| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Gyor |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 00:15:40
So in November 2 Forgotten Realms Setting Books are being released.
Heroes of Faerun is the bigger one with like the general Setting update and player options. It explores 10 regions and has 18 backgrounds (8 Faction Based & 10 Regional Based), 34 feats (including origin feats Spellfire Spark, Purple Dragon Rook, Icefisher, Harper Agent), 19 Spells & Circle Magic (including Doomtide which us permanent with circle casting, a spell named after Symbul that heals a caster when they cast spells, and there is a spell that can summon armies), magic items and regular items, 8 factions (Purple Dragon Knights, Thay, Cult of the Dragon, Harpers, Emerald Enclave, Lords Alliance, Zhents, Order of the Guantlet) with Renown that can grant new Bastion Options, 42 Gods with their own Renown, and 2 monsters.
Adventures in the Faerun has 5 mini settings (Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Calimshan, Moonshaes, Dalelands). Like 40 monsters roughly, 3 Vechicles, ac1-3 adventures that can be customized for locations, and 50 pages of 1 page adventures.
The DLCs are Astarion's Book of Hungry which is Vampire Themed includes monsters, Dhampyr species, 18 feats and 3 backgrounds and some magic items.
Fall of Netheril, time travel to the ancient Netherese Empire. Book has a Gazetteer that details upper and lower Netheril, monsters, magic items, and an adventure. Basically another mini setting. Surprisingly no new spells.
Third mystery DLC will be announced soon. All we know is it has 7 new species.
Also Atlas of Faerun, which is a huge digital map for D&D Beyond. I'm guess location names on the map have hyper links to info on the location.
Also for pre-orders to D&D Beyond an animated map of an Oasis and 8 Faction Dice.
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| 19 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 11 Aug 2025 : 22:59:06
quote:
Originally posted by Lord Karsus
-I saw images of the alternate covers...I don't want to sound like someone who nitpicks and complains about everything, and I can't draw at all, so even like a stick figure drawing is beyond my scope, but what the heck? That artwork is certainly a choice.
I am not a fan of those covers, myself. |
| sleyvas |
Posted - 07 Aug 2025 : 13:35:40
quote:
Originally posted by Lord Karsus
-I saw images of the alternate covers...I don't want to sound like someone who nitpicks and complains about everything, and I can't draw at all, so even like a stick figure drawing is beyond my scope, but what the heck? That artwork is certainly a choice.
absolutely off topic mind you, but as someone who is like you "unable to make a drawing to save my life", I will say that for a few years now I've had a LOT of fun downloading 3d objects from thingiverse, loading them into Microsoft's Paint3d, coloring them, exporting them as PNG files with a clear background from multiple angles, and then importing them into different layers of Paint.net and possibly applying some kind of blurring/shadowning/color effect to the end drawing. I've also gotten minorly decent at doing 3d modifications. It's pretty amazing to me to be able to finally take an image from my mind and make something that at least somewhat resembles what I had in mind. It has also given me a great appreciation for what I would call real artists (which I'm not). |
| Lord Karsus |
Posted - 07 Aug 2025 : 04:53:17
-I saw images of the alternate covers...I don't want to sound like someone who nitpicks and complains about everything, and I can't draw at all, so even like a stick figure drawing is beyond my scope, but what the heck? That artwork is certainly a choice. |
| Irennan |
Posted - 06 Aug 2025 : 06:20:03
quote:
Originally posted by Zeromaru X
42 gods? That's 6 less than the list of Faerūnian gods from the SCAG, lol
It should be the exact number of Faerunian gods that get a small writeup in that book (aka, excluding the racial gods that also get a few lines written about them). Which makes it likely that they'll just copypaste stuff from there. |
| Kentinal |
Posted - 06 Aug 2025 : 03:30:56
quote:
Originally posted by Zeromaru X
42 gods? That's 6 less than the list of Faerūnian gods from the SCAG, lol
Well that is "42 Gods with their own Renown" , some gods share Renown?
There also was over editions removing and returning gods. I am not sure which edition can be said to have the most gods. I would think 2nd Ed. does.
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| Zeromaru X |
Posted - 05 Aug 2025 : 23:18:18
42 gods? That's 6 less than the list of Faerūnian gods from the SCAG, lol |
| sleyvas |
Posted - 05 Aug 2025 : 13:57:12
quote:
Originally posted by HighOne
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
I mean, as I look right now, the Heroes in Faerun book on amazon is pre-order price of $59 (I expect it to drop).
That's kind of shocking. Amazon used to sell 5E books for $25, even though the MSRP was $50. I just checked Heroes of Faerun on a price-tracker and it has never deviated from $59. Looks like most of the 5E books are in a similar boat, being priced much higher than average. When I pre-ordered Tales from the Yawning Portal on Amazon in 2017, it was marked down to $25.
Yeah, the PH, DMG, Monster Manual redos for 2024 .. quite frankly I've been less than pleased with. It was a lot of money and very little change (and many of the things that I noted had changed I didn't find to be improvements... for instance, why remove all the wizard subclasses). I'm sorry with 10 years of rules modifications behind things, they should have consolidated and fixed a lot of their variously released subclasses from other books to give a ton of options for EACH class. Would it have made the books a lot longer? Sure, but let's face it ..... this was a money grab with only a modicum of work.... they could afford to make the books longer, especially given the price.
So, after blindly buying all 3 of those .... yeah, I think I'm finally going into "look at it in a store first" mode, especially if the price is going to be this high. Add into this that I've veered so far from canon and/or interest in the areas that they're developing that I'm not sure that I even care what they do. I really was hopeful for this until I saw this price point yesterday and read what its actually going to deliver. I mean, I might be able to find 20 things on DMs Guild that I appreciate more for $59 |
| Lord Karsus |
Posted - 05 Aug 2025 : 03:46:16
-I find the concept of D&D DLC just funny. |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 05 Aug 2025 : 02:35:23
quote:
Originally posted by Gary Dallison
How many times do you give a company the benefit of the doubt before admitting they are exploiting customers with cheap, poor quality products in an effort to maximise profits.
Are we giving companies more leeway than we would an individual person.
The last 5 years has proven beyond all doubt that greed is the only motivation for any company, and greed is not good, for anyone.
How many times can you dismiss and attack something before it's even out?
How many times can you pre-judge something based on limited information and never actually make an informed decision?
If you look at the books when they come out and decide you don't like them, hey, that's fair, and I won't say a word.
When you refuse to even consider giving something fair shakes and sit back and bitch about it in total ignorance, I'm going to have words on that.
People have been blindly attacking WotC for more than a decade now. I'll be the first to admit that WotC has done little to earn our trust -- but I'll be damned if I participate in uninformed bitching simply because it's easier than any other option. |
| HighOne |
Posted - 04 Aug 2025 : 19:31:12
quote:
Originally posted by sleyvas
I mean, as I look right now, the Heroes in Faerun book on amazon is pre-order price of $59 (I expect it to drop).
That's kind of shocking. Amazon used to sell 5E books for $25, even though the MSRP was $50. I just checked Heroes of Faerun on a price-tracker and it has never deviated from $59. Looks like most of the 5E books are in a similar boat, being priced much higher than average. When I pre-ordered Tales from the Yawning Portal on Amazon in 2017, it was marked down to $25. |
| sleyvas |
Posted - 04 Aug 2025 : 18:00:28
I'm just wondering how much stuff (like monsters for instance) are just going to be a rehash of things they've already done for 5e. I will be buying this (the heroes book only more than likely... unless I hear something intriguing about the one with modules), but its entirely just because I'm curious. However, if its pretty much the same information as was in sword coast adventurer's guide.... that may be my final straw. I mean, as I look right now, the Heroes in Faerun book on amazon is pre-order price of $59 (I expect it to drop).
EDIT: You know what.... looking at what this says its giving... I may be at the point finally where I don't just freely give them the money. More backgrounds... big whoop... some feats... a mediocre amount of new spells. The one big thing I'd be interested in is what they did with circle magic. I may just hold off and look at the book in a book store first. |
| Gary Dallison |
Posted - 04 Aug 2025 : 08:43:13
How many times do you give a company the benefit of the doubt before admitting they are exploiting customers with cheap, poor quality products in an effort to maximise profits.
Are we giving companies more leeway than we would an individual person.
The last 5 years has proven beyond all doubt that greed is the only motivation for any company, and greed is not good, for anyone. |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 04 Aug 2025 : 02:29:55
I hope the new material is worthwhile.
That said, WotC has disappointed me many times. So I'm very cautiously optimistic, at best. |
| HighOne |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 23:11:24
At one time, I would have eagerly looked forward to this, but I soured on 5E years ago and no longer play. |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 21:22:54
Yeah, they used to sell a lot of pdfs of prior edition material through Paizo. When 4E came out, the rule books were pirated and online within days -- and WotC's (over-)reaction was to get rid of ALL pdfs, even the ones from prior editions that were being sold legally.
So someone made illegal pdfs of 4E books, and WotC's response was to cut off any revenue they were still making from ANY prior edition. I mean, I get that it was a smaller portion of their revenue stream than new rulebooks were, but it was also an entirely unrelated portion of their revenue stream. They had nothing to gain from cutting off legal sales of prior edition material.
I can only assume that their reasoning was that if people couldn't get a pdf of the 1E DDG for $4 then they'd have no choice but to buy the 4E PHB.
Eventually they relented and put stuff up on DriveThruRPG, but for people like me that had bought stuff through Paizo, the ability to download those things we'd already paid for was not restored.
Thus, if I lost my previously-purchased pdfs, even though the agreement when I bought them was that I could download them as many times as I wanted, whenever I wanted, I'd have to buy them again.
It's also a thing that several places I've worked have blocked access to any gaming sites -- my current job, I even found a wikipedia page about a particular D&D module was blocked. When time permits at work, I like to be able to read gaming pdfs on my computer.
Part of why I don't do the D&D Beyond thing is because of that limitation. Sure, I can work around it, but I'm disinclined to pay for something and then jump through hoops to access it, because the seller is paranoid and won't do the same thing other gaming companies do. |
| Gary Dallison |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 10:04:25
Way back in the early days of their digital publishing they sold things and then scrapped the platform and all purchases.
I vaguelly recall it happened twice over a 5 year period. |
| Gyor |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 04:07:20
quote:
Originally posted by Wooly Rupert
I'm interested in some of that digital stuff, but I refuse to buy digital content from WotC if I can't download it. Not only do I work in a place where I'd not be able to access it, they've denied me access to legally purchased digital material before.
Damn what did they deny you access to before? |
| Wooly Rupert |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 03:57:00
I'm interested in some of that digital stuff, but I refuse to buy digital content from WotC if I can't download it. Not only do I work in a place where I'd not be able to access it, they've denied me access to legally purchased digital material before. |
| Gyor |
Posted - 03 Aug 2025 : 00:22:45
It's like they are trying to make up for no real Forgotten Realms Setting guide for nearly a decade all at once and condscend to a single month!
For both the Ultimate Bundle it costs $159usd or $220cad. A fortune, but you do get a ton of stuff with that. Said to ge $75 usd savings.
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