Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 goujoe_the_bumpkin Dec 12, 2009 23:17:49	Basically I'm just overwriting the, in my humble opinion, unfortunately chosen (to put it lightly) story events and cosmology changes implemented in 4e FR (Mostly sticking with 3.5 lore, save for some small things from 4e and other things I'm creating from scratch). The pivotal concept of the change being an event called the “Portal Storm”, which caused an abnormally large amount of portals to open and close all over Toril over the course of about a decade or so. This event caused a large amount of planar creatures both sentient and otherwise to be stranded in Faerûn and beyond, and enough time has passed since this event (perhaps a couple centuries or so) to allow these planars on Toril to begin mixing and integrating into the environments and societies of the natives. These beings mostly consisting of aasimars, tieflings, gith, and especially genasi (I've got a thing for them), along with other planars exotic and otherwise that would have the ability to integrate at least somewhat successfully with existing Faerûnian cultures or start their own (I would greatly appreciate suggestions). Along with other changes such as more solidified nations and fewer independent city-states like those on the Sword Coast, a larger role played by off-planet influences (spelljammers would be uncommon, but far from rare), and other things. As far as races go, most of the new core races are simply going to be either planetouched or something similar, such as dragonborn being decendants of half-dragons, eladrin being elves with fey creatures in their ancestry, deva simply being reflavored as aasimars, genasi being re-split into their much more distict and subdued elemental varieties (as I'm sticking with the 3.5 concept of separate planes for each base, quasi, and para element rather then the Elemental Clusterf**k), and planetouched such as teiflings having much more subdued indicators of their race rather then the spawn-of-Mephistopheles look they have now (Tiny horns rather then gargantuan ones, no four foot long tails, basically a look that would allow them and any planetouched to at least somewhat pass as human with a lot of disguising and some heavy robes/hoods if needed). I would greatly appretiate things such as tips, suggestions, pointing out things that I would need to clarify or rework in order to fit in to the redone world, and esspecially perhaps links to some stuff that may have to do with what I'm doing (I would jump for joy if someone pointed me to somwhere that had 4e character stats for 3.5 style genasi!), any sort of feedback would be monumentally welcome and helpful (Well, other then flaming and such, lol).
#2 The_Silversword Dec 13, 2009 2:29:22	Sounds interesting, and very doable in the Realms, there are tons of portals in there. So when did this Portal Storm happen? Or you using the same time period as 4e Realms or are you uping it even more, or not as far? How did this Portal Storm come to happen any way? I could possibly see you just toss out the Core races or at least tweak them all to incoporate some sort of planar change to them, like elemental elves for instance. Are these portal still open or have things more or less stabilized now? Im senseing a sort of Rifts vibe going on. You could introduce some stuff into the Realms that otherwise wouldnt be there, like battle mechs or something. Sounds like it could be a lot of fun!
#3 goujoe_the_bumpkin Dec 13, 2009 3:08:55	I haven't entirely worked out an exact date or year for the Portal Storm to happen quite yet, maybe I'll have it happen the same year as the events that brought about the 4e changes or something along those lines. Now, I may change the exact cause of the Storm once I get more into it, but at the moment I'm thinking that a powerful villain or cult attempting to open a giant portal to the Far Realm had their extremely powerful spells thwarted by some force (perhaps a group of adventurers), but instead of stopping the spell altogether, it essentially went haywire and began opening small portals to Toril from all over the planescape and took a decade or two for the titanic magic throwing the planes out of whack to finally die down and bring the portals back to their typically rare rate of occurrence. The main antagonists of the campaign I'm working on this for will be this villain or group resurfacing to make another attempt at the spell after hundreds of years of preperation. I don't think I want to toss out the core races, as they would still make sense with some reflavoring, I want the whole concept of extreme diversity to play a large role in the new FR. The basic humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and the other vanilla races would still make up a large part of the population, but there would be much much more exotic races who have carved out a niche for themselves in the world. Also, I am going to use a setup of the planes that would allow the worlds of other settings be a part of the large group of planes that make up the Prime Material, so races from Eberron and such would also play a role in the altered world of Toril (I know zilch about any setting other then FR, so some suggestions for influences from other settings would be nice). Also, I do plan on introducing some elements of beyond extra-planar origin later on in the adventure. Basicly the party comes to learn that the Far Realm is a sort of "Border plane", for lack of a better description. Basically the unstable soap film that encircles the bubble that is the planescape. It's the barrier that would mark the border between the universe (planescape) of the Realms and the far-off, other universes that make up the vast multiverse as a whole. The machinations of the group/person trying to reach the Far Realm is somehow able to basicly send out ripples past the Far Realm and into other "nearby" universes of the multiverse, ripples that are picked up by beings of a universe that is none too friendly... let's just say that it's a universe run by the employers of our good, old, pal Cthulhu (Mwahahaha!!).
#4 The_Silversword Dec 13, 2009 3:23:56	Hells yeah, you got to have Cthulu in there! Sounds like a plan to me. Im suprised they didnt actually use something like this in 4e Realms, it would of make sense for the Spellplague to make portals act funny, bringing in creatures from all over the multiverse. So are these new races that were ported in pretty wide spread or do groups from Hell hang out in this particular area and races from the Elemental Chaos hang out in that area or would they all be pretty mixxed? Or what about the gods? Are you going to keep with the standard Realms gods or have other gods from other worlds suddenly taken more of an interest in the Realms now? Theres Time Portals across Faerun too, so maybe beings from different time periods have popped in too? Im really liking this idea more and more, you could pretty much do anything, and add anything you wanted.
#5 gomeztoo Dec 14, 2009 2:30:39	Hells yeah, you got to have Cthulu in there! Sounds like a plan to me. Im suprised they didnt actually use something like this in 4e Realms/quote] Well, they sort of did Cthulu with the Aboleth Sovereignty. And why do you need portals to act weird when you can gate in anything you want from Abeir? In fact, people keep telling me portals got closed and there are fewer now. I keep having to covince them that the portals in the Fall of Stars (still) work. Gomez
#6 goujoe_the_bumpkin Dec 14, 2009 2:48:05	Well, they sort of did Cthulu with the Aboleth Sovereignty. And why do you need portals to act weird when you can gate in anything you want from Abeir? In fact, people keep telling me portals got closed and there are fewer now. I keep having to covince them that the portals in the Fall of Stars (still) work. Gomez As I said, I'm pretty much just overwriting the stuff with the Abeir business, the Primordials, Mystra getting shanked, the Spellplague (Okay, so I may incorporate that in some way), and most of the other setting changes that came with 4e. Besides, I reeeaallly like planar tomfoolery, so I decided to do something with a lot of that going on.
#7 goujoe_the_bumpkin Dec 14, 2009 3:18:33	So are these new races that were ported in pretty wide spread or do groups from Hell hang out in this particular area and races from the Elemental Chaos hang out in that area or would they all be pretty mixxed? Or what about the gods? Are you going to keep with the standard Realms gods or have other gods from other worlds suddenly taken more of an interest in the Realms now? Theres Time Portals across Faerun too, so maybe beings from different time periods have popped in too? Im really liking this idea more and more, you could pretty much do anything, and add anything you wanted. I was thinking a bit of a mix of both of those ideas. The planars that could marginally fit in to the societies of populated areas be fairly widespread (As in maybe around 10%-15% of the population in established regions and cities rather then 0.01%), and specific areas that are much more densely populated with either one type of planar/planetouched, or just planar/planetouched in general. Say for instance: full-on fiendish creatures would cause a lot of trouble wherever they ported in, so a large effort would have been made to eradicate or at the very least contain them, so there might be a small region controlled by devils leading to a higher population of tieflings being sewn and spreading out from that area. While in largely human controlled places such as Cormyr I could see a higher chance of the populace quickly growing rather prejudiced or even xenophobic towards any planars who tried settling in their lands, leading to, say, caravans of wandering genasi gypsies leaving that land to seek a better life elsewhere. And then there's things such as Calimshan that was at one point ruled by Efreeti in the past, perhaps there would be a large population of fire genasi who would migrate to that part of the map (as genasi in the old setting were born from any pairing of any creature from an elemental plane, such as efreets, and a mortal). Really, the possibilities are rather endless, but almost all extremely interesting. Hmm... I didn't really think about the idea of time travel... actually, that gives me an awesome idea! Maybe I could have that be relatively limited (To avoid completely breaking the swords-and-sorcery setting), but have perhaps some regions where tinker gnomes from the (not too far) future have influenced the technology and culture. Can you say Steampunk, anyone? Unfortunately I would probably need to keep that sort of thing relatively controlled, if used at all. While having railroads in the Dales and zeppelins flying over Waterdeep just oozes with awesome, I think that's a can of worms best left to be opened later (though now I totally want to explore that concept at some point in the future!).
#8 The_Silversword Dec 14, 2009 4:05:36	Well, they sort of did Cthulu with the Aboleth Sovereignty. And why do you need portals to act weird when you can gate in anything you want from Abeir? In fact, people keep telling me portals got closed and there are fewer now. I keep having to covince them that the portals in the Fall of Stars (still) work. Gomez Indeed, The Far Realms just scream out Cthulu! And yeah I would imagine that there are still plenty of functioning portals through out the Realms, especially in places not as hard hit by the spell plague, like the Dales for instance.   Hmm... I didn't really think about the idea of time travel... actually, that gives me an awesome idea! Maybe I could have that be relatively limited (To avoid completely breaking the swords-and-sorcery setting), but have perhaps some regions where tinker gnomes from the (not too far) future have influenced the technology and culture. Can you say Steampunk, anyone? Unfortunately I would probably need to keep that sort of thing relatively controlled, if used at all. While having railroads in the Dales and zeppelins flying over Waterdeep just oozes with awesome, I think that's a can of worms best left to be opened later (though now I totally want to explore that concept at some point in the future!). Yeah steampunk would be a great idea. They sort of had that in the Realms with Lantan, but it got blowed up in the Spellplauge, but if youre not doing the spellplauge and Lantan is still there, maybe thier technology is more wide spread? When i was saying time portals i was thinking ray guns and light sabers, but that might be a little too much. There was an old 2e adventure called Tale of the Comet that mixxed high tech with D&D, kinda interesting. Some of the older modules, like the Blackmoor ones dealt with alien technology, and time travel, but that might be a little too crazy for what you got in mind. I'll dig around through some of those adventures and see if theres any thing that might fit in with a multi planar type enviroment, or some Steampunk level tech, Unless you decide you might want some ray guns in there!
#9 goujoe_the_bumpkin Dec 16, 2009 0:03:13	One thing I've been thinking about that might provide some interesting adventures or quests might be to introduce some political upheaval into the Realms. And I don't mean just regime changes and things like that, I mean upheavals reminiscent of real world revolutions. Things such as a communist uprising in Thay, or democractic rebellions in Cormyr, maybe facism in Amn, that sort of thing. Anyone ever use those themes in their campaigns? And what regions do you think might work better for that sort of thing then others?
#10 Doombringer_of_Hoar Dec 17, 2009 12:10:58	Sounds interesting. Add in some Planar politics?