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Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

Unread postby icycalm » 07 Dec 2021 16:15

This isn’t a spoiler because the events happened in the sourcebooks, not in adventures. I am posting it because it helps clarify the brouhaha with 4th versus 5th Editions. I missed out on all this stuff because I wasn’t playing at the time, and if I am not playing I am not following it, so I am catching up with it now. It’s all fascinating to me in both game design/game marketing terms and in terms of the rules and lore.

What Is The Spellplague?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tombofannihila ... ellplague/

The spellplague is a cataclysmic event that happened between third and fourth edition to explain the several mechanic changes that were made during that transition.

Also a lot of time passed in Forgotten Realms official timeline and many iconic NPC's and organizations either died or changed. They have to come up with crazy explanations why famous characters are still alive, such as Volo and the inkeeper at the Yawning portal. The Zentarim, for example, used to be one of the main antagonists and are now portrayed as a necessary evil kind of faction.


Basically 4th Ed was intended to be more video gamey so that D&D could compete with things like World of Warcraft and one of the things they tried to “fix” was game balance, so they made all classes basically equal - extremely similar in how they worked. As a result 4th Ed was so completely different to the gameplay mechanics in any other edition, especially magic, that for the Forgotten Realms setting they felt they had to come up with an in-game lore reason for why everything was suddenly different.

Basically the God of Murder, Cyril, and the Goddess of Night, Shar, murdered the Goddess of Magic, Mystra, and her death caused the “Weave”, ie the fabric of magic itself, to start coming apart at the seams. This had a number of consequences. One was the aforementioned changes to how mages cast magic (spell slots didn’t exist anymore), but there were other consequences too: the Earth itself started to shatter a little, and rifts opened with pieces of land starting to float up into the sky. There were now entire archipelagoes of floating islands (each floating island referred to as an “earth mote”) and people built airships to reach them (making them was difficult and expensive and not common at all).

Additionally, from the bottom of the rifts/chasms left behind, aberrant energy began to spill forth and corrupt any life it touched. I’m not clear on the details but the deepest chasms were connected to the Far Realm itself (Illithids etc like to make their homes in the deepest underdark) and the energy that was now suddenly exposed to the surface and the light of day made the nearby landscape just as twisted and weird as the deepest Underdark. Blue fire erupted from the rifts and if you were burned you might get infected with the Spellplague which would slowly transform you into an insane monstrous version of yourself. If you were infected you were referred to as Spellscarred or Plaguetouched and there was no cure so people treated you like a leper and all you could do was wait to lose your mind. Some embraced the insanity and regarded the Plaguetouched as a superior class of people, the next step in evolution you might say. They started cults and tried to infect more people.

Anyway, the important thing is that Mystra didn’t stay dead. 4th Ed was widely regarded as a misstep and 5th Ed went back to the way things were, so in Forgotten Realms lore, Mystra came back to life and repaired the Weave and magic returned to how it was before. Some effects still lingered; the blue fires that were already burning continued to do so and people who were Plaguetouched remained so.

In the city of Neverwinter, Lord Neverember decreed that all Plaguetouched be immediately carted off to a sanitarium in Helm’s Hold and quarantined there permanently. This was known as the Protector’s Law and although it was unpopular with those whose loved ones were banished and never seen again (you weren’t allowed to visit), everyone acknowledged that it did finally end the epidemic. The only Plaguetouched not forced to Helm’s Hold were those who volunteered for Scar Company: a unit of soldiers stationed by the Chasm near Neverwinter and fought any aberrations that came out.

The earth motes remained aloft, but the knowledge of how to build airships was largely lost and nowadays a functioning airship is almost as valuable as a small kingdom.
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icycalm
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