Refugees from the Forgotten Realms
ffilz:
I've been enjoying the whole Burning Realms series of posts. Sometimes makes me wish I had held onto that grey box and a couple supplements.
But I never dug into it back in the day. Oh, I read the boxed set, and we even had a campaign move into the Forgotten Realms for a while. But it never stuck on me. I will continue to enjoy the Realms through the stories of Judd's games.
Frank
ffilz:
Of course I thought of something more to say after I hit post...
I am really digging the idea of enjoying these mega-settings by taking a few choice bits, often from the early publishing of the setting and go from there, and let go of the need to be confined by the volumes of information, with all it's revisions, and status of who knows more.
I have used the Blackmoor setting in this way. Oh, I use the newer maps from the TSR DA1-DA4 series modules, but I ignore most of the text of those modules, and have totally ignored the D20 version.
I have resolved that when I play Glorantha again in the future that I will stick mostly to the RQ2 era materials, perhaps pulling in a few of the Avalon Hill era bits, and mostly ignoring the Hero Wars/Quest era materials.
I have had fun with these settings when limiting myself. I got caught up in a materialistic hoarding habit with the newer materials and never even really dug into them much.
Frank
Judd:
I lost a post just after I posted about the spiders and lost momentum for posting the last bit. Here we go:
The spiders game used the realm as more of a chew toy than a setting but its good fun so far. Really, the setting has been the hierarchy within the spiders, with Witt and Rob learning about this odd eight-legged, alien society.
Worth noting: I really hate spiders. Once they get big enough that they have facial expressions, they scare the shit out of me.
While running and posting about these games set in the Realms, an old buddy, Jason, commented that he was jealous. Jay and I had played together as teens and all through college. I ran my first one-on-one campaign with him in his parent's kitchen with GURPS, in which he played an albino gunslinging minotaur in a fantasy western thing our teenage minds dreamed up. Good times.
He had planned to visit, so we set up a Realms game set in Waterdeep. He was an old thief who had operated on the periphery of the Shadow Thieves before they were driven out of the city a few years ago. There are rumors of a crime lord gathering power in the city now but no one is sure who. Naturally, we knew who, because a prominent NPC in Waterdeep and the North was Xanathar, a cross between a beholder and Keyser Sjoze.
The game ran almost like a whodunnit but we knew damned well who done it, so it was more of an excuse for Jason to run his old thief, me to set up some meaningful conflicts and finally pit two beliefs against each other. The game ended with him playing double-agent for a Masked Lord and the beholder but the thing is the beholder treats him better and pays him better, doesn't condescend to him and his thief believes that the poorer parts of town are better off with a strong criminal leader putting an end to gang wars.
Like many one-shots, particularly with Sorcerer, BW and Dogs in the Vineyard, I was left with the feeling that the best games were just coming up. I'm hoping that when I move to NYC, Jay and I can pick up where we left off and see what happens to Arlen.
And then there's me and Daniel's play-by-post game, The Ballad of Hal Whitewyrm. We're using Burning Wheel Gold and its in the Dalelands, a part of the setting I didn't have any familiarity with but sounded a bit like human settlers easing into now-open elven lands.
The character is Daniel's teenage dream character, a guy he wrote short stories about in junior high notebooks. This worried me but BW's lifepaths would let me know if he really wanted to play the game with Hal or not. If Daniel had hit his head against the lifepaths and said something like, "Judd, this just isn't how I pictured Hal," it would have been a pretty good sign that he doesn't want to play Hal with BW. The lifepath system in that game is pretty good at making changes in character concepts, offering surprises.
It turned out that he liked the surprises, enjoyed that he had to take some lifepaths that put Hal into slavery in his early years.
The game is going well (though this week has been our slowest posting yet) and the whole play-by-forum thing is interesting to me.
Its nice to be able to hyperlink to a map of the town the game is taking place in, or a picture of the monster they are flying on. But with a setting that has this much material, I have to really pick and choose.
I noticed this when I was burning up Khelben Blackstaff for the BW game. I could have really been mired down in his history, even bits that I found dull and sort of annoying. That whole process of burning up and NPC or monster that is based on something is picking and choosing one's sources. That was satisfying.
There is a first edition grittiness to those first supplements and its been fun to dig them up and using the BW rules, highlight them.
HighmoonMedia:
What has been the best thing to me is that, because we are using only the gray box, it's all open for exploration. There are details I know about the Realms (okay, there are a lot of details), but they aren't necessary. If I can work them in as part of the narration, they are a nice little stake that grounds us in the setting, but if they're not used in lieu of something we create that's better, so be it. So I can write about Hal going to see the phoenix-shaped Temple of Lathander in Shadowdale or him drinking Highmoon stout, or I can explore the hell out of that cursed natural pool in the middle of the Cormanthor by the name of Drowned Hope and make it part of OUR Realms. Both are awesome.
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