Hello!
Me again - I have a question about the Forgotten Realms and 5th edition. Doing some research for potential locations for any adventures and/or campaigns that might come up, and I'm really liking the look of the Silver Marches.
The thing is, all of the available information is going to be from pre-5th edition material, and I'm given to understand someone messed up 4th edition so the original FR creators had to create the 'Sundering' event to do some kind of soft universe reset? Or something?
Essentially, my question is how do I adapt somewhere like the Silver Marches to the current 5th edition 'state' of the world. For example I think I read that the city of Shade in the neighbouring Anauroch region was destroyed. Is there a guide or something for Forgotten Realms post-Sundering? I can't seem to find anything.
Whilst I'm here, I'm having a littler trouble figuring out what the Sundering actually 'did' other than splitting the world across two planes of existence? What does that even mean from 'big picture' perspective?
As always your help is appreciated and I'm sorry if I offend anyone with my noobness.
I am not quite sure what happened during the Sundering, but I described it to the players that there are now less heroes, and less magic items around. =)
As a GM though, i took the liberties to take what happened in 4e and readjust it all for 5e. For instance, I think Neverwinter was destroyed, but now it seems to be up and running again. For the players, all they know is that Neverwinter was wrecked in a few conflicts and was recently rebuilt by one of the Lords of Waterdeep. I generally extrapolate the info from 4e or whatever (I use the 4e materials, but have stuff back to 2e, the maps are a total blessing), and reshape it to how I like it for 5e. Does that make sense?
Also, I found this to be a very useful resource...
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
DigitalEccentric wrote:
I was afraid of this. I'm bit of a lore-nerd when it comes to these things but I'm trying to read wiki's and stuff and it's all giving me a bit of a head ache.
Can someone just clarify the relationship between Abeir and Toril? Are they two identical copies of the same planet that, at one point were joined (whatever that means?) and are now seperated? Except now parts of one are now located in the other and visa-versa?
The wiki is good, but it needs updating - all of The Sundering books are out now and yet there could be more information about what happens in them (with spoiler warnings of course).
I was tempted to peak at the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure to get some more insight into the sate of Faerun for 5th edition, but I'm about to join a group that's playing it now and I don't want to spoiler myself 
Abeir and Toril were not identical. When the gods and primordials had their war, Abeir-Toril was simply sundered by Ao so that half the world's lands went to the primordials and half to the gods. When Abeir rejoined Toril, only a quarter of what was Abeir appeared in Toril, and a quarter of Toril appeared in Abeir, each displacing the other.
They weren't mirror worlds though as new lands appeared in the Trackless Sea where none had been before, as I understand it.
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Abeir
Right, so they are two halves of the same planet/world? Seperated by planes of existence or something?
DigitalEccentric wrote:
Well, as a total noob to this, I don't have a preffered Cosmology yet hah.
All I really won't to know is where the edges of the map are? I can leave all of the Material/Astral/Elemental Plane stuff since I'm basing everything in Faerun for the moment, but I'm just having trouble wrapping my head around the construction and layout of the basic world.
I've seen world maps that show other continents, but are those continents technically in Abeir, so arn't reachable through normal means?
I've read that article you linke Pan but it might as well be Greek for all I understood of it.
Sorry about this!
DigitalEccentric wrote:
The 5e Realms are pretty much meant to look just like the pre-4e Realms. You can ignore all that stuff about Abeir as it only ever was a thing for 4e.
IIRC, all that happened was the pseudo-Central American continent of Maztica was replaced with "Returned Abeir", while the pseudo-Babylonian and Egyptian nations of Unther and Mulhorand in southeastern Faerûn were replaced with some dragonborn lands from Abeir.
As I said, though, you can ignore all that as Ao has (supposedly) returned everything to how it was before.
So using 3E as a template is a good place to start then I guess?
DigitalEccentric wrote:
You can also get the 4e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, pick an area that they turned into a howling wilderness, and declare it to be a new frontier of expansion and growth.
For instance, Cormyr could sponsor expeditions into the Vilhon Reach. (Think Royal Company of Virginia.)
Thanks BRJN - I think I'll stick with the Silver Marches though as I like the sound of it.
Guess I'll have to get used to the fact that there's a lot of leeway to take liberties with the world. I like to try and be as officialy as possible as it reduces the risk of official material completely contradicting something I've done, but I guess that is D&D!
One final question re: The Sundering... given the forces involved (Gods), do you think this event is a little bit like The Time War from Doctor Who? Where only creatures that were advanced or evolved enough to perceive Time were effected by it?
Do you think The Sundering was fought on such a high plane that 'normal' folk, or folk with no advanced magic, weren't aware all this stuff was going on? Or is FR more in your face than that?
Previously-floating earthmotes fall out of the sky, 40 Days and Nights of Rain (to refill the Sea of Fallen Stars), something dumps rock into the chasms leading to the Underdark, earthquakes and volcanoes as Abeir / Toril move apart again ... I'd have to say that the Sundering was pretty hard for the common folk to miss.
The best way I have found to prevent officially released material from over-writing what you do, is to set your campaign someplace that the Official Materials do not cover. (Hence my suggestion.)
I would NEVER set my campaign in Cormyr / Dales / Cormanthor (or nearby); this is Ed Greenwood's home turf. Likewise, WotC is working in Moonsea and Sword Coast for 5e adventures. R.A. Salvatori seems to like the far northwest, so he may step on your toes once in a while.
See, this is what I'm talking about - where did you get all that info from? Is it all from the book series? I wish the wiki page would be updated with summaries already for those.
Looks like I'm going to have to just wing it the best I can. If official material comes out that overwrites my stuff, I suppose as DM it's my choice whether to incorporate or ignore. I suppose the thing I'm struggling most is the soft-reset going from 4e to 5e, but you guys have already given great advice on that.
Yeah, I can appreciate those specific events could be hard to miss, but would people see 40 days of Rain and thing. "Oh, must be the Sundering", or might they just think it's a little bit weird, not nothing out of the ordinary?
I'm more interested in this idea that continents just dissapear or re-appear and swap. Much like how, if history is changed in DW, most normal people just have their brains re-worked to automatically accept the new timeline and they don't notice anything different.
For example: Someone mentioned Returned Abeir replaced another continent. Would the common folk conciously know that an entire region just got replaced, or would their minds have just been retconned by a divine source to just accept the new state of the world? But, say, someone with access to higher magic can see the changes being rought to the world by Ao and the other Gods, so they are aware that the fabric of the world has shifted?
In DW, people's memories are only re-written to accommodate changes if they happened in their relative pasts. Adult Casran developed new memories when The Doctor visited him in his childhood, but the whole world remembered the Christmas Sycoracx invasion. The changes to the forgotten realms occured in the present timeline, they didn't alter the realms' history. Think less The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, more Army of Ghosts/Doomsday.
DigitalEccentric wrote:
This link may help you:
http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-forgotten-realms-in-5th-edition.html
That is useful - I didn' know they'd actually kept the time frame established in 4e.. I figured since they were undoing so much, from a timeline perspective, they'd pretend 4e never happened. Or 'it did but it didn't'.
Oh well, guess mine's going to be even more homebrew! I'm not good enough to take 3e information and plausibly explain 100 years of growth...
I think I'll enjoy writing out my own interpretation of the Sundering anyway. The more I think about it, the more I'm intrigued by my Time War comparison... I thought that was a really interesting part of the early 'new' Doctor Who episodes.