Help request for the lore-less DM. (D&D stuff)
So i've recently spent half a hundred dollars on the Princes of the Apocalypse book, and would quite like to get some use out of it before something newer comes out and it gets harder to find players. (It should be mentioned before i get too far into minutia, that all my games are online.)Anyway, my problem is that i've rapidly grown tired of Forgotten Realms. And i've definitely gotten tired of hearing about how the third son of a dead god decreed that every second toothbrush is magical on the sixth hour of every tenday in which a man named Gerald says the word "booger". That's an exaggeration of course, but probably not as much as you think! Having to do ASoIaF-levels of research every time i want to make up my own hook into a FR adventure is getting old, real quick.
Read the rest here - http://service.rss2twi.com/link/RedditRPG/?post_id=10608099
Which got me to thinking, what I know about the Forgotten Realms ends at 2nd edition, minus a few books here and there. Had a good laugh at the above, but it makes you realize unless you swallow the blue pill and buy everything that is out there, its hard to know all the "arcana".
Running adventure a pre-fab world has its advantages and disadvantages. Especially if you have a group that likes to adhere to canon. I wrote something about this a little while ago. I try to take something up to a point where folks know and then go off the rails from there to make a new canon. Marvel has a bunch of multiple universes so why can't we?
ReplyDeleteI agree Tim. I've come to the conclusion that I may just blow up FR eventually! Why not! Some world ending cataclysm. Be done with it and move on. I think what I am going to do is run it from 2e, so 1347 DR or whatever, the time of Elminster, Drizzt, etc. Not sure if they are still alive in all honesty. To try and maintain any kind of Cannon could be extremely difficult. A lot of the older settings appeal to me, especially when playing with players that are already aware of FR. Even though there is history with greyhawk, you can make it fresh and new, and not worry too much about the other going's on in novels and the like. I had a player of mine ask if he should read the FR books. (scary). As my friend Frank said, its not good if the DM is the one that knows the least about the campaign setting. The above just made me giggle and giggle however (the original blogposting) I hate that I copied it word for word, but its funny.
DeleteAnyways, I'm running the starter set for 5e, and then either building my own world, or greyhawk, Titan, or possibly Blackmarsh.
I agree with your group canon issue. What makes it worse is if a player has more canon knowledge than the DM and starts spouting off the day that this or that event will happen. And then tries to meta-game the crap out of it.
ReplyDeleteI use Forgotten Realms almost exclusively - unless I'm running a 1st edition game. To address this I use the basic info and maps of the setting and twist the crap out of them. Entities (Cormyr, Western Heartlands, etc.), gods (Tempus, Mystra, etc.) and some figures (Elminster) stay the same, but almost everything else is reduced or magnified to give it a different feel. Plus, I state a caveat at the beginning that the campaign will not adhere to canon and that assumptions can get you killed.
As a side note, I'm currently running 3.5e Forgotten Realms with 5e mechanics. Its working quite well.