Recently I joined two Facebook groups that are based around my two favorite settings (the Forgotten Realms and Eberron). It is fun being able to communicate with people that share the same deep love for those worlds and sometimes you even get surprised by some known names commenting on the different threads. But most importantly, those two communities succeeded in inspiring me and making me want to get creative and productive myself again. Which is why I finally succumbed to the temptation of writing on my blog again (To be honest, it was more like helping me overcome another heavy case of procrastination blues). And while I still have all kinds of things going around in my head that I want to tackle, I decided that my focus should be directed at something else I did not even know about that I wanted to do it, before I tried to answer a question posed by another member of the Sages of the Forgotten Realms group.
(As an aside: I‘m using the English language again, because at the moment I‘m mostly active in international groups. There‘s still the possibility that I‘ll also write in German, that will mostly depend on the topic and on whom I‘m to address with a given post.)
Now that question I mentioned revolved around the Forgotten Kingdom of Impiltur and if there were power groups other than the Zhentarim that might work against the Impilturan monarchy. And while I was reading up on the topic, I didn’t only found a possible angle how to do that (in fact, there would be other possibilities as well), I also suddenly felt that this angle might work really well with integrating Paizo’s Ironfang Invasion AP into the Realms.
Now I’ve talked about this thing in former posts.t I like to do stuff like this, because while I also like other worlds (like Golarion, the original setting for that AP), I still find myself coming back to the Realms (and Eberron) again and again. On the other hand, I prefer Paizo adventures over most adventures from other publishers very much. So putting those in the settings of my choice seems to be a win-win scenario as far as I am concerned.
So the plan for the foreseeable future is to read up on as much Impiltur-related lore as I can find (sadly, or should I say luckily, that’s not that much compared to other locations in the Realms), while simultaneously rereading the Ironfang Invasion AP. While I’m doing this, I imagine writing some posts where I just brainstorm and think about what I want to change and what I can leave unchanged and how I can turn this Golarion-based AP into a true Faerun experience. I hope that I end up with a conversion note document that may be of interest for a DM wanting to run said AP in the Forgotten Realms.
I also hope that, as a side effect, to be able to convert certain rules elements to Pathfinder, from updating older 3.5 stuff to maybe also converting 4E or 5E elements, as I stumble about them. If I find such conversions already done by other people I might use those instead.
And in the end I hope that this fires me up enough to finally work on all those other things I talked about in this blog in recent years.
Oh yeah, and just for completeness’ sake, here’s a link to the Eberron FB group I joined. Because while this here is about the Realms, I also have plans for Eberron.
P.S.: Some days after I wrote the initial part of that post, plans have already changed a bit. While reading up on Impiltur and the Ironfang Invasion AP, I found that I feel a bit uncomfortable putting that campaign directly into Impiltur. The premise of that AP depends a bit on Nirmathas being quite the frontier region. There’s no real central government which also means that there’s no real central army. And there’s a lot of wilderness making it quite difficult for any army from the outside to come to the rescue (especially when the Molthune army wouldn’t be very welcome because they are the very thing Nirmathans have fought against for years now.
Unluckily Impiltur doesn’t fit that description very well. Of course, there’s wilderness, but the Impilturan military is used to react quickly to threats by, let’s say a hobgoblin threat, so I feel that resistance would be much more organized and decisive than we find it in the AP. Luckily, there’s a region nearby that seem to fit the Nirmathan background pretty well. I speak, of course about the Great Dale, a region that has a lot of wilderness, is largely uncivilized, and as an added bonus, is near to the Giantspire mountains, where we know from the source books that at least one big hobgoblin army is being built in secret. So while, unlike Molthune in the original AP, Impiltur will still have an important part to play, I decided to start out in the Great Dale and build my campaign from there. At least that’s the modified plan for now.
Wormys Welten 