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What the Player's Handbook says
In Chapter 4, "Personality and Background", the Subsection "Character Details" has a header titled "Sex" that makes the following remarks (emphasis mine):
Sex
You can play a male or female character without gaining any special benefits or hindrances. Think about how your character does or does not conform to the ...
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... a stereotypical medieval world.
Assuming that the world has a publication system and royalties ...
Stop right there
On Earth, the medieval period broadly runs from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The first printing press dates from 1439 and is primarily a renaissance development. The first state ...
45
It certainly exists in the Realms, but the sources don't give a reliable sense of how commonplace it is.
In a quote in this article, Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood says that there are gay characters in Faerûn:
Folks, the Realms have ALWAYS had characters (mortals and deities) who crossdressed, changed gender (and not just to sneak past ...
44
There is good support that it probably means "shield" or "barrier" or "gate" or the like
I agree with Miles Bedinger's answer noting that dwarven words relating to "shield" start with "bar", and that this may be a clue to the semantics. To wit:
barak: "backbone, strength, shield"
barakor: "those who shield"
There are further considerations that support ...
41
Yes...depending
Alignment causes a lot of arguments around the D&D community. There are a pair of rock-solid methods: the Sanctify the Wicked spell, and the redemption rules, both of them found in the Book of Exalted Deeds. The BoED can be a controversial book in some groups, but those rules are a definite method of getting the lich back on the straight ...
41
Simplify it as a downtime activity
There are no official rules for being an author, and while I can tell you, for example, that Volo (you know, the one who writes monster guides) will sell players a signed Volo's Guide to Monsters copy for 50 gold in the Tomb of Annihilation campaign, that kind of information doesn't really help you. Instead, this kind of ...
41
He's a wizard
I mean, he's one of the most powerful wizards the multiverse has ever seen. It's not really surprising he hasn't died of old age-- Clone, for example, is only an 8th level spell and Mordenkainen, if we're using multi-edition lore stuff like the question presupposes, has invented 9th level spells (i.e. Mordenkainen's Disjunction).
There are ...
41
They Would Be Called "Magic"
A +1/+2/+3 weapon, shield, armor, ammunition, etc. have historically been referred to as a "magic" version of that item: magic weapon, magic shield, magic arrow, etc. (though, Volo preferred the term "magical").
In 5e specifically
The Magic Weapon spell (PHB p.257) itself is an example of this nomenclature still being used, ...
39
The main reason was described by R.A. Salvatore in interviews. He describes how the complete overhaul and moving the setting by 100 years would ruin his characters; a 100-year old human is no longer a good fighter. He even states that after the decision was announced in a private meeting between the FR authors and WotC, Ed Greenwood was completely devastated....
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I wondered this before myself, I found that Wikipedia had most of my answers.
The Forgotten Realms is a fantasy world setting, described as a world
of strange lands, dangerous creatures, and mighty deities, where magic
and supernatural phenomena are quite real. The premise is that, long
ago, the Earth and the world of the Forgotten Realms were more ...
36
5E Realms lore does not specifically address this. 4E Realms lore, on the other hand, does. Their exact origin is subject to some debate, even among the elves.
Collectively, the elves are known as the Tel’Quessir6 ("The People"), a title that encompasses Eladrin, Wood Elves, High Elves, Sea Elves, and so on. It is 'widely accepted' that the Tel’Quessir are ...
34
Break it up.
A gem that large is literally priceless. As in, it's worth so much that no one will be willing to buy it for more than a tiny fraction of its value. Imagine that happened on earth. Its value would be several hundreds of billions of dollars. Who would pay that much?
Now think about trying to sell chunks of it. You could much more easily sell a ...
34
At least 26 miles deep, with rumoured unexplored caverns 40 miles deep, though most of the known Underdark is within 10 miles of the surface.
According to the D&D 3e sourcebook Underdark, p.120, the lowest level of the Underdark starts at a depth of ten miles and continues down from there:
No place on Toril is as strange and dangerous as the ...
33
Not exclusively.
Does the #dnd tabletop RPG have one official setting? The answer is
yes. That setting is the multiverse, which includes all #dnd worlds.
– a tweet by @JeremyECrawford
(Emphasis mine.)
In case you're wondering (just like I was) who Jeremy Crawford is, and how serious / official is what he says, he is
(...) one of the two lead ...
33
Deities basically never come to the Material Plane. When they do, it has huge ramifications for that plane as well as for the Outer Planes, and that tends to cause lots of problems and anger all the other deities.
Instead, they send avatars to the Material Plane—and even that is quite rare, because even that still causes a lot of trouble. Most of the stats ...
32
Yes.
Mike Mearls and others on the WOTC RPG team, have said on several occasions that Realms is the default setting for 5e.
When I was working on third and fourth there was this dialogue of "Should we just embrace The Realms as the core setting?" And we were always very wary of a big backlash. Honestly people have complained, but I think when you look ...
32
It's fine unless you're level 18
To see how Purple Dragon Knight (PDK) stacks up let's compare it to a fighter archetype from the PHB. Since we're worried about PDK being underpowered we only need to find one already accepted archtype that it is comparable to. We're going to use Champion because it is broadly similar and it's abilities make an for easy ...
31
Azuth from FR might be a candidate. He is not a god of magic, but of wizards, and is mostly interested in the structured study of magic. From wikipedia:
The clerics of Azuth teach wisdom and restraint. This means that Azuth is often not the favoured god of sorcerers with their fiery, instinctual use of magic, and bards with their somewhat fanciful ...
30
Forgotten Realms was originally the place that Earth's fantasy legends came from.
From a profile on Ed Greenwood in Dragon magazine #244 (p. 112):
The "Forgotten Realms" name originally came from the notion of a "multiverse" of parallel worlds. Our Earth is one, the Realms another. In Greenwood's original conception, Earth's fantastic legends derive ...
30
This answer is informed by two things1:
1. The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (SCAG) (pages 7-70)
2. The baked-into-the-genre-tropes modeled on social-political habits in human history
The Sword Coast as a whole isn't governed as "The Sword Coast"
The region's structure (such structure as exists) is that of local centers of power with a lot of "...
29
The average person living on the surface almost certainly knows them as Mind Flayers, if they know them at all
Dragon #281 includes the article "By Any Other Name: Races of the Underdark", about the naming conventions of the various races that live in the Underdark, which explains that in their native telepathic communication mind flayers are identified by ...
29
It is a process known as ceremorphosis.
Several articles about the Baldur's Gate III trailer indicate that the depicted process is indeed ceremorphosis.
Rock Paper Shotgun touches on it:
They call it Ceremorphosis. The excruciating seven day process by which a humanoid might transform into a Mind Flayer. Stick one illithid tadpole in the brain and one ...
28
According to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition supplement Sea of Fallen Stars (1999), the Sea is mostly saltwater with some freshwater:
Most of the races within the Inner Sea breathe only saltwater, since that is more than 99% of its total volume. However, near the coastal shallows and at inlets where rivers drain into Serôs, brackish ...
28
Plants and Fungi
Not surprisingly there are edible mushrooms and plants that adapted to the Underdark. There are hundreds of different wines produced from fungi. "Spiderblood" is a one of the most expensive and seasoned with spider's venom.
Barrelstalk is a fungus as big as a tree. Only the inner flesh is edible. In the centre there is a large reservoir ...
28
In the Forgotten Realms, Deities are those whom Ao has officially marked as deities.
This answer is generally true for previous editions of Forgotten Realms.
It's possible that some changes may be made for 5th edition, though the Forgotten Realms is generally pretty good about maintaining continuity (including various cataclysms to explain edition changes)...
27
My question: Is this possible?
Yes, it's possible, whether or not the fiend and the god/goddess get along. There is no RAW prohibition from the multiclass, no matter how awkward it looks.
From a purely RAW standpoint, I don't think that Warlocks can lose their powers, but would his good deity even bother with someone who sold their soul to a devil?
...
27
I'd highly recommend that you purchase or borrow Out of the Abyss, since it is the only source of information about Menzoberranzan in 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The information is pretty huge and is about 20 pages long. There are lots of physical descriptions. Furthermore there is tons of material about the Underdark. If your adventure is taking ...
27
Get a barghest to eat you1
This is probably the easiest solution, since barghest will attempt to consume goblinoid leaders. Simply pose as one using a spell like alter self and you can easily attract the attention of a barghest.
The section on the barghest in Volo's Guide to Monsters (p. 123) states
Soul Feeding
A barghest can feed on the corpse of ...
26
Following Thomas Jacobs' excellently researched answer which traced the term to Ed Greenwood in a Dragon magazine article and in the Powers of Faerûn book , I took the matter to Ed Greenwood himself, who is active on twitter, and asked him for the origin of the term.
My tweet:
@TheEdVerse Hey there. A question has arisen in the RPG Stackexchange site ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
