Quote from: S'mon;667199I found that the factions were ok spread over the entire continent, as per the 4e FR Campaign Setting book, but Neverwinter shoehorns in most of them to one city and it's far, far too much.

I have scaled back the factions to about two major and three minor. However, it's the backstory as well that's too much. The fact that one pantheon has been replaced with another. The spell plague. In Neverwinter, the localized catastrophe of the eruption*. Not one, but two alternate planes (shadow and fey). I've chosen to ignore the spell plague and the shadow realm. But a newbie DM would probably have trouble excising whole swathes of the setting and cosmology. And now there's going to be another catastrophe to kick off 5E? I really hope WotC has their own generic default setting.

* Reading the Neverwinter Campaign Setting, I can't but conclude that Greenwood and Salvatore are terrible, terrible writers. Resorting to calamities to move the plot forward, the awful cliches, and worst of all, the insipid names. So you're off to Neverwinter to speak with Lord Neverember, where he may well send you to Castle Never to seek out the Crown of Neverwinter in the Neverwinter Catacombs, and on and on. Mount Hotenow? Really?

Quote from: RPGPundit;666945Ideally, I'd like to see something done with the FR similar to what the latest series of Star Trek movies did to Star Trek; a clean sweep, to shrug off the huge load of fanwank bullshit and horrible concepts that have weighed down and smothered all the awesomeness out of a setting who's biggest problem was becoming too popular with a certain type of geek and certain type of geek-writers.

RPGPundit

I actually concur with this, reset things with a fresh look at the setting but with the 1E as the core from which it all comes and circles back too.

From everything discussed so far it seems pretty likely that they intend to revamp FR with the Sundering, which will probably split it into two timelines....the "spellplague/4E" side which will then go away quietly (or remain the focus of the Neverwinter MMO exclusively) and the pre-spellplague, possibly even pre-time jump 5E core setting. That's what I'm betting will happen, anyway.

EDIT: And as an added bet, I'm going to predict that at some point over the course of the six module/six novel tie in that Salvatore has "future Drizzt" meet "past Drizzt" during this process.

Reboot from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.

Quote from: One Horse Town;666982Quite.

I find the gamut of NPCs and organisations easy to ignore - or indeed use as handy ready-made villains/allies when the PCs are at an applicable level.

I find it rather amusing that some people who go on about 'world in motion' types of games seem to balk at the one setting which seems to have that baked in...

Yeah, when I ran Forgotten Realms, the friends of mine who were fans of the novels thought the odd interactions with major NPCs were cool...but there was always enough danger and evil to go around.

Maybe it comes from my comics/supers background. I ran games set in the Marvel Universe all the time, and no one questioned why The Avengers and the Fantastic Four weren't constantly taking care of everything because they understood that there was sooooooo much going on that those guys were just busy.

I'd love a reboot to gray box, but it won't happen. How about a 500 year jump into the future? ALL of the major book NPCs dead, but the gods and major cities are still there. Make it more wild west, like it was in 1e, and less civilized. The bad guys also can have a few victories in there somewhere.

Quote from: Haffrung;667243I have scaled back the factions to about two major and three minor. However, it's the backstory as well that's too much. The fact that one pantheon has been replaced with another. The spell plague. In Neverwinter, the localized catastrophe of the eruption*. Not one, but two alternate planes (shadow and fey). I've chosen to ignore the spell plague and the shadow realm. But a newbie DM would probably have trouble excising whole swathes of the setting and cosmology. And now there's going to be another catastrophe to kick off 5E? I really hope WotC has their own generic default setting.

* Reading the Neverwinter Campaign Setting, I can't but conclude that Greenwood and Salvatore are terrible, terrible writers. Resorting to calamities to move the plot forward, the awful cliches, and worst of all, the insipid names. So you're off to Neverwinter to speak with Lord Neverember, where he may well send you to Castle Never to seek out the Crown of Neverwinter in the Neverwinter Catacombs, and on and on. Mount Hotenow? Really?

Yeah, I agree. The Shadowfell & Feywild are core in 4e; personally I've not used the Feywild and the Shadowfell just for a couple single-PC vignettes: one PC getting Raised - called back from the Shadowfell, then much later another PC going there to face the Reaper of Cyric and rescue souls so they could be Raised.
For the first two years I ignored the Spellplague too, but I finally mentioned it last month. I wanted to use a two-headed, kangaroo-legged hopping Chaos Troll miniature created by Citadel Miniatures ca 1982 from random dice rolls on Warhammer 1e Chaos Attributes Table... and the Spellplague gave me a good excuse.

The names, characters etc, I mostly ignore it, occasionally make fun of it. Seems to work.

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;666588What they need to do is just re-launch Mystara. Turn it into the flagship setting (rules agnostic for all editions), and leave the fiction out of it. Let the players write their own in essence.

This could be intriguing.

I had a very brief look at 4Es FR book last night. I stopped reading when I got to  'magical power nodes' appear at points where energies meet acting like teleport systems.

Kill it. Put it out of its misery.