| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 28 Feb 2017 : 13:49:32
A few months back I started a youtube series called Faerun History.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkT1vY_wBiCn8CO6B34wuVw
Some of you might have seen me posting this on the Forgotten Realms Archives on Facebook, but I have not posted here yet because I see Candlekeep as a hallowed hall of knowledge, and frankly it’s a bit terrifying to see the quality of the content that is produced here, versus what I have made. (Also, if anyone could find a flaw in my sources, you guys could.)
But I thought it was time I post it here as well. I use candlekeep almost as much as I do my sourcebooks, and of late I have been using it almost published canon.
I started it because I saw all the youtube D&D channels were arguing for homebrew, and I think that a lot of players are missing out on the fantastic setting that Forgotten Realms is. I also believe that a lot of the core sources for D&D info have a spiteful view of the Realms (see nerdarchy and Matt Colville). I love these guys for their D&D/DM talk, but if this were your introduction to D&D, you would never take a second look at the realms.
Hope you can find some interest in this :) |
| 28 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 07 Mar 2017 : 09:19:07
quote:
Originally posted by ghilteras
I commend your effort, and I subscribed. The WoTC seems not interested into the lore vacuum issue, so it's nice to see the community trying to fill the gap.
After Monte Cook left I knew this would have happened. Nobody seems in charge to write lore on FR these days and the fact that all the authors have been laid off after they joined forces to write the Second Sundering is the worst kind of news we could have got in 2017. We might as well get zero novels this year, which might mean zero lore as well if you consider that Dragon+ magazine is not what it used to be and does not do locations spotlights or clarifications about the status quo in the Forgotten Realms. We are left with nwn mmo, which I personally don't really like and the adventures published, but while they did a great job with Storm King's Thunder, the new season is a clear step back: Tales of Yawning Portal is just a reboot of old adventures, meaning that the Wizards have no idea on what to do with the FR. Ed Greenwood, Salvatore, Kemp and Evans won't write anything till further notice so it seems this will be the worst year for FR unless the movie is suddenly announced. The FR are left in a clean slate "do whatever you want" situation that needs MAJOR polishing after the reboot made with the second sundering. It's especially bad if you compare it to how Numenera or Paizo handles the lore of their settings (updates every week or every month and lorebooks both free and commercial are abundant).
I always loved FR and especially Faerun and I kinda liked that the pantheons got shrunk with a bunch of useless deities removed and continents never used gone to Abeir, but now with everything coming back without lore and explanation the world feels so overwhelming that I as DM cannot handle it without resorting to do world building on my own. I am forced to give interpretations on almost every god comeback or every bit of unclarified lore. Unfortunately I don't have time to do world building. It is INSANELY time expensive and with a full job and a wife (and for some DMs kids) it's simply impossible to do this. It should be the Wizards job to give us a detailed world where we could set our adventures, but they are spectacularly failing at this and 2017 looks like it will be the worst year of all.
This is why, in a nutshell, any effort from our community to try to clarify things by piecing together bits and pieces of lore found in the games/books/adventures published till now is invaluable, so thanks a lot for doing this.
Thank you for saying this. I came back to the realms in 5ed, after being heavily invested in 2nd and 3rd edition. I took note that very few things were now explained in the realms, but merely stated that this is how it is. – This did not bother me personally, as I had the background from 2nd and 3rd edition to build the foundation, but I realized that for players who did not have my background this edition would be overwhelmed and underserved.
Almost everything in the realms has several pages of text dedicated to them, and the fan community (whom I love and use frequently) are actively producing more text every day. “Catching up,” by reading all this is a part time job.
In my videos, I spend somewhere between 3 and 5 hours per week in reading up on lore, any my videos are only around 5 minutes long. If I were new and had to run a game in the realms, I would go crazy on prepping.
I too have a full-time job, and cool wife, but no kids. I barely make the time to get this done. I can easily see the time pressures that other people must be facing.
|
| ghilteras |
Posted - 06 Mar 2017 : 19:51:47
I commend your effort and I subscribed. The WoTC seems not interested into the lore vacuum issue so it's nice to see the community trying to fill the gap.
After Monte Cook left I knew this would have happened. Nobody seems in charge to write lore on FR these days and the fact that all the authors have been laid off after they joined forces to write the Second Sundering is the worst kind of news we could have got in 2017. We might as well get zero novels this year, which might mean zero lore as well if you consider that Dragon+ magazine is not what it used to be and does not do locations spotlights or clarifications about the status quo in the Forgotten Realms. We are left with nwn mmo, which I personally don't really like and the adventures published, but while they did a great job with Storm King's Thunder, the new season is a clear step back: Tales of Yawning Portal is just a reboot of old adventures, meaning that the Wizards have no idea on what to do with the FR. Ed Greenwood, Salvatore, Kemp and Evans won't write anything till further notice so it seems this will be the worst year for FR unless the movie is suddenly announced. The FR are left in a clean slate "do whatever you want" situation that needs MAJOR polishing after the reboot made with the second sundering. It's especially bad if you compare it to how Numenera or Paizo handles the lore of their settings (updates every week or every month and lorebooks both free and commercial are abundant).
I always loved FR and especially Faerun and I kinda liked that the pantheons got shrunk with a bunch of useless deities removed and continents never used gone to Abeir, but now with everything coming back without lore and explanation the world feels so overwhelming that I as DM cannot handle it without resorting to do world building on my own. I am forced to give interpretations on almost every god comeback or every bit of unclarified lore. Unfortunately I don't have time to do world building. It is INSANELY time expensive and with a full job and a wife (and for some DMs kids) it's simply impossible to do this. It should be the Wizards job to give us a detailed world where we could set our adventures, but they are spectacularly failing at this and 2017 looks like it will be the worst year of all.
This is why, in a nutshell, any effort from our community to try to clarify things by piecing together bits and pieces of lore found in the games/books/adventures published till now is invaluable, so thanks a lot for doing this. |
| Markustay |
Posted - 04 Mar 2017 : 20:23:19
No matter how you slice it, it comes down to 'hubris'. Karsus wasn't evil, he was just too damn prideful of his own abilities he thought he was 'the only one' who could stop the Phaerimm (and I can prove him wrong THREE times in canon), and he thought he'd be able to do it. No matter what his motivations were, it was PRIDE.
"Pride goeth before a Fall" - quite literally, in this case.
Even if we take into account some of the lore at the tail-end of 3e, wherein Shar influenced him - that was just her whispering to his subconscious, "Only you can save them..." |
| Gary Dallison |
Posted - 04 Mar 2017 : 09:49:58
Im putting Karsus mistake down to a simple and human combinatiom of pride and stress.
The netheril empire was crumbling around itself as the phaerimm unleashed their hordes of thralls and started performing saboteur strikes within the heart of netheril.
Dissident groups were rising up and the populace was revolting under the pressure of hunger, marauding monsters, inequality, and a perceives weakness on the part of the archwizards.
Ioulaum disappeared. The father and saviour of netheril. Karsus always knew he was destined to rule and lead netheril to greatness so he took charge for himself. He knew jergal was planning a huge magical experiment to rewrite the laws of the universe and ioulaum had warned karsus that it was a trap where jergal would steal all their power and use it to restore some super race from nothingness.
So karsus decided to turn the tables on jergal and steal his power from him.
At the same time karsus was struggling to control such a disparate empire and all the uprisings and the independent minded archwizards. The the lichlord appeared with his army.
Karsus got desperate and started to buckle under the pressure. He worried that jergal would not have enough power to steal and help him save netheril. So at the last minute in an act of desperation he changed his mind and took power from the most powerful deity in existence.
Then he realised his mistake.
Was karsus mad. Not at first. He was a prodigal genius. Slightly odd, supremely confident jn his own abilities, but unable to understand the reactions of others. Stress and pressure for a decade made him irrational and desperate and in the heat of the moment at the crucial point he dropped the ball. Weve all done it. I did it yesterday and screwed up a software year end. He was just human like the rest of us. |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 04 Mar 2017 : 09:11:21
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
But that's not really supported in the lore -- instead, we know he was brilliant, egotistical, and self-centered.
I am sorry but whenever I hear these descriptions, I see the far better fleshed out character Vangerdahast Aeiulvana, described by someone affected by the Grodd goblin attacks. Or in a more historical perspective, I am hearing about Xerxes from Herodotus.
When I hear Karsus described this way, he is no deeper than a He-man character. Karsus was a man, and he did human things and had human flaws.
He got angry and frustrated, but he also loved and tried to do the right thing.
|
| George Krashos |
Posted - 04 Mar 2017 : 08:26:59
If you lend any credence to my Jergal tale-spinning, perhaps the offer of a sliver of divinity from that deity touched off Karsus to decide to go the whole hog himself. That certainly fits with his character as depicted in the sources.
-- George Krashos |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 23:54:54
But that's not really supported in the lore -- instead, we know he was brilliant, egotistical, and self-centered. Here's some of the things said about him in the Netheril boxed set:
quote:
The Archwizard tended to take what he wanted, worrying about the consequences later.
quote:
Like most of the archwizards, Karsus believed that the gods were nothing more than mortals who had mastered magic that he hadn’t yet discovered.
quote:
Karsus was a man full of self-confidence and an unshakable faith that what he believed was the way things really were. Not even the pleadings of his closest advisors could sway him once a decision to do something was made.
quote:
Another facet of Karsus’s personality also shined through to anyone who met him: He was stark, raving mad. He acted like an excited child most of the time, and his tantrums were to be avoided at all cost. He could be warm and friendly or ruthless and tyrannical; there really wasn’t anything in between.
Karsus went through many "special friends" during his lifetime. These were individuals whom he suddenly took a great liking to, spoiled for a while (obtaining information or services from them) and then tossed them aside like a forgotten toy. Some in the Karsus Enclave viewed the designation of "special friend" as a death mark.
That's hardly the picture of a kind, self-sacrificing person. Your neighbors don't fear you if you're a nice guy.
As for other options....
Banding together and making a concerted effort wasn't tried. Sure, Ioulaum didn't try it -- but he didn't destroy Netheril, either.
The power to steal divinity could have been aimed in other directions, too... Maybe a big, anti-phaerimm ward. It's been done in canon, against dragons or critters that had eaten human flesh, and the sharn raised a barrier the phaerimm couldn't cross for centuries -- so it was obviously an option.
Or he could have created something that specifically targeted phaerimm, offensively. Swarms of constructs or critters that would home in on phaerimm and blow up. Or maybe an anti-phaerimm plague. Or go the Dragon Mountain route and throw so dang many kobolds at them that they would be overwhelmed and exhausted.
And if he just had to steal divine power only to deal with the phaerimm -- why not go for Death, wave his hand, and simply kill all the phaerimm that way? Why not luck, and cause them to have such horrible luck that their own spells would backfire?
No, there were plenty of other options; Karsus was arrogant and in it for himself. Saving Netheril was a secondary concern to becoming more powerful. |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 22:16:10
The way I see it, all the other options had been tried.
Phaerimm were pulling Enclaves out of the sky.
The empire was falling apart, cities flying away from Netheril to avoid the fate of the fallen.
The people were starving and dying because of life draining spells.
Their Tomb Tapper strategy had failed.
The Sharn were not doing anything at this point.
Heavy magic did not provide an outage.
Shadow Weave was still an unknown factor.
The Nether Scrolls all gone, stolen from under their nose.
Worst of all, Ioulaum had just thrown his hands in the air and left.
Everyone was looking at Karsus to fix this problem. A selfish person would have flown their Enclave out of harms way, would have followed Ioulaums initiative and saved their own skin. But Karsus stayed, he wanted to save the empire.
I think this is the important point to take into account. Everyone is a fan of Ioulaum, he is the father of Netheril, the greatest there ever was. Yet, he left. All the strategies that Wooly suggested, why did not Ioulaum do these things?
I believe Karsus chose Mystryl because he knew that the Phaerimm were magic dependent and that the life draining spell was powered by magic. Picking Mystryl was a strategic choice to fix the problems that Netheril was having, Mystryl was the only god that could target these two problems.
He knew his spell was limited, he knew the power was only to be borrowed.
He was desperate, he was willing to sacrifice his life to save the empire, and he would have, but for that one fatal mistake. |
| Elren_Wolfsbane |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 19:36:16
Yeah, but it sounds like an appropriate place for a lich |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 19:24:07
IIRC, the city of Karse was built on or near that rock, but said city was later abandoned by all except a lich, who was not the most friendly sort.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to memorialize an act of hubris that destroyed a nation. |
| Elren_Wolfsbane |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 18:56:03
Wow, is there a memorial. (Or anything like that) where he fell..(I'm assuming it's where Netheril was) |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 18:45:07
quote:
Originally posted by Elren_Wolfsbane
What did eventually happen to Karsus in the end?
He realized he had just committed one of the multiverse's all-time biggest mistakes, turned to stone, and died. Basically, he cast the spell, had enough time for an "oh, sh t!" and fell out of the sky as a big, big rock. |
| Elren_Wolfsbane |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 18:12:28
What did eventually happen to Karsus in the end? |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 17:30:06
Considering that there were other options available, yet he still chose to steal power from the goddess of magic, I would say he was being extremely selfish.
He could have targeted any other deity, or used that immense amount of power towards some other, more direct means of dealing with the phaerimm.
Or he could have built a coalition of archmages and either directly or indirectly taken the fight to the phaerimm.
He may have wanted to save Netheril, but he was very much looking to benefit himself at the same time. |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 03 Mar 2017 : 16:49:32
quote:
Originally posted by George Krashos
I've always thought that the best depiction of Karsus was in the short vignette Ed provided in his novel "The Temptation of Elminster".
-- George Krashos
Shadows of Undrentide made Karsus for me. A redeemable character that made a tragical mistake, and could never undo it, forever being tortured for what he did.
I see a Karsus that knew he would die after casting his spell, the spell was meant to temporarily take the power of a God, not permanently take it.
Karsus must have known that he would not go unpunished for this.
But it was his one shot to save Netheril and destroy the Phaerimm, something that he was obsessed with.
Karsus made a horrible mistake, but he it was a mistake that was done because of a selfless act. |
| George Krashos |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 23:38:34
quote:
Originally posted by Odin Highhammer
For anyone watching my videos and get into the last half of my Part 3 on Netheril can see me trying to redeem Karsus from having the same fate. Empire of Magic, Lost Empires of Faerun, all the Setting books describe Karsus as a fool, a power-hungry madman.
Having those type of characters makes your world into a parody, like Munchkin or Hackmaster.
I've always thought that the best depiction of Karsus was in the short vignette Ed provided in his novel "The Temptation of Elminster".
-- George Krashos |
| Elren_Wolfsbane |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 17:15:01
quote:
Originally posted by dazzlerdal
People are people. In times of stress or desperation they do bad things for selfish reasons.
Conversely bad people do not stomp on every kitten they see, butcher every child, nor mug every old lady.
The realms is full of people and they act like people. At least thats how it used to be in my nostalgia tinted brain
I can agree on that. There are sometimes thise characters that do just want to murder everyone and take over all the kindoms. But they too are subject to those grey areas |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 17:01:14
I don't think I need characters to be "awakened" to do the right thing, but I need them to be "real" people.
As of now, I feel that Manshoon or Szass Tam are about as rational as Skeletor from He-Man is. Telamont used to be my go-to example of "evil but understandable" - Has burden of running a city, but lays good plans, distributes power among his children and generally has some achievable goals.
When he suddenly went nuts and attacked Myth Drannor, wanting to destroy the weave - That is something Skeletor would do. Why flip him like this?
For anyone watching my videos and get into the last half of my Part 3 on Netheril can see me trying to redeem Karsus from having the same fate. Empire of Magic, Lost Empires of Faerun, all the Setting books describe Karsus as a fool, a power-hungry madman.
Having those type of characters makes your world into a parody, like Munchkin or Hackmaster. |
| Gary Dallison |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 16:40:24
People are people. In times of stress or desperation they do bad things for selfish reasons.
Conversely bad people do not stomp on every kitten they see, butcher every child, nor mug every old lady.
The realms is full of people and they act like people. At least thats how it used to be in my nostalgia tinted brain |
| Elren_Wolfsbane |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 16:25:38
I'm a little conflicted with the moral gray areas. Yes sometimes an evil character can change overtime and have those moments of in clarity. But something's are black and white. So I guess I would say I'm kind of both. I guess just very little Shades of Grey is what I prefer |
| Gary Dallison |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 15:05:00
Ironically eds version was always a shades of grey campaign. Its only as it progressed that it was made into a black and white flick.
I still play it the original way |
| Arivia |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 13:32:27
I subscribed and I'm looking forward to watching later! |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 10:51:27
Thanks for the kind words. When making these videos I often think about “how would candlekeep respond to this sentence”, it keeps me on the straight and narrow.
I think Forgotten Realms has gotten a bad rap mostly due to the moral compass always being so clear. Good and Evil is very clear. I think that as a society we have moved far past this view, and it’s something that LotR still stand strong on. Moral gray areas are what we like nowadays. We want Evil to be relatable and understandable.
This is an area where Forgotten Realms has stumbled for long, but I think they are understanding that this needs to change.
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| Elren_Wolfsbane |
Posted - 02 Mar 2017 : 08:51:29
Wow, I love this. For someone who wants to learn even more and absorb as much knowledge of lore as no can, this is perfect. Keep it up. Hazzah!!! |
| KanzenAU |
Posted - 01 Mar 2017 : 23:26:46
A noble effort. I find the Realms does indeed go unappreciated in a lot of RPG circles.
I think that's partially because there's just so much lore that you have to do a lot of reading to really appreciate it, and the gaming side focuses so heavily on the (superficially-only) generic Sword Coast. I find it's scoffed at most often for being just another Tolkien rip off, and it's so much more than that - so good luck with your endeavour! |
| Brimstone |
Posted - 01 Mar 2017 : 23:03:32
I subscribed. Plan on checking it out when I get a chance. |
| Odin Highhammer |
Posted - 01 Mar 2017 : 17:41:39
quote:
Originally posted by Baptor
Just finished your first video. Well done. These are amazing and very interesting even to someone like me who knows quite a bit about Realmslore already.
I subscribed of course. Please keep making these!
Thanks, I am trying to aim for one video per week, but we shall see if that works out. |
| Baptor |
Posted - 01 Mar 2017 : 05:19:13
Just finished your first video. Well done. These are amazing and very interesting even to someone like me who knows quite a bit about Realmslore already.
I subscribed of course. Please keep making these! |
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