Thain and the Forgotten Realms

The Thain module has its origins as a Forgotten Realms-adjacent server.  An island on the sword coast that incorporated many Forgotten Realms ideas. Forgotten Realms gods and factions (such as Thayans, Banites, and Lolthians ) were heavily featured and made module appearances, and in some cases these influences drove major setting plots.

 

In recent years, the current Staff have decided to gently disassociate Thain from the Forgotten Realms.  The reasons for this are:

• A feeling that the Forgotten Realms is too distinct from the kind of setting we want Thain to be.  TFR is a realm with adventuring academies where magic is a toy or a piece of technology, while the story we want to tell features a world that is more dangerous and less video-gamey. 
• TFR is a place with a pre-set and well-understood cosmology, and a lot of narrative baggage that might weigh down the kinds of stories we want to tell on Thain.  Resurrection, planar travel, the afterlife, and so on are all easily recognized powers in TFR, while on Thain we want to have more control over the nature of these things.
• We feel that TFR can hold many characters back from engaging with Thain’s distinctive setting pieces. Many characters would try to bring their TFR experience into Thain in ways that felt disruptive.  We want characters to come here to engage with Thain as it exists, without necessarily assuming that all of their TFR experience and knowledge will apply.
• Above all, we want Thain to be a place where we can tell our own stories. 

 

Rather than retconning past TFR interactions, our approach here is to phase the TFR out of our setting gradually and over time.  Many aspects of FR still exist within our setting – Lolthian drow, a banite dungeon, and so on.  In the days to come, we expect that these aspects will gradually be phased out in favor of Thain-specific things, and no new TFR-specific work will be added to the module.   In this way, we expect the influence of TFR to gradually and seamlessly disappear into Thain’s history, while we focus more on the aspects of our setting that make it unique.

 

Of course, individual characters are still welcome to be from TFR, and these characters can still be successful as characters, so long as their primary objective is not to bring the Forgotten Realms to Thain (ie: building Temples of the Triad and so on.)

 

If you have questions about Thain’s associations to TFR or need more details on something, feel free to ask in the #ask-staff-anything channel in our Discord.