One of the brilliant things the D&D creative team did in Fourth Edition was wreck the city of Neverwinter and turn it into an adventurer’s playground.
Yep, they hit Neverwinter with an eruption of Mount Hotenow, slammed it with quakes and ruined the heart of the merchant quarter with a raw, stinking chasm from which spewed all sorts of demonic, spell-plagued creatures.
And after the immediate disaster, they populated the city with a despicable array of opportunists and evil factions, all fighting each other over what was left. Lord Neverember’s hold on power was thread thin, with any number of political foes trying to topple him. Â The Jewel of the North not only lost its shine, there was a dark ugly crack running right through it.
From a DM’s perspective, it was wonderful. You had a mix of political intrigue, the conflicts were brutal, and there was an untamed frontier feel to the place. Hell, you even had a gang of Many Arrows Orcs running one quarter of the town. What’s not to love about that?
Time Heals All Wounds
Well, apparently that was too much adventuring goodness for Fifth Edition. I finally grabbed a copy of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, and what did I find?
That Neverwinter pretty much has had an urban renewal project that took out all the fun bits of the city.
- The Chasm? Sealed it.
- The dilapidated High Road into town? Rebuilt it.
- Lord Neverember’s tenuous rule? He’s embraced as Lord Protector.
- Neverember’s weak/contrived claims of royal blood? No one cares.
- Creepy Castle Never? Plans to rebuild it as a symbol of rejuvenation.
- Good gods on the ropes? Tyr has set up shop at the Hall of Justice and Oghma’s faithful have restored the House of Knowledge.
- Neverember’s tight-fisted grip on commerce? Guilds can form without his approval.
- Neverember’s brutal, abusive Mintarn mercenaries? Replaced by respectable neighborhood militias.
- Gauntlgrym as an adventure site? An ally that produces arms and armor.
- Pirates and press gangs? Trade ships come and go without interruption, bringing goods the city needs.
- Neverember’s rival, the rebellious Sons of Alagondar? Largely dispersed, some are even joining the city guard. (Which means they are accepting a paycheck from “the man.” Talk about laying down).
- The orc gang? Moved back east. (They probably got bored).
Headache Inducing Paradise
So, what kind of terrors yet await adventurers in Neverwinter?
- Sometimes “inns and taverns underestimate the number of guests.” Well, that’s harrowing.
- “New stores and workshops open by the tenday …” Great. In tonight’s adventure, you stand in a line and fill out job application forms.
- “ … some steal as a means of making a living.” OK you tomb-robbers, gear up and get tough. I know you want to beat back demons and monsters in some dungeon, but tonight we stop pick-pockets and delinquents, that is if the town militia doesn’t round them up first.
-  “… for many traders … it is a vast opportunity to both aid a fledgling power and get quite rich doing so.” Or we can play investment banker.
- “Those seeking to create a home or start a business can simply do so …” You know what, exploring dungeons is dumb. Let’s settle down and raise eight or nine kids like our friend Sallah.
Make it stop, already!
You Don’t Fix Gotham City
Batman’s been fighting crime in Gotham City since when, 1939? Has the city ever gotten better? In fact, you can probably say it just gets worse and worse.
Why does Gotham City remain a cesspool that generates arch-villains like old bread sprouts mold? Because Batman needs someone to fight in next month’s issue, that’s why. No one wants Bruce and Selina Kyle to settle down and start having Bat-babies in domestic diaper-changing bliss. They want to see Batman and Catwoman duking it out, with maybe a few other caped baddies thrown in for good measure.
Adventure design is about conflict, not tranquility.
In twelve stupefying paragraphs, the Realms writers completely deflated that once-dynamic, danger-filled city. As a creative choice, it makes little sense, it does a disservice to the team that crafted that amazing 2011 game book that should serve as a model on how to present campaign settings.
As a DM, I don’t want a Neverwinter that I can move my family to because it promises a job with benefits. I want a dangerous place to drop my adventurers into. Heck, I don’t want it to get better. I want it to be like Gotham, getting progressively worse!
Quit Whining And Run The Neverwinter You Want
I know, I know. That option is not only open to me, it’s available for everyone out there.
It’s just that as someone who has been so gratified by Fifth Edition, from the quality of the core rule books, the rollout of the hardback adventures and now the release of a new SRD and Open Gaming Licence, it seemed like Wizards of the Coast was not only hitting its stride, it had a clear understanding of what makes D&D engaging.
I understand how the designers might want to reflect more stability in Neverember’s rule (especially now they’ve taken Waterdeep away from him and given it to Laeral Silverhand —Â a design choice I do wholeheartedly endorse — because it invites conflict and is ripe with storytelling potential). Or perhaps they need to reflect some changes from the series of novels or organized play. But I don’t recall the D&D Encounters “Storm over Neverwinter” or “Lost Crown of Neverwinter” resulting in a complete pacification of the town. Â Â Â Â
But that entry in the SCAG means that somewhere along the line, someone, probably several someones gathered around a white-board in a conference room, really missed the point.
And because of it, they’ve drilled it into the canon of the Forgotten Realms.
Ehh, I don’t think your Gotham analogy works. Like you mentioned, Gotham’s been around since 1939. 4E was looked at by many (including authors of the Realms, such as Greenwood & Salvatore) as something terrible that ruined a good campaign setting. If the Realms’ Neverwinter had always been a cesspool (like Gotham), it would be one thing. To me, this sounds more like the 5E crew coming through and making sweeping changes to all the Realms to try to retcon their 4E mistakes, and maybe some good Neverwinter opportunities got caught in the crossfire. I see your point that 4E Neverwinter seemed to have some good stuff going on, but when you look at how many atrocities the designers committed in the Realms other than Neverwinter, and how many people hated those changes, I think it’s easy to see why they felt the need to go back to their roots, even if it required some pretty obvious retconning and handwaving to fix.
What they really should of done is create a campaign book that allows a group of dedicated PC’s to bring about a positive change to the city instead of just hand waving it in the 5E book.
Having all the problems just conveniently “fixed” feels cheap and missed opportunity, providing plot hooks and direction for the shiny happy ending of Neverwinter, it would of made for a more interesting place to adventure and feel like less of a heavy handed retcon of the 4E version of Neverwinter.
I agree with that – making a full module out of it would have been much more interesting!
Yes, like Brandon, I agree that a series of adventures to solve Neverwinter’s problems would have been good to play. Fortunately, it sounds like you do as Troy says: leave the city status as written in 4e, then treat the problems listed under “Time Heals all Wounds” as a series of adventure sparks.
An interesting thing is that Troy’s list contains a mix of important things that different characters will excel at. Do you turn to the bard to convince the populace that royal blood’s not necessary? Raiding the pirates might drive them out of the city, but how do you ensure that they don’t relocate downstream, or that new pirates don’t threaten the ships bearing supplies to rebuild the Jewel of the North?
An adventure that meets the goal of retuning to normalcy would be a good step. But I rather like the perpetual chaos of Neverwinter. Just because the treasures of Undermountain were unearthed once, doesn’t mean it can’t be looted again and again.
The thing to remember is that events don’t just happen in the p&p game anymore. Fixing the city is the focus of the Neverwinter video game. There are a few cool quests that could serve as inspiration for a p&p campaign.
First, you make a good point, toriel. Thank you. Let me respond in the spirit it is given, I personally don’t feel beholden to any of the many outcomes that might be the focus of a video game. As someone who doesn’t play video games, I don’t think I should have an expectation to “remember” how something I didn’t participate in went. 😉
That said, I appreciate that the Realms is being played in many different platforms. But I am not concerned about lining up game objectives from one to the other.
For instance, the only way that I can win Lords of Waterdeep is when I pull the Larissa Neathal card. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I make her the Open Lord in my version of Waterdeep. (It’s not that she couldn’t; it’s that I don’t think the outcome of another game MUST be accounted for when I play in the Realms.)
It might very well be that that Neverwinter WAS wrecked so it could be the subject of a video game. And that’s OK, because the rpg and the video game stories are starting from the same place. But once they diverge, they don’t influence one another. So far as I understand video games, what happens at your table can’t influence the video game. But by your reasoning, the converse must be true; the tabletop game must accept the outcomes of the video game. That’s a one-way street I do not like.
(This is not to say that you shouldn’t incorporate inspiration wherever you find it. You should. So, if you saw something cool in a video game, but all means, as a GM, you should find away to incorporate that into your tabletop fun. Doing things like that is what we should be about.)
Yet, even as I write this, it apparently seems that the scenario you paint is exactly what did happen. Neverwinter was apparently fixed up in the video game, so they incorporated that into the canon.
Regardless, the lament I have is that they fixed anything, and even if they felt the need to restore Neverwinter, then they should at least give us new storylines that encourage high adventure. Use the limited space in the SCAG to tell me that a clan of cyclops have moved to town or Helm worshippers have a new stronghold; almost anything has got to be better than that there is long line at the bar and no place to sit.
How do we make this nice and pleasant Neverwinter be a place of adventure?
What if all these resolved problems are secretly a ploy? Maybe the Abolethic Sovereignity secretly won. They tend to work in shadows. Now you have a secret faction which is finishing its primary goal.
To make it adventuring, you’d need to give a clue that something is off. An easy way is have a well-liked NPC visits to Neverwinter then gets changed. A drastic change in personality to give the players a clue to start investigating.
That is a start in the right direction, Eric. I never liked or trusted those aboleths anyways.