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Sydonai said:
Notably Sharess' Aspect is radically different depending on what country you are in and IIRC what point in the timeline it is.
Because outside of her earth-descended worshippers the people of Faerûn tend to just...ignore what she was originally.
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I don't care that characters in the setting do that, I care that the author did and should have just created a deity whole cloth.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Sharess is explicity a CORRUPTION of Bast, who first merged with Felidae and then got mindfucked by Shar, a primordial goddess of darkness
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And Iounn is explicitly a goddess of knowledge and invention named after an iconic d&d magic item that is in every single edition, even though no one knows who the dude who created them was.

You can justify it all you want, but if Greenwood isn't going to depict the egyptian gods as the egyptian gods he shouldn't have used them in his setting. (Also holy shit the implications of someone getting corrupted into a god of hedonism when you could just have it be a choice or something.)
 
shepsquared said:
And Iounn is explicitly a goddess of knowledge and invention named after an iconic d&d magic item that is in every single edition, even though no one knows who the dude who created them was.

You can justify it all you want, but if Greenwood isn't going to depict the egyptian gods as the egyptian gods he shouldn't have used them in his setting. (Also holy shit the implications of someone getting corrupted into a god of hedonism when you could just have it be a choice or something.)
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5e changed it again. Now Ioun is a male deity.

Admittedly I may be biased because Congenio Ioun of Netheril was an enjoyable NPC in one of the first campaigns I played in.
 
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Arawn_Emrys said:
5e changed it again. Now Ioun is a male deity.

Admittedly I may be biased because Congenio Ioun of Netheril was an enjoyable NPC in one of the first campaigns I played in.
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Really? Which book? Because as far as I can tell the only book that mentions Ioun is the DMG, and that's in the context of 4e's Dawn War Pantheon.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Current item description is

"An Ioun stone is named after Ioun, a god of knowledge and prophecy revered on some worlds. "
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I think god can be gender neutral as a term. Since they aren't making any new setting but continually twisting and replacing old lore for a 'generic' setting I assume this is meant to be a reference to the 4e goddess.

Then again, making Ioun male is way less than what they did to the Raven Queen, Shadar-kai and every elven mythology on every plane.
 
shepsquared said:
I think god can be gender neutral as a term. Since they aren't making any new setting but continually twisting and replacing old lore for a 'generic' setting I assume this is meant to be a reference to the 4e goddess.

Then again, making Ioun male is way less than what they did to the Raven Queen, Shadar-kai and every elven mythology on every plane.
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What did they do elven mythology? Just out of curiosity, I am 2e/3.5 guy, never bothered with 4e and 5ed lore and games.
 
You know, it isn't just the changes, it's the fact that there wasn't really any reason for them that annoys me. Most of what I REALLY HATED in 4th wasn't even the mechanics (other than removing Wizard's "learn new spells from scrolls and captured enemy spellbooks"), it was the completely pointless but massively setting altering fluff changes.

I'd been playing in the realms since early 2e and the whole Spellplague+Timeskip+rewriting the entire past to add new races made it not the realms.
 
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Arawn_Emrys said:
You know, it isn't just the changes, it's the fact that there wasn't really any reason for them that annoys me. Most of what I REALLY HATED in 4th wasn't even the mechanics (other than removing Wizard's "learn new spells from scrolls and captured enemy spellbooks"), it was the completely pointless but massively setting altering fluff changes.

I'd been playing in the realms since early 2e and the whole Spellplague+Timeskip+rewriting the entire past to add new races made it not the realms.
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Realms had the thing where edition changes mean a drastic change to the setting back in 2e with the Time of Troubles. Continuing that tradition for 4e clearly ended with them going too far, but I'd argue at least we knew where we stood in 4e. (5e Realms is an uncertain mess because they don't bother with setting books anymore).

Arawn_Emrys said:
Well, they decided that most of the elven subspecies weren't elves anymore for one. "Eladrin", previously a type of good aligned outsider, became the species name for the "high/moon/sun/grey" elves.
(Eladrin, General Information (Monstrous Manual) for the old version)
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No, that's still 4e. 5e was Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, where every elf on every plane is ultimately descended from Corellon, and much like Elder Scrolls are former demigods with all elven gods coming from the most notable demigods getting named by Corellon. Where Lolth convinced every single elf and elf god to give up their innate shapeshifting and adopt static forms, thus becoming the mother of elfkind with Corellon as the father. Where Corellon got angry at Lolth for betraying his ideals and the spirits that defended her because "they argued that no entity who sprang from Corellon, no matter how rebellious, should be attacked." became drow after Lolth tried to actually kill Corellon.

So all elves are eternally reincarnating because Corellon won't let any of them except the Seldarine stay in Arvandor, except for Drow who apparently don't. Now trancing is remembering your past lives and the eladrin are the elves that went to the feywild and are thus the closest to what elves once were and the Raven Queen and shadar-kai are just a cursed evlen demigoddess and her followers. The book even goes so far as to call out Eberron's god of drow as another subordinate deity to Lolth on most worlds , implying that Lolth is still the true goddess of drow even on Eberron.

The entire thing is a mess of ideas that really belong in their own setting. But instead its implied to be Forgotten Realms lore, because that's the default setting now.
 
shepsquared said:
Realms had the thing where edition changes mean a drastic change to the setting back in 2e with the Time of Troubles. Continuing that tradition for 4e clearly ended with them going too far, but I'd argue at least we knew where we stood in 4e. (5e Realms is an uncertain mess because they don't bother with setting books anymore).


No, that's still 4e. 5e was Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, where every elf on every plane is ultimately descended from Corellon, and much like Elder Scrolls are former demigods with all elven gods coming from the most notable demigods getting named by Corellon. Where Lolth convinced every single elf and elf god to give up their innate shapeshifting and adopt static forms, thus becoming the mother of elfkind with Corellon as the father. Where Corellon got angry at Lolth for betraying his ideals and the spirits that defended her because "they argued that no entity who sprang from Corellon, no matter how rebellious, should be attacked." became drow after Lolth tried to actually kill Corellon.

So all elves are eternally reincarnating because Corellon won't let any of them except the Seldarine stay in Arvandor, except for Drow who apparently don't. Now trancing is remembering your past lives and the eladrin are the elves that went to the feywild and are thus the closest to what elves once were and the Raven Queen and shadar-kai are just a cursed evlen demigoddess and her followers. The book even goes so far as to call out Eberron's god of drow as another subordinate deity to Lolth on most worlds , implying that Lolth is still the true goddess of drow even on Eberron.

The entire thing is a mess of ideas that really belong in their own setting. But instead its implied to be Forgotten Realms lore, because that's the default setting now.
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I was talking about 4th in that post. I haven't really delved into 5e realms because by common consensus, all games in the realms within my circle of friends ignore the entire 4e and leadup to 4e and the most recent "canon" lore is:
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
I was talking about 4th in that post. I haven't really delved into 5e realms because by common consensus, all games in the realms within my circle of friends ignore the entire 4e and leadup to 4e and the most recent "canon" lore is:
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5e's stance is that the Spellplague didn't happen, except maybe it did and a bunch of gods came back to life. Probably.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
You know, it isn't just the changes, it's the fact that there wasn't really any reason for them that annoys me. Most of what I REALLY HATED in 4th wasn't even the mechanics (other than removing Wizard's "learn new spells from scrolls and captured enemy spellbooks"), it was the completely pointless but massively setting altering fluff changes.

I'd been playing in the realms since early 2e and the whole Spellplague+Timeskip+rewriting the entire past to add new races made it not the realms.
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"Removing setting bloat and going back to basics so we can attract new players who no longer get turned aside by a massive sweeping cosmos spread across dozens of books" is a pretty good reason to make massive sweeping changes.

As is "Okay, new Edition, new team. We're doing this our way, let's unchain this bitch from the past and float our own way down the river".
 
As I said, I plan on using the 2e/3.5 lore and the 5e crunch whenever I get the chance to run a game in the Forgotten Realms.

And I plan on making Dragonborn being a thing now a plot point instead having them retconned in.
 
Kaiya said:
"Removing setting bloat and going back to basics so we can attract new players who no longer get turned aside by a massive sweeping cosmos spread across dozens of books" is a pretty good reason to make massive sweeping changes.

As is "Okay, new Edition, new team. We're doing this our way, let's unchain this bitch from the past and float our own way down the river".
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That said, speaking as a comics fan, the 'let's go back to basics' normally ends up 1) not as basic as promised, and 2) is a very temporary solution, so tends to not be as good as... not.

The best way to go back to basics isn't to do mass resets or meddling, but rather to do products that focus on the basics in the old, or to make a new setting entirely.
 
Q99 said:
That said, speaking as a comics fan, the 'let's go back to basics' normally ends up 1) not as basic as promised, and 2) is a very temporary solution, so tends to not be as good as... not.

The best way to go back to basics isn't to do mass resets or meddling, but rather to do products that focus on the basics in the old, or to make a new setting entirely.
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Yeah, and this is why I categorically refuse to read comics, and only watch movies and sometimes the cartons. This stuff has negative effects to getting new people in, because the whole thing is so daunting.
 
Kaiya said:
Yeah, and this is why I categorically refuse to read comics, and only watch movies and sometimes the cartons. This stuff has negative effects to getting new people in, because the whole thing is so daunting.
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Well, that's the flip side with comics- there's a lot of good entry ways in there that doesn't need or expect you to do the whole thing (very little does), and even jumping in mid-stream of a bigger one can work surprisingly well.

Any more than a FR campaign requires you to know everything going on in Faerun rather than, like, starting with a town and surrounding environments and gradually going from there.
 
Q99 said:
Well, that's the flip side with comics- there's a lot of good entry ways in there that doesn't need or expect you to do the whole thing (very little does), and even jumping in mid-stream of a bigger one can work surprisingly well.
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And then when you're invested in the story, some editorial mandate will completely derail it to make their latest crisis crossover seem more "edgy." :p
 
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