tussock wrote:Nothing in the Realms is like that, the events that changed things are centuries old and the modules produce almost no effect on anything, other than to suggest changes made centuries ago might be being undone!
Every edition advanced the FR timeline--1e to 2e is a 10-year jump (1358 to 1368 DR), and 2e to 3e is 4 years--and changed the setting with Realms Shaking Events, and if you're counting the Prism Pentad heroes taking out the Dragon of Tyr and the druids regrouping and starting to make a dent in the Athasian wastelands as significant setting changes, then the Time of Troubles rearranging the pantheon and the Zhentarim and Red Wizards changing significantly in power over the years definitely count. FR has seen more changes in 14 in-game years than most settings see over their entire production run.
The differences are just less noticeable if you're only looking at the setting splatbooks, because Dark Sun made a big deal about "Look, we had a novel series that changed the setting and advanced the metaplot! Here's everything that's different!" in the second round of books whereas FR has a metric shit ton of novels that change things all the time so the splatbooks don't call it out (and couldn't cover all the changes if they tried).
As for the modules, all of them assume by default that the heroes win so that the world continues to exist and fans' favorite countries aren't nuked off the map (cough cough Spellplague), but (A) most of them do have side effects beyond the module so it can actually make a difference whether you set your campaign before or after a given module happens and (B) most of them have suggestions on how the setting is affected if things don't go well for the party and where the DM can take things from there, with the three- or four-module 3e adventure paths discussing a half-dozen breakpoints in addition to the "what if the villain wins at the end" section.
Not only that, but FR has time travel built into the setting (Netheril dabbled in chronomancy quite a bit, the Arcane Age supplements talk about bringing "modern" PCs back to Netheril and Cormanthyr, and things like
time conduit spells and
time gates are explicitly placed in the setting for anyone to learn about and try to use), so it provides more support for individual parties subverting or ignoring canonical events than even Dragonlance does.
Orca wrote:In Eberron there isn't a series of written adventures where you invade Droaam and set it to rights, and reigniting the Last War is generally agreed to be a bad thing even if it's inevitable in the long term. The pieces are there if you want to set one of those games up though. Yes, the default enemies are terrorists, organised crime, crazed cults and so forth. So?
Not only are the pieces all in place to reignite the Last War, but they go out of their way to give three of the four remaining major nations a reason to
want to do so, so that they can easily serve as the designated bad guys in Last War II. Aundair wants to go all
Lebensraum on the Eldeen Reaches, and Queen Aurala really wants to establish and rule a
Third Reich Second Kingdom of Galifar; Cardinal Krozen wants to pin all of Thrane's woes on those damn dirty heretical shifters and goblins, hand out "
Gott Silver Flame Mitt Uns" belt buckles, and purify the continent of the lesser races; the Karrn warlords were humiliated by the Treaty of
Versailles Thronehold forcing Karrnath to submit to various penalties, like surrendering
its colonies Valenar to the natives, and they'd really like to pay the other nations back.
Hell, Karrnath is a blatantly expy of leading-up-to-WW2 Germany, with German-sounding names for everything, a strongly martial culture with compulsory military service, and a straight-up Nazi Party analog in the Order of the Emerald Claw, which is an uber-patriotic slightly-occult extremist organization that constantly talks about wanting Karrnath to "rise again!" and is obsessed with bloodlines and blood purity. The parallels couldn't be more obvious without literally having the Emerald Claw go around yelling "Heil Vol!" all the time.