Tag: Forgotten Realms

Is the Baldur’s Gate 3 Cast Ready for Primetime?

On By Charlie BrooksIn Role-Playing Games, Video GamesLeave a comment

Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 follow.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a huge hit in a way that no other Dungeons & Dragons video game ever was. Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro and the current D&D license holder, would obviously love to capitalize on the game’s runaway success. Larian Studios decided not to make any more Baldur’s Gate games, though, so the folks at Wizards need to turn elsewhere to capitalize on its popularity. That means spinoffs, and likely lots of them.

We’ve already seen characters from the game turn up in official D&D RPG products. Karlach and Minsc grace the cover of Heroes of Faerûn, for example, with Astarion and Shadowheart joining them in official artwork within the book. Astarion got his own digital product, and the alternate cover of the Monster Manual features a mind flayer who is very recognizable to players who made it to Act Three of the game.

But those are all cameos. Beyond the boundaries of the rulebooks lie the spin-off products that feature these popular characters’ personalities, the aspects of them that fans fell in love with them. Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion comes out this month, Karlach is getting a comic book, and the game as a whole is getting an HBO spinoff series. But how will these complex and multifaceted characters translate to other media?

Larian created a very rich story with Baldur’s Gate 3, and part of that is that the characters people meet in Act One are only facades or surface impressions of who they really are. As the game goes on, you discover that they run much deeper, but only if you get their initial masks to drop. How will that sort of depth translate into spinoff stories where the corporate owners of the brand will want the characters to be as recognizable and marketable as possible?

Let’s take a look at what Wizards of the Coast has done with this sort of thing in the past and what it might mean for the future.

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What Made the Baldur’s Gate Novels the Worst D&D Books of All Time?

On By Charlie BrooksIn Role-Playing Games, Video GamesLeave a comment

After enjoying popularity in the late 80s and early 90s, Dungeons & Dragons video games had largely gone extinct as the 21st century approached…until a little game called Baldur’s Gate revitalized the genre. The Black Isle/Bioware collaboration became a runaway hit that led to an even bigger sequel a couple years later. With something so popular, and with D&D making a lot of its brand money on its novel lines, a novelization was inevitable.

Wizards of the Coast tapped Philip Athans, their senior managing editor, to write the novel. Athans had spent a long time editing other Forgotten Realms novels and was one of the employees who had stayed with the D&D brand through its transition from TSR to Wizards of the Coast. Sadly, what he wrote turned out…bad. Almost unspeakably bad. Years later, the Baldur’s Gate novel would become a punchline until it was finally written out of official continuity with the approach of D&D 5th edition.

But the failure of Baldur’s Gate as a novel wasn’t just a matter of Athans whiffing on a video game adaptation. There were many factors behind the scenes that doomed this novelization and left Athans holding the bag.

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Comics & Quests: Wake of the Realms Master

On By Charlie BrooksIn Comics, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

Since I don’t own copies of the Dragonlance or Spelljammer comics, this entry marks the end of my 1990s D&D comics. While there were other D&D comics over the years, it would take two full editions of the game before a licensed comic struck my fancy as much as the gang at Selûne’s Smile and the crew of the Realms Master did.

So let’s dive into one final adventure with our intrepid crew and see how the story ends for Dwalimor Omen and his faithful companions.

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Comics & Quests: Everybody Wants to Run the Realms

On By Charlie BrooksIn Comics, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

I’m going to put my conspiracy hat on for a moment and speculate on why the penultimate issue of DC’s Forgotten Realms comic series is a spoofy fourth-wall breaking story…

By 1991, DC knew that their licensing agreement for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was nearing its end. TSR, the company that owned AD&D, decided to produce their own comics. This ended the ongoing comics quite abruptly, giving the creative teams a short window to wrap up their ongoing stories. I think both Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms had their stories ready to print when they received the notice that the arcs they were working on would be their last. That likely necessitated the insertion of a quick one-shot to make sure the current story arcs ended with the license’s expiration.

Why do I think this? Because both titles had a single-issue fill-in ahead of their final stories. AD&D has “Summer in the City,” which could at least use the familiar setting of Selûne’s Smile for its one-off. But the Forgotten Realms comic was in no place to run a silly one-off when their heroes were still struggling with the aftermath of Labelas Enoreth destroying their ship. Thus, my theory goes, “Everybody Wants to Run the Realms” happened. We’ve had some fourth wall breaks in the past, such as with “Players,” but nothing that ever as explicitly meta-fiction as this.

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Comics & Quests: Picking Up the Pieces

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Our last story with the Realms Master crew put them through their paces. Vartan became possessed by a mad god, Agrivar’s successful fight against alcoholism was undone, Minder’s body got shattered, and the ship was smashed to pieces by an angry god.

But at least it can’t get much worse…right…?

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Comics & Quests: Against the Gods

On By Charlie BrooksIn Comics, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

The D&D comics produced by DC came out right at the dawn of 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so the Time of Troubles which shaped that edition’s Forgotten Realms setting played a major role from the beginning. Characters referred to magic going awry, the gods becoming more distant, and so on. However, as the Forgotten Realms comic draws to a close, the Time of Troubles finally arrives.

What happens to the crew of the Realms Master when the gods are suddenly cast down and magic stops working? Let’s find out.

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Comics & Quests: Rites and Wrongs

On By Charlie BrooksIn Comics, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

All good things must come to an end. In 1991, TSR decided that they wanted to create their own line of comics, breaking the licensing agreement they had with DC. This meant the end of several ongoing titles at DC, including Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms. As such, “Rites and Wrongs” is our last tale with the adventurers from Waterdeep.

Fittingly, it all begins with some drunken carousing…

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Comics & Quests: Summer in the City

On By Charlie BrooksIn Comics, Role-Playing GamesLeave a comment

I griped a bit about the ending of “Pillar of Gold” due to a god just popping up and resolving the story in the last couple of pages, but gods do tend to meddle in the Forgotten Realms. The real issue is when a god has no role in the tale other than as a resolution mechanic. By comparison, “Summer in the City” features a good dose of Selûne, but the ending doesn’t feel like a cop-out. This is largely due to the fact that the heroes still earn the ending they get. It also doesn’t hurt that Selûne has been part of the ongoing story since the beginning, so she doesn’t pop out of nowhere to save the day.

Despite the need for divine intervention, “Summer in the City” is a light-hearted tale and serves as the last one-shot story in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons comic. Our team of Kyri, Onyx, Timoth, and Vajra are all together once again, so let’s see what they get up to on a hot summer day in Waterdeep.

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What is “Canon” in Baldur’s Gate 3?

On By Charlie BrooksIn Role-Playing Games, Video GamesLeave a comment

Spoilers for the Baldur’s Gate franchise follow.

Like any video game sequel, Baldur’s Gate 3 makes certain assumptions about what happened in the games that preceded it. This goes a bit beyond just the events of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, since Baldur’s Gate 3 also follows several novels, adventure modules, and comic books. And while continuity is what you make of it, there are many who want to know what the game considers “canon.”

Now note that “canon” is not the same as “official,” and it’s especially not the same as “right.” What follows is my take on the fictional events which set the stage for Baldur’s Gate 3. It bears no seal of approval from Wizards of the Coast or Larian Games, nor is it a suggestion that someone who plays through the older games is doing something wrong if they veer from the events described here. For example, in 100% of the Throne of Bhaal games I finished, I settled down with Viconia and made her a better person before she got assassinated by worshipers of Lolth. Her appearance in Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t ruin those old play-throughs; it just means that the events in that version of the Forgotten Realms happened slightly differently.

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