#thatisnothowanythingworks

[songofmadness]

Alright, this was originally one massive post in which I screamed into the void about various things. In the interests of maintaining some clarity, I’ve decided to split it up into a few separate screaming fits. To begin: what the everloving f*ck is going on with worldbuilding in the Forgotten Realms??

Ok, so. Some group projects have enough overlap between each contributor that the final product is nice and cohesive. And sane. The Forgotten Realms timeline very much does not meet that lofty standard. It's a disastrous patchwork of well-intentioned (I'm assuming) madness. Someone in there definitely understood how ecological pressures work, and the resulting population boom/decline that follows on from that. With added monster migration! And racism/anti-refugee rhetoric! Kudos to whoever that was. Of course, that scrupulous attention to detail mostly didn’t continue but it was still a nice touch. Also mad props to whoever came up with Thayan wizards essentially sending a Mongol Horde to invade Rashemen, over and over again. And then running into the folly of invading Russia Rashemen in winter. With predictable results. That gave me a bit of a laugh as I went insane over everything else.

(That said, my horrible inner environmental sciences nerd lost it a bit at the idea of massed cavalry hastily retreating across a recently Red Sea-ified lakebed. Protip: This would not go well.) ((Ha, also, on my first readthrough, I had it in my head that Rashemen was predominantly mountainous -- so why the hell were they bringing in cavalry that specialised in hit and run tactics a la the Fursan Unit. Those tactics require some nice big open spaces, like say, a desert. Or the plains alongside Lake Mulsantir, which I'd completely forgotten about lol Still, that's a pretty small part of the entire country, if they'd even managed to capture the city there's still all those pissed off berserkers up in the mountains...)) I kind of want to write a pseudo-historical tract about the Thayan campaign against Rashemen now. From what I gather, it was a glorious comedy of errors. And yet they kept trying!

There was the odd nod to the importance of trade/economics in that every time Dragonspear is embroiled in fuckery taken over by yet another group of Super Evil Bad Things, Waterdeep ran into shortages. And presumably everyone else along the Trade Way suffers to varying degrees until someone raises an army to go clear out the Hellmouth once more.

((Seriously, what the hell is up with Dragonspear?? Why is it forever Like This? It was even consecrated as a temple at one point, but that still wasn’t enough to halt the demonic shenanigans for more than a couple decades.))

Overall, it’s all very handwavy – massive drought in 1322? Cool, ok, thanks for the heads up that there’s a huge dieback of flora and fauna in basically all of Faerun. Now what? 

Well, if we were being reasonable, the fallout would have been catastrophic:

Widespread drought means a failed harvest, a failed harvest means people are now eating their seed corn/wheat/whatever - assuming they even have that to spare. This does not bode well for the next harvest. A failed harvest means massive shortages of staple foods – bread, basically, for Westernized campaign settings, rice for whatever asian influenced countries Faerun undoubtedly has. Grain crops are very important.

In the cities that still have reserves of food, like all good medieval cities should, there would still be rationing and most likely massive price hikes on staples sold by third parties (merchants). What happens when the price of bread goes up? Historically, riots. A whole lot of riots.

In other news, mass flora dieback means that prey animals have nothing to eat, therefore a bigass population boom of predators is incoming – followed by a very messy drop off once the food supply runs out. Given that most of Faerun’s predators consider humanoids very much a part of their diet, that’s clearly gonna cause some problems down the line… 

All this is a massive oversimplification but the key issue here is that this is happening over ALL OF FAERUN. A drought in one area is gonna suck for those people, sure, but they could import food - at a massive cost, admittedly - or there could be a huge migration of people out of the afflicted region. Distressing, yes, a powerful motivator for worldwide upheaval, yes. But still not a huge deal. But this is ALL OF FAERUN. A continent wide drought, even one lasting for just a couple years, isn’t a problem. It’s an extinction event.

It’s like they went,” rocks fall, everyone dies!” on the entire world and then it is never talked about again. This is the sort of thing that is driving me to madness. :D

I’m not saying there weren’t glorious high points in my research. Discovering that a prominent Neverwinter sorceress once died because someone literally dropped a dead dragon on her house was frankly incredible. But overall it just ends up being a whole lot of – And then this happened! And this happened! This other thing happened over here! There’s very few, if any, long term consequences that follow on from major events. 

In the real world, things frequently happen because something else happened a hundred years before. Individual choice is just that, individual. One person choosing to do or not do a thing, while still influenced by cultural or societal pressures that have their roots in world events, is fundamentally an individual choice. When you start thinking in terms of wholeass countries, hell, a CONTINENT, things get a bit messier. And when you’re looking at an overall chronology of events in a specific region, there should be precedents having a greater impact on the course of history. You can't - or at least shouldn't - have an entire world where most, if not all, worldbuilding is treated as having happened in isolation.

At the very least, the world should have mostly ended in 1322. DUE TO DROUGHT.

((Of course then I wouldn’t have been able to write “1323 - Thay attempts widespread mind control, fails miserably.” in my official(ish) timeline, and that really would have been a loss.))