How should Faerun actually be, considering all the epically powerful spellcasters?

[Melcar]

Based on this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?624446-Why-the-desire-for-low-magic) thread, it go me thinking. How should Faerun actually look like, under the influence of so many epicly powerful spellcaster, when considering both the lore, and the game mechanics of 3.X around the years of 1372-1380, pre-spell plague!

The idea is naturally that such an abundance of high powered magic would transform the setting from a Conan/GoT/LotR - essentially low-magic setting - into something crazy, like Tippyverse... so how crazy? How would that change and what would/should faerun look like, if the printed stuff were taken at face value?

In the other thread, it seemed like some people have a very good idea, and I would love to have that fleshed out more...


Thanks!

[Biggus]

Are you talking about stuff like the tippyverse (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy)?

[Melcar]

Are you talking about stuff like the tippyverse (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy)?

Well maybe... It was alluded to, how unrealistically it is that FR is the way it is with all the epic level characters in that setting... so I wanted to hear how people, who considering both the lore, and the game mechanics of 3.X envision FR being...

[Darg]

Well, setting spellcasters are generally bound by reasonable and limited interpretation of the laws that make up magic. Meaning if they cast a 4th level spell they would only ever get a 4th level equivalent effect. While magic is extremely reality bending, the ability of even a 20th level wizard wouldn't be able to reshape the entire plane on their own. It would require time, resources, underlings, and a sphere of influence. All this while combatting the powers that be. Or they could become player characters or the BBEG that needed a juicer against players as they have different rules governing their abilities as seen on these forums and elsewhere.

[DarkSoul]

I think the setting would be more different than how it's described if there weren't as many powerful casters keeping one another in check. Larloch isn't going to take over half of the Coast because the Chosen of Mystra/Harpers/Lords' Alliance will work directly against him, while the Twisted Rune/Arcane Brotherhood/Zhentarim/Red Wizards will capitalize on the chaos to expand their own power.

Making big, sweeping changes just because you can tends to draw out other people who think the same way, and when your changes don't agree with one another, no one wins.

[Troacctid]

There are a lot of high-level casters, but they're not remotely united. Many of them are invested in maintaining the status quo. Others are opposed to one another and would retaliate if another stepped out of line. Additionally, this is a setting where the gods are particularly active, and even high-level casters usually prefer to avoid ticking them off. Because of all these factors, there's sort of an uneasy truce, or at least a cold war, between the most powerful casters, and nobody is interested in moving directly against the others.

That's not to say that Faerun has never gone through major upheavals. There was the Time of Troubles, the Spellplague, the Fall of Netheril, all those various novels, a bunch of adventures where players have to save the world...there is a lot of history in this setting.

You have to realize that the can opener wasn't invented until almost 50 years after the tin can. Just because the pieces are there for progress to happen doesn't mean that it will happen instantly, or even at all. Sure, maybe if we advanced the timeline another hundred years, a cabal of epic wizards would get together and create the Tippyverse. Heck, maybe Szass Tam is already working on it, and he's in the process of putting agents in place to create permanent portals across the Moonsea and beyond! But there's no reason to believe that a Tippyverse will spontaneously arise the exact moment someone first learns how to cast teleportation circle. Technological development takes time, research, and will.

[Spiderswims]

How should Faerun actually look like, under the influence of so many epicly powerful spellcaster, when considering both the lore, and the game mechanics of 3.X around the years of 1372-1380, pre-spell plague!

Faerun is a post apocalypses setting. The basic idea is "long ago" there was super high magic, but never the Tippyverse as the Realms has powerful active gods.

A typical zero level elf baker living in Myth Drannor in 700DR had, just from the mythral around the city:

*Immunity to all divination and enchantment charm spells
*A comfortable magical climate citywide
*A chance each day of curing any illness
*Can make a mythral ghost of themselves when badly hurt
*Can have the mythral recharge a magic item
*Can have the mythral teleport them anywhere in the city at will (but it does permanently drain 1hp)
*They get magical longevity
*Fly at will, plus feather fall if they somehow do fall
*Immunity to poison
*Hostile spells have effects reduced to minimum (6d6=damage 6)
*Plus many more "secret/unknown/forgotten powers" too

And too add just one more thing grown in and around the city:

Blueglow moss:

*heals 1d4 per hour if you sleep on it
*regeneration of lost limbs
*gain enhanced vision
*Levitate at will

And that is really, really, really just the tiny, tiny, tiny tip of the iceburg. (I'm even leaving out a ton of stuff that would not really effect a baker who can't cast spells too). This does not count for the dozens of other helpful spell effects, like say city wide magical lights and dozens of magic items...from like polymorphing clothing to bedrooms of restful sleep and more.

But that was the past. The modern Realms of 1370 or so, are still coming out of the magic Dark Ages. A typical elf baker living in Waterdeep has..........next to nothing. No magic at all. They live a life exactly like a baker on Earth in 1370 or so.

Sure Waterdeep has a dragon mythral, giant stone statue guardian constructs, air griffon cavalry, some magical lit streets, and some vague weather protection. A couple shops or taverns have an Iron Golem Guard or have a time stop ward that freezes thieves in time or blasts away with a meteor swarm if a window is broken. And the city has hundreds of spellcasters, and many of them have fancy magical spells and items to do things like teleport, make food, or have magical servants.

But your average zero elf baker in Waterdeep.....well, they can walk down a street at night and look at the pretty magical lights.

So.....you can see it's a HUGE fall.

Most of the "Main Published" Realms Locations, like The North, Sword Coast, Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Cromyr, Sembia and the Dalelands fall under the post apocalyptic high magic setting. Most of the places that have an echo of the past high magic, like Nimbral, Evermeet or Hallarua are a lot less published and kept "vague": where they have "high magic", but we don't see many examples published much at all.

So, most of the Realms is still right at the start of a Magic Renaissance (again). War wizards in Cromyr mind read people in public looking for criminals, wizards in Baldur's Gate levitate cargo on and off ships and Sembia makes barrels that can create water once a day.

But it's very random and disorganized. And worse, everyone keeps things secret and does not share. And worse then that...everyone opposes each other and sabotages each other. And worse then that.....the world is full of evil people and monsters too. A nice little Dalelands story: once upon a time there was a kindly old wizard who used to shrink with an advanced shrink objects spell barrages on a river and carry them past some rocky rapids in his pockets. Until some evil wizard thugs showed up, looking to steal his unique spell...and killed him. The wizard kept his spell well hidden so not only did they not find it, but it has also been 'lost' to the whole world.

And on top of that you have the gods sitting back.....and knowing the long, long, long, long history that empires always fall. Even more so magical empires. It's only happened hundreds of times. It's exactly like when your a teacher and you watch a new kid try the 'new' trick, to them, of hiding something behind their back...just like every other kid in the history of the world: amazingly that kid fails. A god sees the same thing with massive magical empires: they build up and fall hard. Every time. There might be a hint or two that the gods "keep" the Realms down on magic a bit....or at least slow it down....but there is nothing in direct cannon that says that in big bold black letters.

Plus...er....a lot of official game writers either don't 'get' the Realms, don't care about the Realms, hate the Realms, are "just doing the most basic bare minimum job they are paid to do" or are just making a pure generic D&D product and just slap "Forgotten Realms" on the cover. This is how you get one deep immersion true Realms book that has a town with a hundred spellcasters, including a shapechanged wyrm dragon archmage........and another 'generic' book where some writer says the "only" spellcaster in miles of that same town is one 5th level bumbling wizard that knows the 'powerful' spell fog cloud.

[Zanos]

Well maybe... It was alluded to, how unrealistically it is that FR is the way it is with all the epic level characters in that setting... so I wanted to hear how people, who considering both the lore, and the game mechanics of 3.X envision FR being...
Faeruns history actually kind of explores this. As Spiderswims mentioned above they're used to be extremely high magic permanent settlements in Faerun. Netheril was probably the largest, their major cities floated and were ruled autocratically by whatever Arcanist established the city. They had permanent magical auras covering the entire city that allowed for permanent magic items to function without XP cost(or con in 2e) and provided a bunch of effects and on-demand spells for residents.

Netheril doesn't exist anymore. They had a prolonged war with a species of creatures that devour magic called the Phaerrim. They strained the weave so badly and were losing so their leader at the time decided to cast a spell to temporarily assume the powers of the settings god of magic. This caused a bunch of bad stuff to happen, but essentially the Weave failed completely and all their floating cities fell to the ground, and almost everyone involved died. There are a few very powerful survivors, but they're pretty reclusive and for good reason aren't really keen on establishing huge magical settlements anymore.

In modern times, the active powerful spellcasters tend to be big Evil guys working against eachother or one of the very few Good high level spellcasters, who are a bit busy with all the scheming gods and rival archmages.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Spiderswims
A typical zero level elf baker living in Myth Drannor in 700DR had, just from the mythral around the city….

What’s your source on these effects?

Also, I believe it’s mythal. Although “mythral” does have a nice ring to it, as if it shone like moonlit silver. :smalltongue:

[Ramza00]

Faeruns history actually kind of explores this. As Spiderswims mentioned above they're used to be extremely high magic permanent settlements in Faerun. Netheril was probably the largest, their major cities floated and were ruled autocratically by whatever Arcanist established the city. They had permanent magical auras covering the entire city that allowed for permanent magic items to function without XP cost(or con in 2e) and provided a bunch of effects and on-demand spells for residents.

Yep Faerun is all of the above stuff with its post apocalyptic setting.

Floating Cities and Peasants trying to survive against wolves and super-low fairy tale fantasy.

The tech exist to escape the Apocalypse with magic and other things, but the problem is "coordination" such as state capacity and so on. Lots of small warlords preventing anyone from getting critical mass to rebuild a society that provides enough consistency to provide true social services.

This is of course a storytelling device so the DM can have the freedom to tell what type of story they want, they can do whatever they want for there is likely a place in Faerun that is like that in some way. Furthermore with 5 different continents (with Faerun being only 1 of the five), and 16 major nations on Faerun you have lots of places and different cultures to place your characters in. And those 16 major nations well they have a population of a little over 40 million per the 3rd edition manual so we are talking a population that is 2/3rds the size of the Roman Empire at its height (though in real world how big the Roman Empire population is...well it is highly debated) but those 40+ million are spread over dozens of intelligent humanoid species.

-----

So Post Apocalypse everywhere, with the height of civilization being flying cities, but since we had the apocalypse we just have magic cities almost as good as the real ones but on the ground and much less population than they used to have at the height.

[Silent Alarm]

You have to realize that the can opener wasn't invented until almost 50 years after the tin can. Just because the pieces are there for progress to happen doesn't mean that it will happen instantly, or even at all. Sure, maybe if we advanced the timeline another hundred years, a cabal of epic wizards would get together and create the Tippyverse. Heck, maybe Szass Tam is already working on it, and he's in the process of putting agents in place to create permanent portals across the Moonsea and beyond! But there's no reason to believe that a Tippyverse will spontaneously arise the exact moment someone first learns how to cast teleportation circle. Technological development takes time, research, and will.

It should be noted that one of the duties of the Harpers is to prevent this very thing from occurring. So you have in setting, an organization with a driving purpose of essentially keeping everyone in the Dark Ages. Why are the Harpers considered good? Your guess is as good as mine, but one of their duties is indeed to prevent progress of magical technology to the point of keeping Faerun in a never ending state of Medieval Stasis.


What’s your source on these effects?
Cormanthyr: Empire of Elves, although if you want an example of another Mythal, you can open up Lost Empire's of Faerun and take a look at the Wards of Silverymoon on page 50. While not as powerful as the Myth Drannor Mythal, the Wards of Silverymoon are an example how powerful even the simplest mythal could be.

[Ramza00]

Cormanthyr: Empire of Elves, although if you want an example of another Mythal, you can open up Lost Empire's of Faerun and take a look at the Wards of Silverymoon on page 50. While not as powerful as the Myth Drannor Mythal, the Wards of Silverymoon are an example how powerful even the simplest mythal could be.


I was thinking Silverymoon with the Mythals or however you spell it. You are kidding me there are more powerful ones in current times of 3.5? (not the long forgotten empires that still have some artifacts around)

[Melcar]

It should be noted that one of the duties of the Harpers is to prevent this very thing from occurring. So you have in setting, an organization with a driving purpose of essentially keeping everyone in the Dark Ages. Why are the Harpers considered good? Your guess is as good as mine, but one of their duties is indeed to prevent progress of magical technology to the point of keeping Faerun in a never ending state of Medieval Stasis.

I was unaware that the Harpers worked towards that goal...



Right, FR imposes authorial fiat in order to behave the way its author wants it to and not according to the way the game rules suggest it should operate (and in fairness to Ed Greenwood, FR only operates on D&D rules because he realized he could make considerably more money that way, it was never originally intended to be a D&D setting). That mostly works for FR, which also has the legacy of previous editions to use as a shield. Even given this, though, a consider portion of the population of the Realms lives either under the direct control of some kind of wizard-king/magocratic ruling council (or some other monstrous entity with 9th level spellcasting) or in a kingdom where the resident archwizard could easily take control but just doesn't because they think it would be too much work or something.

However, if you design a setting based in 3.X D&D from scratch you can't run around this problem in the same way that FR does.

So, if that be the case, what would Faerun look like without authorial fiat?

[Silent Alarm]

I was thinking Silverymoon with the Mythals or however you spell it. You are kidding me there are more powerful ones in current times of 3.5? (not the long forgotten empires that still have some artifacts around)
There are quite a few Mythals still in use even in modern Faerun. Evereska's Mythal is quite ancient and powerfu Undermountain has a Mythal that makes leaving it quite difficult. Mythals come in three classifications:

High/True Mythals, which are created by Elves.
Wizardly/Near Mythals, which are created by everyone else and usually Wizards.
House Mythals, mythals that effected a single building.

Even the Netherese had a type of Mythal created by a 10th level spell called Lefeber's Weave Mythal (not to be confused with the 4th level spell of the same name) and arguably their Mythallar was essentially a highly concentrated mobile Mythal. Mythals are all around Faerun and add credence to the idea that the people of modern Faerun are essentially living in a Dark Age (something Ao has evidently backed up.)


I was unaware that the Harpers worked towards that goal...
It is one of their least advertised mission statements. There are plenty of factions dedicated towards keeping the rest of Faerun in the dark ages (ranging around the alignment spectrum). From the Chuch of Azuth and their God's edict that they enforce a status quo called "The Magebond" (the unwritten rule taught to literally every Wizard) to the Harpers themselves. Some Wizards refuse to follow the Magebond and as such they are usually pounced on by everyone from the Harpers, to the Churchs of Azuth and Mystra, to the Chosen, etc.


So, if that be the case, what would Faerun look like without authorial fiat?
There are plenty of in-universe or "authorial fiat" that enforces this rule. What might the Forgotten Realms look like without such a limitation? Well? They've already shown us that. This is basically what Netheril was to a T, with the exception being that they had access to edition equivalent of epic magic. Essentially your question is "What would Faerun look like if Netheril never fell?" and we just do not have an answer to that. Even in the height of the decadence of Netheril during the Shadowed Age, they still weren't performing the degree of insanity that 3.5e Min/maxed Epic Wizards are capable of doing. Maybe it was because of a moral line in the sand that they carved before torturing individuals for infinite XP farms, but it never quite hit that degree. If allowed to? I'm sure the various cities of the Path of Light would have Mythals that had the effects of a Sympathy spell to draw in every creature the Netherese deemed bad and culled them regularly for XP to create whatever magical item or spell that caught their fancy. I'm sure all of them would be flying if not spacefaring, or perhaps the Netherese would have retreated from the Realm entirely and become something else entirely? The simple fact of the matter is that we do not know.

The attempt to negate "authorial fiat" however is just silly. We're talking about a fictional setting and asking "what if this fictional setting was not like itself?". Utterly ridiculous.

[Scots Dragon]

I was unaware that the Harpers worked towards that goal...

They don't. The goal they actually work towards is stopping evil people from gaining unbalancing levels of power, defending the common folk from monsters and tyrants, and doing general heroic adventure stuff but with more formal guidance.

Notably the Harpers actually contribute to the development of magical research as part of their sponsorship by Mystra. Them keeping magical and technological progression down is literally out of nowhere and has never been their mission statement. Granted some of them might work towards that goal individually if they believe that's what's right, since the Harpers are not universally united on every front and there have been schisms in the organisation in the past, with the splinter-group known as the Moonstars being a famous example, but they were actually founded in the aforementioned Myth Drannor and consider the multi-racial and multi-faith nation protected by magic to be an ideal to once again strive towards.

[Spiderswims]

I was thinking Silverymoon with the Mythals or however you spell it. You are kidding me there are more powerful ones in current times of 3.5? (not the long forgotten empires that still have some artifacts around)

The zero level elf baker is Silverymoon only gets from the ward:

*Comfort Climate
*Immunity death, evil, or teleportation descriptor, conjuration (summoning) spells, and evocation [fire] spells
*Protection from negative energy and protection from evil


In 1375 DR or so....

*A handful of elven cities with true mythals
*Lots of "near" mythals, like Sliverymoon
*Lots and lots and lots of minor building like-mythals

Most important places have tons of high level magic way, way, way beyond the core things like "oh they cast Arcane Lock" on the door.

But like I mentioned above for many reasons, many writers will just scribble something like "wow! The powerful magic ward grants a +1 to saving throws!"

[gijoemike]

Faerun is a post apocalypses setting. The basic idea is "long ago" there was super high magic, but never the Tippyverse as the Realms has powerful active gods.

A typical zero level elf baker living in Myth Drannor in 700DR had, just from the mythral around the city:

*Immunity to all divination and enchantment charm spells
*A comfortable magical climate citywide
*A chance each day of curing any illness
*Can make a mythral ghost of themselves when badly hurt
*Can have the mythral recharge a magic item
*Can have the mythral teleport them anywhere in the city at will (but it does permanently drain 1hp)
*They get magical longevity
*Fly at will, plus feather fall if they somehow do fall
*Immunity to poison
*Hostile spells have effects reduced to minimum (6d6=damage 6)
*Plus many more "secret/unknown/forgotten powers" too

And too add just one more thing grown in and around the city:

Blueglow moss:

*heals 1d4 per hour if you sleep on it
*regeneration of lost limbs
*gain enhanced vision
*Levitate at will

And that is really, really, really just the tiny, tiny, tiny tip of the iceburg. (I'm even leaving out a ton of stuff that would not really effect a baker who can't cast spells too). This does not count for the dozens of other helpful spell effects, like say city wide magical lights and dozens of magic items...from like polymorphing clothing to bedrooms of restful sleep and more.

But that was the past. The modern Realms of 1370 or so, are still coming out of the magic Dark Ages. A typical elf baker living in Waterdeep has..........next to nothing. No magic at all. They live a life exactly like a baker on Earth in 1370 or so.

Sure Waterdeep has a dragon mythral, giant stone statue guardian constructs, air griffon cavalry, some magical lit streets, and some vague weather protection. A couple shops or taverns have an Iron Golem Guard or have a time stop ward that freezes thieves in time or blasts away with a meteor swarm if a window is broken. And the city has hundreds of spellcasters, and many of them have fancy magical spells and items to do things like teleport, make food, or have magical servants.

But your average zero elf baker in Waterdeep.....well, they can walk down a street at night and look at the pretty magical lights.

So.....you can see it's a HUGE fall.

Most of the "Main Published" Realms Locations, like The North, Sword Coast, Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Cromyr, Sembia and the Dalelands fall under the post apocalyptic high magic setting. Most of the places that have an echo of the past high magic, like Nimbral, Evermeet or Hallarua are a lot less published and kept "vague": where they have "high magic", but we don't see many examples published much at all.

So, most of the Realms is still right at the start of a Magic Renaissance (again). War wizards in Cromyr mind read people in public looking for criminals, wizards in Baldur's Gate levitate cargo on and off ships and Sembia makes barrels that can create water once a day.

But it's very random and disorganized. And worse, everyone keeps things secret and does not share. And worse then that...everyone opposes each other and sabotages each other. And worse then that.....the world is full of evil people and monsters too. A nice little Dalelands story: once upon a time there was a kindly old wizard who used to shrink with an advanced shrink objects spell barrages on a river and carry them past some rocky rapids in his pockets. Until some evil wizard thugs showed up, looking to steal his unique spell...and killed him. The wizard kept his spell well hidden so not only did they not find it, but it has also been 'lost' to the whole world.

And on top of that you have the gods sitting back.....and knowing the long, long, long, long history that empires always fall. Even more so magical empires. It's only happened hundreds of times. It's exactly like when your a teacher and you watch a new kid try the 'new' trick, to them, of hiding something behind their back...just like every other kid in the history of the world: amazingly that kid fails. A god sees the same thing with massive magical empires: they build up and fall hard. Every time. There might be a hint or two that the gods "keep" the Realms down on magic a bit....or at least slow it down....but there is nothing in direct cannon that says that in big bold black letters.

Plus...er....a lot of official game writers either don't 'get' the Realms, don't care about the Realms, hate the Realms, are "just doing the most basic bare minimum job they are paid to do" or are just making a pure generic D&D product and just slap "Forgotten Realms" on the cover. This is how you get one deep immersion true Realms book that has a town with a hundred spellcasters, including a shapechanged wyrm dragon archmage........and another 'generic' book where some writer says the "only" spellcaster in miles of that same town is one 5th level bumbling wizard that knows the 'powerful' spell fog cloud.

This is one of the best summaries I have ever seen on the Realms. Many people think D&D is some sort of horror/extreme violence game because PC's are frankly terrible people who commit goblin, orc, drow, and kobold genocide. And I am talking about players, not parents or guardians. They aren't actually wrong many organizations in game want their members to be murderhobos. But both Dragonlance and FR are set in post apocalyptic wastelands of magic. Points of light in a field of much larger and super dangerous darkness. Grayhawk isn't much better as the council of 8 was betrayed by one of their own and the traitor formed his own empire. Darksun and Ravenloft are super terrible by intent and design. Top that off with there are so many deities good/bad/neutral that even a small hamlet on market day there is a 100% chance there is an evil cultist somewhere. Heck there is at least a 60% chance there are 2 cultists for different factions. Everyone is trying to survive and compete for resources after a magical nuclear war in pretty much all cases.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

They don't. The goal they actually work towards is stopping evil people from gaining unbalancing levels of power, defending the common folk from monsters and tyrants, and doing general heroic adventure stuff but with more formal guidance.

Notably the Harpers actually contribute to the development of magical research as part of their sponsorship by Mystra. Them keeping magical and technological progression down is literally out of nowhere and has never been their mission statement. Granted some of them might work towards that goal individually if they believe that's what's right, since the Harpers are not universally united on every front and there have been schisms in the organisation in the past, with the splinter-group known as the Moonstars being a famous example, but they were actually founded in the aforementioned Myth Drannor and consider the multi-racial and multi-faith nation protected by magic to be an ideal to once again strive towards.

As typical with a lot of the fandom 'criticisms' of the Forgotten Realms are basically headcanons that have been accepted uncritically. I blame 1d4chan for the most part. (For example, the Harpers often are defenders of the status quo... against forms of 'progress' that would be far worse. I like my laws of magic functioning, my evil empires defunct, and my world unexploded, thank you very much.)

[Quertus]

The Forgotten Realms is pretty thoroughly peopled by tactically and strategically inept idiots - at least compared to a Playground Determinator. So the FR should look exactly the way it does.

Introduce one powerful individual who "gets it", and the world should quickly look however they think that it should. Or, as Troacctid said,


You have to realize that the can opener wasn't invented until almost 50 years after the tin can.

[Scots Dragon]

The Forgotten Realms is pretty thoroughly peopled by tactically and strategically inept idiots - at least compared to a Playground Determinator. So the FR should look exactly the way it does.

Introduce one powerful individual who "gets it", and the world should quickly look however they think that it should. Or, as Troacctid said,

So how are you going to deal with all the people who don't want to live in a magical dictatorship and are higher-level than you, as well as being literal Chosen of the Goddess of Magic in many cases?

Also how are you going to deal with the fact that the Forgotten Realms doesn't actually work on D&D 3.5e rules, because the rules it's most in line with are AD&D 2e according to its creator?

[ShurikVch]

Check the Reed Richards Is Useless (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUseless) trope - it have a section about D&D (in the "Tabletop Games" spoiler)

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Palanan
What’s your source on these effects?


Originally Posted by Silent Alarm
Cormanthyr: Empire of [the] Elves

Okay, thanks. Do you know if this was ever updated to 3.5?

I'm familiar with the mythal in Silverymoon from the Silver Marches supplement, and as you point out it's not nearly as effects-heavy as what you've described from Myth Drannor. Wondering if they toned it down a bit between 2E and 3E.

[Clistenes]

Economy:

A single high level character could break the economy creating stuff with Magecraft and Fabricate, and transporting wares with Teleport and Leomund's Secret Chest (plus Bags of Holding, Portable Holes and Grendel's Dragonsking Bags).

The right combination of spells can create large amounts of wood, stone, iron and salt, so the spellcaster wouldn't even need to buy raw materials.

Permanency would allow to create a net of Teleportation Circles and protect them with the right spells. Using gold and a set of Pipes of Power the caster could buy the xp they need to make the spells permanent.

Wall of Stone, Stone Shape and Move Earth would allow the spellcaster to create buildings almost on his own, and they could furnish them using Magecraft and Fabricate. He can build warehouses and teleport stations... Or what the hell, even whole settlements focused towards supporting his magical merchant company.

And when you add Planar Travel, and hence, access to extraplanar market... oh, boy!

At that point, a single experienced and determined high level spellcaster has destroyed medieval economy forever. Even if they die and the Teleportation Circles and extraplanar travel devices are stolen, somebody else would use them.

Once medieval economy is broken, society and politics follow suit. Cities can import food in bulk from other continents or from other planes, so local feudal lords lose their economic power because they can't sell them their crops. Some merchant and trade guilds crumble down, and newly unemployed artisans and workers from fallen merchant companies revolt. People have to specialize in the production of crops and products that the spellcaster can't or won't create or import.

There two possible paths ahead:

1.-Collaboration. The wizard, the government and the cities and maybe the feudal lords basically make a deal and kickstart magical globalization, maybe even a "Great Wheelization". The wizard can't produce everything with Fabricate, they have a limited amount of daily spell slots to spend, so he should better specialize in creating expensive stuff. There are lots of stuff that they will buy from peasants and artisans and teleport it around.

So each location connected by the net of Teleportation Circles and Planar Gates should specialize in the production of a single product or a few products in high demand in the other locations. Lots of jobs are lost. Lots of jobs are created. Some people are ruined, others get filthy rich. Governments probably get lots of money thanks to taxation.

2.-Conflict. Magical Luddites attack the wizard's warehouses and teleport stations, and destroy the magic circles to save their own jobs.

Or maybe cities, lords and kings seize control of the circles for their own use.

But you can't capture a high level wizard so easily. He can retire to an inaccessible location, maybe a dungeon or a the top of a mountain... his original base probably was in a place like that all along...

Also, he probably had contingencies to destroy the Teleportation Circles in case they were taken from him. Or he could create a deadly trap at the other end of the Teleportation Circle, rendering it unusable... Anyways, you can't control the net unless you control both ends of the teleportation trade route, which implies that lords and kings have to seize control of a location in a far away country, which isn't feasible unless they send a whole army and conquer that country.

Eventually, the wizard keeps control of a part of his net of Teleportation Circles and Planar Gates, the part that connects locations which have chosen to collaborate with him.

Countries that have chosen to oppose the wizard have no other choice but to close their frontiers to international trade... otherwise their markets would be flooded by cheaper wares imported from the countries that have chosen to work with the wizard. The world is divided between self-sufficient medieval economies and those bound by teleportation circles and interplanar trade...


Government:

This is a world in which priests can communicate directly with their gods. Why would churches accept the dominance of kings? If the representatives of the main churches of a kingdom go to the king and give him their orders, the king folds down.

A king would be at best a Chief Executive Manager who has to answer to the board of directors made up by representatives of the churches. If the board of directors vote the king out, he is out for good. If they vote to implement a law or policy by a large enough majority, the king obeys.

Magocracies could avoid that to some extent. The only opinion that matters in a Magocracy is the opinion of the ruling mages... so, who cares if the majority of the peasants worship Chauntea or Gond or whatever? The wizards don't care. The churches of Azuth and Mystra will have power, but the limit between priest and wizard would be probably blurry there... The most powerful wizards would probably see themselves as favored disciples of Mystra and Azuth themselves.

[Ramza00]

Government:

This is a world in which priests can communicate directly with their gods. Why would churches accept the dominance of kings? If the representatives of the main churches of a kingdom go to the king and give him their orders, the king folds down.

A king would be at best a Chief Executive Manager who has to answer to the board of directors made up by representatives of the churches. If the board of directors vote the king out, he is out for good. If they vote to implement a law or policy by a large enough majority, the king obeys.

Magocracies could avoid that to some extent. The only opinion that matters in a Magocracy is the opinion of the ruling mages... so, who cares if the majority of the peasants worship Chauntea or Gond or whatever? The wizards don't care. The churches of Azuth and Mystra will have power, but the limit between priest and wizard would be probably blurry there... The most powerful wizards would probably see themselves as favored disciples of Mystra and Azuth themselves.

So our real life experiences of churches would not map onto D&D churches. Kings and Empires allowed religion that knit the empire together, and destroyed churches that challenged their power. Where this had problems is when you had multiple cultures in your empire, and when you punishing a local faith creates a revolt and you then succeed or fail with the revolt as the King / Emperor. See things like the English Civil War, Maccabees Revolution, Thirty Year War, etc.

But in D&D churches are not just parallel power structures where the masses can revolt around the king, faith / deities can literally grant power, thus arming your armies. Thus churches, kings with armies, technocracy, etc with other sources of power they would be at each other’s throats more often, either one side will win, Cold War between nearby factions, or something like feudalism where the church and king have reciprocal obligations like a king and his lords, and his lords and his peasants.

[Quertus]

So how are you going to deal with all the people who don't want to live in a magical dictatorship and are higher-level than you, as well as being literal Chosen of the Goddess of Magic in many cases?

Also how are you going to deal with the fact that the Forgotten Realms doesn't actually work on D&D 3.5e rules, because the rules it's most in line with are AD&D 2e according to its creator?

Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, is - if I read (skimmed) correctly, higher level than any of the listed Forgotten Realms NPCs. He also has a better understanding of magic than the resident goddess of magic. And he is thoroughly familiar with 2e.

However, he is also tactically inept. He does not "get it". He could, can, and does interact with *numerous* copies of Faerun without breaking the setting, because his biggest contribution to most Forgotten Realms is to maintain a Spell Component Shop in Waterdeep¹.

However, as others have pointed out, one 17th level Wizard who "gets it" could roflstomp a NI number of higher level NPCs who don't.

How would *I* deal with them? Honestly, *I* wouldn't care about *them* - I'd want to murder any deity not actively attempting to tear down the Wall of shame. Which, as it's now down in 5e, means I, personally, have little in the way of "passions" for the Realms, and wouldn't bother making waves. Shrug.

¹ he doesn't run the shop personally - he outsources that, usually to random peasants who display gratitude when he happens to save them from some monster or another

[Scots Dragon]

Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, is - if I read (skimmed) correctly, higher level than any of the listed Forgotten Realms NPCs. He also has a better understanding of magic than the resident goddess of magic. And he is thoroughly familiar with 2e.

However, he is also tactically inept. He does not "get it". He could, can, and does interact with *numerous* copies of Faerun without breaking the setting, because his biggest contribution to most Forgotten Realms is to maintain a Spell Component Shop in Waterdeep¹.

However, as others have pointed out, one 17th level Wizard who "gets it" could roflstomp a NI number of higher level NPCs who don't.

How would *I* deal with them? Honestly, *I* wouldn't care about *them* - I'd want to murder any deity not actively attempting to tear down the Wall of shame. Which, as it's now down in 5e, means I, personally, have little in the way of "passions" for the Realms, and wouldn't bother making waves. Shrug.

¹ he doesn't run the shop personally - he outsources that, usually to random peasants who display gratitude when he happens to save them from some monster or another

That's a lot of words to say very little of value.

Also the 17th level wizard who 'gets it' wouldn't actually work that way because the rules play second fiddle to the narrative in the Forgotten Realms, so...

[Clistenes]

So our real life experiences of churches would not map onto D&D churches. Kings and Empires allowed religion that knit the empire together, and destroyed churches that challenged their power. Where this had problems is when you had multiple cultures in your empire, and when you punishing a local faith creates a revolt and you then succeed or fail with the revolt as the King / Emperor. See things like the English Civil War, Maccabees Revolution, Thirty Year War, etc.

But in D&D churches are not just parallel power structures where the masses can revolt around the king, faith / deities can literally grant power, thus arming your armies. Thus churches, kings with armies, technocracy, etc with other sources of power they would be at each other’s throats more often, either one side will win, Cold War between nearby factions, or something like feudalism where the church and king have reciprocal obligations like a king and his lords, and his lords and his peasants.

The main difference is, the leader of a church in Faerun can ask their god for instructions, and they can't fake their orders, because their god would punish them at once with loss of their divinely granted powers...

So when a high priest speaks in Faerun, you can be sure they speak the words of their patron deity. If a king of lord opposes them, he is opposing the god itself.

In our own world plenty of emperors and kings fought the popes, and the clergy and believers didn't revolt en masse. People understood that the pope was just a man and a temporal prince who was defending his own interests.

In Faerun? If the High Priest of Tyr says that Tyr repudiates and condemns you, then you can take their word as truth, as if the god himself had descended to Faerun and spoken the words.

If your god and your king fight, who are you going to support?

The only way a monarch can maintain their authority is by keeping good relations with the majority of the important faiths and avoid pissing any of them too much; if one of them becomes too demanding, you can count on the others to keep them in check. But if enough churches agree on something, the temporal ruler can't really oppose them. And if even a single deity becomes really determined to achieve something... you better not get in their way, no matter what the other gods think... your best hope is that gods will fight it over between themselves without involving too much destruction in the mortal plane...

[Melcar]

The Forgotten Realms is pretty thoroughly peopled by tactically and strategically inept idiots - at least compared to a Playground Determinator. So the FR should look exactly the way it does.

Introduce one powerful individual who "gets it", and the world should quickly look however they think that it should. Or, as Troacctid said,

But is it not expected that super geniuses like Larloch, Elminster, Simbul, the Srinshee would adapt and evolve so as to continue to stay competitive! I mean shouldn't they "get it"?

[The_Jette]

But is it not expected that super geniuses like Larloch, Elminster, Simbul, the Srinshee would adapt and evolve so as to continue to stay competitive! I mean shouldn't they "get it"?

Elminster is directly ordered by Mystra to go around the Realms, dropping powerful magic items into caves and dungeons, then cast spells to draw equally powerful monsters to the area to defend those items. This is so that future generations of adventurers can face challenges that will strengthen them, and reward their efforts. He then travels around under the guise of a wizened old man and spreads rumors about these areas so that the young adventurers can hear about them and find their way there. He's intentionally growing the strength of others so that he doesn't personally have to attend to every little matter that pops up around Faerun. Yes, he's powerful and intelligent enough to handle everything that goes wrong. More importantly, though, he's intelligent enough to not have to. Honestly, the reason why the Forgotten Realms isn't some combination Magocracy/Theocracy is because it's a game world built around the concept of furthering adventures for people to play through.

[Telok]

It doesn't even really require a wizard who 'gets it', a cabal of merchants can hire one to quietly set up a teleport network. Even a sufficently high level warlock to scroll-umd the requisite spells would do. I don't think you absolutely need 9ths either, since you can make spell traps of teleport.

Of course that's just setting off an economic revolution. Ruling elites are never good at seeing those coming or at managing them. Governments are always playing catch-up to economics and change. Especially since once an idea gets spread about people will use it if they can benefit from it.

Even just pairs of sending stones based on scrying instead of message would start transforming societies once a few nobles and mercants got hold of them.

[Ramza00]

The main difference is, the leader of a church in Faerun can ask their god for instructions, and they can't fake their orders, because their god would punish them at once with loss of their divinely granted powers...

So when a high priest speaks in Faerun, you can be sure they speak the words of their patron deity. If a king of lord opposes them, he is opposing the god itself.

In our own world plenty of emperors and kings fought the popes, and the clergy and believers didn't revolt en masse. People understood that the pope was just a man and a temporal prince who was defending his own interests.

In Faerun? If the High Priest of Tyr says that Tyr repudiates and condemns you, then you can take their word as truth, as if the god himself had descended to Faerun and spoken the words.

If your god and your king fight, who are you going to support?

But that is actually how it happened in the past. Maybe not the middle ages past, but in other times such as the BC period prior to Hellenization. For example the Neo-Assyrian King / Emperor Ashurbanipal purposefully created an image (aka Propaganda) similar to wizard god Nethys of Pathfinder. He is both the scribe king (knower of many languages) but also the destroyer, he is the protector bringer of all that is good and progress but also the destroyer of cities who scatters the other gods into the wind. He is famous for several reasons some of which is political / religious for after Ashurbanipal death his empire fell apart and new empires were created, but also because Ashurbanipal created a great library of many cultures and it is thus due to him certain stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh survived to modernity due to writting down more copies of this older text. Well this "king" made sure to appoint his younger siblings as priests for two of the city temples of his empire.

-----

And you can argue well the Gods do not have to accept these priests / clerics of the King, and I respond well then it becomes a technarchy and the gods lose, or the god's win and no one remembers the name of this upstart wannabe king.


The only way a monarch can maintain their authority is by keeping good relations with the majority of the important faiths and avoid pissing any of them too much; if one of them becomes too demanding, you can count on the others to keep them in check. But if enough churches agree on something, the temporal ruler can't really oppose them. And if even a single deity becomes really determined to achieve something... you better not get in their way, no matter what the other gods think... your best hope is that gods will fight it over between themselves without involving too much destruction in the mortal plane...

Like I said there will be continuous cold wars between various factions, various faiths, but also non-faiths like guilds, technarchy, magicarchy and so on.

We are going to have
A) feudalism in the long run [reciprocal obligations between power centers]
B) or a dominance of one power structure
C) or city-states where they agree upon local rules to keep the various factions in check within the city and nearby area but they can't control the power structures too far removed in other cities.

-----

Back to the conversation Faerun is an apocalyptic world that has not recovered since the apocalypse. Thus it gives the DM freedom for what remains is a mixture of so many different societies at different tech and governmental levels of complexity allowing you to do low level content, mid level, high level, and epic.

[Clistenes]

But that is actually how it happened in the past. Maybe not the middle ages past, but in other times such as the BC period prior to Hellenization. For example the Neo-Assyrian King / Emperor Ashurbanipal purposefully created an image (aka Propaganda) similar to wizard god Nethys of Pathfinder. He is both the scribe king (knower of many languages) but also the destroyer, he is the protector bringer of all that is good and progress but also the destroyer of cities who scatters the other gods into the wind. He is famous for several reasons some of which is political / religious for after Ashurbanipal death his empire fell apart and new empires were created, but also because Ashurbanipal created a great library of many cultures and it is thus due to him certain stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh survived to modernity due to writting down more copies of this older text. Well this "king" made sure to appoint his younger siblings as priests for two of the city temples of his empire.

-----

And you can argue well the Gods do not have to accept these priests / clerics of the King, and I respond well then it becomes a technarchy and the gods lose, or the god's win and no one remembers the name of this upstart wannabe king.


In Faerun the king couldn't force the gods to grant spells to his siblings. And if he pushed his agenda too far a divine avatar may appear and kill him with its own hands: For example, Sammaster was killed by an avatar of Lathander,

[Ramza00]

In Faerun the king couldn't force the gods to grant spells to his siblings. And if he pushed his agenda too far a divine avatar may appear and kill him with its own hands: For example, Sammaster was killed by an avatar of Lathander,

In Faerun the king can go chaotic evil [with his armies] on the followers of said god unless the god respects what the king wants. This in turn causes either an agreement the king likes, or the king dies in the night due to an assassin or the god summoning a stronger force.

Sword of Damocles still exists in FR.

----

Gods with the exception of Ao are not all powerful beings that get exactly what they want. Yes they can shape the plot but they are not all powerful. Sometimes their followers die and so on. Or you create a big enough dust up that other gods ban against other gods and say "knock it off."

In sum Gods with the exception of Ao "ascent" to the current status quo, they allow it, even if it is not their desired status quo. (Aka consent, I allow it vs I want it and this is to my desires actualized.)

Hubris / being smited is something every King has to balance against when they go CE, yet there are levels of injustice the gods find perfectly acceptable to not create a stink about. Unjust governments exist in FR but also in our world's ancient history.

[Quertus]

But is it not expected that super geniuses like Larloch, Elminster, Simbul, the Srinshee would adapt and evolve so as to continue to stay competitive! I mean shouldn't they "get it"?

Was the world peopled entirely by idiots for the 50 years without a can opener? So, no, they shouldn't just "get it" on their own.

Now, once someone else "gets it"? Well, at that point, them "getting it" is predicated upon numerous things, not the least of which is them hearing about and recognizing the importance of this different way of looking at the world… in some scenario other than "the person who 'gets it' ending their existence".

So, yes, if Tippy started creating a Tippyverse, probably some of the others could catch on and comprehend at least parts of what was going on, and adapt accordingly. Trust me when I say from experience that the number of people with all the data, evidence, and experience who actually get it even then will be disturbingly small.


That's a lot of words to say very little of value.

While that certainly lacked the verbosity of my infamous "Wall of Text" spell, I'll not deny a low "signal to noise" ratio. But it did answer the question asked.


Also the 17th level wizard who 'gets it' wouldn't actually work that way because the rules play second fiddle to the narrative in the Forgotten Realms, so...

The rules may well "play second fiddle to the narrative" in The Forgotten Realms (and that would explain a lot about its incoherence), but that's definitely not the way it works at all tables with all instantiations of copies of Toril. And almost certainly not the way it should work for the purposes of a question like, "how *should* Faerun actually be…".

[Mechalich]

Also how are you going to deal with the fact that the Forgotten Realms doesn't actually work on D&D 3.5e rules, because the rules it's most in line with are AD&D 2e according to its creator?

Ultimately you can't. FR simply cannot work according to 3e or 3.5e rules, but that's not FR's fault.

The problem is, the full implications of the mechanical changes from 2e to 3e were not properly understood by the design teams working for WotC early on in the 3e cycle. No one quite understood how different, especially at high level, things actually were, and it wasn't very late in the cycle (really even into the production of Pathfinder in many cases) that worldbuilding for the system came to understand the need to drastically limit the presence of high level characters and other essential modifications.

Taking a fantasy world as it stands and then just one day drastically converting the magic system that underpins it means chaos. There are more than a few fantasy series that specifically explore this scenario, in either 'magic goes away' or 'magic comes back' scenarios. However, the situation with a D&D setting like FR is that the popularity of the setting is actually significantly greater than the popularity of the system among the fanbase. We know this is true because WotC actually dared to conduct the experiment of drastically altering FR to fit a new system for 4e and the resulting backlash was sufficiently great that they ultimately had to disavow the whole thing and put the world back the way it used to be for 5e.

Honestly the thought experiment of how should the Realms function according to 3.5e rules is rather absurd because 3.5e rules never allow a world to reach the state the Realms were in immediately prior to the edition change in the first place.

[Scots Dragon]

Ultimately you can't. FR simply cannot work according to 3e or 3.5e rules, but that's not FR's fault.

The problem is, the full implications of the mechanical changes from 2e to 3e were not properly understood by the design teams working for WotC early on in the 3e cycle. No one quite understood how different, especially at high level, things actually were, and it wasn't very late in the cycle (really even into the production of Pathfinder in many cases) that worldbuilding for the system came to understand the need to drastically limit the presence of high level characters and other essential modifications.

Taking a fantasy world as it stands and then just one day drastically converting the magic system that underpins it means chaos. There are more than a few fantasy series that specifically explore this scenario, in either 'magic goes away' or 'magic comes back' scenarios. However, the situation with a D&D setting like FR is that the popularity of the setting is actually significantly greater than the popularity of the system among the fanbase. We know this is true because WotC actually dared to conduct the experiment of drastically altering FR to fit a new system for 4e and the resulting backlash was sufficiently great that they ultimately had to disavow the whole thing and put the world back the way it used to be for 5e.

Honestly the thought experiment of how should the Realms function according to 3.5e rules is rather absurd because 3.5e rules never allow a world to reach the state the Realms were in immediately prior to the edition change in the first place.
It should also be kept in mind additionally;

Forgotten Realms wasn't designed with any sort of Dungeons & Dragons rules in mind at all, and in fact precedes the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. It was originally created as a personal fantasy setting by Ed Greenwood in the 60s, and elaborated upon after that point. It was only after he started playing D&D that he started incorporating that.

[Troacctid]

But you can't capture a high level wizard so easily. He can retire to an inaccessible location, maybe a dungeon or a the top of a mountain... his original base probably was in a place like that all along...

Also, he probably had contingencies to destroy the Teleportation Circles in case they were taken from him. Or he could create a deadly trap at the other end of the Teleportation Circle, rendering it unusable.
Okay, I gotta know, who is this wizard? Faerun's high-level characters are generally pretty well-documented. Which one is he? Is there lore about him? What books does he show up in? You have me curious now.

[Remuko]

Okay, I gotta know, who is this wizard? Faerun's high-level characters are generally pretty well-documented. Which one is he? Is there lore about him? What books does he show up in? You have me curious now.

I cant speak for certain but what I got from the post you quoted is that its just hypothetical optimized wizard, not some specific character.

[Troacctid]

The premise of the thread is that Toril already has a lot of high-level casters. If you have to invent a totally new character in order for your theory to work, does that really count? I don't think it should count. You ought to be able to show that there is a character in canon who is 1. able to do all that, 2. motivated to do it, and 3. hasn't already attempted it.

[Elysiume]

The premise of the thread is that Toril already has a lot of high-level casters. If you have to invent a totally new character in order for your theory to work, does that really count? I don't think it should count. You ought to be able to show that there is a character in canon who is 1. able to do all that, 2. motivated to do it, and 3. hasn't already attempted it.Yeah, if the premise is "the spellcasters in Fareun mean that Faerun cannot exist as it is," that's one discussion, which is what I assumed the thread was discussing. If the premise is "if a mid-to-high optimization high-level spellcaster arrives in Faerun, what happens," that's a very different thread because optimized player characters tend to behave very unlike story characters.

[Melcar]

The premise of the thread is that Toril already has a lot of high-level casters. If you have to invent a totally new character in order for your theory to work, does that really count? I don't think it should count. You ought to be able to show that there is a character in canon who is 1. able to do all that, 2. motivated to do it, and 3. hasn't already attempted it.

If we imagine all the wizards like Elminster, Larloch, Srinshee, Ioulaum being optimized (while considering the lore) to the best of this forums abilities, how should that impact the realms and what would that look like?

So, that newly invented character could be any one of them being optimized... It does not have to be a newly created characters. Take any of the level 17+ spellcasters and imagine that the character being run by Tippy or Ur-Priest or who ever is the best optimizer here...

There might be rivals and organizations to spoil one another, but imagine it was the collective of this forum worldbuidling Fearun on 3.5. Besides all the mailmen, killer gnome and batman wizards, and the utilization of constant free wishes from summoned creatures and dweomerkeepers... would we see teleportation circles all over, would farming be a thing of the past, would warfare be conducted with people or constructs...



The reason for this question is basically that I am working on a epic level campaign, and while I haven't gotten a lot of stuff down yet, I want to make sure (or at least try) that my version of the realms is as realistic considering the rule set as possible. While I understand that sufficiently motivated, no holds bared individuals will eventually become Pun Pun, I have chosen to simply ignore this and determine that Pun Pun is impossible in the realms, because no one knows about the Sarruks Su abilities...

I have also chosen not to include epic magic, because I feel its a ****ty system. But besides that, what kind of realms are we looking at? Is Tippyverse the logic conclusion? Or would things revert back to Netheril-like world? Or Imaskarian empires?

Taken to its logical conclusion I wonder how all the 90+ epic level spellcasters being optimized, using 3.X rules to its fullest would change the realms.

I apologize for repeating my self here, but I kind of got the feeling, that it might not be clear what I was asking. :smallredface:

[noob]

If we read the books we easily conclude that the Faerun casters are essentially all extraordinarily dumb.
If they are as dumb as they are in the books it makes sense that their influence on the global world will be low.
If one of them goes full 100% TO then there is huge odds of a paradise in a bottle situation: the BBEG does not actually needs to take a kingdom to have a billion slaves doing everything they want: they can make their own pocket world then create slaves that makes slaves and have everything they ask for with next to no effort and no risks of rebellion.
If a good guy goes full TO then it is the point where things breaks down because they will jump straight ahead in fixing all the bad things in all the worlds with swarms of invulnerable slaves.

[Scots Dragon]

If we read the books we easily conclude that the Faerun casters are essentially all extraordinarily dumb.
If they are as dumb as they are in the books it makes sense that their influence on the global world will be low.

The majority of work on the Forgotten Realms was not done with D&D 3.5e in mind. The vast majority of sourcebooks and development were all done for AD&D 2e, and similar applies to the various famous novels and characters associated with those.

The reason things feel 'dumb' in D&D 3e is that they didn't change the setting to match the rules*, they instead adopted the rules with the assumption that things would work as they always had.



*Also like 99% of Theoretical Optimisation stuff is exactly that; theoretical. It relies on a whole lot of spherical rothe, and it's very far away from the way things actually work in practice.

[noob]

The majority of work on the Forgotten Realms was not done with D&D 3.5e in mind. The vast majority of sourcebooks and development were all done for AD&D 2e, and similar applies to the various famous novels and characters associated with those.

The reason things feel 'dumb' in D&D 3e is that they didn't change the setting to match the rules*, they instead adopted the rules with the assumption that things would work as they always had.



*Also like 99% of Theoretical Optimisation stuff is exactly that; theoretical. It relies on a whole lot of spherical rothe, and it's very far away from the way things actually work in practice.
Ad&d 2e had spells comparably op and world reshaping with minimal efforts as 3.5.
2e simulacrum was nearly as strong as 3e ice assassin for example.

[Scots Dragon]

Ad&d 2e had spells comparably op and world reshaping with minimal efforts as 3.5.
2e simulacrum was nearly as strong as 3e ice assassin for example.

It's also not how things actually work in practice in either edition, since the rules do not dictate how the world works, they attempt to describe how the world works and run into issues because of players ignoring RAI in favour of 'RAW'.

And let's be clear on the latter; 99% of the time it's really not how the rules are actually written, some people just have poor reading comprehension and make the wrong assumptions about the way certain things interact. There are a whole bunch of examples of this.

[noob]

It's also not how things actually work in practice in either edition, since the rules do not dictate how the world works, they attempt to describe how the world works and run into issues because of players ignoring RAI in favour of 'RAW'.

And let's be clear on the latter; 99% of the time it's really not how the rules are actually written, some people just have poor reading comprehension and make the wrong assumptions about the way certain things interact. There are a whole bunch of examples of this.
What simulacrum creates is rather nebulous: there is like 10 ways to build one(90% of the strength is a weird concept) but outside of that there is not that many assumptions.
For example in 3.5 ice assassin create a specific thing as does genesis (time trait addition is not raw in my opinion since you can not see time) and with the two of those you easily have a paradise in a bottle situation.

[Scots Dragon]

A 2e simulacrum has no more than half the level of the original being, and is a zombielike creation that lacks the proper knowledge and personality of the original, and it requires specific material components that cannot be easily acquired without the cooperation of the being which is to be duplicated.

[AvatarVecna]

Before getting to the question, I do wanna bring up a worthwhile point regarding the previous thread: my post about how relatively common high-level casters are in Faerun wasn't supposed to be "and that's why it's obviously high-power", it was more a rebuttal against the specific point that Faerun is low-power because of the lack of high-level casters (13 lvl 20s, as was the quote). Faerun in particular is low-power for in-universe story reasons, despite what should be a (again, relative) abundance of powerful casters.


The reason for this question is basically that I am working on a epic level campaign, and while I haven't gotten a lot of stuff down yet, I want to make sure (or at least try) that my version of the realms is as realistic considering the rule set as possible. While I understand that sufficiently motivated, no holds bared individuals will eventually become Pun Pun, I have chosen to simply ignore this and determine that Pun Pun is impossible in the realms, because no one knows about the Sarruks Su abilities...

This a stretch, both mechanically and from a lore perspective.

Mechanically, it's a DC 24 Knowledge (Local) check to recognize a Sarrukh on sight, with every 5 additional points giving a useful piece of information (not necessarily stat information, but something at least). In a low-op world, Knowledge (Local) is one of the less useful monster knowledge skills, since humanoids aren't fought that frequently. In a mid-op world, humanoids are already far and away the most dangerous creature type out there, and investing in the knowledge skill necessarily to glean info from their statblock is highly useful and worth investing in. Getting it as a class skill is either an easy feat tax or a non-problem depending on your class. A Wizard 21 is maybe looking at 24 ranks and +10 from Int on the low end...so even making some seriously weak assumptions about these epic mages, they still definitely know about Sarrukh's in general, and likely know a small handful of useful pieces of information about them. And pumping skills into the triple digits isn't that difficult for optimized epic casters.

From a lore perspective, this also isn't really that weird either. Sarrukh's aren't just a weird race that's off hanging out in another continent entirely - they're a progenitor race that's been around for tens of thousands of years, and had a global empire for a good 1500 of those. The races they created still walk and slither and swim across Toril, and theirs are among the countless ruins dotting the Faerun landscape waiting to be explored and plundered. I would agree that they wouldn't necessarily be common knowledge - it's a very old empire, and those always end up falling, so it's just one more fallen empire in a long history of the same - but especially for mages of great power and knowledge, the amount known wouldn't be nearly as limited as it is for your average low-level scholar.

I will admit that it's easier to just start from the assumption that infinite loops in general, and especially Pun-Pun tricks, are off the table. It just makes things easier to analyze if literal infinity isn't a possibility.


I have also chosen not to include epic magic, because I feel its a ****ty system. But besides that, what kind of realms are we looking at? Is Tippyverse the logic conclusion? Or would things revert back to Netheril-like world? Or Imaskarian empires?

Without touching on too much complicated stuff, I think 3.5 setting would end up post-scarcity surprisingly quickly. Custom magic items could do this pretty obviously, but if you'd prefer to avoid the "can vs can opener" issue, you can do about as well with Self-Resetting Magic Traps (the rules for which are one of the most integral parts of the default game, so you can bet they're super-well-understood) and Spell Clocks (which are online material, so probably less well-known, but they're still in the toolbox). Any spell that has permanent effects, in particular creation spells, will be hugely popular. Methods of generating spells, GP, and XP aren't too difficult to pull off, and all of those can easily lead to absurd power even without touching on infinite loops.

The big issue you run into with generating infinite amounts of food or building material or whatever is going to be getting it where it needs to be - it doesn't matter that an at-will command word item of Create Food And Water can theoretically feed 72000 people per day forever, that's a close-range spell. This is part of why Teleportation Circles get so popular: if transporting the food infinity times just has a one-time cost, and creating infinity food just has a one-time cost, then in the long run you're saving infinite money. It'd be good to have backups available so that there's not one easily-stolen source of food for everybody, and so that you have more than enough in case things go weird, but you have NI savings from not buying rations, you can afford it. This holds true if you upgrade it from Create Food And Water to something that gives even better food.


Taken to its logical conclusion I wonder how all the 90+ epic level spellcasters being optimized, using 3.X rules to its fullest would change the realms.

I apologize for repeating my self here, but I kind of got the feeling, that it might not be clear what I was asking. :smallredface:

It's honestly one of those questions that's impossible to answer, even if we were to play it out. None of us really know for sure how an Int 30+ wizard would approach the situation, what tricks he'd use to outmaneuver his opponents, what items he would create to abuse some little-used part of the system, what monsters he would subjugate to pull off some weird shenanigan or other. Even without Pun-Pun or any infinite-whatever shenanigans on the table, it's entirely possible for a high-level mage to generate XP and money, and then turn that XP/money directly into power. Granting your own wishes, and actual honest-to-god time travel are on the table. Quite frankly, if I had a time machine, I can't say for sure how it would change the world, and I don't even have phenomenal cosmic powers to complicate that chronological opportunity.

Like, without touching on absolutely anything else, imagine how different the world would be if, every time a baby is born, they spend 30 seconds in this weird tube at the hospital that magically improves all their stats by 5 points. It's still earth, it's still our history and religions and no magic, but every baby is just way way better at everything. That world doesn't even have magic, but think about how much different it would be.

[noob]

A 2e simulacrum has no more than half the level of the original being, and is a zombielike creation that lacks the proper knowledge and personality of the original, and it requires specific material components that cannot be easily acquired without the cooperation of the being which is to be duplicated.
There is the following problems with the rules:
1: Duplicate a creature with no levels and the effect is undefined and so the gm have an headache creating a creature with entirely new stats.
2: it was possible to add a personality and some knowledge of the original but it involved another spell and the way the memories are picked is not indicated: it is another rule vacuum: there is no valid way to deduce how it is spread: for example the original ate a dolphin: what will the simulacrum remember of the scene? maybe only the fact they ate something and not the fact they ate the dolphin or maybe it will know "ate a dolphin" and have no pictures associated or maybe it will forget a random portion of the left half of the pictures or a random combination of those or maybe you take the memories turns it into binary files then for roughly half of the 0 and 1 you write "forgotten" there is like thousands of ways to handle "having 41% of the memories" and you can apply any of them or all of them in a statistical way.

Essentially the spell is directly broken in multiple ways in the "can not really deduce what even happens" form.
So much of the optimisation based on the spell will vary a lot from table to table.

[Quertus]

3.5e rules never allow a world to reach the state the Realms were in immediately prior to the edition change in the first place.

Why not?


If we read the books we easily conclude that the Faerun casters are essentially all extraordinarily dumb.

Strongly agreed :smallamused:


If they are as dumb as they are in the books it makes sense that their influence on the global world will be low.
If one of them goes full 100% TO then there is huge odds of a paradise in a bottle situation: the BBEG does not actually needs to take a kingdom to have a billion slaves doing everything they want: they can make their own pocket world then create slaves that makes slaves and have everything they ask for with next to no effort and no risks of rebellion.
If a good guy goes full TO then it is the point where things breaks down because they will jump straight ahead in fixing all the bad things in all the worlds with swarms of invulnerable slaves.

Agreed.

Also, why is it always the good guys who realistically ought to be breaking things? :smallconfused:


The majority of work on the Forgotten Realms was not done with D&D 3.5e in mind. The vast majority of sourcebooks and development were all done for AD&D 2e, and similar applies to the various famous novels and characters associated with those.

The reason things feel 'dumb' in D&D 3e is that they didn't change the setting to match the rules*, they instead adopted the rules with the assumption that things would work as they always had.



*Also like 99% of Theoretical Optimisation stuff is exactly that; theoretical. It relies on a whole lot of spherical rothe, and it's very far away from the way things actually work in practice.

First off, the forgotten realms characters feel 'dumb' even under 2e mechanics. Falling back to 2e does nothing to preserve their pride for anyone who understands 2e.

Oh, wait - I've critiqued a module written by Ed Greenwood himself. A 2e module named Halls of the High King. In it, just in the first chapter, you've got Wizards…Casting spells beyond their capabilities.

Casting spells that aren't in their "spells memorized" (which is full, I checked - so it's not just "they cast that spell, and their memorized spells are what they have left").

Casting Time Stop… just to Teleport away… instead of just teleporting.

Casting Invisibility… just to Teleport away… instead of just teleporting.

Casting spells which don't do what the module has them do.

No, even in 2e, the Wizards are complete pants-on-heads numbskulls who can't really do anything right, let alone anything smart.

So, no. They (Realms Wizards) feel 'dumb' because they are dumb¹. Period.

Second, no, most TO does not require "spherical rothe" - it's just "too good" for the balance of the table.

Now, yes, *some* TO (like, say, infinite attacks) breaks down at the fiction level, just as some fiction (like Drizzt dodging Magic Missiles) breaks down at the RAW layer. Then again, you don't have to go to TO to get things breaking down: curiously, when *I* sit on an elephant, I can't reach off *either* side, let alone "threaten" every "square" adjacent to the elephant, from top to bottom, simultaneously.

The abstraction breaks down long before TO, and it doesn't break down significantly worse for TO than for PO.

¹ at least compared to a Playground Determinator… and probably compared to your average 5-year-old advisor required by the would-be evil overlord

[noob]

Also, why is it always the good guys who realistically ought to be breaking things? :smallconfused:


Because many things in the forgotten realms needs to be broken down to make it a better place.
Ex: the dictatorial hierarchies in some countries(the dictator themselves does not need to be killed), evil artefacts, cults trying to summon evil gods, ao's face, ao's ability to exist, AO, ao and so on (the reason why most gods do bad things instead of bottling themselves in their own worlds and not bothering with people is ao forcing them to not do that ex: time of troubles and forcing gods to need worship).
As for evil guys I only told they had high odds to make their own heavens but they can also decide to go and conquer the world if they have a strong emotional attachment to it for example.
(or kill that fifth level fighter that challenged them 4 times before for getting the last word and so on: the kind of thing you do because of your feelings)

[Troacctid]

If we imagine all the wizards like Elminster, Larloch, Srinshee, Ioulaum being optimized (while considering the lore) to the best of this forums abilities, how should that impact the realms and what would that look like?

So, that newly invented character could be any one of them being optimized... It does not have to be a newly created characters. Take any of the level 17+ spellcasters and imagine that the character being run by Tippy or Ur-Priest or who ever is the best optimizer here...
Making an existing character "smart" instead of "dumb" (and I would strongly disagree that a fictional character making choices you disagree with makes them dumb, unrealistic, or wrong, but let's set that aside for now) satisfies my first condition. It doesn't satisfy conditions 2 or 3. Just because they could do something doesn't mean they should or would do it. Why is it even something they'd want to do in the first place? Is it actually going to help with their goals? And furthermore, there are characters (and even whole civilizations) in canon who have already attempted such things! Some of them were even successful! We were just talking about Netheril and Myth Drannor upthread, but there are also individual wizards of great power like Manshoon and Halaster who have used what we might consider TO tricks (demiplanes, clones) to become basically invincible. They just don't particularly care about taking over the world.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by noob
If a good guy goes full TO then it is the point where things breaks down because they will jump straight ahead in fixing all the bad things in all the worlds with swarms of invulnerable slaves.

Pretty sure that a “good guy” wouldn’t be using slaves.


Originally Posted by Scots Dragon
The vast majority of sourcebooks and development were all done for AD&D 2e, and similar applies to the various famous novels and characters associated with those.

Which is why I asked if the 2E supplement on Cormanthyr had ever been updated to 3E, since the mythals in 3E seem to be a little toned down by comparison.

[noob]

Pretty sure that a “good guy” wouldn’t be using slaves.



Which is why I asked if the 2E supplement on Cormanthyr had ever been updated to 3E, since the mythals in 3E seem to be a little toned down by comparison.

The whole "simulacrums are totally not people" is just justifications to encourage good people to use slaves I think.

[Zanos]

We were just talking about Netheril and Myth Drannor upthread, but there are also individual wizards of great power like Manshoon and Halaster who have used what we might consider TO tricks (demiplanes, clones) to become basically invincible. They just don't particularly care about taking over the world.
Indeed, some individuals from Netheril survived and are simply no longer interested in creating post scarcity magocracies. Larloch and Ioulaum have effectively made themselves invincible and have hidden themselves away to focus on their own research. They tried, succeeded for a few millennia, and then failed spectacularly.

[Tvtyrant]

Indeed, some individuals from Netheril survived and are simply no longer interested in creating post scarcity magocracies. Larloch and Ioulaum have effectively made themselves invincible and have hidden themselves away to focus on their own research. They tried, succeeded for a few millennia, and then failed spectacularly.

Also they get access to magic other people are denied for being good boys. Larloch can cast 10th level spells out of a 10th level slot if he wants, as a reward for puttering in his shop all day instead of interfering in godly domains and mortal realms.

[Spiderswims]

IBut besides that, what kind of realms are we looking at? Is Tippyverse the logic conclusion? Or would things revert back to Netheril-like world? Or Imaskarian empires?

Taken to its logical conclusion I wonder how all the 90+ epic level spellcasters being optimized, using 3.X rules to its fullest would change the realms.

Well, you really need to separate the fictional setting from the game rules. And more so on how the people use the rules to play the game. When you have a game setting with an overly friendly GM, a gentleman's agreement, pick and choose what rules to follow, create a game world with a massive bias for the 'player' and tons of house rules to make the game "fun and fair" you get the problem world people are talking about.

An easy one is that such a Player would demand that their character never be attacked or effected by anything that was in their personal view "unfair". Like if their character was attacked when already weakened or distracted. Or just a simple encounter that was way too powerful for the character. Nothing in the rules forbids this, but this type of player would say it's "wrong" simply as they did not like it.

Plus this type of player does have the wacky idea that "only their" special character knows everything: if it's in an official book, their character knows everything about it.


Would "optimizing" Epic level Realms spellcasters....AND having EACH of them be a Player Character an overly friendly GM, a gentleman's agreement, pick and choose what rules to follow, create a game world with a massive bias for the 'player' and tons of house rules to make the game "fun and fair"....change anything in the Realms?

No.

Mostly because it would never happen in the official shared setting. I mean if you want to sit at home and say your version of the Realms is X, you can. But that setting will never have all characters being player characters with an overly friendly GM, a gentleman's agreement, pick and choose what rules to follow, create a game world with a massive bias for the 'player' and tons of house rules to make the game "fun and fair".

First off the setting would use all the rules as written, with none of the changes and additions that make the game words like "fair" to players. None of that. Zero.

Second, you'd have a world of creatures smarted and more powerful and more wise then your lone character, many that have a ton of experience(the real kind, not silly numbers on a page).

Third is simply all the unknown "custom" things. You can be an expert on a couple rule books...but that is it. Once you get effected by things you don't know about and will never know about....you loose fast. You can make custom stuff too, sure....but it's still you vs the world.

If you need a lore explanation it would go like this:

Once upon a time reality was obliterated every day by someone abusing power. After say the billionth time, everyone had enough.
Everyone multiverse wide, long ago, agreed (for the first and only time ever) to limit the abuse of power. So dozens of unknown unknowable rules and laws were put into reality to make sure that reality is not obliterated....again.

Mortals olny know a couple vague rules and laws.....like wearing two magic rings, for example. Or things like there are Time Guardians that make sure no one abuses time travel. Or magic and reality guardians.

A LOT of this is beyond subtle. Say just six epic diviners with hundreds of high level and epic spells keep watch on the potential future. When they see a 'crazy Bobepic archmage' that does anything they don't like in the future: they change it. Step on a butterfly and 'Bob' is never born or maybe Bob just becomes a very low intelligence pig farmer. Then add in, oh, 100 or so 10-20 level diviner types also doing the same thing, but on smaller scales.

So you take an example where a player would just say: like "oh I'd just have my PC make teleport traps and ruin the world". Eh....not quite. See the divinations would see that coming and the character would be stopped before they even took a single character level.

Plus add in, oh, 100 more active defenders. They just watch out for anything that might be a threat and deal with it.

And you get the big question of natural or not. You craft a portal between two cities. But it has a random malfunction and opens to other planes every so often. Is it a normal, natural malfunction? Is it an artificial malfunction added by someone? Or does it go beyond that to "everyone" added the normal, natural malfunction to reality?

[Scots Dragon]

Well, you really need to separate the fictional setting from the game rules. And more so on how the people use the rules to play the game. When you have a game setting with an overly friendly GM, a gentleman's agreement, pick and choose what rules to follow, create a game world with a massive bias for the 'player' and tons of house rules to make the game "fun and fair" you get the problem world people are talking about.

An easy one is that such a Player would demand that their character never be attacked or effected by anything that was in their personal view "unfair". Like if their character was attacked when already weakened or distracted. Or just a simple encounter that was way too powerful for the character. Nothing in the rules forbids this, but this type of player would say it's "wrong" simply as they did not like it.

Plus this type of player does have the wacky idea that "only their" special character knows everything: if it's in an official book, their character knows everything about it.

I feel like this is the source of way more of D&D 3.5e's weird imbalances than people like to admit to. People play it a certain way other than what's actually intended, and house rule away all the impediments that come with that, and then they complain that there's no balance. Ignoring that there was all of the balance already there in the rules that they decided to ignore because it didn't benefit them personally.

[Clistenes]

Okay, I gotta know, who is this wizard? Faerun's high-level characters are generally pretty well-documented. Which one is he? Is there lore about him? What books does he show up in? You have me curious now.

Any high level wizard who wishes to do so...

The point is, 3.5 rules make it not only possible, but easy.

[Troacctid]

Any high level wizard who wishes to do so...

The point is, 3.5 rules make it not only possible, but easy.
Okay, but, like, any high-level wizard could also easily destroy a city with, like, earthquakes or whatever. Does that mean that all the cities on Toril should be destroyed? Just because it's possible for them to be?

If you want to argue that this is a logical consequence of the existence of high-level spellcasters, you need to be able to show that high-level spellcasters would actually want to do that. The high-level casters in this world are known quantities! There aren't a bunch of rando nobodies who just happen to have 20 levels of wizard all running around casting spells all over the place. We're talking about named characters with established goals and MOs. Which of them, specifically, should be doing this?

[Quertus]

Making an existing character "smart" instead of "dumb" (and I would strongly disagree that a fictional character making choices you disagree with makes them dumb, unrealistic, or wrong, but let's set that aside for now) satisfies my first condition. It doesn't satisfy conditions 2 or 3. Just because they could do something doesn't mean they should or would do it. Why is it even something they'd want to do in the first place? Is it actually going to help with their goals? And furthermore, there are characters (and even whole civilizations) in canon who have already attempted such things! Some of them were even successful! We were just talking about Netheril and Myth Drannor upthread, but there are also individual wizards of great power like Manshoon and Halaster who have used what we might consider TO tricks (demiplanes, clones) to become basically invincible. They just don't particularly care about taking over the world.

Although I agree to strongly agree with most of your post (especially that behaving suboptimally is not "wrong" - role-playing is seemingly so close to a lost art, especially in discussions), being me, I'm going to focus on the part I… if not disagree with, at least want to clarify: FR NPCs feeling dumb.

Now, I absolutely agree that "not doing things the way I would" is in no way grounds for calling characters dumb. In fact, one could (and a proper Playground Determinator certainly would) consider *most if not all* of my characters to be varying degrees of dumb. Because they are all varying degrees of suboptimal.

However, there is a difference between "suboptimal" and "pants on head" - and Realms Wizards are notoriously pants-on-head.

Did you read my spoiler about FR Wizards in just one chapter of just one module? How concepts like "number of spells memorized" and "maximum spell level" are just too complicated? How Wizards will use Time Stop and/or Invisibility before Teleporting away? Never mind the Wizard with superior ranged allies, who then penalized ranged attacks, blocks LoS, and otherwise does their best to not just remove but often reverse every advantage they have. That group could have *greatly* increased their effectiveness by murdering the Wizard before the encounter, that's how bad they were.

And that's just one chapter of one module to demonstrate just how much concentrated pants-on-head failure one can find in the Forgotten Realms.

Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, is tactically inept… but it's hard for me to say that with a straight face when Forgotten Realms NPCs are part of the discussion, as they come off as not just tactically inept, but somewhere between straight up completely inept and an active detriment to anyone with them. Quertus… really doesn't come off as terribly clueless in comparison to their frequent pants-on-head tactical blunders.

So, properly role-playing a Realms Wizard does, indeed, involve asking whether they should or would do a thing. But it also involves a level of utter cluelessness that should make an even remotely competent party :smallfurious:, and send a Determinator into seizures at the incomprehensible stupidity of their actions.

When a 5-year-old¹ can see that your plan is really unbelievably bad, it might be time to rethink your life. In that vein, I have yet to read about a Realms Wizard² who doesn't need to have an intervention, and rethink their life.

I think that's not an unfair set of criteria for saying that something "feels dumb" - even (or especially) given that how something "feels" is entirely subjective.

EDIT: wanted to add that I think them being suboptimal makes them more realistic. Just… they didn't have to be pants-on-head in order to feel realistic, so… it kinda swings back in the opposite direction, making their survival necessitate a completely pants-on-head world. Which, happily for them, the Realms quite succeeds at qualifying for.

¹ I ran out of convenient 5-year-olds, and 2020 isn't helping, so I had to improvise and ask someone slightly older. Hopefully I won't lose "evil overlord cred" for this substitution.
² at least one who gets a modicum of "screen time".

[Zhorn]

Sounds like a classic nuclear deterrence setup.
Headcanon inbound:
If a known high level mage (ie: Mad Mage) were to just randomly glass a city, there would be enough groups with a vested interest in maintaining a stable status quo that a high level retaliation would be on its way pretty quickly to eliminate the threat before additional damage was done, be that other high level mages or adventuring groups and their allies.
So unless the Mad Mage wasn't interested in their own survival, wanton destruction out in the open would be something they'd avoid as to not draw attention and immediate retaliation. Same logic can be applied to ancient dragons and attacking cities; they COULD do a lot of damage but the risk of retaliation is too high to not be worth it.

Then there's the rise to power of such dangerous individuals; if they were displaying such destructive tendencies as they were amassing power, it would make sense they would draw attention from such an opposition to counter them.
Furthermore; if they didn't display a sense of caution about preserving their own life, such reckless behaviour could lead to their own demise by accident long before reaching city level threats of power (we all know how short lived murder hobos tend to be).

From there you're left with the more clever and ambitious Mad Mage types who instead set up fortified locations warded from simple detection to launch their machinations from, but instead of doing direct assaults personally they set up means of destruction they can be safe from, such as Acererak and the Soul Monger, with loftier goal than just "blow something up".

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The current geopolitical stasis in the Realms is basically due to this:


A LOT of this is beyond subtle. Say just six epic diviners with hundreds of high level and epic spells keep watch on the potential future. [...] Then add in, oh, 100 or so 10-20 level diviner types also doing the same thing, but on smaller scales.
[...]
Plus add in, oh, 100 more active defenders. They just watch out for anything that might be a threat and deal with it.

...plus this:


Sounds like a classic nuclear deterrence setup.

On Toril itself, for every high-level caster who wants to change things there are several to dozens of other high-level casters who want to oppose that change. The Hathrans can't turn Rashemen into a magical utopia because they're constantly under attack by the Red Wizards, who can't commit their full forces to the effort because they have to defend themselves from the Simbul leading assaults to kill them, who can't focus on making life better for the Aglarondans because the Society of the Kraken is constantly trying to undermine the country, who can't devote more effort to the task because the Harpers are always up in its business, who can't wipe out all the bandits and mercenaries on the Sword Coast because the Sharites and Shadow Weave adepts are always causing trouble, who can't advance their plots against Mystra because Elminster is always ruining their schemes, who can't try to advance the Dalelands because the Zhentarim are always meddling and raiding there, who can't expand farther north because the Hathrans guard their borders against such miscreants, who can't turn Rashemen into a magical utopia because they're constantly under attack by the Red Wizards, who....

And beyond Toril you have the gods, who are incredibly powerful (both personally and in terms of their multitude of followers), can see at least weeks into the future with their innate divine abilities (and possibly longer with various artifacts and custom spells and such), and are very invested in maintaining the status quo within certain bounds. Bob the High-Level Druid wants to raise a huge mythal that makes crops grow really fast to supply a whole city with abundant food on relatively little farmland? Chauntea, Goddess of Agriculture, would be very happy to see such a thing, especially if he consecrates it in her name. Joe the High-Level Wizard wants to make an infinitely-resetting trap of create food and water to feed entire communities without needing to farm anymore? Chauntea, Second- or Third-Most-Powerful Deity in Realmspace Because of All the Farmers Worshiping Her, would object most fervently to any mortal attempting to render agriculture obsolete and could apply a considerable amount of political, theological, and magical pressure against such a plan.

Now, this doesn't mean powerful casters or gods enforce Medieval Stasis, as the Realms have never been anything approaching "medieval" in societal, technological, or aesthetic terms and there are plenty of individuals and factions encouraging magical advancement. (It is basically in "perpetual-apocalypse stasis," but that's a whole 'nother story.) Netheril has already been mentioned, but there are plenty of other ridiculously-high-magic empires in Toril's past; even just counting human empires, there have been at least 8-10 other major empires worthy of the name (Imaskar, Jhaamdath, Narfell, Raumathar....) and even the arguably shortest-lived and weakest of them, Narfell, was a full-on demon-worshiping magotheocracy that lasted over 800 years without any divine meddling trying to take them out.

It does mean, though, that a single caster just waking up one day and deciding "Welp, I think I'm going to make myself a teleportation circle network and render traditional trade obsolete" (or similar) is going to be facing stiff opposition from several churches of deities of trade and travel and such, several good-aligned organizations who don't want to see commoners impoverished or starved, several evil-aligned organizations who don't want to see their monopolies vanish, and so forth--at the very least; Cormyr or Calimshan might oppose a teleportation network on national security grounds even if they'd benefit from the increased trade, for instance, and send a few adventuring parties and a few War Wizard or sha'ir specialists to deal with the meddling wizard.

And all of that is ignoring the many and varied monsters infesting Faerûn that are smart, magically-powerful, and inclined to oppose large-scale meddling, like the phaerimm opposed Netheril or various evil dragons oppose do-gooder organizations or the like. Even if you plopped a Playground-grade optimized caster down on Toril one day and told them to do their worst (aside from RAW-but-not-RAI Pun Pun-level cheese), making changes to the setting isn't nearly as easy as one might suppose.

[Mechalich]

The thing is, balance of power systems aren't actually stable. Eventually a spark sets off the powder keg and there's a giant war. And then when the war ends you have to redraw the maps.

In the Realms, however, somehow giant wars happen, but no one important ever actually dies (at least not in a way that counts, Elminster has personally 'killed' Manshoon on multiple occasions, but he hasn't departed the setting by any means), and none of the institutions change and there aren't even any long term economic effects.

The city of Tilverton got turned into a no-go magical hellscape following the return of the archwizards, but Cormyr was somehow just fine. The Shadovar exterminated supposedly a massive fraction of the Cult of the Dragon in the same event, but the Cult keeps on trucking.

In a lot of ways the Realms relies on a fantasy version of superhero setting comic book logic to keep on going. The world is always almost destroyed, but somehow everything's okay and life goes on as if nothing happened and even characters who appear to have been lost can be expected to return eventually. And it really isn't any more believable for FR than it is for Marvel.

[Troacctid]

That's the nice thing about fictional powderkegs. They don't go off until the plot is ready for them to.

[Clistenes]

Okay, but, like, any high-level wizard could also easily destroy a city with, like, earthquakes or whatever. Does that mean that all the cities on Toril should be destroyed? Just because it's possible for them to be?

We have been given a list of dozens of epic level named characters. But these aren't all the high level characters, only the few that reached epic levels and achieved sone form of immortality...

There are have existed many more 17-20 level characters during Faerun's history besides these few dozens who have become ancient liches or Chosen to deities. An most of these characters aren't named... can you give me a complete list of all 17-20 level wizards alive in Toril during year 1300? during year 1200? during year 1100?


If you want to argue that this is a logical consequence of the existence of high-level spellcasters, you need to be able to show that high-level spellcasters would actually want to do that. The high-level casters in this world are known quantities! There aren't a bunch of rando nobodies who just happen to have 20 levels of wizard all running around casting spells all over the place. We're talking about named characters with established goals and MOs. Which of them, specifically, should be doing this?

One of the many unnamed 17-20 level wizards that have existed during Faerun's histiry.

Many wizards wouldn't care about society and would retreat to their towers and dungeons... but we know there are wizards who are part of merchant families and thieves' guilds, wizards who are involved in politics, of wizards who are royalty... these would be interested in international trade.

Thayze Selemchant of Amn's Council of Six was a wizard, Akabar Bel Akash was both a wizard and merchant. Queen Zaeanda and Haedrak III were wizards and royals.

Wizards can be involved in trade and politics... what if one of them reaches high level? Can you prove that none of them will ever reach high level?

Princess Zandra of Tethyr was high level enough to train a future Blackstaff. Vangerdahast Aeiulvana was involved in politics. All the Blackstaffs were involved in politics. Plenty of powerful Waterdevian wizards used their powers to help the city.



It does mean, though, that a single caster just waking up one day and deciding "Welp, I think I'm going to make myself a teleportation circle network and render traditional trade obsolete" (or similar) is going to be facing stiff opposition from several churches of deities of trade and travel and such, several good-aligned organizations who don't want to see commoners impoverished or starved, several evil-aligned organizations who don't want to see their monopolies vanish, and so forth--at the very least; Cormyr or Calimshan might oppose a teleportation network on national security grounds even if they'd benefit from the increased trade, for instance, and send a few adventuring parties and a few War Wizard or sha'ir specialists to deal with the meddling wizard.

As I said, the wizard could be expelled from many places. But others would choose to work with him, and others would choose to copy him.

The teleportation net would succeed in at least some places, and villains couldn't conquer all of those.. I mean, villains are trying and failing to conquer countries and overthrowing governments all the time in Faerun all the time...

Unless the churches and good governments always oppose the teleportation net, or the villains always succeed to destroy it, it should exist in at least several countries in Faerun.

[noob]

Well, you really need to separate the fictional setting from the game rules. And more so on how the people use the rules to play the game. When you have a game setting with an overly friendly GM, a gentleman's agreement, pick and choose what rules to follow, create a game world with a massive bias for the 'player' and tons of house rules to make the game "fun and fair" you get the problem world people are talking about.

An easy one is that such a Player would demand that their character never be attacked or effected by anything that was in their personal view "unfair". Like if their character was attacked when already weakened or distracted. Or just a simple encounter that was way too powerful for the character. Nothing in the rules forbids this, but this type of player would say it's "wrong" simply as they did not like it.

Plus this type of player does have the wacky idea that "only their" special character knows everything: if it's in an official book, their character knows everything about it.


Would "optimizing" Epic level Realms spellcasters....AND having EACH of them be a Player Character an overly friendly GM, a gentleman's agreement, pick and choose what rules to follow, create a game world with a massive bias for the 'player' and tons of house rules to make the game "fun and fair"....change anything in the Realms?


This "gm friend but no knowledge of the rules" optimisation is done by 100% of the characters in the books.
"I dodge magic missile" have been done in a book and there is commonly wizards preparing spells above what they have the right to prepare or outright casting spells they did not prepare in the books.
You are essentially saying "I do not like pcs and will not give them the same treatment as the wizards in the novels" and it is not at all what the thread was about the thread was about the characters in the books and not the players!

Players are 100% irrelevant to the discussion and talking about them is only misdirection.

The truth is that the book characters are mostly lazy people or fixing only something they saw or fighting someone who attacked them personally.
Some wanted to make magical utopias and they did succeed then their magical utopias fell to an utter lack of common sense: Why make flying flipped mountains? It is only a catastrophe in waiting: it looks designed to fail.
Also "making tons of people reach high level" is similarly designed to fail: some will be evil and less dumb than the others and then kill all the others to get cool servitors from their corpses or something.
Permanent teleportation circles are extremely vulnerable to attacks an are not a good way to typpyify things: use created lantern archons instead to make transports way more unpredictable and not centralised(unless you have an evil government or country in which case you want the new system to fail in order to justify a "fight against terrorism" to keep your population placated).

Also all the time the people who do their magical utopias in FR want cultural radiance but doing so is a super bad idea because it makes you a good target for any raider that wants cool loot.

So what worked is a magical dystopia where evil wizards live in opulence on the work of slaves called thay because they had the lowest amount of bad decisions(only one: using slaves which can trigger slave rebellion events and attacks from liberators).

[AnimeTheCat]

Okay, but, like, any high-level wizard could also easily destroy a city with, like, earthquakes or whatever. Does that mean that all the cities on Toril should be destroyed? Just because it's possible for them to be?

If you want to argue that this is a logical consequence of the existence of high-level spellcasters, you need to be able to show that high-level spellcasters would actually want to do that. The high-level casters in this world are known quantities! There aren't a bunch of rando nobodies who just happen to have 20 levels of wizard all running around casting spells all over the place. We're talking about named characters with established goals and MOs. Which of them, specifically, should be doing this?

I agree, motive and character plays such a big part in why things like this don't happen in a fantasy setting, or even in the real world. The fact that Faerun doesn't have a singular magiocratic civilization stitched together through spellcraft across the entire world is probably largely for the same reason our world doesn't have a singular [insert governance type] civilization stitched together through technology across the world. What motivation does any singular individual or group have to accomplish this goal. If it's about money or research, you're going to make more money by selling to opposing groups that are having some kind of conflict, and if you want to achieve some kind of specific research it's best to do so when you have some kind of reason for needing to achieve that research outcome, not just because you want to. Also, there's no unifying factor around the entire world. There's no reason for the relatively prosperous nation A to want to be governed or to govern the relatively prosperous nation B, and the citizenry likely wouldn't take kindly to that kind of power center shift either (be that because of a perceived lack of representation in said power center or otherwise).

Thoughts, motives, and rationales matter a lot when it comes to "Why isn't X?"

[Huzuhbazah]

How should Faerun actually look like, under the influence of so many epicly powerful spellcaster, when considering both the lore, and the game mechanics of 3.X around the years of 1372-1380, pre-spell plague!
Faerun would be in a state of rapid, constant, and total flux, as every motivated and capable deity and spellcaster would be wishing it to change virtually every instant.

[Scots Dragon]

I'd argue that we've seen what happens when the Optimised mage happens. It was called Karsus' Folly, and it's the reason that spell levels end at 'nine' outside of stuff like true dweomers and elven high magic (both under the auspices of epic spellcasting).

[Efrate]

In the absence of authorial fiat and Marty Stu/Mary Sue types, all these ineffective high level casters should have been easily taken care of. If Elminster as written without plot armor is meddling he should be easily struck down by anyone who cares and tries. Same for almost all the named NPCs. Even barring chain gating solar's to infinity and the like, it should be rather easily managed. Ao forbids too much meddling in mortal affairs, so chosen or not should be easy enough. A decently prepped and 30+ intelligence full caster should invalidate most opposition that doesn't come at least equally prepped. And nearly none of the named NPCs are.

You overthrow The Symbul, ally with Hathran/Rashimi vs. Thay, teach them how to not suck, secure your borders and work from there. Or anything likewise. Or control from the Shadows to avoid a target. It's easy. A few of those moves would cause the other high level npcs to either adapt or get destroyed. They come at you as stupid as they are, one more threat eliminated.

If they adapt why bother with you when they can do the same. You should eventually reach a stasis of competency. Then you can Tippyverse or whatever.

[Scots Dragon]

The obsession with making the Forgotten Realms characters out to be incompetent buffoons because they don't follow the optimal paths of an edition that wasn't even released until most of the characters and stories were a decade and a half old is really weird, especially when the setting was built largely to be a narrative one and not rules-heavy crunch nonsense. And I have to admit, it perplexes me as to why it's always the Realms. Why doesn't Mordenkainen or Tenser or Rary get that negative attention since they're both about as powerful as the big names in Faerûn.

Makes me suspect the overall thing is just part of an overall set of anti-Realms trends that people are kind of obsessed with.

[unseenmage]

Economy:

...
Never did like this take on magic economy as it tends to ignore that magic and monsters ALSO un-create wealth at a pretty fantastic rate as well.

From disintegrate effects to the literal digestive tracts of monsters there're loads and loads of ways even magically created wealth, and even post scarcity causing machines, can and do get removed from the equation.

That magic giveth, but magic also taketh away is rarely ever addressed.

[ShurikVch]

Considering the sheer number of secret organizations and societies, Faerûn should be much more of "spy fiction" than "hack and slash dungeon crawling adventure"

[noob]

Considering the sheer number of secret organizations and societies, Faerûn should be much more of "spy fiction" than "hack and slash dungeon crawling adventure"

Only if you care about the secret organisation instead of waiting for them to reveal themselves and shout strongly "we are at the final part of our plan meant to end the current status quo in the place where we are" and then bash them regardless of whenever they would have brought good or bad changes.

[Yanagi]

If we imagine all the wizards like Elminster, Larloch, Srinshee, Ioulaum being optimized (while considering the lore) to the best of this forums abilities, how should that impact the realms and what would that look like?

So, that newly invented character could be any one of them being optimized... It does not have to be a newly created characters. Take any of the level 17+ spellcasters and imagine that the character being run by Tippy or Ur-Priest or who ever is the best optimizer here...

Fantasy economies and societies are deliberately built thin. RPGs are designed to center the players, and the sociological world building involves many conceits that just make play easier so people can focus on the action/adventure. The designers had in mind an intended play style that is collaborative, immersive, and focused on the narrative path of an adventure, so many complicated background processes that must exist in the setting are sanded down so the focus can remain on adventuring together. Money is the best example of this: breaking the 3.5 economy is like hunting a teddy bear that says encouraging things when squeezed: it's vaguely shaped like a large threatening object but it actually exists to be comforting and easy to interact with.

The cheap but entirely valid answer is all the wizards and gods and etceteras are already trying to win but it's like all the clowns trying to get out of the tiny car at once: the independent flailing of each aggregates into a impediment that blocks every other one. That's kind of...actual Realmslore: do the hubris and something will be able to smack you, only to be smacked in turn.

If I take your meaning, though: I think what you mean to say is that your base assumption is that all top-tier casters should be mechanically optimized and operate using optimal stratagems because they're described in fluff as very powerful, and therefore you want to know what that would look like if all of the Faerun casters behaved in that manner.

A single epic caster and their organization permitted to do Tippy economic stratagems in a setting with no characters optimized to the same level (NB: I don't know how gods work mechanically. Maybe they're rock to the caster's scissors and all this is moot) resembles a disruptive monopoly. The motive--fully automated luxury wizard communist or autocrat sorceror-of-industry monopolist--doesn't matter, the process is just zeroing out costs through economy of scale and flooding the market with loss leaders to end competition completely capture the consumer base. Basically...the rise of Walmart but faster. Since epic casters have stuff they want that isn't just more money, this same power-loop is also applied to statecraft: the accumulation of hard and soft power--all that fun crap that grants authority--but also the ne plus ultra of magical WMDs and automated combatants (undead, summons, constructs are pretty much drones). That makes them something like a petrostate dictator with a high-grade arsenal.

And coercive force will be needed because people--specifically most of the people with temporal power that stems from entitlement to redistribute limited resources--will attempt to say "no." Everyone with entrenched power based on existing distribution of limited resources loses the basis of their authority...and their lifestyle...when free resources drop...not just kings, skilled laborers with better than average salaries, people with rent and debt that can't service because they can't pay it down with free sandwiches. Unless everything becomes free at exactly the same moment, everywhere, there's going to be region crises as the commodities and finished goods they need to sell devalue to zero. Force is also going to be there are still supply chain gaps that bad actors can exploit to monetize your free stuff: free sandwiches handed out on every street corner in Illusk is going to become a warehouse full of sandwiches confiscated by the warlords because people can't pay the free sandwich tax, free t-shirts for everyone in Zhent becomes a giant pyre because Bane-priests say "t-shirts bad and also we will hit you."

The nicest all-powerful caster is still destroying the life that everyone knows and all of their stability, on the promise of a universal bounty contingent on the continued beneficence of a singular all-powerful epic caster who promises not to be an autocrat even though their is no check on their ability to be an autocrat.

But...

If you have more than one individual implementing these control schemes at the same time it's everyone using a small number of viable strategies dictated by top tier optimization, which bottlenecks all possible builds with in game rules down to maybe a viable dozen. Everyone at the top is incentivized to do perpetual motion industry, create their zone of political control, have WMDs and counters for WMDs. Infinite production versus infinite production means no one can overwhelm any other through market forces alone, so everyone has to develop both hard and soft strategies that lean into available optimal tactics. It's like the nuclear triad...each side might emphasize different facets, but they all have to think about the same things. But the danger isn't really comparable to nuclear warfare because nukes require a nation's-worth of money to build and a lot of bureaucracy to maintain in launch readiness. Every magic side is basically one superbeing with a personal WMD arsenal that requires no authorization to use and has no usage doctrine other than personal impression.

Given that it's Faerun and many of the epic casters are somewhat knowable because of years of biographical detail and description of their relationships, you can guess the lines along which cadres and tensions will form:

- the altruists with missionary tendencies,
- the pragmatists with an eye towards non-confrontation,
- the stable autocrats continuing the pyramid-shaped social structure they were already part of,
- the unstable actors most likely to escalate tension as they try to grasp more for no reason other than to do it,
- the whimsical/mad figures who do things without reason,
- the inscrutable parties who are unknown to all other parts and have unclear drives.

Interactions between these cadres is going to look like a cold war that occasionally gets warm through proxy conflict, and sometimes there's a flare up between rational actors that triggers a limited exchange, and sometimes there's a mass casualty event because a non-rational actor pops off. The part that makes this all bananapants crazy is that the only sure winning move is total decapitation strike while remaining anonymous...and I don't even know if that's possible given the layers of contingency possible with high level magic and supernatural allies, so destruction is only assured for the normal people. Furthermore the magical equivalent of automated second strike capability--the Dead Hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand)--seems like something everyone could implement. Barring some kind of black swan moment of brilliance that further breaks the already broken mechanics underpinning the setting it looks a lot like a forever war with tactical nuclear strikes.

Does MAD actually exist as a deterrent in this scenario? I don't know. Deterrence as strategy--avoiding being the target of a first strike by guaranteeing a retaliatory second strike of equal or greater force--hinges on the idea of parity in loss: leaders need to be alive and have people and land to have a nation to lead--and at minimum they like the money people and land make while not being destroyed and/or irradiated. Tippyverse optimal-casters might want people and land because they're of a place and have a way they want things to be, but they don't need people or land to keep functioning as a side. That's...spooky.

Nobody actually answer this but just consider...in real life, is the Cold War over or not? Most of the missiles are still pointing at the same targets but there's a lot less anxiety that they'll be used. The proxy fights the big players encouraged before the Berlin Wall fell are still going. Money and weapons from major Cold War players have a strange habit of pooling in places where they guarantee opposite sides on a conflict just keep creating a trickle of dead people.

Thought-experiment-Faerun's going to be like that: uncertain because all the weapons are primed and periodically someone dies and everyone has to wonder whether that was a war death. Each person in each zone of control might be materially comfortable enough to not think about how their lives are in the balance all the time, and not sure what it means if people they don't know far away die violently. The people with power will constantly be spying and wargaming whether to escalate or de-escalate. Good caster-autocrats can't just assume an Evil caster-autocrat that's gone quiet isn't using their power to do one of the known, knowable strategies that could cause mass death and destruction. Evil caster-autocrats who've built a comfortable self-serving setup are going to assume that goody-goody caster-autocrats are going to try and...genuinely help their people with no strings attached. Everyone has to be scared of whimsical, mad, caster-autocrats, because they have the power but no self-governance. And everybody's going to lose sleep over the possibility there's and unknown unknown in a crypt somewhere.

I guess who starts their system breaking magic first and their order of operations is also, really important to who has how much power, but it's basically impossible to describe because there's too many sides and each would have a plan that is a reflection of the epic caster's priorities, worldview, and personality...but the problem with gaming this out in a setting like Faerun is that the past is just all Tippyverse-capable epic casters, so either past casters have done the thing and then still failed (which is kind of true, looking at the first elves and Netheril and them wizards what stole all the Egyptians) or nothing would be as it is. If infinite power loops meant the end of history then the Sarrukh would still be running Toril.

[Of course they actually still are. in every crystal sphere it is a mystical inevitability that hidden magic lizard people are the apex species. Rule of Three, Unity of Rings, Center of All, Ubiquity of Lizard People.]

And if that sounds bleak and miserable...well...perhaps I'm deliberately emphasizing the negative because the meta-aware argument of "they are smart and magic on paper, they cannot fail" doesn't feel sound when a more fundamental rule is that rolling a 1 is a fail regardless of how large the static bonuses are, and most settings are built exclusively on smart wizards failing. And when the future is people constantly making that "do I hit the red button" check, over and over indefinitely, somebody's going to get the critical fail eventually.

It makes me think of the basic good dudes who've actually saved us from not existing while the Great Smart Men were tripping over their own narcissism to turn everything into unstable isotopes and neutrons. Mangods whimsically throwing mountains at one other don't leave room for Vasily Arkhipovs, which strikes me as doom sign.


There might be rivals and organizations to spoil one another, but imagine it was the collective of this forum worldbuidling Fearun on 3.5. Besides all the mailmen, killer gnome and batman wizards, and the utilization of constant free wishes from summoned creatures and dweomerkeepers... would we see teleportation circles all over, would farming be a thing of the past, would warfare be conducted with people or constructs...

What you're saying is that the setting would be something different if you ignored all the materials contextualizing why the setting is the way it is, and that the highest-level casters would be more efficient if they weren't characters with informed attributes based on world-building material that would actually inform their choices.

By all means, individually or collaboratively wreck and rebuild Faerun as optimizers, it would be really fun if people could mate that fluff-crunch pairing, but... optimization does not actually explain motivation, so the what of their powers does not actually inform the how of using their powers.

Pun Pun can infinite loop themselves into basket weaving skills that making the phlogiston itself weep.

What is true is what is accepted as truth through narrative choices, for your personal version of the Realms.

Which...haha...is precisely what I did above with my jeremiad above. Nothing I said is solid unless someone wants all or part of it to be solid.


The reason for this question is basically that I am working on a epic level campaign, and while I haven't gotten a lot of stuff down yet, I want to make sure (or at least try) that my version of the realms is as realistic considering the rule set as possible. While I understand that sufficiently motivated, no holds bared individuals will eventually become Pun Pun, I have chosen to simply ignore this and determine that Pun Pun is impossible in the realms, because no one knows about the Sarruks Su abilities...

The world waits within the guidebooks frozen in place, awaiting the game runner to curate its parts before presenting it to the players to set in motion. It is polite to establish with one's players a shared understanding of the state of the setting and the explicit and implicit "rules" of what is possible, ultimately the game runner exercises fiat every time they have to invent a detail or improvise a characterization.

Part of that fiat is telling players "no" if their wants things that negatively affect the experience of all the other players and game runner...OR realizing that everyone wants to be in god mode and entirely rebuilding play to something that suits that style and everyone can participate. A Civ-like collaborative world-building exercise where people are in character is a great idea, as is setting up NPCs with competing visions to provide conflict, but it would probably be more interesting and challenging in a different game mechanic more suited to robust economics and simulating large-scale population dynamics.

If you're starting a game at epic, it's a good idea to have all the players on the same page about what epic play is going to look like--adventuring just with bigger stakes, a more sociological style where the PCs have organizations and long term goals, or just Faerun BTFO with caster cheese. The first two aren't mutually exclusive...the third it's a good idea to check in a make sure everyone's having fun. Fun together is the actual point.


I have also chosen not to include epic magic, because I feel its a ****ty system. But besides that, what kind of realms are we looking at? Is Tippyverse the logic conclusion?

There is no logical conclusion, really. There's also not really any information that could result in a logical conclusion because it's abstractions working on free form fiction. A perfectly-functioning Tippyverse can be if the game runner and players let it be and that's all there is to it.

But--

Both the history of magic dudes in Faerun and powerful dudes in reality suggests that just because someone has the ability to make things better, or at least more efficient, does not mean they will inevitably do that because it is the "best" option. Furthermore the grand abstraction of "in the big picture this better" is often used to justify immediate suffering and atrocity...and payout is not actually guaranteed. And even granting good intentions leading to a payout, the process--the violence or coercion required to advance progress--breaks people in ways that getting their mechanical needs addressed can't fix. Also...hubris is a real thing: power isolates the powerful and changes how they think because they are alone with their abstractions and their whims--baking in narcissism--and that combines poorly with utopian schemes making assumptions about what people want and need.

This is a funny thing to think about when you look at how swagger about epic casting ability includes "...and here's how I can kill or mind control all the stuff that would try and stop me, and here's how I could cause a mass casualty event . Also I can kill gods."

Every wizard is capable of a series of WW1 war crimes at any time--and everybody who knows what a wizard is, knows it--and that would affect everybody at all times. An epic wizard can be nicest person in the world, but they're also a dictator with a C/B/N weapons stash that gets into squabbles with other similarly-armed dictators. Saying "no you can't destroy the entire economic basis of my society with free sandwiches because you have a hunch" is...sane and justified, because it's not that hard a Knowledge roll for Realmslore to remember a time a wizard did something showy and:

- it worked and had unintended consequences;
- it worked but something else impossibly powerful retaliated, or did sabotage, or just sent lots of goons;
- it worked until it didn't work and now it's an engineering disaster;
- it didn't work and now something is terribly, terribly wrong in a way that will for the basis of a new adventure module because there's a hole with monsters.

...which really complicates the picture of "I have the best intentions and will succeed because, with my Doylean understanding of the Watsonian setting surrounding me, I have the absolute highest numbers and optimal strats."

[Troacctid]

It's also worth noting that Tippy originally named epic magic and active deities as two contraindicating factors that would be likely to prevent the rise of a Tippyverse, and the Forgotten Realms has both of those factors in spades.

[Scots Dragon]

It's also worth noting that Tippy originally named epic magic and active deities as two contraindicating factors that would be likely to prevent the rise of a Tippyverse, and the Forgotten Realms has both of those factors in spades.

It's actually got multiple versions of the former, since in the Forgotten Realms epic magic is used for a variety of concepts that were present in the pre-D&D 3e Realms. Notably it's representative of true dweomers, attempts to recreate high-level Netherese magic by powerful mages, and is also the system by which Elven High Magic tends to function.

In addition, it should always be kept in mind many of the stat blocks for high-level characters were created prior to the release of the latter-day sourcebooks that would have made for much more useful interpretations of their abilities. The Seven Sisters tend to have pretty terrible stat-blocks utilising sorcerer/wizard multiclassing, but could almost certainly be fixed up by incorporating the Ultimate Magus prestige class from Complete Mage, which was introduced way later, to flesh out their abilities in a much more accurate fashion.

Indeed, most characters in Faerûn were statted up all the way back in D&D 3.0e in like 2001, some of them having been given their stats prior to the release of the Epic Level Handbook and thus showing very different interpretations of what an epic level character should look like.

[The_Jette]

In the absence of authorial fiat and Marty Stu/Mary Sue types, all these ineffective high level casters should have been easily taken care of. If Elminster as written without plot armor is meddling he should be easily struck down by anyone who cares and tries. Same for almost all the named NPCs. Even barring chain gating solar's to infinity and the like, it should be rather easily managed. Ao forbids too much meddling in mortal affairs, so chosen or not should be easy enough. A decently prepped and 30+ intelligence full caster should invalidate most opposition that doesn't come at least equally prepped. And nearly none of the named NPCs are.

I don't mean to bicker, but eliminating Elmister is not an easy feat, mainly because he can (and will/has) call upon a number of magical resources that others simply do not have access to. He knows every spell in every book. He can swap out his prepared spells for any other spell he needs at any time. If he can't swap, for some reason, he has access to the 9th level spell Wish, which would allow him to cast any spell he needs at the moment. He also channels Silverfire (not spellfire), which is granted to the Chosen of Mystra, allowing him to do pretty much anything he wants including turning off an enemy's ability to cast spells. And, if somehow someone got through all of that power and magic and beat him to the point that his life is threatened, he wouldn't even have to call on Mystra. Mystra would just show up and literally tear to pieces anyone who was threatening him. What are you going to do against the Goddess of Magic who literally controls the very thing that you are wielding as a weapon? Elminster can stop your spellcasting, but Mystra can take it away permanently.
I'm just saying that of all the NPCs to say you could destroy easily, Elminster is not one of them.

[Edea]

Arcane magic is divinely governed in Faerun; Mystra and Shar can just turn it off if someone does something egregious with it (Karsus's vestige might even be incorporated into a 'failsafe' of sorts, though that's not canon...the fact that Ioulaum has not been brought to task for that fiasco almost feels like a plothole). Ao also actually interferes with Toril, albeit at the managerial level only. As long as they're paying attention, magic will be unable to get to the sheer levels of crazy it does in tippyverse.

[The_Jette]

Arcane magic is divinely governed in Faerun; Mystra and Shar can just turn it off if someone does something egregious with it (Karsus's vestige might even be incorporated into a 'failsafe' of sorts, though that's not canon...the fact that Ioulaum has not been brought to task for that fiasco almost feels like a plothole). Ao also actually interferes with Toril, albeit at the managerial level only. As long as they're paying attention, magic will be unable to get to the sheer levels of crazy it does in tippyverse.

Mystra gets to govern who uses magic through the weave. So, unless the spellcaster attacking Elminster is using Shadow magic, Mystra can just deny them access to the weave. And, Ao rarely interferes. Mystra went on a rampage through the 9 hells in Elminster in Hell and only retreated when it seemed apparent that she had managed to piss off Asmodeus by doing so and didn't want to start a divine war. It seems unlikely that any God would interfere on behalf of a random Wizard who decided to attack Mystra's favorite mortal to ever exist.

[Quertus]

The obsession with making the Forgotten Realms characters out to be incompetent buffoons because they don't follow the optimal paths of an edition that wasn't even released until most of the characters and stories were a decade and a half old is really weird, especially when the setting was built largely to be a narrative one and not rules-heavy crunch nonsense. And I have to admit, it perplexes me as to why it's always the Realms. Why doesn't Mordenkainen or Tenser or Rary get that negative attention since they're both about as powerful as the big names in Faerûn.

Makes me suspect the overall thing is just part of an overall set of anti-Realms trends that people are kind of obsessed with.

Personally, I describe the denizens of Faerûn as incompetent buffoons pants-on-head, not because they're suboptimal (or because of any "anti-Realms" sentiment (which, to fairly state my biases, I do have some - but that sentiment extends only to the Wall of shame, not to the rest of the Realms)), but because they are often more valuable to their side dead. Yes, if teamed up with a Forgotten Realms Wizard, your best bet for success is probably to kill them. Not kill them and replace them with someone better, just kill them. Because, odds are, they will be an active detriment to your success.

Why is it always Realms Wizards? Well, by all means, if you have stories of Mordenkainen or Tenser or Rary (when he wasn't actively betraying his "team") being so pants-on-head as to penalize their own troops, attempt to solo antimagic (with no capacity to cast in antimagic), uselessly cast invisibility and/or Time Stop before Teleporting away, or anything of that ilk, by all means, let us know. Until then, I'll just put it out there that *I* haven't heard stories of such utter ineptitude from those names.

Have you?

(EDIT: do note that those stories of the utter ineptitude of Realms Wizards have nothing to do with "rules-heavy crunch nonsense" (like "number of spell slots" or "maximum spell level known", which is *also* too complex for Realms Wizards), but involve such trivial common sense that even small children of a presumably no-magic plane can comprehend their actions and choices as laughably foolhardy)

[Yanagi]

Personally, I describe the denizens of Faerûn as buffoons pants-on-head, not because they're suboptimal (or because of any "anti-Realms" sentiment (which extends only to the Wall of shame)), but because they are often more valuable to their side dead. Yes, if teamed up with a Forgotten Realms Wizard, your best bet for success is probably to kill them. Not kill them and replace them with someone better, just kill them. Because, odds are, they will be an active detriment to your success.

Why is it always Realms Wizards? Well, by all means, if you have stories of Mordenkainen or Tenser or Rary (when he wasn't actively betraying his "team") being so pants-on-head as to penalize their own troops, attempt to solo antimagic (with no capacity to cast in antimagic), uselessly cast invisibility and/or Time Stop before Teleporting away, or anything of that ilk, by all means, let us know. Until then, I'll just put it out there that *I* haven't heard stories of such utter ineptitude from those names.

Have you?

(EDIT: do note that those stories of the utter ineptitude of Realms Wizards have nothing to do with "rules-heavy crunch nonsense" (like "number of spell slots" or "maximum spell level known", which is *also* too complex for Realms Wizards), but involve such trivial common sense that even small children of a presumably no-magic plane can comprehend their actions and choices as laughably foolhardy)

Okay I'll bite.

I want to know which module this is because I want to read it and understand why it burned down your mansion and killed all your servants before launching a vicious smear campaign that got you banned from the salons of Lombardy and Bohemia, causing you such distress that you can no longer drink absinthe without spilling it on your ermine cuffs.

[Telok]

Funny thing is, you don't need to rewrite the top 10 wizards of FR into TO super-casters in order to start collapsing the setting.

It just takes one middle-high level cleric of the church of doing good deeds to walk past the magic trap on the way to that church's holy item vault and think "What of that cast Create Food & Water instead of Maximized FlameStrike?" to start feeding a thousand near-starving people a day.

It just takes a mid level wizard tired or copying stuff by hand to make an automatic book copying box and lending it to friend to start the whole printing press thing going.

It just takes one merchant relative of an adventurer who looted a Mirror of... brain fart, the one that does scrying and can form a 2-way portal. But one trader who knows about and has access to an instant transportation/communication device will start all their competitors trying to replicate it.

It doesn't take rewriting the biggest casters stat blocks to take FR in a completely different direction. It takes anyone with the power equal to 5th level spells to say "Maybe I can do more that blow stuff up, mind control people, and create undead with this ability." to start down that path. To keep FR in it's current situation that sort of thinking has to be killed and the evidence buried every time it's happened...

[vasilidor]

lets face it, Elminster is the penultimate DMPC/Mary sue.

[Troacctid]

It doesn't take rewriting the biggest casters stat blocks to take FR in a completely different direction. It takes anyone with the power equal to 5th level spells to say "Maybe I can do more that blow stuff up, mind control people, and create undead with this ability." to start down that path. To keep FR in it's current situation that sort of thinking has to be killed and the evidence buried every time it's happened...
The technology already exists. Go to Lantan, Halruua, etc. There just isn't any good mechanism for it to spread, or good reason for the artificers to give up their trade secrets. A mid-level caster invents a cool new magic item? Great! That'll do a lot of good for their town. Now what? How do you sell this thing to other towns? How do you distribute it? Do you have enough capital and manpower to mass-produce it? Can anyone even buy it? A small town of 750 people could pool literally every piece of coinage in the city and still have to look under the couch cushions before they could afford a resetting food trap that dispenses bland gruel.

[Scots Dragon]

Okay I'll bite.

I want to know which module this is because I want to read it and understand why it burned down your mansion and killed all your servants before launching a vicious smear campaign that got you banned from the salons of Lombardy and Bohemia, causing you such distress that you can no longer drink absinthe without spilling it on your ermine cuffs.

Apparently Halls of the High King. The only high level wizard doing anything of note in that is Flamsterd, and he only ever does one of the things that are complained about; casting an invisibility spell before teleporting away. Which is used to protect the presence of another person, not himself.

[Yanagi]

Apparently Halls of the High King. The only high level wizard doing anything of note in that is Flamsterd, and he only ever does one of the things that are complained about; casting an invisibility spell before teleporting away. Which is used to protect the
presence of another person, not himself.

Welp that name is certainly cursed enough to reach out of the module and destroy the life and sanity of a player through a series of elaborate bunkum setups.

Not quite "flame turd" but creeping up on it; and you get the vague sense that it's a conjugation of the verb "flamster."

Good name for a Fire-type hamster Pokemon, but that's probably an extra level of humiliation if you're a wizard from 1990.

[Scots Dragon]

What gets me is that it's a huge set of complaints about one adventure module. The AD&D-era for Forgotten Realms had literally dozens of adventure modules. It numbers in the fifties when you count all the subsettings such as Kara-Tur, Maztica, and Al-Qadim. And then on top of that you have enough novels, supplements, and other material to fill a small library.

Judging the competence of entire setting based on the actions of a small handful of characters in one early adventure, while misrepresenting the actions of those characters at that, feels staggeringly disingenuous.

[Yanagi]

What gets me is that it's a huge set of complaints about one adventure module. The AD&D-era for Forgotten Realms had literally dozens of adventure modules. It numbers in the fifties when you count all the subsettings such as Kara-Tur, Maztica, and Al-Qadim. And then on top of that you have enough novels, supplements, and other material to fill a small library.

Judging the competence of entire setting based on the actions of a small handful of characters in one early adventure, while misrepresenting the actions of those characters at that, feels staggeringly disingenuous.

Well, I didn't know the module and I can never quite tell who's doing funny hyperbole versus genuinely-moved hyperbole...

...but I'm nonplussed about the choice to skip over "the writer messed up or there was a fluff reason" to the idea it means the fictional characters are generally unintelligent.

[Quertus]

Okay I'll bite.

I want to know which module this is because I want to read it and understand why it burned down your mansion and killed all your servants before launching a vicious smear campaign that got you banned from the salons of Lombardy and Bohemia, causing you such distress that you can no longer drink absinthe without spilling it on your ermine cuffs.


Apparently Halls of the High King.

That is indeed the module that I am referencing.


The only high level wizard doing anything of note in that is Flamsterd, and he only ever does one of the things that are complained about; casting an invisibility spell before teleporting away. Which is used to protect the presence of another person, not himself.


What gets me is that it's a huge set of complaints about one adventure module. The AD&D-era for Forgotten Realms had literally dozens of adventure modules. It numbers in the fifties when you count all the subsettings such as Kara-Tur, Maztica, and Al-Qadim. And then on top of that you have enough novels, supplements, and other material to fill a small library.

Judging the competence of entire setting based on the actions of a small handful of characters in one early adventure, while misrepresenting the actions of those characters at that, feels staggeringly disingenuous.

Now you've made some really bad assumptions. Not quite "Realms Wizard" level wrong, but still wrong.

It's not *just* that one module from which I judge the Realms, it is from everything I've ever read about the Realms from which I judge the Realms.

That module happens to be the most recent bit of Realms fluff that I've read / reread (as I am currently running a party through that module), and, from my senile perspective, one of the worst modules I remember ever reading.

That the epic level Flamsterd supposedly only acted pants-on-head once, that he only does one of the things that I complained about? Two issues.

First, that *he* only does one of the things that I complained about? That means that the pants-on-head tactics aren't simply limited to one Wizard, which is much more harming to the competence of Realms Wizards in general than if they could simply label Flamsterd some inept black sheep of the wizarding community.

Second, that he only does *one* of the things that I complained about?… perhaps, but that is not the complete list of his ineptitude, even in this module. Let's step through this.

This "gentle" "polite" and "kindly" man will "step on anyone's who's sleeping", kill "those who thwart his will" "ask the corpse questions" and "apologize the the remains is he's made a mistake".

What qualifies as "thwarting his will"? Unknown. But this "gentle" "polite" and "kindly" man will curse any of the (low-level) PCs who have the gall to reject his generous offer of 0 GP¹ to go to a foreign land to fight minions of a dark god that are steadily overwhelming said land (a wealthy militarized nation that has just commissioned the crafting of over 1,000 additional swords, the delivery of which is the initial focus of chapter 1 of the module), cursing them to have their weapons *automatically break* *for months*.

He casts invisibility, in your words, "to protect the presence of another person"… before Teleporting them *both* away. Now, apparently, this doesn't look pants-on-head to you… which… isn't a good sign. Care to explain how this is not a pants-on-head move, how this is "misrepresenting the actions of those characters at that"? Because my mandatory evil overlord 5-year-old advisor substitute assures me that it is, in fact, pants-on-head.

(EDIT: oh, and let's not forget that Flamsterd thinks that it's a good idea to goad people into attacking him, so that he can learn their "bad tactics", when his own tactics are (as listed above, and) authorial fiat: assume that he is immune to anything anyone tries.)

Now, as this module - like most Realms fluff I've read - was written by Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Realms and (nearly) all of its NPCs², I should think its contents rather authoritative (heh) regarding the competence of the individuals depicted.

Lastly, I'll note that you have not produced similar stories of such complete ineptitude for any of the big names from other worlds. This leads me to suspect that they were *not* written to be as pants-on-head as their Realms counterparts. Am I wrong?

¹ OK, to be fair, *someone else* is supposedly offering payment, if the PCs aren't Milo-level paranoid about explosive runes enough to actually read the proffered letter, and are gullible enough to believe the words of an unmet stranger presented by the rude interloper.
² for clarity: I'm not sure if the Forgotten Realms that Ed runs at his own home table includes NPCs (like, say, Drizzt) created by other authors or not. So it is possible that *all* "real" Realms NPCs are created by Ed.


Well, I didn't know the module and I can never quite tell who's doing funny hyperbole versus genuinely-moved hyperbole...

Hard to say, really. I can only say that the more pushback I get on my opinions, the harder of a look it forces me to take at the evidence for my opinions, and the more cemented in, "no, they really *are* that pants-on-head" that my opinions have become.


...but I'm nonplussed about the choice to skip over "the writer messed up or there was a fluff reason" to the idea it means the fictional characters are generally unintelligent.

The writer messed up. Consistently. In… pretty much the "pants-on-head" nature of the entire Forgotten Realms.

They (the various Realms Wizards) aren't "unintelligent", they're completely clueless in a way that makes my tactically inept signature academia mage look positively "ept" in comparison¹.

If you've got a fluff reason why someone would…

… turn someone Invisible before Teleporting the two of you away (instead of just Teleporting)…

… have a force of (vastly) superior ranged attackers… and then cast spells to penalize ranged attacks… and otherwise force the confrontation into melee…

… be immune to ESP despite having no magic items, no applicable spells, and no ability to gain new spells (having buried their spellbook under a tree several weeks journey away)…

then, by all means, let me hear it. This module just happens to be in focus right now because I'm currently running a party through it. But everything I have ever read about the Realms has left me with the impression of pants-on-head fools, unable to realize that they are the butt of their own jokes.

¹ for reference, Quertus, my signature tactically-inept academia mage for whom this account is named, might choose seemingly randomly between hundreds of spells, rather than picking what to a Playgrounder is *obviously* the superior tactic, but at least whatever bad tactic he chooses to implement, he does so with at least a basic comprehension of the world around him.

[Efrate]

Becoming an Arcanist apposed to a wizard, and learning to access raw magic sidestepping the weave should allow an sufficiently dedicated arcane caster to live without worrying about the weave. Not sure if Mystra has any portfolio sense or such with raw magic. It is accessible to mortals and during the aftermath of one of magical changes recently mortals had to learn to use it as opposed to the weave. Incarnum and midnight metamagic and such also should help get you off weave, or at least give you a stepping off point.

Or just be a chosen of Helm and she likely will not domuch, not wanting to die again.

I however if I run in FR I make a habit of having my players kill named NPCs just because of how terrible they all are built, and to show how much better even with a little brain you can be. Usually about ten levels lower, possibly more. I hate how weak the marquee characters are and like to show my players how D&D characters are potentially so much stronger than near any comparable characters in media.

[Scots Dragon]

Lastly, I'll note that you have not produced similar stories of such complete ineptitude for any of the big names from other worlds. This leads me to suspect that they were *not* written to be as pants-on-head as their Realms counterparts. Am I wrong?

Funnily enough I am not obsessed with being mean spirited and using a shortened version of a fairly common ableist slur (the word that follows ‘pants on head’ begins with ‘R’) to describe the characters in a setting I dislike. I actually like Mordenkainen and Tenser, I just wonder why people aren’t complaining that Greyhawk isn’t also now the Tippyverse.

Or Dragonlance, given the power of Dalamar and Raistlin.

Or Mystara, given the Principalities of Glantri.

Or Golarion, given places like the Magaambya and Academae.

It’s usually just the Realms. Pretty exclusively in fact. And again, these are settings I like. Largely because they don’t indulge in boring Tippyverse nonsense

[unseenmage]

Funnily enough I am not obsessed with being mean spirited and using a shortened version of a fairly common ableist slur (the word that follows ‘pants on head’ begins with ‘R’) to describe the characters in a setting I dislike. I actually like Mordenkainen and Tenser, I just wonder why people aren’t complaining that Greyhawk isn’t also now the Tippyverse.

Or Dragonlance, given the power of Dalamar and Raistlin.

Or Mystara, given the Principalities of Glantri.

Or Golarion, given places like the Magaambya and Academae.

It’s usually just the Realms. Pretty exclusively in fact. And again, these are settings I like. Largely because they don’t indulge in boring Tippyverse nonsense

The answer to your query likely rests in no small part in 1) that the Realms is far more popularized and well known as a result and 2) the Realms have a much.much longer living history than just about every other setting.

That added to the Mr Fantastic trope mentioned earlier mean that it gets more attention, has had a longer timeline, and has been in the spotlight much longer which all culminates into a disruption of the suspension of disbelief.

That we're discussing this on the Playground forums which are themselves notorious for applying logic to the fantastic rather than narrative and you have a recipe for folk to be aware of and vent their frustrations with a setting held in narrative stasis for more than a generation.

On top of that a lot of defunct products had their contents just folded into the Realms canonically.
Did you know that there is at least one Spelljammer dock run by elves in Faerun? You'd think that'd be a big deal but thanks to narrative stasis it's a barely known factoid best left to the folks over at the Candlekeep forums to archive and forget about.

[Tvtyrant]

The answer to your query likely rests in no small part in 1) that the Realms is far more popularized and well known as a result and 2) the Realms have a much.much longer living history than just about every other setting.

That added to the Mr Fantastic trope mentioned earlier mean that it gets more attention, has had a longer timeline, and has been in the spotlight much longer which all culminates into a disruption of the suspension of disbelief.

That we're discussing this on the Playground forums which are themselves notorious for applying logic to the fantastic rather than narrative and you have a recipe for folk to be aware of and vent their frustrations with a setting held in narrative stasis for more than a generation.

On top of that a lot of defunct products had their contents just folded into the Realms canonically.
Did you know that there is at least one Spelljammer dock run by elves in Faerun? You'd think that'd be a big deal but thanks to narrative stasis it's a barely known factoid best left to the folks over at the Candlekeep forums to archive and forget about.

Heck Waterdeep has laws about flying Jammers over it. They are expected to land in the water and float over so as not to panic the population.

[Yanagi]

That is indeed the module that I am referencing.

Now you've made some really bad assumptions. Not quite "Realms Wizard" level wrong, but still wrong.

It's not *just* that one module from which I judge the Realms, it is from everything I've ever read about the Realms from which I judge the Realms.

That module happens to be the most recent bit of Realms fluff that I've read / reread (as I am currently running a party through that module), and, from my senile perspective, one of the worst modules I remember ever reading.

That the epic level Flamsterd supposedly only acted pants-on-head once, that he only does one of the things that I complained about? Two issues.

First, that *he* only does one of the things that I complained about? That means that the pants-on-head tactics aren't simply limited to one Wizard, which is much more harming to the competence of Realms Wizards in general than if they could simply label Flamsterd some inept black sheep of the wizarding community.

Second, that he only does *one* of the things that I complained about?… perhaps, but that is not the complete list of his ineptitude, even in this module. Let's step through this.

This "gentle" "polite" and "kindly" man will "step on anyone's who's sleeping", kill "those who thwart his will" "ask the corpse questions" and "apologize the the remains is he's made a mistake".

What qualifies as "thwarting his will"? Unknown. But this "gentle" "polite" and "kindly" man will curse any of the (low-level) PCs who have the gall to reject his generous offer of 0 GP¹ to go to a foreign land to fight minions of a dark god that are steadily overwhelming said land (a wealthy militarized nation that has just commissioned the crafting of over 1,000 additional swords, the delivery of which is the initial focus of chapter 1 of the module), cursing them to have their weapons *automatically break* *for months*.

He casts invisibility, in your words, "to protect the presence of another person"… before Teleporting them *both* away. Now, apparently, this doesn't look pants-on-head to you… which… isn't a good sign. Care to explain how this is not a pants-on-head move, how this is "misrepresenting the actions of those characters at that"? Because my mandatory evil overlord 5-year-old advisor substitute assures me that it is, in fact, pants-on-head.

(EDIT: oh, and let's not forget that Flamsterd thinks that it's a good idea to goad people into attacking him, so that he can learn their "bad tactics", when his own tactics are (as listed above, and) authorial fiat: assume that he is immune to anything anyone tries.)

Now, as this module - like most Realms fluff I've read - was written by Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Realms and (nearly) all of its NPCs², I should think its contents rather authoritative (heh) regarding the competence of the individuals depicted.

Lastly, I'll note that you have not produced similar stories of such complete ineptitude for any of the big names from other worlds. This leads me to suspect that they were *not* written to be as pants-on-head as their Realms counterparts. Am I wrong?

¹ OK, to be fair, *someone else* is supposedly offering payment, if the PCs aren't Milo-level paranoid about explosive runes enough to actually read the proffered letter, and are gullible enough to believe the words of an unmet stranger presented by the rude interloper.
² for clarity: I'm not sure if the Forgotten Realms that Ed runs at his own home table includes NPCs (like, say, Drizzt) created by other authors or not. So it is possible that *all* "real" Realms NPCs are created by Ed.

Hard to say, really. I can only say that the more pushback I get on my opinions, the harder of a look it forces me to take at the evidence for my opinions, and the more cemented in, "no, they really *are* that pants-on-head" that my opinions have become.

The writer messed up. Consistently. In… pretty much the "pants-on-head" nature of the entire Forgotten Realms.

They (the various Realms Wizards) aren't "unintelligent", they're completely clueless in a way that makes my tactically inept signature academia mage look positively "ept" in comparison¹.

If you've got a fluff reason why someone would
then, by all means, let me hear it. This module just happens to be in focus right now because I'm currently running a party through it. But everything I have ever read about the Realms has left me with the impression of pants-on-head fools, unable to realize that they are the butt of their own jokes.
]

Yes, Forgotten Realms is notable amongst RPG settings for how all of the problems aren't solved by powerful NPCs in the liminal time-space that precedes the introduction of player characters.

Okay, I'm admittedly flamstering at this point but you've got this Vegeta in a George Bernard Shaw play energy going that makes me want to counter with a tone that's more Goku doing a lecture series on Roland Barthes, but I really I don't have a lot of room to clown because I'm the kind of person that writes a mediocre college essay about the Nash equilibrium in an environment dominated by magic ladies with rockin' 80s hair and Gandalf's off-brand bargain store cousin.

[Quertus]

Funnily enough I am not obsessed with being mean spirited and using a shortened version of a fairly common ableist slur (the word that follows ‘pants on head’ begins with ‘R’) to describe the characters in a setting I dislike. I actually like Mordenkainen and Tenser, I just wonder why people aren’t complaining that Greyhawk isn’t also now the Tippyverse.

Or Dragonlance, given the power of Dalamar and Raistlin.

Or Mystara, given the Principalities of Glantri.

Or Golarion, given places like the Magaambya and Academae.

It’s usually just the Realms. Pretty exclusively in fact. And again, these are settings I like. Largely because they don’t indulge in boring Tippyverse nonsense

1a) "pants-on-head" is a common phrase?

1b) there's more to the phrase than just "pants-on-head"?

1c) I like the visual, and use it as a special form of… what did others call it?… "pixel *****ing", I believe… where, you tell the GM that you put on pants, but, because you didn't specify *where* you put them, the GM rules that you put them on your head. But, in this case, it feels like FR Wizards are very intentionally putting their pants on their heads, no matter how many times people ask, "are you sure?".

2) I'm not a *fan* of the Forgotten Realms, but, then again, I'm not exactly a hater, either.

2a) I do hate the Wall of shame.

2b) I think that "Faiths and Avatars" is the best handling of divinity and religion I've seen in D&D (or, quite possibly, any RPG).

2c) otherwise, I'm pretty Realms-neutral.

2d) I actively claim that 4e Forgotten Realms was "the Forgotten Realms for people who hate the Forgotten Realms".

3) ah, your complaint is that it feels like the Realms is being singled out, moreso than any specific unfairness in the evaluation itself.

4) thankfully, I think that the Realms' very nature and general incompetence renders it fairly insulated from this particular claim of "why aren't they Tippy" - and I have said as much, repeatedly.

5) as to *why* it is always the Realms? No idea. I, at least, am not picking on them for not going Tippy.

6) it's not "mean spirited" - in fact, IMO, it's a pity that there aren't other people with my level of insight into the tactical failures of various characters, who are more well-read (or, at least, less senile), to give a more thorough evaluation of Realms Wizards, as well as a more well-rounded comparison of the tactical capabilities of the denizens of various worlds.

[Yanagi]

Did you know that there is at least one Spelljammer dock run by elves in Faerun? You'd think that'd be a big deal but thanks to narrative stasis it's a barely known factoid best left to the folks over at the Candlekeep forums to archive and forget about.

I cannot see the word Spelljammer without contemplating whether I should be worried about what the spells are being jammed into and whether it requires grapple mechanics to perform.

But I could be misreading the situation and should be more concerned with what flavor the spell jam is and how seasonal availability affects its production and quality.

[unseenmage]

I cannot see the word Spelljammer without contemplating whether I should be worried about what the spells are being jammed into and whether it requires grapple mechanics to perform.

But I could me misreading the situation and should be more concerned with what flavor the spell jam is and how seasonal availability affects its production and quality.
See now THIS has me imagining The Spelljammer as a massive living spell that's been crammed into an even.more massive crystal jelly jar that's roughly sphere shaped.

[Yanagi]

See now THIS has me imagining The Spelljammer as a massive living spell that's been crammed into an even.more massive crystal jelly jar that's roughly sphere shaped.

It's the inevitable intersection of infinite cosmic power and the universal instinct to pack stuff into a random on-hand jar and stick into the fridge to forget about.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

It's not *just* that one module from which I judge the Realms, it is from everything I've ever read about the Realms from which I judge the Realms.

[Continues into page-long spiel about said ancient module virtually no one has heard of or cares about, rather than any other, more significant material]

...I don't believe you. Certainly, you've failed to demonstrate any such knowledge, and in fact gone a fair way to demonstrate the opposite.


Now, as this module - like most Realms fluff I've read - was written by Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Realms and (nearly) all of its NPCs

Wrong, given the massive parade of other writers who have been involved at one point or another.


Lastly, I'll note that you have not produced similar stories of such complete ineptitude for any of the big names from other worlds. This leads me to suspect that they were *not* written to be as pants-on-head as their Realms counterparts. Am I wrong?

Indeed you are. As an example, most materials involving Greyhawk's Circle of Eight show that their strategic nous makes Elminster look like Alexander - the obvious demonstration being Vecna Lives, in which all but one of them get themselves slaughtered in utterly idiotic fashion so the PCs have to get involved; the one survivor (Mordenkainen, the posterboy for 'Stupid Neutral') then is ridiculously unhelpful, while the eponymous villain then picks up the idiot ball so the PCs have a ghost of a chance.

Just one example of many, and I could do other settings albeit perhaps to a lesser extent.


So it is possible that *all* "real" Realms NPCs are created by Ed.

It is not. Again, vast parade of writers.


I can only say that the more pushback I get on my opinions, the harder of a look it forces me to take at the evidence for my opinions

Again, I don't believe you. You don't give the impression of having truly considered the possibility you could be wrong.


"pants-on-head" is a common phrase?

Yes. In some places, anyway.


there's more to the phrase than just "pants-on-head"?

There is - the next word is an archaic term for the mentally disabled, now regarded as a slur.

This is not particularly obscure knowledge, it could be found with five seconds of googling.


it's not "mean spirited"

Perhaps it's not meant to be, but it absolutely comes off that way.

[The_Jette]

Becoming an Arcanist apposed to a wizard, and learning to access raw magic sidestepping the weave should allow an sufficiently dedicated arcane caster to live without worrying about the weave. Not sure if Mystra has any portfolio sense or such with raw magic. It is accessible to mortals and during the aftermath of one of magical changes recently mortals had to learn to use it as opposed to the weave. Incarnum and midnight metamagic and such also should help get you off weave, or at least give you a stepping off point.

Or just be a chosen of Helm and she likely will not domuch, not wanting to die again.

I however if I run in FR I make a habit of having my players kill named NPCs just because of how terrible they all are built, and to show how much better even with a little brain you can be. Usually about ten levels lower, possibly more. I hate how weak the marquee characters are and like to show my players how D&D characters are potentially so much stronger than near any comparable characters in media.

I think you meant a "True Arcanist", which is a Wizard Prestige class that you cannot take until your 31st character level, assuming you're a straight caster. And, once you hit the 10th level of that Prestige Class you essentially make yourself the target of Mystra and her chosen, anyways. That's a sure way to have more than one Chosen of Mystra gang up to take you down. So, that fight'll come to you. Also, in a mechanical sense it may be "easy" to gain the prestige class. But, in an in-world sense it's nothing close to easy, as you'd literally have to train yourself to use magic that isn't a part of the weave. To a spellcaster in the Forgotten Realms that would be akin to heresy. Imo, no Incarnists would be able to face a chosen of Mystra in spell combat. But, you may disagree. That's a way to derail a thread real fast.
As for being a Chosen of Helm... well, you're not going to be a spellcaster, since Helm doesn't make Spellcasters his chosen. So, you're not going to be a threat to Elminster in the slightest way. And, honestly, I'm not surprised that you have FR NPCs get killed by your party. You seem to think they're all idiots and play them as such.

[Telok]

The technology already exists. Go to Lantan, Halruua, etc. There just isn't any good mechanism for it to spread, or good reason for the artificers to give up their trade secrets. A mid-level caster invents a cool new magic item? Great! That'll do a lot of good for their town. Now what? How do you sell this thing to other towns? How do you distribute it? Do you have enough capital and manpower to mass-produce it? Can anyone even buy it? A small town of 750 people could pool literally every piece of coinage in the city and still have to look under the couch cushions before they could afford a resetting food trap that dispenses bland gruel.

That's about how it went in RL too. The artisans didn't immedately go into self financed mass production and then try to sell early printing presses to starving pesants. It was churches and leaders in large towns saying "hey, that could be useful" who comissioned them to be made.

[Yanagi]

"mean spirited" - in fact, IMO, it's a pity that there aren't other people with my level of insight

Sir I very much hope that this is exquisitely committed trolling but I also afraid because I couldn't find what the LD50 on confidence is and perhaps you should take some activated charcoal as a prophylactic measure.

Edit to add: I have simply gone ahead and ordered you some activated charcoal on Amazon but I'm unsure of how to deliver them to a slightly depleted understaffed chalet in Monmarte during the height of the Bourbon Monarchy as I lack the temporal tariff of seven livre, four ecu and a powdered wig no larger an moderately overfed Pomeranian.

[icefractal]

If you're talking about 3.x, and going significantly high-op, then it'd look pretty cyberpunk.

Not in the cybernetics or neon sense, but in the sense that the 0.001% have become effectively a separate species and no longer need the rest of us for anything.

With unbounded loops on the table (and this includes stuff like "Astral Projection exists as written", I'm not talking Pun-Pun here), a high-level caster can sit in an empty room for a few months (or less if you're in a hurry) and create as large a pocket realm with as many perfectly-loyal minions as they want, with each minion being far more powerful than most people they could recruit the normal way.

The only thing they might care about from the rest of the world is artifacts and unique high-level people. And if Ice Assassin is available, then they only need enough info about the latter to make copies.

I would imagine this effectively reduces the number of high-level casters actually acting on the world, as anyone who simply wants to continue their studies or live a pleasant life can retreat entirely from the rest of the world and do so easily. That leave the ones who care about the prime material for either ideological, benevolent, or prestige reasons.

So probably a lot of wars going on, but they might occur mostly on other planes, between armies that rarely include any naturally occurring people. Life on the material plane might be extremely variable - one month Sulmar the Benevolent shows up and ambrosia is literally growing on trees, all your injuries are healed, etc. The next month Cignas the Vain takes over and failing to venerate his image is not only a death sentence but also your soul gets destroyed.

Interesting, but pretty alien to most fantasy settings.

[Yanagi]

So probably a lot of wars going on, but they might occur mostly on other planes, between armies that rarely include any naturally occurring people. Life on the material plane might be extremely variable - one month Sulmar the Benevolent shows up and ambrosia is literally growing on trees, all your injuries are healed, etc. The next month Cignas the Vain takes over and failing to venerate his image is not only a death sentence but also your soul gets destroyed.

Interesting, but pretty alien to most fantasy settings.

I kind of feel like it slides between cyberpunk and cosmicism and rests in neither entirely. Sometimes the giant unmatched entities are engaged with the world and you can maybe plan around them or benefit, and sometimes they're just doin' stuff beyond ken and you hope you aren't downstream.

Then the weekend comes and there's, like, five Nyarlathoteps all working different non-Euclidean street corners.

[Scots Dragon]

What gets me in Tippyverse shenanigans is that it assumes that these spells will work perfectly every time and produce infinitely repeatable results with no side effects. The rules are meant to cover things that will come up in the course of normal play, and by nature of how much that has to cover a lot of things get simplified and left out because they just aren’t stuff that the game was meant to take into account.

However, the lore does take some of that into account. And the results pretty much show that the Realms with ‘competent’ wizards would look exactly as it does because the setting history is filled with the ruins of more grandiose projects that went wrong in some way.

Myth Drannor is a demon-infested hellscape filled with surges of wild magic from its broken mythal.

Netheril is now a desert and its great flying cities and their mythallar effects long forgotten.

Undermountain is a treacherous and inhospitable labyrinth spawned from the mind of a madman.

The create food and water trap works for its first few uses perhaps. But does it work forever? Does its nature as a trap item start transforming the food into a poisonous form after a while that makes people ill? The rules don’t say so, but the lore indicates a half dozen things that would occur. And that’s leaving aside the fact that this trap likely needs maintenance in the long term, and that’s liable to be expensive.

The rules don’t mention that, but they don’t need to because it’s a logical extrapolation.

The rules also don’t cover whether a more mundane trap like a pit of spikes would eventually have those spikes rust. They would due to the fact that rusting is a thing that just happens. Wood becomes rotten, metal rusts, and the trap just stops working due to age and lack of maintenance. To be sure the trap will work a shockingly long time, but for every trap in a dungeon that still works there’s likely a dozen others that are already triggered too many times, have rusted themselves shut, or just plain stopped working for whatever reason.

The same is likely to be true of magic traps.

[Melcar]

I think you meant a "True Arcanist", which is a Wizard Prestige class that you cannot take until your 31st character level, assuming you're a straight caster. And, once you hit the 10th level of that Prestige Class you essentially make yourself the target of Mystra and her chosen, anyways. That's a sure way to have more than one Chosen of Mystra gang up to take you down. So, that fight'll come to you. Also, in a mechanical sense it may be "easy" to gain the prestige class. But, in an in-world sense it's nothing close to easy, as you'd literally have to train yourself to use magic that isn't a part of the weave. To a spellcaster in the Forgotten Realms that would be akin to heresy. Imo, no Incarnists would be able to face a chosen of Mystra in spell combat. But, you may disagree. That's a way to derail a thread real fast.
As for being a Chosen of Helm... well, you're not going to be a spellcaster, since Helm doesn't make Spellcasters his chosen. So, you're not going to be a threat to Elminster in the slightest way. And, honestly, I'm not surprised that you have FR NPCs get killed by your party. You seem to think they're all idiots and play them as such.

What edition is this from? Found it... its homebrew! Bah :smallannoyed:

Also I want to stress that even though I started this thread, I actually really like the realms... Its my favorite setting, so me asking this question is not about me trying to bad mouth it, or put it down, but simply me being curious...

[Yanagi]

What gets me in Tippyverse shenanigans is that it assumes that these spells will work perfectly every time and produce infinitely repeatable results with no side effects. The rules are meant to cover things that will come up in the course of normal play, and by nature of how much that has to cover a lot of things get simplified and left out because they just aren’t stuff that the game was meant to take into account.

However, the lore does take some of that into account. And the results pretty much show that the Realms with ‘competent’ wizards would look exactly as it does because the setting history is filled with the ruins of more grandiose projects that went wrong in some way.

Myth Drannor is a demon-infested hellscape filled with surges of wild magic from its broken mythal.

Netheril is now a desert and its great flying cities and their mythallar effects long forgotten.

Undermountain is a treacherous and inhospitable labyrinth spawned from the mind of a madman.

The create food and water trap works for its first few uses perhaps. But does it work forever? Does its nature as a trap item start transforming the food into a poisonous form after a while that makes people ill? The rules don’t say so, but the lore indicates a half dozen things that would occur. And that’s leaving aside the fact that this trap likely needs maintenance in the long term, and that’s liable to be expensive.

The rules don’t mention that, but they don’t need to because it’s a logical extrapolation.

The rules also don’t cover whether a more mundane trap like a pit of spikes would eventually have those spikes rust. They would due to the fact that rusting is a thing that just happens. Wood becomes rotten, metal rusts, and the trap just stops working due to age and lack of maintenance. To be sure the trap will work a shockingly long time, but for every trap in a dungeon that still works there’s likely a dozen others that are already triggered too many times, have rusted themselves shut, or just plain stopped working for whatever reason.

The same is likely to be true of magic traps.

I love the plot utility and background texture of broken magic.

One of my favorite things I've ever thrown into a setting was a cultural taboo about constantly eating food producing by magic. No one actually had *the* story of why, but rather many versions of what the consequences were and how that was discovered.

I also like the idea of long term magical devices experiencing mechanical failure if a piece degrades or breaks, but also develop software issues leading to glitching and unintended effects. One of the first FR scenarios I ever ran involved a mythal damaged by a massive magical assault that kept the ghosts of both defending and invading armies in a recursive loop of refighting that last couple of days of conflict. Later in the same setting characters out in the steppe east of Faerun encounter a failed attempt at a flying mountaintop that's tipped and sometimes drags great furrows through the ground: the local nomads refer to as the Great Plow and view as kind of curse from the gods of sedentary peoples.


Also I want to stress that even though I started this thread, I actually really like the realms... Its my favorite setting, so me asking this question is not about me trying to bad mouth it, or put it down, but simply me being curious...

For the record--

I gave a rather long response that might sound snarky or like I'm down on the setting, but it's a good faith attempt to engage with the idea dotted with a very odd sense of humor. I'm fine with the Realms, but I think that optimizing everyone flattens all the characters into balance of power where everyone has the same best strategies (a Nash equilibrium) which is interesting as a game theory exercise but doesn't leave a lot of room for players, even new epic players.

Existing major casters are already in a kind of equilibrium dictated by character and context, but the underlying reason for their inaction leaves doors open--they do not solve problems players can solve, but they also can create problems for players to solve. Pushing the Realms into a different configuration through narratives of how the wizards could all use magic proactively is different (and more interesting) is certainly possible, but it makes more sense from narrative that mechanics.

[Quertus]

Perhaps it's not meant to be, but it absolutely comes off that way.

So, first things first: how so?

What advice would you give me to not come off that way?


Sir I very much hope that this is exquisitely committed trolling

I am committed to intelligent discourse, especially with those who do not serve as an echo chamber for my preexisting ideas and beliefs.


but I also afraid because I couldn't find what the LD50 on confidence is and perhaps you should take some activated charcoal as a prophylactic measure.

Edit to add: I have simply gone ahead and ordered you some activated charcoal on Amazon but I'm unsure of how to deliver them to a slightly depleted understaffed chalet in Monmarte during the height of the Bourbon Monarchy as I lack the temporal tariff of seven livre, four ecu and a powdered wig no larger an moderately overfed Pomeranian.

If you have invented this bit whole cloth, kudos; if not, I sadly have missed the reference.

However, I am disheartened at your "prophylactic" reference.


...I don't believe you. Certainly, you've failed to demonstrate any such knowledge, and in fact gone a fair way to demonstrate the opposite.

One of my numerous character flaws is that "research" is fairly antithetical to my being. Between that and my growing senility, I concede the point that I will be unlikely to demonstrate my prior exposure to Realms lore (although evidence of both my knowledge and my ignorance doubtless exists in various posts throughout the history of the Playground - I'm no "Realms scholar", but neither am I completely unlearned).

What I hopefully *have* demonstrated, however, is just how much evidence of just what level of foolishness is required - and required to be vetted by my mandatory evil overlord 5-year-old advisor substitute - before I reach the conclusion of "pants-on-head" activity. That it is not just "they inefficiently used healing spells instead of summoning a unicorn" level of "a Playground Determinator would choose differently", but actual boneheaded moves that would merit a "???" rating in chess.

Based on that, should one not find it strange to believe that I would judge the Realms as a whole without cause?


Wrong, given the massive parade of other writers who have been involved at one point or another.


It is not. Again, vast parade of writers.

Hmmm… it is important that we come to an understanding on this for productive discourse to result. So let me try again.

There are numerous threads of discussion in this thread. One of them involved the notion of the *real* Forgotten Realms at Ed's table.

This begs the question of, when there is a conflict, who should be considered the primary source?

It seems very clear to me that Ed's creations in Ed's world, when written by Ed, do not have "primary source" conflicts - they are presented as accurately and "realistically" as it is possible for them to be depicted.

Also, there is the question of whether the "official" NPCs *not* crafted by Ed actually appear at Ed's table, in the "real" Realms.

However, the main point is, I believe that limiting discussions to those instances of characters with clear "primary source" authorship will be beneficial to correctly evaluating how such characters should be played.


Indeed you are. As an example, most materials involving Greyhawk's Circle of Eight show that their strategic nous makes Elminster look like Alexander - the obvious demonstration being Vecna Lives, in which all but one of them get themselves slaughtered in utterly idiotic fashion so the PCs have to get involved; the one survivor (Mordenkainen, the posterboy for 'Stupid Neutral') then is ridiculously unhelpful, while the eponymous villain then picks up the idiot ball so the PCs have a ghost of a chance.

Just one example of many, and I could do other settings albeit perhaps to a lesser extent.

Cool. Thank you for engaging. A few things, though.

Are you able to either a) provide a reference, so that I might read this for myself (darn reading comprehension failed me - is "Vecna Lives" a novel, module, or what? (EDIT: looks like a module. I'll dig through and see if I have it)), or b) explain *this* incident to a *greater* extent?

I'll assume you can see how "they did something dumb and got killed" isn't exactly at the same level of detail as "they cast Invisibility before Teleporting away" or "they had ranged superiority, and penalized ranged attacks, blocked LoS, and otherwise did everything they could to negate their advantages and force the conflict into melee", right? How it is not suitable for an "apples to apples" comparison to the actions of Realms Wizards by either myself or my mandatory evil overlord 5-year-old advisor substitute?

Also… Greyhawk is… Gygax? And the Circle of Eight are "his" NPCs? Was this source written by Gygax?

My real question is, was the author of the purported strategic failings of the Circle of Eight the *primary source* for their actions, the way that Ed Greenwood is for the actions of his NPCs in his world, or does it hold all the credibility of you writing a fanfic in which Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, is depicted as a mercantile genius, revolutionizing pricing and logistics, and out-haggling [insert something impressive here]?

I should like to compare instances of characterization of NPCs with no primary source conflicts, if possible.


Again, I don't believe you. Certainly, you don't give the impression of having considered the possibility you could be wrong.

And how, in your opinion, would one evidence such behavior, beyond my presumably noticeable continued revaluation of the facts of the matter, and of the grounds for my beliefs?

[Silent Alarm]

Are you able to either a) provide a reference, so that I might read this for myself (darn reading comprehension failed me - is "Vecna Lives" a novel, module, or what? (EDIT: looks like a module. I'll dig through and see if I have it)), or b) explain *this* incident to a *greater* extent?

I'll assume you can see how "they did something dumb and got killed" isn't exactly at the same level of detail as "they cast Invisibility before Teleporting away" or "they had ranged superiority, and penalized ranged attacks, blocked LoS, and otherwise did everything they could to negate their advantages and force the conflict into melee", right? How it is not suitable for an "apples to apples" comparison to the actions of Realms Wizards by either myself or my mandatory evil overlord 5-year-old advisor substitute?

They are indeed referencing the module Vecna Lives and the event that I BELIEVE they are referencing is the prologue to the actual adventure where pre-generated PCs of the Circle of 8 are slaughtered by an individual in possession of the Hand/Eye of Vecna acting in his interest. I'll include the section detailing the "battle" for context:


On the first round, Vecna/Halmadar wins the initiative. (If you must, you can justify this because of Vecna/ Halmadar’s foresight and his innate spellcasting ability, both of which give him the edge in this battle). If he loses the initiative for any reason, remember that his 70% magic resistance will shield him from the PCs’ attacks. (It is strongly recommended that you secretly roll the dice and then announce the attack had no effect.) Prior to the group’s entrance, Vecna/Halmadar used his eyebite power (charm). Vecna/Halmadar’s first action is to use his monster summoning IV power. This causes three gargoyles to appear behind the party, blocking the exit. The player characters will hear a small click (the snap of fingers) and then suddenly the shuffling and roaring the gargoyles. At this point, Vecna/Halmadar has not revealed his presence. In the next round, as the players turn to deal with the monsters, Vecna/Halmadar uses his time stop power.

Within its radius, it will affect all the player characters (no saving throw). The effect lasts for three rounds. In that time, Vecna/Halmadar bursts out of his coffin and kills the six least damaged player characters (held characters can be automatically slain and the quasi-lich has two attacks per round), breaking their necks with the strength of the Hand of Vecna. He also makes three attacks with his eyebite, attempting to charm one or more of the surviving characters. Since the player characters are frozen in time, describe the quasi lich’s movements as a blinding blur. They hear a high-pitched cackling, like a record spinning too fast.

When the spell wears off, six of the player characters drop to the ground, dead. The gargoyles are not where they were when the battle began. The gargoyles, outside the area of effect, have moved to surround the group as much as possible. Spells planned by the survivors may be cast into empty air. In the following round, Vecna/Halmadar automatically gains the initiative, simply because he seems to have appeared out of nowhere. He uses his instant death touch (no saving throw) to slay another character. He also makes his last eyebite attempt to charm the remaining character. Meanwhile, the gargoyles close in on the survivor.

After this, Vecna/Halmadar uses his cone of cold power (20d4 + 20 points of damage). If the character is still standing after this attack, he is subjected to a second cone, unless obviously immune to the first. Should this be the case, Vecna/Halmadar tries one of his other attacks either a touch to cause serious wounds or disintegrate. At some point, the player characters may want to escape (probably after the quasi-lich has handily killed several of the party.) Unfortunately, part of the same magic that binds Vecna/Halmadar in this chamber blocks the use of passwall, dimension door, and teleport spells. Only when the characters are free of the mound can they use spells to flee.

To summarize, Vecna/Halmander the quasi-lich attacks as follows:

Round 1: Gargoyles are summoned and appear in the hall behind player characters. This signals the beginning of combat.
Round 2: Characters state their actions. Characters and Gargoyles roll for initiative. Regardless of outcome, Vecna/Halmader acts first, using his Time Stop.
A. First round of time stop: Vecna kills two characters, attempts to charm third, Gargoyles move out of the way.
B. Secound round of time stop: Vecna kills two characters, attempts to charm third.
C. Third round of time stop: Vecna kills two characters, attempts to charm third if necessary.

Characters come out of time stop, take their action. Vecna/Halmader suddenly appears behind them. Gargoyles have moved to different positions. Six characters fall dead, throats crushed.
Round 3: Characters check for surprise. If not surprised, characters state actions and initiative is rolled. Vecna/Halmader wins. Touches and slays character. Gargoyles attack remaining characters (if gargoyles are still alive).
Round 4: Normal initiative is rolled. Vecna/Halmader uses cone of cold.
Round 5+: Normal combat. Vecna/Halmader attacks to kill the remaining character.
However all of this? 100% a non-sequitur because the module essentially railroads you into the entire situation to advance the plot, and furthermore all it would have done is delay the inevitable. They cannot teleport away, they cannot message anyone outside, all of their prepared spells are prepared and in the module for all to read, and given their resources? They were doomed from the get go. Arguably, their greatest tactical error could be entering the tomb first when there was a reasonable degree of expectation that they could have henchmen with them, however the obvious counter to that is the fact that it was an ambush pure and simple, and nothing is worse than being a Wizard in an ambush. There was nothing in the module prior that could have alerted the Circle of Eight towards the fact that:

Halmadar was still alive and still had the eye and hand. Mordenkainen only mentioned to them that his divinations only told him SOMETHING bad was going to happen and nothing else.
That they would be under prepared for what they would encounter. Most of the Circle of Eight for that encounter have access to spells like Wish and Limited Wish, Rary himself has access to Shapechange, they have access to summons and can cast Polymorph Any Object and this that and another, and all of that is meaningless because Halmadar has Magic Resistance 70%, and the GM is told flat out to bump that 70% up by 30% (in not so many words).

Anyone who says "Oh, they should have done X" or "They should have done Y" is missing the point that given the resources they had available to them and applied as tactically sound as a player could act, they were screwed. This whole whataboutism for the Circle of Eight is just a feeble dodge, as given the resources they had, they were screwed tactically 6 ways from Sunday.

[Eisfalken]

I wanted to comment on something I haven't seen brought up in this thread as yet that is another potential reason that Toril exists in the state that it still does, despite the presence of all these epic spellcaster types for so long in the narrative, something even Ed Greenwood (via Elminster) touches upon.

If you look at Toril from the cosmic standpoint of things... it's not actually "that" important. Toril is one world of the Material Plane. Elminster has been to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other worlds, at least in passing. In canon, he and his fellow Chosen of Mystra have met with and even taken care of Greyhawk's own Mordenkainen after the latter's most recent troubles with Strahd/Ravenloft (i.e. going insane for a bit before being rescued by "adventurers"). Elminster is aware of and knows about spelljamming, which pretty much says enough about that particular can of worms.

And all of this is to say nothing about the infinite variety found in the rest of the Great Wheel / World Tree / World Axis cosmos, of which Elminster certainly is more than familiar with (if only from jaunts into literal Hell and back).

Now, sure, some wizards have obligations and sentiments about Toril; Elminster is very definitely one of these. But the only real reason a lot of villains screw around on Toril is because they're not so stupid as to do it on other planes where powerful beings can equal or outmatch their magical power. And the more "neutral" mages who don't care about mundane concerns and only want to research magic, well... where better to do so than in places where it is literally easier than the Material Plane? The Astral Plane alone beckons to anyone who wishes to spend eternity studying magic, since it dispenses with metabolic needs and even provides advantages to people with large amounts of magic and a genius mind to fly around with. That's to say nothing of other planes, or even demiplanes, where they can perform incredible feats otherwise impossible in the Material Plane, satiate desires both subtle and grotesque that could never be accepted elsewhere, and otherwise do things that ordinary non-wizards can't even fathom.

The reason that magic hasn't overwhelmed Toril is that it's literally weaker there than almost anywhere else in the cosmos, comparatively speaking. Wizards seeking "real" power can get it anywhere else, if that's what they want. Villains who only want to torment "lesser" beings, well... they can do it easier on the Material Plane, and they have a vested interest in there not being an abundance of magic knowledge/power everywhere. The good guys are there to guide, inspire, and help folks oppose that evil, but the smart guys like Elminster learned (through examples like what happened with Sammaster) not to put a lot of power too fast into unsteady or untested hands, or today's good guy is tomorrow's villain.

This is backed up in that Ed subscribed to the multiverse thing (he personally wrote The Wizards Three, for crying out loud), which creates a whole set of crystal spheres and planes for all those otherwise powerful wizards found on Toril to head out to. Asking why there aren't more mages on Toril is like asking why there aren't more Ph.D. graduates in certain poor, rural areas that don't have the resources for those graduates to actually use their knowledge: those poor, rural areas aren't "bad", but they're insufficient to the needs of advanced scientific research and technological industry. Those geniuses might spend their whole life trying to reform that rural area to their needs, but then they're not doing the thing they originally wanted to, almost certainly will encounter resistance to their plans, etc. If I were some wizard on Toril, I wouldn't bother sitting there with Mystra looking over my shoulder continually; I'd pack my bags for any plane more suitable to doing what I want with my powers.

So the summary is that the reason Toril isn't more "affected" by all this powerful magic is by a combination of active design and benevolent apathy. Only the forces of dedicated Good and Evil have a strong desire to maintain a status quo with regards to the availability of magic; Neutral geniuses head for better pastures to practice the Art where they won't be bothered by things like politics, war, religion, or even just social pressures. Only a few times has any wizard in FR tried to somehow make magic more prevalent, but that very ambition is what drove some like Karsus to try and lay hold of the very force of magic itself... only to incur disastrous consequences that made things worse.

It's not just Toril, either; Greyhawk is largely presumed to be this way as well, and Eberron sidesteps the matter by actually having magic affect society and technology in certain ways (as well as having alternative issues, like interweaving conspiracies clamping down on the really powerful stuff).

That's my take on the thing. I'm sure others differ, but that's how I explain it as a DM, based on everything I've seen in the game over 25 years.

[Quertus]

On the first round, Vecna/Halmadar wins the initiative. (If you must, you can justify this because of Vecna/ Halmadar’s foresight and his innate spellcasting ability, both of which give him the edge in this battle). If he loses the initiative for any reason, remember that his 70% magic resistance will shield him from the PCs’ attacks. (It is strongly recommended that you secretly roll the dice and then announce the attack had no effect.) Prior to the group’s entrance, Vecna/Halmadar used his eyebite power (charm). Vecna/Halmadar’s first action is to use his monster summoning IV power. This causes three gargoyles to appear behind the party, blocking the exit. The player characters will hear a small click (the snap of fingers) and then suddenly the shuffling and roaring the gargoyles. At this point, Vecna/Halmadar has not revealed his presence. In the next round, as the players turn to deal with the monsters, Vecna/Halmadar uses his time stop power.

Within its radius, it will affect all the player characters (no saving throw). The effect lasts for three rounds. In that time, Vecna/Halmadar bursts out of his coffin and kills the six least damaged player characters (held characters can be automatically slain and the quasi-lich has two attacks per round), breaking their necks with the strength of the Hand of Vecna. He also makes three attacks with his eyebite, attempting to charm one or more of the surviving characters. Since the player characters are frozen in time, describe the quasi lich’s movements as a blinding blur. They hear a high-pitched cackling, like a record spinning too fast.

When the spell wears off, six of the player characters drop to the ground, dead. The gargoyles are not where they were when the battle began. The gargoyles, outside the area of effect, have moved to surround the group as much as possible. Spells planned by the survivors may be cast into empty air. In the following round, Vecna/Halmadar automatically gains the initiative, simply because he seems to have appeared out of nowhere. He uses his instant death touch (no saving throw) to slay another character. He also makes his last eyebite attempt to charm the remaining character. Meanwhile, the gargoyles close in on the survivor.

After this, Vecna/Halmadar uses his cone of cold power (20d4 + 20 points of damage). If the character is still standing after this attack, he is subjected to a second cone, unless obviously immune to the first. Should this be the case, Vecna/Halmadar tries one of his other attacks either a touch to cause serious wounds or disintegrate. At some point, the player characters may want to escape (probably after the quasi-lich has handily killed several of the party.) Unfortunately, part of the same magic that binds Vecna/Halmadar in this chamber blocks the use of passwall, dimension door, and teleport spells. Only when the characters are free of the mound can they use spells to flee.

To summarize, Vecna/Halmander the quasi-lich attacks as follows:

Round 1: Gargoyles are summoned and appear in the hall behind player characters. This signals the beginning of combat.
Round 2: Characters state their actions. Characters and Gargoyles roll for initiative. Regardless of outcome, Vecna/Halmader acts first, using his Time Stop.
A. First round of time stop: Vecna kills two characters, attempts to charm third, Gargoyles move out of the way.
B. Secound round of time stop: Vecna kills two characters, attempts to charm third.
C. Third round of time stop: Vecna kills two characters, attempts to charm third if necessary.

Characters come out of time stop, take their action. Vecna/Halmader suddenly appears behind them. Gargoyles have moved to different positions. Six characters fall dead, throats crushed.
Round 3: Characters check for surprise. If not surprised, characters state actions and initiative is rolled. Vecna/Halmader wins. Touches and slays character. Gargoyles attack remaining characters (if gargoyles are still alive).
Round 4: Normal initiative is rolled. Vecna/Halmader uses cone of cold.
Round 5+: Normal combat. Vecna/Halmader attacks to kill the remaining character.

This whole whataboutism for the Circle of Eight is just a feeble dodge, as given the resources they had, they were screwed tactically 6 ways from Sunday.

Well, then.

Turns out, I'm familiar with this scenario. Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, performed much better than did the Circle of Eight¹, which, while it does not speak highly of their competence², is merely on the level of "not what a Playground Determinator would do", not "they clearly enjoy wearing their pants on their heads"³.

Also, the module was written by David Cook, so even if there had been questionable actions taken by the Eight, there is the whole "primary source" issue to consider.

All in all, not even worth taking to my mandatory evil overlord 5-year-old advisor substitute.

¹ not through any particular Playgrounder brilliance, however. The GM seemed way too eager about us running an all-Wizard party, Quertus is something of a coward, loves summons / meat shields, and he has more custom detects and information-gathering spells than there are spells in core. And Quertus has several tricks that kinda trivialize this encounter.
² or, perhaps more accurately, their portrayal
³ for that, they would have needed to… I dunno… tried to overload him by handing him more artifacts or Fireball themselves to death upon seeing the gargoyles or something?

[Chauncymancer]

The main difference is, the leader of a church in Faerun can ask their god for instructions, and they can't fake their orders, because their god would punish them at once with loss of their divinely granted powers...

So when a high priest speaks in Faerun, you can be sure they speak the words of their patron deity. If a king of lord opposes them, he is opposing the god itself.

In our own world plenty of emperors and kings fought the popes, and the clergy and believers didn't revolt en masse. People understood that the pope was just a man and a temporal prince who was defending his own interests.

In Faerun? If the High Priest of Tyr says that Tyr repudiates and condemns you, then you can take their word as truth, as if the god himself had descended to Faerun and spoken the words.

If your god and your king fight, who are you going to support?


In Faerun the king couldn't force the gods to grant spells to his siblings.
The trick here is to pay off a high ranking cleric of Mask, and raise him up as the Real High Priest of Tyr. The High Priest of Tyr who opposes you is obviously a false priest who gets his powers from his secret worship of Mask.


It should be noted that one of the duties of the Harpers is to prevent this very thing from occurring. So you have in setting, an organization with a driving purpose of essentially keeping everyone in the Dark Ages. Why are the Harpers considered good? Your guess is as good as mine, but one of their duties is indeed to prevent progress of magical technology to the point of keeping Faerun in a never ending state of Medieval Stasis.

Every attempt to create an advanced magical society in Faerun has resulted in atrocity, tyranny, and a collapse back into low fantasy Dark Ages. The Harpers are merely acting out the implicit conservative worldview of their authors, in which it is better to suffer forty years of back breaking labor as a serf than to be transmuted into a goblin centipede by the dealkyr at age nine.

[Scots Dragon]

Every attempt to create an advanced magical society in Faerun has resulted in atrocity, tyranny, and a collapse back into low fantasy Dark Ages. The Harpers are merely acting out the implicit conservative worldview of their authors, in which it is better to suffer forty years of back breaking labor as a serf than to be transmuted into a goblin centipede by the dealkyr at age nine.
There’s Halruaa, Silverymoon, Evermeet, Deep Imaskar, etc. Advanced magical societies which don’t suck do actually exist, they just don’t work like the Tippyverse.

[unseenmage]

Assuming that random tears in reality could isekai an optimizer into Faerun I'd bet that every deity's portfolio sense let's them stop that from happening every single time.

Allowing a modern human with any kind of widely applicable knowledge (and the skill to do so of course) would be bad enough, but allowing a person with meta knowledge about your universe just couldn't be allowed.

Itd be like inventing all of the can openers all at once AND knowing exactly where said invention could or couldn't destabilize entire nations.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Anyone who says "Oh, they should have done X" or "They should have done Y" is missing the point that given the resources they had available to them and applied as tactically sound as a player could act, they were screwed. This whole whataboutism for the Circle of Eight is just a feeble dodge, as given the resources they had, they were screwed tactically 6 ways from Sunday.

Yeah, no. They can either win or at least ensure some of them survive and escape fairly easily given their stated resources and V/H's abilities. In fact, you helpfully highlighted two methods:

Shapechange: There are numerous forms which can essentially no-sell everything V/H can do (remember, he's a human fighter who explicitly has no magical abilities or useable items beyond the hand and eye). Iron Golem might work well - ironically enough, so might a Lich, Demilich or other powerful undead. Then, even with the instructions to cheat at magic resistance, you can just pummel him to dead.

Wish or Limited Wish: Can of course be used to escape dangerous situations, and are distinctly missing from the list of spells the tomb blocks.

There are of course, rather more - the module does indeed give us their travelling spellbooks, and they're fairly extensive (2e high level spells make 3.X look like the pinnacle of balance). Even by the ultra-harsh RAW of the module, it should be winnable - the fact that it is written as if it isn't is simply bad writing. (More broadly, it assumes they all rush in - if even one of them hangs back, or they do what wizards do and send in a few summons in first, they can skip merrily away from V/Hs alpha strike, and given his strictly limited abilities there's not actually that much he can do about it.) Even with the instructions to fudge, he's beatable RAW - without them they could take him quite reliably if they act like actual intelligent wizards rather than the Leeroy Jenkinses the module supposes.

However, I talked about strategy, not tactics, one hopes you have some idea of the difference. Analysing their tactics is difficult as they're theoretically under player control, insofar as anything in that terrible module is. But their strategy and general decision making is unmitigatedly terrible:

They go into this tomb without any other assistance or their strongest member. It's an oddly specific level of urgency that requires you bring "the entire secret ruling class of the city of Greyhawk" (module's words), but not their best member, any of their numerous allies, summonable creatures, or any other support. (It's not as if it wouldn't be helpful, either - V/H has fairly limited magical defences and mass-target capability, so overwhelming him with numbers would be entirely possible. More to the point, they're a bunch of 2e wizards with no meat shields.)

For some unfathomable reason, they've told no one - not even Mordenkainen where they are, and other than clones (that will take months to mature) have no failsafes set up in case of their demise, despite knowing they're messing with a power that is at least in certain ways more powerful than them (hence the divination blackout in the first place). Thus, when they do get slaughtered the first act of the adventurer is spent just trying to find them. Their supposed leader, meanwhile, isn't even aware of their deaths, and apparently so disinterested in learning about them that he'll flounce away from the party informing him of this if they mouth off to him.

They break into a magically sealed tomb - one obviously set up to contain something very powerful given the grade of spells securing it - without making any additional anti-undead preparations. (Their detailed spellbooks are explicitly only their travelling spellbooks, and they've got the ability to teleport so they could easily go and make additional preparations before breaching the seals.)

Et cetera. It's famously a very badly written module, and thus has a lot of its characters act stupidly.

However, no matter their stupidity as written, you've missed the point - as with Halls of the High King, it's essentially anecdotal. They're not indented to be written as idiots, they're intended to be written as intelligent men - but this was done badly. My point is that if you use Halls of the High King's poor writing to dismiss Forgotten Realms as a setting full of idiots (as Quertus plainly does), you have to do the same with pretty much every other setting because they all have at least one module where their signature characters pick up the idiot ball. (Though, of course, Flamsterd really isn't a signature character on the level the Circle of Eight or Elminster are - the man as opposed to the island doesn't even rate a page on the wiki.)

The better approach is to recognise these errors as what they are, and disregard them rather than disregarding the entire setting.

[Quertus]

(More broadly, it assumes they all rush in - if even one of them hangs back, or they do what wizards do and send in a few summons in first, they can skip merrily away from V/Hs alpha strike, and given his strictly limited abilities there's not actually that much he can do about it.) Even with the instructions to fudge, he's beatable RAW - without them they could take him quite reliably if they act like actual intelligent wizards rather than the Leeroy Jenkinses the module supposes.

However, I talked about strategy, not tactics, one hopes you have some idea of the difference. Analysing their tactics is difficult as they're theoretically under player control, insofar as anything in that terrible module is. But their strategy and general decision making is unmitigatedly terrible:

They go into this tomb without any other assistance or their strongest member. It's an oddly specific level of urgency that requires you bring "the entire secret ruling class of the city of Greyhawk" (module's words), but not their best member, any of their numerous allies, summonable creatures, or any other support. (It's not as if it wouldn't be helpful, either - V/H has fairly limited magical defences and mass-target capability, so overwhelming him with numbers would be entirely possible. More to the point, they're a bunch of 2e wizards with no meat shields.)

For some unfathomable reason, they've told no one - not even Mordenkainen where they are, and other than clones (that will take months to mature) have no failsafes set up in case of their demise, despite knowing they're messing with a power that is at least in certain ways more powerful than them (hence the divination blackout in the first place). Thus, when they do get slaughtered the first act of the adventurer is spent just trying to find them. Their supposed leader, meanwhile, isn't even aware of their deaths, and apparently so disinterested in learning about them that he'll flounce away from the party informing him of this if they mouth off to him.

They break into a magically sealed tomb - one obviously set up to contain something very powerful given the grade of spells securing it - without making any additional anti-undead preparations. (Their detailed spellbooks are explicitly only their travelling spellbooks, and they've got the ability to teleport so they could easily go and make additional preparations before breaching the seals.)

Et cetera. It's famously a very badly written module, and thus has a lot of its characters act stupidly.

However, no matter their stupidity as written, you've missed the point - as with Halls of the High King, it's essentially anecdotal. They're not indented to be written as idiots, they're intended to be written as intelligent men - but this was done badly. My point is that if you use Halls of the High King's poor writing to dismiss Forgotten Realms as a setting full of idiots (as Quertus plainly does), you have to do the same with pretty much every other setting because they all have at least one module where their signature characters pick up the idiot ball. (Though, of course, Flamsterd really isn't a signature character on the level the Circle of Eight or Elminster are - the man as opposed to the island doesn't even rate a page on the wiki.)

The better approach is to recognise these errors as what they are, and disregard them rather than disregarding the entire setting.

So, you're wrong about me - I use Halls of the High King as anecdotal for how the Realms characters rather consistently hold the idiot ball close to their heart.

Now, I'll agree that they (*almost* certainly) aren't *supposed* to be pants-on-head, that they're probably *intended* to be written as intelligent men / women / what-have-you. Fans complained about the treatment of a supposedly intelligent planner in The Open Door, saying that he never would have misinterpreted or been caught unawares by the scenario.

When you've got multiple authors, it can easily be a valid complaint. However, in the case of Halls of the High King (and most of the Realms lore I've read), we're getting the depiction straight from the primary source. So, it's hard to say "he wouldn't have" when he clearly, canonically did.

When most of the Realms is written as wearing their pants on their heads, one can either attempt to constantly second-guess the author, or simply accept that that's just the way that the Realms is.

I, obviously, have chosen the second path. It's not *wrong* for you to implement your own personal copy of the Realms using the first path.

However, if you sat down at Ed's table, or watched his game as a fly on the wall, I think you'd find his NPCs doing the same types of things he writes about them doing. So I find it difficult *not* to conclude that the second path is *at least* as valid as (and probably more valid than) the first path for purposes of discussing property role-playing of Realms NPCs.

-----

Although I largely covered this, I'll repeat it to address your specific concerns.

Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, despite being *tactically* inept, had little problem with this scenario because he and the rest of the party utilized the *strategic* layer to trivialize this challenge utilizing allies, meat shields, etc.

Now, I have no idea whether or not this module involves proper role-playing of grey hawk's elite. Maybe they really are a bunch of Leroy Jenkins, kick in the door types, unable to comprehend the tactical vulnerability of a group of squishy Wizards with no meat shields. However, as it's *really* hard to survive earlier editions with that attitude, my bet's on the module handing them the idiot ball.

However, just as you claim that one should be able to comprehend the difference between "tactical" and "strategic", so to do I claim that one should be able to comprehend the difference between "suboptimal", "useless", and "actively detrimental".

Going in without meat shields was suboptimal. Choosing not to become immune to the opponent was suboptimal (*if* they were working with perfect knowledge of that opponent's capabilities).

But they would have needed to have memorized "protection from something that they made extinct last year" to fall into the "useless" category, like the invisibility Flamsterd cast before Teleporting away.

And they would have needed to, I dunno, decide to feed their vampire Cleric before going on the quest, or hand their foe extra artifacts or something to be actively detrimental like penalizing their own ranged troops, blocking LoS, and forcing the fight into melee.

So, even with your explanation, even as bad as the module is, even as strong with the idiot ball as it requires the circle of eight to be, they're still not even in the same league as Faerun.

[Psyren]

There are a lot of high-level casters, but they're not remotely united. Many of them are invested in maintaining the status quo. Others are opposed to one another and would retaliate if another stepped out of line. Additionally, this is a setting where the gods are particularly active, and even high-level casters usually prefer to avoid ticking them off. Because of all these factors, there's sort of an uneasy truce, or at least a cold war, between the most powerful casters, and nobody is interested in moving directly against the others.

This, and even above the gods, there's an even more powerful overgod that is particularly interested in maintaining that status quo.

This is not to say you can't change any of that at your table, OP, but it does answer your question of "why is default FR the way that it is."

[Troacctid]

Ultimately I think OP asked the wrong question. He clearly should have asked "What would a Tippyverse AU for the Forgotten Realms be like?" (I don't know if "Tippyverse AU" is a tag on AO3, but clearly it should be, because there seems to be a lot of demand for it.)

[Raven777]

snip

I just wanted to mention that Eisfalken take on reasons why really powerful (or clever) spellcasters don't bother with Toril sounds a lot like possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Actually, I see a lot of parallels between imagining solutions to the question "why don't powerful spellcasters takeover or overhaul the setting" and "why didn't an advanced alien civilization already take over our corner of the galaxy".

If we go to Wikipedia's page on the Fermi Paradox, a lot of the solutions are reminiscent of our own wizard related ones.


Rarity of intelligent life sufficiently advanced wizards: Wizards who "get it" (have had an opportunity to develop holistic view of their world's mechanics in the same capacity a player knows its rules) are few to non existent.


It is the nature of intelligent life sufficiently advanced wizards to destroy themselves: Advanced magical civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radical setting altering capabilities. The kind of magical theory that ushers in automatic and permanent teleportation circles and Create Food traps might also enable devastation on a civilization ending scale.


Intelligent alien species wizards cannot evolve advanced technologies magic: The evolution of characters like us (players), with holistic system knowledge and an inclination to abuse or synergize mechanics and all that sort of thing, may be rare. The actual physics of Toril might simply not permit the kind of rules bending an actual game does, the same way a primarily water world wouldn't let aliens develop fire and all the technology that follows.


Alien species Advanced Wizards may isolate themselves from the outside world: This is Eisfalken's take. In the same way aliens may seem absent because it makes more sense to them to simply "ascend to a higher plane of existence" (most likely transfer themselves into eons-lasting time-dialted solar-powered virtual paradises) rather than launch physical vessels at great expense to colonize meat-space, it might make more sense for the overwhelming majority of sufficiently advanced Wizards to simply build and inhabit their own demi-plane, go research the deep mysteries of existence on the Astral Plane, or go play God in another realm entirely.


It is the nature of intelligent life advanced Wizards to destroy others: The statu quo absolutely might be enforced by mortal organizations (like the Harpers or the Church of Azuth), Gods and Outsiders, or Ao himself. These powers that be might go out of their way to nip in the bud any radical magical innovation. Especially, Ao can pull the equivalent of a cosmic retcon if the mortals rock the boat too much.

[Raven777]

And, of course, there's the ultimate, debate-ending meta-solution:

For us: We all might be a simulation already. Aliens are absent because the "creators" just didn't simulate any.
For the Forgotten Realms: They all might be inhabiting a fictional setting. Casters don't overhaul the setting because author fiat keeps it that way.

:smallwink:

[Quertus]

"What would a Tippyverse AU for the Forgotten Realms be like?"

I guess it depends on how much Realms flavor you keep intact.

Myself, I envision epic casters trying to trick or coerce low-level adventurers into leaving the safety of the deity-infested cities and the convenience of the Teleportation Circle network, and go solve problems adjacent to the problems that they actually want solved. Where all the epic casters are playing a big game of chess against each other indirectly, while hiding in their nice, safe, deity-infested cities. But there's no real point to their games, as nothing ever changes. Except the underlying rules of both magic and reality - but that's just because Mystra keeps dieing (completely independent of the Wizard games).

So… not much different than the Realms are now, except that the citizens inside the cities maybe feel a hair safer, and a bit more repressed.

[Quertus]

Now, I'll agree that they (*almost* certainly) aren't *supposed* to be pants-on-head, that they're probably *intended* to be written as intelligent men / women / what-have-you.

When most of the Realms is written as wearing their pants on their heads, one can either attempt to constantly second-guess the author, or simply accept that that's just the way that the Realms is.

I, obviously, have chosen the second path. It's not *wrong* for you to implement your own personal copy of the Realms using the first path.

However, if you sat down at Ed's table, or watched his game as a fly on the wall, I think you'd find his NPCs doing the same types of things he writes about them doing. So I find it difficult *not* to conclude that the second path is *at least* as valid as (and probably more valid than) the first path for purposes of discussing property role-playing of Realms NPCs.

This has bothered me ever since I wrote it.

When I roleplay Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, I intentionally stretch my already verbose verbiage. Attempting to create such grandiose word structures, real time? I will, at times, make mistakes: misuse words, or create grammatically-incorrect structures.

It would not be unfair for someone, after playing beside Quertus for years, to conclude that Quertus must possess linguistic difficulties - especially given that the other characters that i roleplay are clearly noticeably lacking his particular failings (in extent or frequency, if not altogether).

So I find the blind application of this methodology potentially… irritating. Regrettably, I am as yet unable to discern the means to calibrate the metric adequately to produce consistently acceptable results.


However, just as you claim that one should be able to comprehend the difference between "tactical" and "strategic", so too do I claim that one should be able to comprehend the difference between "suboptimal", "useless", and "actively detrimental".

Going in without meat shields was suboptimal. Choosing not to become immune to the opponent was suboptimal (*if* they were working with perfect knowledge of that opponent's capabilities).

But they would have needed to have memorized "protection from something that they made extinct last year" to fall into the "useless" category, like the invisibility Flamsterd cast before Teleporting away.

And they would have needed to, I dunno, decide to feed their vampire Cleric before going on the quest, or hand their foe extra artifacts or something to be actively detrimental like penalizing their own ranged troops, blocking LoS, and forcing the fight into melee.

So, even with your explanation, even as bad as the module is, even as strong with the idiot ball as it requires the circle of eight to be, they're still not even in the same league as Faerun.

This has also bothered me, but to a lesser extent.

I think that the Eight would need to have actually *cast* completely useless spells, not just have them memorized, to parallel the useless tactics of Flamsterd.

And, although I had wanted to pay homage to a certain web comic, I think that, in order to "reverse a previously held advantage" the way that the example Realms "actively detrimental" character did, the 8 couldn't have just fed their pet vampire, and kissed their succubus lover goodbye, they would have needed to… trickle in, one at a time (outside range to learn anything from the previous deaths), "protected" by an antimagic field / creation of a null magic zone / under the effects of a permanent, non-dismissible silence spell… or some equivalently "???"-rated strategy.

[Chauncymancer]

There’s Halruaa, Silverymoon, Evermeet, Deep Imaskar, etc. Advanced magical societies which don’t suck do actually exist, they just don’t work like the Tippyverse.
My understanding of Silverymoon is that it's actually pretty unadvanced, the Mythyl and the Lady aside, and that Deep Imaskar is not a good example of a good society.

[danielxcutter]

I mean, you don't even have to go as far as the can opener for this. People probably knew that steam made pot lids rattle for ages, but it took literal millennia for the steam engine to become mainstream.1

3.x's magic system is rather strong for a setting like the Forgotten Realms, I suppose, but I think that's because the magic system is totally out of whack and NOT an inherent problem of the Realms themselves. I mean, like, what about in 5e?

As for the actual OP question... well, probably somewhere between Toril as it is now, and Eberron on steroids.

[icefractal]

Thinking further on it, I think you really don't want to go into NI territory even if you have no concern for matching the existing fluff, because it causes weird effects.

For example, at the high end (again, Astral Projection / Ice Assassin tier, not Pun-Pun), there isn't that much difference between "one high-level caster" and "1000 high-level casters". They both have arbitrarily large amount of minions. Minions that can be as powerful as the casters themselves (they can literally be Ice Assassins of those casters). And unless they maintain near-perfect secrecy, Ice Assassin also means their mere existence is as good as their active support, because you can have a copy of them contributing any special expertise needed.

So, like, Thay having an entire evil empire with large numbers of powerful Wizards in it doesn't necessarily mean they're any more powerful than "one random caster who got paranoid and made an overly large number of bodyguards". (Greyhawk, I know, it just jumped to mind).

Rule most of the free lunches out, and while still being absurdly more powerful than most settings account for, high-level casters will care about things like "resources" and "allies". But at that point you're looking at significant houserules.

[Melcar]

This, and even above the gods, there's an even more powerful overgod that is particularly interested in maintaining that status quo.

This is not to say you can't change any of that at your table, OP, but it does answer your question of "why is default FR the way that it is."


Ultimately I think OP asked the wrong question. He clearly should have asked "What would a Tippyverse AU for the Forgotten Realms be like?" (I don't know if "Tippyverse AU" is a tag on AO3, but clearly it should be, because there seems to be a lot of demand for it.)

What I was trying to ask, albeit in a poorly worded way was probably something closer to whether or not Fearun should indeed look like Tippyverse, whether that indeed is a more realistic constellation for a setting considering 1) all the RAW (using all official published material) and 2) considering the makeup of a setting filled with so many high level casters?, but yes Troacctid probably said it the best!

I know that at our table, we simply accept when things are weird or illogical, because the DM might be going somewhere with it, or that the table wants to run a LoTR themed hardship campaign or what not...

Like in one of our current campaign in Aglarond the Simbul has gone missing, and magic items have become a rarety thus costing like 3 times the normal cost... And I'm like why? How come - knowing the Red Wizards have been mass producing magic items for years - have they all of a sudden become so rare as to merit such a price increase? No one knows and worse, no one seems to care ingame. Offgame I'm told not to break immersion or ask too many challenging questions because it will wreck whatever setting/mood the DM is trying to make. Sure its a balancing move from the DM and we all know it, but it just feels wrong considering the realms... But we go with it... at least for now. So we are indeed helping to perpetuate an idea of the realms being a certain grimy fantasy trope-esk way, where life is hard, brutish and cruel, despite all the phenomenal cosmic power!

So to itarate, I thought it would be a cool thought experiment to think on how the realms realistically should look, considering all the official published material and all the Rules as Written...

On a sidenote... I'm kind liking the idea of a more tippyverse approach to the setting, somehow because is comes across to me as more "realistic" in as much as epic casters should be more proactively using the spells available to them - like why wouldn't you. I don't think I would enjoy full blown Tippyverse, but something in the middle, where some would have seen the light... but as mentioned that will quickly snowball... so in other words I don't know yet.

I feel like its highly illogical that things doesn't evolve, that high level casters don't become better at it. Sure characters like Aumvor, Larloch, Ioulaum are reclusive for a reason, but there must be some more bent on progress... idk...



I just wanted to mention that Eisfalken take on reasons why really powerful (or clever) spellcasters don't bother with Toril sounds a lot like possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Actually, I see a lot of parallels between imagining solutions to the question "why don't powerful spellcasters takeover or overhaul the setting" and "why didn't an advanced alien civilization already take over our corner of the galaxy".

If we go to Wikipedia's page on the Fermi Paradox, a lot of the solutions are reminiscent of our own wizard related ones.


Rarity of intelligent life sufficiently advanced wizards: Wizards who "get it" (have had an opportunity to develop holistic view of their world's mechanics in the same capacity a player knows its rules) are few to non existent.


It is the nature of intelligent life sufficiently advanced wizards to destroy themselves: Advanced magical civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radical setting altering capabilities. The kind of magical theory that ushers in automatic and permanent teleportation circles and Create Food traps might also enable devastation on a civilization ending scale.


Intelligent alien species wizards cannot evolve advanced technologies magic: The evolution of characters like us (players), with holistic system knowledge and an inclination to abuse or synergize mechanics and all that sort of thing, may be rare. The actual physics of Toril might simply not permit the kind of rules bending an actual game does, the same way a primarily water world wouldn't let aliens develop fire and all the technology that follows.


Alien species Advanced Wizards may isolate themselves from the outside world: This is Eisfalken's take. In the same way aliens may seem absent because it makes more sense to them to simply "ascend to a higher plane of existence" (most likely transfer themselves into eons-lasting time-dialted solar-powered virtual paradises) rather than launch physical vessels at great expense to colonize meat-space, it might make more sense for the overwhelming majority of sufficiently advanced Wizards to simply build and inhabit their own demi-plane, go research the deep mysteries of existence on the Astral Plane, or go play God in another realm entirely.


It is the nature of intelligent life advanced Wizards to destroy others: The statu quo absolutely might be enforced by mortal organizations (like the Harpers or the Church of Azuth), Gods and Outsiders, or Ao himself. These powers that be might go out of their way to nip in the bud any radical magical innovation. Especially, Ao can pull the equivalent of a cosmic retcon if the mortals rock the boat too much.


I really like this...

[Scots Dragon]

My understanding of Silverymoon is that it's actually pretty unadvanced, the Mythyl and the Lady aside, and that Deep Imaskar is not a good example of a good society.

Silverymoon is fairly magically advanced, with a whole lot of wizards and a pretty prestigious magical school. Serving the city is an order of wizards known as the Spellguard, who maintain the mythal and the various other protective wards of the city. The people have access to a wide variety of personal magical abilities as a result of that mythal, and the city itself is a pretty cosmopolitan mini-utopia in the North, featuring one of the few instances of a truly multi-species society.

Following the Spellplague the mythal was damaged and nonfunctional and yet nobody in the city noticed because the Spellguard maintained the individual traits of the mythal manually. And during this time the Lady had vanished, leaving the Spellguard in charge.

Deep Imaskar is neutral and isolationist, not really good but not actually evil either. The majority of people just don’t know it exists and they like to keep it that way. Anyone who stumbles upon it is harmlessly relocated and their memory of Deep Imaskar erased. Even those who venture out have its location blocked from their minds until they’re brought back home.

The city itself makes the Tippyverse look fairly mundane, being incredibly vast and yet not limited by conventional geometry. Most buildings are much larger internally, and the city is essentially a honeycomb of pocket dimensions and weird spatial stuff.

[Asmotherion]

Faerun should look like Faerun, bacause:

A) Getting access to magic is an extreamly hard thing to to; It either requires you to delve in monster infected ruins, or be able to afford buying one.

Given that a Trained Hireling only makes 3SP per day, averaging to 9 gold per month, it means that anything beyond that monthly salery is the equivalent of buying a new car. And that's without calculating living expences.

And, a Lv1 commoner or other NPC class, has as many chances to survive a monster infested ruin alone, as fighting a Tarasque.

Also, hiring a spellcaster to cast a single 1st level spell for them is beyond their budget.

Getting access to a class is a bit more streightforward way to gain money, but for that, they would need to have the natural talent to do so; Even then, most won't be able to figure everything on their own, and should get a mentorship from an other representative of that class; This could mean anything from years playing servant 'till they earn that 1st level, to needing to pay a potentially heavy fee to their teacher. After that, you become part of the elite, and fall into...:

B) Because Spellcasters don't have any direct profit in making magic more accessible. Sure, you may have the oddball who wants to have his local town worship him as a savior, but the general concensus is, Spellcasters have better things to do than helping society. Between quests to stop evil overlords (or good ones, depending on the caster), defeat Devils and Demons, dwelling into ruins to get artifacts and MacGuffins, and researching new ways to twist and bend the rules of the cosmos to their every whim, there's no much time left for charity. Those that do a kinda collective work, are an exception, and that's whithout accounting for sometimes Spellcaster agendas interfearing with each other, and one destroying the other's work.

So, overall, the real question is not how Faerun should actually be; It's supposed to look like Faerun, because the Author told us so. Rather, we should be asking, "Why is it this way". In that case I think I give a pretty good explaination, though more details can be gathered through the lore.

Otherwise one could ask the question "with different variables, how would a world similar to Faerun actually function?" and the answear is the Tippyverse.

[danielxcutter]

I believe someone mentioned upthread that gods and epic magic were specifically mentioned as preventing the creation of a Tippyverse.

[noob]

I believe someone mentioned upthread that gods and epic magic were specifically mentioned as preventing the creation of a Tippyverse.

Yes because epic magic and the gods take the place and do whatever they want.
Gods prevents tippyverse with their ridiculous powers unless they are gods with the idiot ball or that are not interested in the mortals which was the case for FR(All the fr gods are wearing proudly the idiot ball, and most are awful compassionless people and none of them were interested in mortals until AO obligated them to need worship and even then a tippyverse maker could just promise them some worship from thousands of peacefully living creatures in exchange for them not hurting their world)
Epic magic prevents the tippyverse by being a tool that allows to do everything so it limits creativity: instead of just figuring out that among the 40 tools you got before level 20 you have tools that can do everything you just get epic magic and can literally create a spell that do whatever you want so you then do the idiotic stuff you wanted(like flipping mountains and making them fly in order to make the easiest to destroy kingdom ever(seriously the FR people are critically dumb)) instead of seeing that some of the tools you had are so ridiculously powerful that by the time you got what you wanted you could also get awesome things you did not even know you wanted.(like making an army of loyal ice assassins because you wanted to keep the entire mountain in the air by spamming telekinesis because once again you are critically dumb but then you might figure out you also have an army once someone collapses the mountain)

[Scots Dragon]

Alternatively; the Tippyverse doesn't actually work as described, it's just a thought experiment based on the specific rules loopholes of a specific edition, and does not actually match even very well with the canonical lore of said edition. The actual game mechanics are not the actual laws of physics for the setting, but instead just the attempts to translate those in a form where people can roll dice around a table. Just because some theoretical optimisation stuff and rules interactions indicate that something might work, that doesn't necessarily mean that it does.

People really need to remember that the campaign settings are narrative fantasy worlds you can imagine visiting first and foremost, and tabletop game mechanics second, rather than vice versa because that's what allows you to use any one of a dozen editions and even entirely different role-playing games with them.

[icefractal]

Alternatively; the Tippyverse doesn't actually work as described, it's just a thought experiment based on the specific rules loopholes of a specific edition, and does not actually match even very well with the canonical lore of said edition. The actual game mechanics are not the actual laws of physics for the setting, but instead just the attempts to translate those in a form where people can roll dice around a table. Just because some theoretical optimisation stuff and rules interactions indicate that something might work, that doesn't necessarily mean that it does.Depends on what you mean by "the Tippyverse".
Specific details of using magic traps? That could be seen as a loophole. Using Teleportation Circle for exactly its written purpose? That's a bit harder to handwave aside.

I mean, if anything, sticking to the precise game mechanics limits the effects of magic on the setting. When we consider things from a purely fiction standpoint, there are a lot more non-combat uses of magic that would make sense. "There are monsters (including ones that can defeat an entire army), widespread magic, hundreds of other sapient species, and other dimensions, but the world somehow largely resembles medieval Europe" is pretty hard to justify on flavor grounds, leaving mechanics aside entirely.

[Scots Dragon]

Depends on what you mean by "the Tippyverse".
Specific details of using magic traps? That could be seen as a loophole. Using Teleportation Circle for exactly its written purpose? That's a bit harder to handwave aside.

A spell which lasts 10 minutes/level without permanency, and costs 1,000gp to cast and 4,500xp (22,500gp in Pathfinder) to make permanent? And you expect to make a network of these rather than as singular traps and methods by which to travel between specific locations?

And again, this is only for 3.5e. The teleportation circle spell does not function that way in D&D 5e, only being able to teleport between notable teleportation circles by casting the spell itself, and it's entirely absent from earlier editions.


I mean, if anything, sticking to the precise game mechanics limits the effects of magic on the setting. When we consider things from a purely fiction standpoint, there are a lot more non-combat uses of magic that would make sense. "There are monsters (including ones that can defeat an entire army), widespread magic, hundreds of other sapient species, and other dimensions, but the world somehow largely resembles medieval Europe" is pretty hard to justify on flavor grounds, leaving mechanics aside entirely.

Given that the flavour was 'the mediaeval world plus all of these monsters and myths', I don't see why that would be the case.

[Mechalich]

Given that the flavour was 'the mediaeval world plus all of these monsters and myths', I don't see why that would be the case.

That flavor contains an embedded presumption that the monsters and myths are unable to impact the world and change it's medieval nature. This generates the immediate follow-up question: 'why don't the monsters and myths alter the way the world works?' and this applies on both the in-universe (Watsonian) and out-of-universe (Doylist) perspectives.

Now, in FR, the Doylist perspective is well-understood. The world works the way it does because that's how Ed Greenwood wants it to work and he simply does not care to justify it further. The problem is that, for those players who find a justification important, there's a distinct absence of applicable Watsonian reasoning to make the Realms work.

Ultimately the best answer is probably that the Realms is arbitrary and it doesn't work if you try to make the systems match the fluff presentation (and some of the fluff is outright ridiculous purely on its own, as places like Cormyr make no sense, you can't have a long-lasting monarchy where a majority of the nobles rebel ever decade), and that's okay. If fantasy verisimilitude is important to your game don't run the Forgotten Realms. It's not designed for that and trying to hammer a square setting into a round storytelling medium is an exercise in futility.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult for fans of fictional settings to admit that 'this setting is ridiculous but I love it anyway or even because of how ludicrous it is,' especially when this is pointed out by hard-core world-building purists who have inherent objections to dealing with settings that fundamentally can't stand on their own. This leads to defending the indefensible that is totally unnecessary. Faerun doesn't work and that's completely okay.

[NigelWalmsley]

Thinking further on it, I think you really don't want to go into NI territory even if you have no concern for matching the existing fluff, because it causes weird effects.

Also it makes the game basically impossible to run with any rules engine more detailed than Munchausen. NI Ice Assassins chasing each other around is just not something you can resolve in any mechanical detail, so if your exercise in resolving mechanical details points there, it's self-defeating.


Rule most of the free lunches out, and while still being absurdly more powerful than most settings account for, high-level casters will care about things like "resources" and "allies". But at that point you're looking at significant houserules.

Yeah. The better question is not "what happens if you follow the rules exactly", but "what does an interesting setting that is informed by the existing rules look like".


Getting access to magic is an extreamly hard thing to to; It either requires you to delve in monster infected ruins, or be able to afford buying one.

Not necessarily. Mentor allows you to train 5th level characters. A mid level character can create (relatively) safe dungeon-esque experiences to train people. It's not trivial, but it's certainly doable.


Because Spellcasters don't have any direct profit in making magic more accessible.

Sure they do. Magic items take time and XP to make. If there are other casters out there making Pearls of Power or whatever for you to buy, you don't have to spend your own resources on them. Moreover, many of the powers in the Forgotten Realms are explicitly some variation on "wizard school". If you've postulated that there are organizations of Wizards that get together and study magic, it seems bizarre to suggest that those organizations don't actually result in anyone learning magic.

[Elves]

Alternatively; the Tippyverse doesn't actually work as described, it's just a thought experiment based on the specific rules loopholes of a specific edition, and does not actually match even very well with the canonical lore of said edition.
Sometimes technical constraints can lead you to a new place. Tippyverse style fantasy is arguably more interesting than "knights and castles". At least, as long as magitech isn't just reskinned Earth technology like in Eberron.


People really need to remember that the campaign settings are narrative fantasy worlds you can imagine visiting first and foremost.

Yeah. The better question is not "what happens if you follow the rules exactly", but "what does an interesting setting that is informed by the existing rules look like".
It's not FR, but in this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?593513-Sketching-Out-A-High-Magic-Setting&p=24049551#post24049551) old thread I tried to imagine a Tippyverse that was slightly more grounded.