I allow interdimensional travel in my campaign. I think it is both fun to have more diverse and interesting options, and as a GM, I simply do not want to go through the hassle of managing content. I justify it in game by having their patron be the head of an interdimensional company focusing on transporting goods, services, and people between worlds.
Check Licenses and Resync Entitlements: < https://www.dndbeyond.com/account/licenses >
Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
D&D with High School Students by Bill Allen; Season 1 Episode 1: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52NJTUDokyk&t >