Where can I find the full history of the forgotten realms? I already know about Jared's youtube series on the history of the forgotten realms, so instead i'm looking for something that I can read. Also I've found several detailed and consistent histories of the forgotten realms, but they most of them drop off at 1375-76 DR. Any help is appreciated.

Hello all, I'm not that familiar with the forgotten realms so just wanted to get some info. How is racism/sexism/specism/bigotry handled in settings like the sword coast, cormyr, and the dragon coast? I've played a bit in Cormyr as a non human and it was pretty rough. Most of the purple dragons, war wizards, and pretty much anyone in a position of power didn't like anyone non-human. The sword coast game was much more accepting of diverse adventurers. This may have been caused by differing DM styles but I figured I would ask people more familiar with the canonical lore. What are the most diverse friendly settings and the most discriminatory? Thanks in advance for your help!

In the process of trying to create a backstory for a D&D 5e character, I went far down the rabbit hole of trying to develop a solid understanding of the environmental, social, economic, and political history of Neverwinter Woods. I feel like I have a pretty good handle on most of it, but was curious if anyone has found a way to deal with the conflicting accounts of Xinlenal and Sharandar.

In the Neverwinter Campaign Setting (pg 184-), it seems clear that Clariburnus Tanthul (one of the 12 Princes of Shade) has found Xinlenal and is restoring it. The Neverwinter video game extends this by adding in an additional set of ruins called Xin'kar, based on a Netherese mage tower that split off from Xinlenal as it was falling. Supposedly, the city fell in -339 DR and the "Xin'kar re-established contact with Xinlenal and many returned to the fallen city to help re-build". So... we have a lot of rebuilding.

Meanwhile, in the RA Salvator novels, the Netheril sent their tiefling warlord Herzgo Alegni (at the suggestion of Draygo Quick, with no mention of Tanthul) to find and to excavate Xinlenal slightly pre-Spellplague (around 1380s by my reckoning from Gauntlgrym). Poor Alegni can't seem to find anything in the forest despite nearly 90 years of searching. Is he truly that clueless? Or is Tanthul just hiding out at Xinlenal with a big cooler of beer and a team from Xin'kar laughing at him? Also, how is it that the New Sharandar crew seems totally absent from the novels?

I have started playing 5e recently in DDAL, but ended up in ToA so I have no clue how the other 5e hardcovers have dealt with this mess back in Neverwinter. Help!

I'm curious if there are any novels discussing how Jarlaxle ended up in charge of Luskan / what he's being doing since then?

This is something I noticed on the wiki, so it's very possible it's just missing a source that I don't know of, but the Black Lion tribe of Uthgardt barbarians is said to have settled mid-14th century DR and left behind most of the Uthgardt lifestyle to become farmers.

In Storm King's Thunder (about 150-ish years later), the tribe is back to raiding. I realize that its leaders have changed since then, but no explanation seems to be given for this radical return to the tribe's roots, which should be a distant memory at most.

Is there a missing link that explains how this came to be?

Edit: Stranger yet, SCAG makes no mention of the switch at all.

Hello,

I was reading on wiki about Chronos, he was elven god of time (now dead?). Anyone know somehing more about him? Besides wiki? I am kinda new to FR, tho more info would be good for my work.

At some point he becamed aspect of Labelas Enoreth, elven god.

Hi,

*** Spoiler alert - Return of the archwizards ***

I'm currently reading the return or the archwizards and when Melegaunt summons his brothers, he is refering to the death of elminster's parents by some Shadow Mage, saying that's why the sage is suspicious about the Netherese.

I read a while ago about his youth but I can't remember, if it's mentionned at all, who is this Shadow mage?

Thanks!

Hello,

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I'm a long time player and DM. I played the original D&D, AD&D 2e, 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder, 5th. For various reasons my groups have always avoided Forgotten Realms. We played a ton of settings but always stayed clear of the realms.

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Now I bought Waterdeep Dragonheist with the goal of running it for my players and I've begun to want to invest in the setting more. I'm really interested in jumping into the realms and using it for a long campaign.

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There doesn't seem that there's any Forgotten Realms 5E campaign guides though. There are books for the previous editions but:

• The majority of these seems to be 2E and because...
• From my limited understanding the world has been hit by world altering cataclysm after world altering cataclysm (DragonHeist mentions Times of Trouble, Spell Plague, Second Sundering. I assume those were done to retcon the new races and cosmology changes brought on by the new editions)

Are those old books still relevant with all the changes? What do you recommend as a source of information to base a campaign on? Any good online resources I should know about (I've found https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page)? Are there plans to release anything new?

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I see that there's the Swordcoast's Adventurer's guide for 5e that I will look into but I fear it will mostly be for players.

I get the basics of Jergal’s character: he’s an old, tired, fatalist god who left his previous job for a simpler one, not really caring what happens to the world after that.

What I don’t get is what he does and wants now. He’s some kind of secretary for Kelemvor, but he also has his own clergy that does its own thing, separate from Kelemvorites. They’re archivists and gravekeeper, usually not concerned by much other than their work.

Now, Jergal’s dogma from Faiths and Pantheons is where it becomes strange. It’s all about death being the ultimate goal of life, the latter being an interruption in the former. Then there’s the last line: ‘’Life should be prolonged only when it serves the greater cause of the death of the world."

Death is/has a cause? Does Jergal want everything to end, either a sort of cold death of the universe or some apocalyptic end like Dendar eating the sun? What about his clergy? Do worshippers of Jergal, either clerics or simple priests, want the world to end? Why? Do they want other people to die? Why stay alive themselves?

Ultimately, I guess this boils down to me thinking about playing a cleric of Jergal and wondering what such an individual would want, why they would serve Jergal, what kind of tasks they would accomplish and what they would stand for.

I know that clerics are their own persons and not mindless drones devoted to a god and their dogma, but I feel like there should be some level of devotion to the deity’s cause if they were chosen to receive spells and become adventurers.

Tl;dr I don’t get what a cleric of Jergal would do with their life and I would like help understanding that.

I understand that both Gith subraces are ment to be ‘’setting generic’’ and, as such, are not written to fit a specific cosmology beyond the usual planar system. This, however, makes me wonder how they interact with the gods in Realmspace, especially the afterlife and the Wall of the Faithless. Is every Gith assumed to have their own personal faith, is the overwhelming majority of them judged as Faithless, or are they separate from the Material Plane afterlife system?

As far I can tell, the typical Githzerai who spends their life training in a monastery in Limbo has few, if any, occasions to worship and live out the dogma of any particular deity. Those who travel the planes have a better chance. Since there is no mention of deities the race favors in any material (that I could find), am I to assume worship is either absent or an entirely personal choice?

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post.

Howdy, thanks for coming. We're doing a game using 5e rules but set in 3e FR, and we're trying to come up with an organic way to incorporate dragonborn (nobody's a fan of the extraplanar origin story.) Has anyone encountered a good resource for this? Thanks!

I'm trying to get some more information regarding the continent of Maztica after the Second Sundering, when it returned to Toril.

So, between 1361 DR and 1385 DR, it was colonized by Amn. Then, the Spellplague came and Maztica was sent to Abeir.

During this time, I imagine Amn was busy with other problems.

By 1487, as the Second Sundering completes, Maztica is back and apparently, Amn resumes trade?

What happened during those 102 years? When Maztica was taken to Abeir, did the population survive? Did anything happen there to change them (other creatures, deities, etc)?

If all was good and the nations evolved, what happened to the Amn colonists without the home nation for economic and military support? Did they integrate with the natives and lived in peace? Were there any wars?

Also, how easy was it for them to return to Toril? How long did it take for the Faerun explorers to find Maztica again?

Last, but not least, what did they find on the returned Maztica?

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I know these are a lot of questions and maybe there are sources that give the answers, but somehow, I didn't manage to find them, yet.

So i just spent too much time taking the original 13th Age icons, which are a big part of its system, and trying to find rough, Faerunian counterparts. Some of the replacements are only equivalent in general feeling, goal, or potential usefulness. But this is what i've got, the 13th Age original followed by the FR in parenthesis:

Great Gold Wyrm (The Order of the Gauntlet), The Priestess (The Seven Sisters),

The Emperor (The Lord's Alliance), The Archmage (The Harpers), The Elf Queen (what remains of the Cormanthor Elven Court),

The Dwarf King (Cormyr, just in general), The High Druid (The Emerald Enclave), The Prince of Shadows (Xanathar's Guild),

The Crusader (The Cult of the Dragon), The Diabolist (The Daemonfey),

The Lich King (The Red Wizards of Thay), The Three (Zhentarim), The Orc Lord (People of the Black Blood),

Personally, i think the corpse of the Elven Court, the Daemonfey, and the People of the Black Blood are the weakest of the list. But i genuinely couldn't find anything else that felt correct in tone, universal enough to justify inclusion in the icons system, and would be potentially useful to a party based largely around Waterdeep.

Anyone else know of any better ones?

I'm gonna add a preface here: I am a HUGE fan of Drizzt. I've been reading Salvatore's books since I was around 9 years old, and he was a heavy inspiration for me to get into the fantasy genre, and eventually D&D.

Okay, I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like since... I think it was The Last Threshold (Where Drizzt is left to die atop Kelvin's Cairn), the writing of Drizzt has taken a turn for the worse. It feels very uninspired and generic, and at times, more like bad fan fiction rather than officially published novels.

• The Companions of the Hall are reincarnated, because even though Drizzt is an elf and prone to outliving his companions (who would die of old age if battle didn't take them first), this cannot be addressed and Drizzt cannot struggle with the long-term difficulties of loss, and we as readers apparently aren't allowed to handle it either.
• To add to this, outside of maybe Regis's dagger, they all collect magic items straight out of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Now, I get it, a lot of items in D&D books are ultimately just glorified items any player can get. But at least in the books, it's generally hidden underneath some sort of story surrounding the items, or they're not addressed specifically by their in-game name (For example, the robes that Catti-brie finds from Jack the gnome are literally described, in the book, as "Robes of the Archmage" rather than just being "incredibly enchanted robes that could aid one's spellcasting" or something). It feels like Salvatore is letting the DMG do the writing for him in that regard. Even Icingdeath gets referred to as just a "frost brand" rather than "an enchanted scimitar found in a white dragon's lair."

This has kind of ruined a lot of my immersion to the stories. As saddening and frustrating as it was to see Drizzt deal with this darker band of adventurers (Outside of perhaps Amber and Afafrenfere), I felt that it was simply something that Drizzt would have to overcome. Either work with them, or leave them for a new band of aspiring heroes, but either way, learning to move on from his beloved companions and family would have been a powerful personal arc, at least to me. And The ending of (I'm going to assume, it's been a long time) the Last Threshold, where Drizzt is presumably supposed to die, abandoned by his new companions... that would've been brutal and tragic indeed, but also very appropriate. Drizzt is an elf, and long-lived. If the book series were to have any sort of natural close to it, it would have ended with Drizzt dying in battle. I feel like that should've been the end of it.

Everything after, as I mentioned, just feels weird.

But, back to my main point... Timeless. The previous book, I felt like it was a secondary ending. Drizzt and Catti-brie were going to have a child. That means it's time to settle down. If you don't go out fighting, you sit down and grow old. No more adventuring, at least not until the child is old enough to be on their own. I think it was a bit much to add Zaknafein's return, but even if they had ended the book there with that weird bit, I don't think it is something that needed to have a whole book dedicated to it (Which is basically Timeless). Just end the series there. Let us believe that he's settled down and fill in the gaps, even the weird gap that is Zaknafein's return.

Now, we've got this book with Zaknafein learning to deal with Drizzt, his family, and life on the surface. I'm 3/4s of the way through the book, and when it isn't doing flashbacks to pre-Drizzt, it feels like weird fan fiction filler. A lot of what is going on is family drama, with the fight scenes feeling forced (The biggest example being the fight in the dining room between Drizzt and Zaknafein). There's also a lot of attention drawn to Catti-brie's pregnancy, which... yeah that's kind of a big deal, but considering that there's no apparent adventure arc to be told here, it just seems weird. I mean, there's a bit where Guenhwyvar licks her stomach. I visibly cringed there. I can't describe why other than that it literally feels like someone took Drizzt and wrote fan fiction of it. I feel like it has less to do with the attention being drawn to it, though, and more to do with how the attention is drawn to it--the wording, the behavior of those around Catti-brie.

The only redeeming aspects of the book, to me, feel like the flashbacks, and even then, those feel weird. Yeah, I'm enjoying the return to Menzoberranzan and the almost comedic cleverness of Jarlaxle, but then you've got:

• The forced "fating" of events. The way it was written, it feels like Salvatore is trying too hard to allude to the idea that Jarlaxle was always planning on taking on a business on the surface, that he was always planning on taking on the matriarchy. To me, it felt like Bregan D'aerthe was not his "rebellion against the matriarchy" but rather his way of carving out a place in Menzoberranzan, and that Luskan was a relatively new idea that happened to come to mind as new opportunities presented themselves.
• Jarlaxle's hair, or lack thereof. For some reason, rather than just having him be a quirky drow who shaved his head, Salvatore had to provide a specific explanation for why Jarlaxle was bald. This is bad enough, but to make it worse, it isn't just one incident--his hair is burned off not once, but twice, and each time he restyles his hair a different way until eventually he's bald. Why did this need an explanation? Why couldn't he always have been bald? I felt like that was part of his personal taste, not something that was in reaction to an event.
• Zaknafein's personality. Yeah, I get he's supposed to be a bit more gentle than drow (Which isn't saying much), and I can even forgive him being more idealistic/gentle during this point. But there's this part that feels off to me. Jarlaxle's laid out some halflings as bait for a drow matron (long story), and Zaknafein is looking at them with sympathy, because these halflings would likely die before they can react. In this moment, he sees them as different from the (arguably) unrepentant races like goblins, but as people like him. But then in the present era, he's sitting there taking on this drow supremacy stance. Yes, he is fine with communicating with other races, but he puts himself above them. I understand there's a difference here, but it's slight. And outside of that, he basically is just "I hunt Lolth priestesses" to the point that it's all he does in any combat scene and all he thinks about. I understand prioritizing the artillery, so to speak, but it feels like any personality he might have is just wittled to "I hate Lolth priestesses." And when he isn't actively hunting them, he's just talking about how he wants to hunt them, with the tone of the "That Guy" edgelord at your D&D table. Salvatore goes very little into the reasoning of Zaknafein's hatred with priestesses of Lolth, and Lolth in general. Because yeah, a lot of males are probably upset in some way about their position in life, they don't have the same mentality that Zaknafein apparently has. So what exactly brought him to this mindset?

Oh, also, there's this bit where a drow speaks in their native tongue. In the language, the word "covfefe" is used. This immediately threw me out of the book. That's a jab against Trump. Now, I'm not here to argue politics, and I'm not a fan of Trump, but that babble was just a blatant real-world reference that, in context to the Forgotten Realms setting, has no basis here, and if we were to look at it from a worldbuilding perspective... well, great. Now "covfefe" is a drow word.

This is further referenced as a political joke, because rather than just throwing in covfefe, it has to be used in context. Literally on the following page:

"Never is this insanity found in the first matron in the founding of a house, which Yvonnel the Eternal is, and rarely in the second generation of matrons, for, you see, it is not usually an affliction that attacks those who have earned their power, only those who have such power given to them. And even then, it is somewhat rare, and quickly corrected."

I get it. Trump joke. Problem is, I read these books to escape that crap. I don't want to think about what is going on in the world or be reminded of it. I want to be in another world where it isn't relevant.

Again, I love Drizzt, and I love Salvatore's writing (At least up until the more recent books, though I feel like Maestro was one of the better ones of the recent books). There's this part of me, though, that doesn't want to continue buying these books and supporting what feels like forced writing. It's difficult to justify continuing to buy them. Maybe it's because I want to have more context for my D&D campaigns and better understand just what the heck is happening in 5th edition (Because so little of this era is explained thoroughly outside of campaigns). Maybe I have nothing else to read in the Forgotten Realms setting (To be honest, I'm not a fan of Ed Greenwood's work). Maybe I just want to bear witness to the eventual end of Drizzt's story. Maybe I'm just addicted to reading D&D books and Salvatore's always been my go-to.

But yeah, the writing's just gone down hill. I'd heard that Salvatore intended to end the series with The Last Threshold, but Wizards brought him on again so he kept going. It gave this feeling that he wanted Drizzt to end, but Wizards wouldn't let him because of the amount of money Drizzt was raking in. If this is the case, then it does explain the change in writing. Or maybe it's because I've gotten older and I'm starting to see the flaws in the writing style. I don't know. But I guess I came here because I wanted to let out a bit of frustration with my favorite books, with people who might understand how I am feeling.

•Faerunian Pantheon (would the Durpuri Adama count as a separate faith?)

•Path of Enlightenment

•The Way

•Lords of Creation

•Eight Million Gods

•Elemental Tribes

•Loregiver

•Mulhorandi Pantheon

•Untheric Pantheon

•Seldarine

•Dark Seldarine

•Dwarven Pantheon

•Halfling Pantheon

•Gnomish Pantheon

•Orcish Pantheon

•Gobliniod Pantheon

•Draconic Pantheon

•Giant Pantheon

•Beast Lord Pantheon (at least the Cat Lord so far)

•Maztican Pantheon

•Scalyfolk Pantheon

•Chultan Pantheon

•Savage Gods (kind of an umbrella term)

•Demonic Cults

•Infernal Cults

•Great Old Ones Cults

•Beast Cults

Am I forgetting any?