17 replies to this topic

[Feanor]

Sometime ago, in another topic, someone mentioned that Suldanesselar does not exist in official FR. This made me ask : Ust'Natha and its background about being the place where the drow descended to Underdark, is official AD&D or not ?

[Archmage Silver]

A good question, since BioWare used information from wizards of the coast and dungeons and dragons. Still, I think that Ust'Natha and its background are official AD&D 'cause if they were just made up, it would be a huge thing since the drow and their descend are official AD&D. So it is very likely that Ust'Natha and its background should be considered official AD&D.

[Arachnos]

Suldanesselar does exist in FR lore. It gets a mention in the 2ed Lands of Intrigue sourcebook, which covers Tethyr, Amn and the surrounding lands..

It only gets a paragraph though.

[Feanor]

Why drows have such a high resistance ? Maybe because they reside in Underdark ?


Edited : Resistance to magic. How the hell I missed that ??? Gee...

Edited by Feanor, 06 August 2004 - 05:41 AM.

[Xander77]

Resitance to being squeezed, kissed and glomped?

To being friendly with people?

To magic?

Nah, that can't be it...

[Archmage Silver]

The high magic resistance of the drow originates from the constant use of magic to survive in the underdark and this could work for other races as well if all them used magic constantly for a long time.

[NiGHTMARE]

Correction: Ched Nasad used to exist - it was destroyed in the War of the Spider Queen novels (which of course are set a few years after BG2) .

BTW, which book(s) are Ust Natha mentioned in?

[Feanor]

What are the Demonweb pits ?

[Shadow Angel]

The Demonweb Pits are/is Lolth's divine plane/s.

As Bhaal had the Throne of Blood.

[Mongoose87]

But do the other Drow gods not also dwell there, dispite the teachings otherwise of the Drow faith?

[V. Lokai]

But do the other Drow gods not also dwell there, dispite the teachings otherwise of the Drow faith?

Yes. The other drow gods (Vhaeraun, Selvetarm, etc) make their homeplane there too. Eilistraee also has a home in Arvandor I believe with the good elven gods.

[NiGHTMARE]

Eilistraee's home is Svartalfheim in Ysgard; Ghaundaur's is the Cauldron of Slime in the Paraelemental Plane of Ooze; Kiaransalee's is Thanatos in the Abyss; Lolth's and Selvetarm's is the Demonweb Pits, 666th layer of the Abyss; Vhaeraun's is Ellaniath in Carceri.

Edited by NiGHTMARE, 08 August 2004 - 11:11 PM.

[Zandilar]

Heya,

Eilistraee's home is Svartalfheim in Ysgard; Ghaundaur's is the Cauldron of Slime in the Paraelemental Plane of Ooze; Kiaransalee's is Thanatos in the Abyss; Lolth's and Selvetarm's is the Demonweb Pits, 666th layer of the Abyss; Vhaeraun's is Ellaniath in Carceri.

Uh... Nope.

I do have to contradict you here... they retroactively changed the Cosmology of Faerun, and it basically "has always been that way"...

Eilistraee now dwells (mostly) in Arvandor with the Seldarine
The rest of the Drow pantheon dwell in the Demonweb Pits, and even Eilistraee has a realm there, though she rarely ever visits it.

The Realms were never meant to fit into Greyhawk's Great Wheel cosmology....

Here is a very interesting thread on Sean K Reynold's forums talking about the Cosmology of the Realms, and why it was part of the Great Wheel in the first place, and why it should never have been...
Cosmology Question

(Sean Reynolds is responsible for the new cosmology, and since his name is actually on the cover of FRCS along with Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams, and Rob Heinsoo, I think he'd know what he was talking about. )

(Mind you, the new cosmology was not published at the time the Baldur's Gate games were made!)

Edited by Zandilar, 13 August 2004 - 04:49 AM.

[Xander77]

What exactly changed, why and how does Sean explain it?

What books were the changes detailed in?

[Zandilar]

Heya,

What exactly changed, why and how does Sean explain it?

What books were the changes detailed in?

This is the key quote out of that thread...

Except it wasn't TSR "trying to bring everyone together." It was Lorraine Williams (owner of TSR, a non-gamer who looked down on gamers, who was proud that she never gamed, and planned on giving TSR to her daughter as a gift when she turned 18 so she's have a "little business" to run") who said that all TSR products had to use the same universe so that people would all buy the same universe-books. She's also the person who said "If it's in core D&D, it's in FR," which is why every single Monster Manual monster _had_ to have a place in FR, and why every world-subset expansion (OA, Maztica, Al Qadim, etc.) was crammed into FR instead of letting it be independent. Lorraine, who ran TSR into the ground because she didn't know what she was doing. Lorraine who decided that TSR's audience was children age 8-10 and any evidence to the contrary was just wrong. She wanted FR to use the Great Wheel because the Great Wheel was "official." Do you really want to be taking her advice for your game or for official FR product?

We went a different way because we were no longer forced to follow strict rules that made no sense or were even bad for the setting.

You can find information on the new Cosmology in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (pg 256) and the Players Guide to Faerun (pg 139). (They are both 3rd Edition books.) Briefly, it's more of a treelike structure, and has deity groupings that make more sense. (For example, Dweomerheart is the home of all the deities of magic, Mystra (NG), Azuth (LN), Velsharoon (NE), and Savras (TN).)

[NiGHTMARE]

Uh... Nope.

Uh... yep.

Feanor said AD&D, and his post is in reference to BG2, so clearly he's talking about 2nd Edition, not 3rd Edtion (which of course is D&D, not AD&D). In 2nd Edition, the planes I mentioned are the ones the deities reside on.

Not to mention the very idea of worlds within the same universe having different cosmologies makes absolutely not sense whatsoever. And if the idea in 3E was to seperate FR from the rest of the D&D universes and no longer have it linked with f.ex Greyhawk in anyway whatsoever, surely they should have also removed/replaced most of the non-human gods (since nearly all of them are from Greyhawk), gotten rid of all the deities who originated from other worlds (such as Tyr), renamed the Abyss, Arvandor, the Nine Hells and any other plane which has the same name as one in the Greyhawk universe (the Tanar'ri and Baatezu should also be renamed), etc, etc.

For that matter, elves originate from another Prime Material world (and yes, this is explicity said in both 3rd and 2nd Edition sourcebooks), so if the Forgotten Realms is the only world within it's cosmology, how did they get there? There only answer is they couldn't have done, meaning there should no longer be any elves in the Forgotten Realms! Of course since drow are a type of elf, Lolth, Vhaerun and the others shouldn't actually exist within this new cosmology at all! Which makes the whole issue rather a moot point .

Baiscally this is one of the 3rd Editon changes which we can safely ignore, thank you very much . And I don't care what Sean K Reynolds says. If some Wizards employee came along and removed dwarves, gnomes, elves and halflings from the Forgotten Realms and declared that they had never existed there, would s/he know what they were doing and be entitled to do that simply because their name appears in the credits for various D&D books?

Edited by NiGHTMARE, 14 August 2004 - 02:06 PM.

[Zandilar]

Heya,

Feanor said AD&D, and his post is in reference to BG2, so clearly he's talking about 2nd Edition, not 3rd Edtion (which of course is D&D, not AD&D).  In 2nd Edition, the planes I mentioned are the ones the deities reside on.

Retroactive change means that technically the change effects 2nd Ed too. It also doesn't preclude the idea that some races came from other primes (because, they did, in fact, do so.) And nowhere is it ever stated that you can't travel between different cosmologies either - portals might be one way to do it, being as they're so common... (Elves, for example, came through a portal.)

But I'm not going to argue with you about it, because it's clear we're never going to agree. I am just pointing out that the Cosmology has changed in 3rd Ed and it's a retroactive change.