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Hope the dragon doesn't come
I'm being a little facetious obviously, but in the fiction of Forgotten Realms for most towns (as opposed to a large city) without nearby adventurers the plan for a dragon defense is to hope they never need to worry about it and evacuate if they see it coming.
And lest you think this is unrealistic and that a town would try to ...
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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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You should be more assertive
Can my character have this hairstyle
It is your character, so ultimately it's up to you. If you say she has a ponytail, she does.
female characters usually do not tie their hair
But your character does. She is a combat cleric, she can't allow an unfortunate mistake (like hair getting into her face) to mess things up in a ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 copyright act ...
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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 ...
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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, ...
46
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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The primary question here, to me, is, what exactly constitutes “high magic”? D&D itself supplies a definition—but I don’t think it’s a good one, it doesn’t capture, to me, what people mean when they say high magic. That is because it is defining “high magic” as being “high” relative to the norms of D&D—which are already, I would say, very “high magic....
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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 ...
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This is addressed directly in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes
The first chapter is all about the Blood War. A very simplified and brief synopsis of the reasons the Blood War is a stalemate:
Demons have quantity
Devils have quality
There are groups and individuals acting as intentionally balancing forces who are sufficiently powerful to manage any side that ...
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Oh, Very Very Yes
If you want some dead gods, come on down to the Avatar Trilogy, where Bane got Banedead, Bhaal rolled over, Myrkul went from being God of the Dead to dead of the god, and other such fun events. They're not the only ones - just some of the many who had themselves a very bad day during the Time of Troubles. Each one had the bad luck to be ...
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Your DM is making things up to inhibit you as a player because "reasons".
Nowhere in any edition of D&D is "hairstyle" a part of character creation or something you need to track for any mechanical reason whatsoever. As you describe it the GM said long hair in your eyes might hurt concentration. There's nothing at all in D&D rules governing this so ...
answered Nov 26 '19 at 18:46
Joshua Aslan Smith
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Alright, this is going to delve into both canon and conjecture, as it must for such a nebulous topic. I'll break them down so we know which is which.
The Many Gods of the Dead
As has been noted (correctly), the Wall of the Faithless was established by Myrkul. His successor Cyric kept the Wall erected largely out of malice and sadism, never questioning its ...
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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 ...
answered May 30 '19 at 3:53
Please stop being evil
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Eberron and Faerûn might be connected, possibly
It is the default of D&D campaign settings that they are connected to one another through the “multiverse,” which refers to all the other planes beyond the Material one the campaign setting is set on. In AD&D 2e, those planes themselves became their own major campaign setting, Planescape. And it is ...
39
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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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I contacted the artist who designed the coin pictured. Her name is Olga Drebas, and she is listed as one of the Interior Illustrators on page 2 of W:DH. In a public tumblr post she answered:
The character on the golden coin is Ahghairon, the first Open Lord and founder of Waterdeep city, as per the art brief I had.
For the record, Olga was very nice.
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XGtE suggests the result is a Half-Elf
This book includes a table (p. 62) for determining parent races when your character is a half elf. It includes the possibility of:
One parent was an elf and the other was a half-elf.
Therefore we can infer that the offspring of an elf and a half-elf is a half-elf, or at least that that is a valid result.
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Gnomes are pretty famous throughout various editions and worlds of D&D for creating clockwork devices of greater or lesser complexity, which probably would involve developing various forms of bushing or bearing. Depending on the specific game, rock gnomes often function in a sort of quasi-industrial/magitech/mage-punk conceptual space. I wouldn't be ...
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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 ...
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I believe crude ball bearings would be made the same way as shot - by dropping rapidly cooling lead down a tower, so it solidifies mid-air as tiny spheres. Well within the tech range for D&D.
They would be useless at 5000rpm in my grinder, but perfectly fine for tripping orcs.
As for why they’d be common, if they’re effective for tripping orcs, then ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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The Forgotten Realms is not "high magic"; it represents D&D's standard level of magic (DMG p.9, p23).
While magic is somewhat commonplace in the Forgotten Realms, this is really the baseline level of magic in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. The Forgotten Realms is defined in the rulebooks as a standard D&D campaign setting.
This is not ...
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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 ...
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