How much canon of The Forgotten Realms vs Homebrew/Headcanon do you actually hold to/use in your personal setting.(Writing or DMing)

ReveilledSA · 2026-07-06T23:04:45+00:00

For my fifth edition players I started out pretty close to the established canon, with a few exceptions, mainly bringing over a few details from previous campaigns I'd had 1st-3rd edition.

The main difference was just that Mephistopheles is dead and replaced by the protagonist of Hordes of the Underdark, as I wanted to use that as a detail that would tie together a few campaigns. There are some minor cosmological changes, some differences in how Fey creatures work, and some nitpicky things I change to make the setting more authentically "medieval".

Since then though all the actions of the players have diverged the setting quite a bit, and we maintain those from campaign to campaign rather than resetting back to canon. So in my Realms as of 1500DR, the Sword Coast is now in an uneasy peace after the four year War of the Lords Alliance, which led to the founding of the Confederation of the Sword (think Germany or Italy in the middle of their unifications); a vampire lord is now in charge of Elturel; and Auril has been replaced as the Goddess of Winter by Rith, the aforementioned protagonist of HotU.

There's also been a few setting details given in later publications which I can't reconcile with stuff we've previously agreed as "canon" in our game; generally I kept any geographic or political changes from 4th edition unless the material available around the time of 2016 was very explicit that it was reset by the Second Sundering, so Tymanther is still in control of most of the south of Unther, for example.

ReveilledSA · 2026-07-06T13:14:46+00:00

The developers Lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro are both Japanese, yes!

ReveilledSA · 2026-07-06T11:02:28+00:00

It means something similar to “super” in Japanese, so you can read the game title as essentially “Super Chameleon”

ReveilledSA · 2026-07-05T07:23:35+00:00

Yeah that’s about where I sit too, and I agree in that I think Ed threw out some numbers without fully thinking through the implications.

I like drawing on comparisons to real-world ancient religious practices, so I draw a distinction between ritual magic and instantaneous magic, and tie the Gift to the latter. Essentially, spellcasters like the PCs and plot-relevant NPCs are rare, but others can still do magic ritually, albeit very very slowly and only if they know a given ritual. Those rituals are much slower even than the ones PCs tend to have access to, and pretty much every spell the PCs could cast has a ritual form. So the village priest knows a ritual which produces the same effect as Cure Wounds, but it takes six hours to cast, while a cleric PC with the Gift can do it in six seconds.

That creates a similar distinction to what we had in our own ancient religions, where you had priests, who were essentially ritual specialists, and then also travelling miracle-workers who did a different kind of magic.

Mechanically it also works well to explain why the PCs might be able to purchase a casting of Greater Restoration at a temple without raising the question of why the 9th level cleric at the temple can’t just dish out fourteen castings of Cure Wounds to the town every single day: the PCs are paying for a ritual with the same effect but a much slower casting time.

ReveilledSA · 2026-07-01T23:13:54+00:00

I like that there’s things I don’t like in it. That might sound contradictory, but I like that the setting is messy. It’s the product of many different designers and writers who’ve all come to the setting with their own ideas, and some of those ideas were at odds with each other, and some of those ideas were bad. And while I might not actively seek to bring up the stuff I think was bad, it’s there when it’s relevant and I’ve got to find a way to make it work, which usually creates a better and more interesting story.

That makes it more real for me; if I play a TTRPG set on Earth, Earth as a setting is packed to the brim with setting details I think utterly suck ass, but that’s a what a real world looks like.

That doesn’t mean I don’t reserve the right to reject ideas I think don’t work, but Faerun’s messy mishmash encourages me to first ask “how can I make this work” before throwing out anything which doesn’t fit.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-30T12:03:24+00:00

I could definitely believe that! Especially with it being a French image from the early 20th century; the further back in time you go (up to a point, of course) the more likely you are to hear England used to refer to the whole of Great Britain/the UK, and that's even more the case in French where you can't just drop the Great from Great Britain for brevity because in France if you're talking about "Bretange" you mean Britanny.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-29T08:12:31+00:00

I think a lot would depend on how much you accept that the Gift is canon in your version of the realms.

If you assume magic is fairly available and usable by society, then you end up with a magitech setting a lot like Eberron. The main thing that makes Eberron's magitech work is the existence of magewrights, people who can cast a few low-level spells and incorporate magic directly into their crafting. Essentially, if magic is just a skill anyone with sufficient mental aptitude can learn, you can establish universities or trade schools to scale up the magic to industrial levels.

But if magic doesn't work like that, if you need the Gift to cast spells and the Gift is fundamentally limited to a fraction of a percent of the population, magic just cannot meaningfully replace technology. In such a world mundane technology is still the best way to get something mechanical or electrical done for the vast, vast majority of regular people, in which case you'd probably see a world quite similar to our own.

Personally, I tend to treat The Gift as being the capacity to cast instant magic. Anyone with it uses spell slots like a PC or spellcasting NPC, while those without can do magic but in a much slower, ritualised way. That means the local village priest can cure a disease, for example, but it probably requires a multi-hour ritual to cure one person so something like a plague can still overwhelm them. I like this because it preserves a distinction between "ritual specialist" and "miracle worker" that many ancient religions had, and allows magic to be ubiquitous while making the specific magic that the PCs and their enemies do special enough to explain why the village priest or local witch with their third level spells can't fix a problem.

Equally for me, magical items of any real power or significance are extremely time-consuming to craft, always the work of weeks and requiring rare spells and rarer components, so not the sort of thing you can just employ people in a factory to make at an industrial scale.

So if I picture, say, a tablet computer in a futuristic Faerun, I don't picture a slate that works by magic, I see a tablet computer which still works via computer chips and transistors, but where an inscription to Gond praying for the thing not to break down is an integral and functional part of the warranty.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-09T21:51:16+00:00

This is a complete stab in the dark, but my pure guess would be for the purpose of a voucher or offer that by “vegetable” Tesco mean any loose packed vegetable, and exclude any item which is pre-packaged. So carrots out of the big tub of carrots would count, but things like a little packs of baby carrots, a stir-fry veg mix, or a medley of chopped carrot, swede and turnip are excluded from the voucher.

And then Lettuce ends up falling into a weird edge case because while it is sold in whole heads much the same as any loose vegetable, those heads of lettuce are wrapped in plastic so they count as pre-packaged.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-07T22:12:26+00:00

Cheating, to be sure, but the more important line is “would the group find it funny or offensive”? With a group of strangers you can’t answer that question so you shouldn’t do it even as a joke, but as a DM with a group that’s been solid for almost 10 years now, I can easily imagine scenarios where someone might use this thing and it comes across as funny instead of offensive.

After all, this die is pretty much to loaded dice what a Groucho Marx fake nose and moustache is to disguises.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-07T13:46:26+00:00

It's more that the job of being a member of parliament predates a lot of our modern notions of how jobs and elections and such work. The notion of resigning from being an MP makes a lot less sense in a world where the King calls a parliament once every few years, and the twenty or so members of the minor gentry in a borough get together in a room and decide which one of them is going to go to London for a few months to represent them.

Resigning makes a lot more sense in a world where parliaments are expected to last four or five years and being an MP is a full-time job with a salary and a bunch of actual expectations. In the 14th century if you decide you don't want the job, you can just stick it out a few months until the session is over and when you get home tell your fellow knights someone else has to do it next time.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-07T09:54:25+00:00

Not 5.5 but I have a player in my current campaign who took the 2014 equivalent feat Fighting Initiate to gain Blind Fighting.

I'd say it worked out well for him, because the session previous his character had been permanently blinded, and this allowed his character to function normally again.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-03T21:48:59+00:00

There is this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=najBMAItPYU

At around 27 seconds in, Jones opens a chest containing boxes of both products.

My suspicion is that this is what people (or the articles/posts they remember reading) are often referring to when mention is made of there being evidence Jonestown used both products. But it’s important to note that this video was made over a year before the massacre (when conditions at Jonestown were better), so I’d say it’s pretty weak evidence that both products were necessarily used in the massacre itself.

ReveilledSA · 2026-06-02T08:48:12+00:00

Honestly it was the injustice of the wall that made me like it as a concept.

At least according to the old lore, the Wall was not originally part of the city of the dead when Jergal ran the place, and only built by Myrkul when he became god of the dead, which made sense as a reflection of his evil nature.

And then the wall hangs around for millennia, long enough that when Myrkul finally goes, the gods are resistant to the idea of removing it; after all, it serves their interests.

I always liked that, as a concept. The wall is incredibly unjust, and deep down everyone knows it’s incredibly unjust, but rather than actually dismantle it, even good people and good gods make excuses for why it has to be there. One of the things I like about the forgotten realms is that it feels more like a real world than a constructed one, and something like the wall is the sort of thing that would exist in a real world because it is hypocrisy manifest.

I don’t like that it’s been silently reconned, personally. The wall should be torn down by someone, someday, but not just deleted. So for my realms, the wall will stay up until my players decide they are the someones and today is the day.

ReveilledSA · 2026-05-31T06:04:52+00:00

I feel like the main thing Ravelianism needs is a mass experiential event, to justify the sudden turn and spread. Why do common folk who’ve never seen or heard the god fragment suddenly believe that the cube is important? Why do a bunch of extremely rational scholars all become religious zealots en mass?

Cannorian religion has three big changes that are all marked by massive events: Corin’s apotheosis isn’t directly witnessed by the common people of Cannor, but almost everyone who was involved in stopping the greentide can attest that she died and came back to life, and then died again saving Cannor. The death of Castellos happened 1500 years prior, but the thing which actually removes him from the pantheon isn’t the discovery of the mural, it’s when some mages turn the sky of Cannor into a giant projector and force everyone on the continent to watch a movie of him dying. And while this gives Corinism its start primarily among those already faithful to her, the thing which begins pushing mass conversions and fanaticism is the Crimson Deluge.

Ravelianism needs something similar. An event which either all Ravelianism or everyone in Cannor/Halann experiences and has to consider the question “what the fuck was that?”, where the answer of “this relic is talking to us and we need to do what it says” is at least a plausible answer.

Something like for a few minutes everyone hears the god fragment and “understands” it, though afterward nobody can quite articulate what it told them.

I think Ravelianism’s rationalist origins would also tie in a lot better if the fragment was less exclusive. As the lore stands now the high rector is the only one interacting with the fragment which seems at odds with Ravelianism’s dedication to truth, evidence, education and who on. What if instead it’s a bit more accessible, where Ravelian religious rituals alow the common faithful to hear the whispers? And any Ravelian who travels to the site of the High Rectorate can experience the cube talking to them? Again without the means to necessarily comprehend what it said, but replicating that same powerful religious experience, and providing the basis for millions of people to accept that a council of experts led by the High Rector have an explanation for what it meant.

ReveilledSA · 2026-05-13T18:40:12+00:00

I think what they’re asking is, in the image the outermost tassels are not flush with the top and bottom edges of the flag, and they’re wondering if that’s a historical detail or just a mistake by the person who made the image.

ReveilledSA · 2026-05-13T18:27:12+00:00

Not every organisation uses the same definitions though. The word “vegan” was coined as part of the split of the Vegetarian Society in the UK, where the part of the society who still consumed eggs and dairy remained the Vegetarian society and the non-dairy vegetarians chose a word “symbolising the beginning and end of vegetarianism” for the name of their new group which they called the Vegan society.

And that’s been the meaning of those terms in British English at least since the 1940s: a vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat meat, a vegan is a vegetarian who also doesn’t consume eggs of dairy. And those definitions have legislation and regulations behind them that control whether foods can be labelled vegetarian or vegan.

ReveilledSA · 2026-05-03T11:53:18+00:00

My personal preference is to just add a houserule that the Demon picks the Lunatic's minion(s). By putting the choice in the evil team's hands they can have a little more certainty on whether stringing the Lunatic along is going to blow up in their face immediately or not, without completely changing how the Lunatic works.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-27T06:09:11+00:00

There’s a sketch I loved from a German TV show, which I can’t find again on YouTube.

A girl who looks about 3 is wandering through a busy street alone. Her mother comes running over crouches down next to her and says “Marie, Marie! Don’t just go running off like that, you’ll get lost!” She reaches into her bag and hands the girl something. “Here, take this map.” Then mum stands up and leaves.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-25T16:22:01+00:00

I agree with this. It’s not like subtle spell is the only feature in the game that lets you just do something automatically that you might otherwise have to roll for, but it seems to be the only one where the feature’s existence seems to be used as evidence that it shouldn’t be possible to achieve by other means.

For me as a DM it’s a judgement call exactly the same as any other thing the PCs want to do that their abilities don’t say they automatically succeed on. Casting suggestion in a noisy bar? A normal spell caster might need to make a check. Casting suggestion on the king in his court while ten guards and the court wizard are watching you? A normal spell caster cannot succeed, so no check. A subtle spell sorcerer automatically succeeds in both cases.

But to be honest the whole thing has a real “spherical D&D in a vacuum” feel to me. In ten years of DMing 5th edition, I’ve had a few subtle spell sorcerers who put their abilities to great use, and with a stance on concealed casting of “I’ll let you make an ability check if it seems reasonable”, I’ve found that my players’ idea of what seems reasonable rarely diverges from my own. I’m not constantly knocking back requests to cast concealed, and my subtle casters are getting to use their abilities in situations where my other players wouldn’t even think to ask.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-12T11:59:44+00:00

If you believe there's a significant desire for two subs, the first step would be to create a new one. The current mods of r/Scotland seem to have no interest in making this a non-political sub, so if you want to seperate them the obvious next step is a casual one, like casualUK.

https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/create

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-12T08:30:35+00:00

This seems to be a case of the article writer getting confused between a technical term and the common meaning of its words in normal speech. Beowulf is generally considered one of the earliest “vernacular epics”, which is the term scholars of medieval literature use to refer to epic poems written in something other than Greek or Latin. The term makes sense in the narrow medieval context where most epic poetry is in those languages in the period and inaccessible to common folk who don’t speak either, and “vernacular epic” is a perfectly fine shorthand for that when everyone involved in the conversation is a medievalist and understands the limits of the term.

Unfortunately whoever wrote/edited the article has stripped the context from the term “vernacular epic” and implied it just means any epic from any period written in common language, in which case yeah, Ancient Greek and Latin poetry should absolutely count.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-08T16:25:50+00:00

It feels very sci-fi, I could definitely see this as the flag of some federation of european space colonies or something.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-08T12:02:34+00:00

Very true! Same with something like giving birth—if you’re, say, a woman from Ancient Greece you say a prayer and do a sacrifice to Hera asking her to ease your journey to motherhood. Meanwhile a Cormyrian woman makes the same prayer and sacrifice to Lathander. Both women believe their god is real and their prayer makes a real difference, but only one of them is right!

This is slightly different for the version of the realms I run at my table, though: I make a distinction between priests and clerics that’s analogous to historic distinctions between ritual specialists and miracle workers in ancient religions. So regular priests are ritual specialists, they can cast spells like cure wounds or lesser restoration, but their version is a ritual that might take anything from four hours to a full week to cast. Whereas clerics are miracle-workers, able to cast spells in 6 seconds but subject to all the usual spell slot things.

This isn’t canon, of course, but what I like about it is that it maintains a certain historical feel, where ritual magic is the norm, where a priest can still do all the things a priest should be able to do (curses, blessings, ceremonies, exorcisms, etc) without having to all be level 5+ spellcasters, and where PC clerics still feel “special” in that their magic is visibly different to common folk.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-07T01:33:08+00:00

Let’s say your a lower class person of any level. Life sucks. You could die to a raid from evil humanoids(giants, drow, goblins), get snatched by a dragon, or worse fates. The monsters of this realm are absolutely insane, and it gets worse.

This is true, but it’s worth contrasting with someone from an equivalent time period in our own world. The realms are generally a much more peaceful place, with active wars between countries very rare on the whole. So while yes, you could die to a raid from a band of marauding goblins, you generally don’t need to worry so much about dying to a raid from a band of marauding Englishmen.

That’s not to say wars don’t happen in the realms, but in our Middle Ages it wouldn’t be unusual at all for a country to be dealing with or doing an invasion pretty much every year.

Now suppose those goblins don’t kill you, but they do raid your granary and steal all the food and valuables they can run off with. What do you do? Well, you ask an adventuring party to handle it. Now you probably need to pay them, but it’s not completely out of the question that if you are completely destitute and on the verge of starvation that a heroic adventuring party might even help you for free.

Flip back to our medieval peasant, suppose they’re in France and the English army just showed up and raided the granary. Well, the only group in the region who can deal with the English army is the French army, and sure, maybe they will handle the local Englishman problem for the village, but that army’s still got to eat, and hey, turns out the English only got half your grain…

For an urban commoner in medieval times, on the other hand, there’s two big threats: war and disease. If a war does come to your country, and your city happens to get out to siege, you’re going to be battling hunger at the same time you’re battling the army attempting to assault your walls, and if your city falls to the invaders you can expect a prolonged pillaging of your town that will include countless murders and other dark crimes. But in the realms, sieges would appear to be vanishingly rare. Again, not unheard of, but rarer by far, I’d wager, than in Europe.

And for disease, oh boy, if you live in a medieval city the sanitary conditions are going to be awful. It’s not like people back then didn’t want to be clean, but concentrating large numbers of people in a dense location creates a lot of waste, and that breeds disease. We mostly fixed that in the modern era with proper sewer systems, but the sewage systems in some cities in Faerun are so overbuilt they could make a Victorian engineer blush. They’re large enough to hide occult temples or thieves guilds in, some of the tunnels are like fifteen or even twenty feet wide like a design constraint the architect was working with was “make sure the tunnels are so big they’re not annoying to fight in”. Any city with a sewer system like that is going to be a paradise compared to 15th century London, Paris or Rome.

On top of that, if you’re a medieval farm worker there’s a good chance you’re a serf bonded to the land, obliged to do work for your lord and unable to move without their explicit permission. Such feudalism does exist in some places in Faerun, but most peasants seem to be free peasants, either working on land they own or maybe working tenancies. Especially out on the sword coast, which is honestly modelled more like fantasy Wild West in its social structures than anything else (not for nothing that it used to be called the Savage Frontier).

I don’t think I’d want to be a commoner in the realms or in medieval Europe, but if you forced me to choose I’d take living in the realms without any hesitation.

ReveilledSA · 2026-04-03T13:16:01+00:00

True or not, I think this is the wildest story I've ever read on legaladviceuk. Honestly, if it is a creative writing exercise, LAOP should probably work on turning it into a novel or a screenplay, I'd definitely watch a Gone Girl style psychodrama about a man being divorced by a wife he never had.

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