When I last left off, I was talking about how a recent image in Dragon Heist changed thing in a good way before going on a bit of a rant about the rampant whitewashing in D&D art in previous editions. [1] So now it’s time to talk about the Peoples of Southwestern Faerûn, and more specifically how the may not exactly be as they’ve been advertised and described in the past.
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Forgotten Realms has always had a problem with expansion. When it first drew breath as a world for writing for Ed Greenwood, it was Faerûn and not much else. It was a tight package that more or less worked. Then they bolted on Kara-tur and Zakhara, and things got confusing, especially when Zakhara was fused into Faerûnian history as the source of both the Bedine and Calishites, and in the latter case, completely ignored the people in place. However, the recent release of Dragon Heist has changed this, by giving us a solid look at what a Tethyrian looks like. The vibe and coding for the Lands of Intrigue, Amn, Tethyr, and Calimshan, got thrown for a loop, but in a good way.
Things have been quiet here for a bit. No posts through October or November, and radio silence on what’s going on until now. The facts of the matter is that I’ve been busy with my real world job, infants are as exhausting as they are adorable, and I’m writing a game world. Not just a game world, a whole campaign setting. I’m participating in World Anvil‘s World Ember 2018 competition, and it’s time to lay out some information about Ruin World Iosterra.
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Welcome to the second installment of the Backgrounder series! I’ve expanded the scope of these posts to include regions and peoples in addition to monsters, and the first post up is also the first one ever polled from the POCGamer fanbase. So let’s talk about Durpar. This was a bit more challenging than anticipated, so I’ve broken it into two parts, the first being an overview of what’s known about Durpar, the second being a theoretical framework to introduce Durpar into your campaign or as a subsetting in your campaign. Read more
Lore is at much of the core of Dungeons & Dragons; it’s involved in shaping perceptions of the game, guides interactions with certain aspects of it, and is a big part of how the game is learned. The mechanics of the game may shift and change, but lore remains relatively consistent. Major events still occur in roughly the same ways and times from edition to edition, and monster lore persists even more strongly. So what happens when lore starts to be altered on a large scale, as in the case of the Elven Pantheon and the backstory of Lolth, as happened in the recent release of Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes?
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