Arcane Age and Council of Wryms

[Coronoides]

So my Forgotten Realms lore is weak so help me out here. I know nothing about the Arcane Age beyond what I've skimmed here.

Council of Wryms is set in the past on a isolated chain of islands ruled by dragons.
The Arcane Age is Forgotten Realm's in the distant past.
In Council of Wryms human invaders cross a vast ocean to invade the islands of the dragons. The lands of humans are not described.
Could I use use the Arcane Age as the distant lands of the humans for Council of Wryms? The dragons' Isles must have sunk Atlantis style before the FR present
The dragon civilisation might be a surviving enclave from the 'Dawn Age', does that make sense?
I know there's lots of magic, lost lore of the ancients and all that, but are there other technological or cultural cues that make the Arcane Age look and feel like the past of a D&D world?

[willpell]

The 3E era, at least, heavily ties arcane magic to dragons, so it would make sense to say that a bunch of wizards would want to invade Io's Blood. And of course, this would make more sense of why a bunch of dragons would actually be scared of the human invasion, since we all know there's nothing more OP than a Human Wizard.

[Coronoides]

The 3E era, at least, heavily ties arcane magic to dragons, so it would make sense to say that a bunch of wizards would want to invade Io's Blood. And of course, this would make more sense of why a bunch of dragons would actually be scared of the human invasion, since we all know there's nothing more OP than a Human Wizard.

In the 2e era there was a Dragon Magazine article detailing the wizards of the Dragon slayers who used dragon body parts as spell components.
I have also noticed that the human flying cities and the dragon’s Aerie (a. Massive structure housing the centre of government) were both made by levitating off the tops of mountains.

[Zeromaru X]

In Council of Wryms human invaders cross a vast ocean to invade the islands of the dragons. The lands of humans are not described.
Could I use use the Arcane Age as the distant lands of the humans for Council of Wryms? The dragons' Isles must have sunk Atlantis style before the FR present

Or still be existing, just isolated from the rest of the world. There are at least 3 continents beyond Faerûn that Faerûnians know nothing about them. For instance, Katashaka: humans in the Realms originated there, still present day (1490s DR) Faerûnians only known the name of the place. They even don't know the actual location of that continent.

Netherese and Imaskari humans were so OP that they even blocked gods entering Toril (at least, until the gods became serious and owned the Imaskari). So, yeah, I can see the dragons from Io's Chain wary about them.

[Coronoides]

In Council of Wryms human invaders cross a vast ocean to invade the islands of the dragons. The lands of humans are not described.
Could I use use the Arcane Age as the distant lands of the humans for Council of Wryms? The dragons' Isles must have sunk Atlantis style before the FR present

Or still be existing, just isolated from the rest of the world. There are at least 3 continents beyond Faerûn that Faerûnians know nothing about them. For instance, Katashaka: humans in the Realms originated there, still present day (1490s DR) Faerûnians only known the name of the place. They even don't know the actual location of that continent.

Netherese and Imaskari humans were so OP that they even blocked gods entering Toril (at least, until the gods became serious and owned the Imaskari). So, yeah, I can see the dragons from Io's Chain wary about them.

Yes totally. The Arcane Age would only be preferable IF there was aspects of it that made it feel like it is in the past such as feeling a bit like the Roman Empire or having only early Iron Age technology.

[Coronoides]

Reading the Netheril book not even 10 pages in and I encounter room lights and taps of running water. So looks like the Arcane Age is not what I’m looking for. Rather than feeling like the past its even more like 20th century USA than other D&D settings.

[Sturm]

Netheril is high magic so IMHO the best use with Council of Wyrms could be an invasion of the islands by powerful wizards... But I would not place Io's Blood Island Chain in the Realms as it seems a bit too big to fit into the existing geography. It is true however that several regions of Torin are unknown and undeveloped.

[ripvanwormer]

I don't think there's anything in Council of Worms that suggests it's in the distant past other than a single line stating that it's set in the past. I read it like I read Star Wars's "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," just a rhetorical device meant to indicate that it's separate. It could easily fit as a distant land in a contemporary D&D setting.

[Big Mac]

So my Forgotten Realms lore is weak so help me out here. I know nothing about the Arcane Age beyond what I've skimmed here.

When I first started reading about Arcane Age, one thing I missed was that there are two "settings" within the Arcane Age.

One is the Netheril products, which deal with how the humans of the Netherese Empire was, before they screwed up and nearly destroyed everything.

The other is the elven civilisation of Myth Drannor, before that broke up.

Both of these civilisations are now gone, and PCs in current Realms campaigns (either 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e or 5e) can learn bits about them from artifacts. But Arcane Age was an attempt to let people play in the past.

I've been told that the two types of Arcane Age products are not set at the exact same time.

Council of Wryms is set in the past on a isolated chain of islands ruled by dragons.
The Arcane Age is Forgotten Realm's in the distant past.
In Council of Wryms human invaders cross a vast ocean to invade the islands of the dragons. The lands of humans are not described.
Could I use use the Arcane Age as the distant lands of the humans for Council of Wryms? The dragons' Isles must have sunk Atlantis style before the FR present

I think you have a couple of options there.

You ether have to move Io's Blood Islands onto Toril (and reboot any Council of Wyrms canon that gets in the way of you doing that)...

...or you can move part of Toril onto the planet of Io's Blood Islands (and reboot any Forgotten Realms canon that gets in the way of you doing that).

A third option would be to look at Abeir. (That's something invented for the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms product line.) The 4e designers had the Forgotten Realms planet (Abeir-Toril) split into two worlds in the ancient past. One world became Abeir and was controlled by primordials. The other world became Toril and was controlled by gods. There is a lot less going on with Abeir, so if you didn't actually want to use Forgotten Realms, as it is, maybe you could raid the Abeir map, drop it onto one of the parts of the world outside the Io's Blood Islands map.

Abeir has the dragonborn in it. So you could place them onto your world, along with rebooted humans from Netheril, to give you something to go with.

A fourth option, if you want to have Forgotten Realms work as is and have Council of Wyrms work as is, is to look at the fact that "Forgotten Realms" is "forgotten" because it once had a large number of portals to other worlds. (The other worlds have forgotten the "Forgotten Realms".) There are some entire nations on Toril that were populated by humans stolen from other worlds. The Mulhorandi pantheon is an "Egyptian-like" pantheon from a different world, that came to Toril after large numbers of it's people were kidnapped and brought to Toril to serve as slaves.

If you went with the fourth option, you would just need to find an interesting group of imported humans in Forgotten Realms, and then use Io's Blood Islands as their original homeworld. That would allow you to use the same human gods and the same origin story, but cut off the future story that "present day" Forgotten Realms products use (as that has not happened yet).

What if you used Egyptian ideas from Legends & Lore (and other sources) to build a continent based on FR's Mulhorandi stuff, and said that one day in the future a dragon would "do a deal" with someone from Forgotten Realms, to get these some or all of these humans teleported off of their planet.

The dragon civilisation might be a surviving enclave from the 'Dawn Age', does that make sense?
I know there's lots of magic, lost lore of the ancients and all that, but are there other technological or cultural cues that make the Arcane Age look and feel like the past of a D&D world?

Netheril is actually a time when the humans learned magic from the elves and started learning spells so powerful that they could damage the world. At the end of the Netherese Empire, magic (in Realmspace) was actually changed so that some of the more powerful spells would no longer be available.

There are similar things in other settings with Dragonlance having a Kingpriest who tried to steal power from the gods and Greyhawk having a couple of nations destroy each other with magic (including something called the Rain of Colourless Fire).

If you go back to the time before the Arcane Age product line, the Netherese actually started off a lot less powerful. So you could look at their origins, make them more primative and have them as a civilisation that had just started to discover magic that would allow them to challenge dragons.

Grand History of the Realms might be able to give you some other long lost empires that you could reboot and use.

[Big Mac]

In Council of Wryms human invaders cross a vast ocean to invade the islands of the dragons. The lands of humans are not described.
Could I use use the Arcane Age as the distant lands of the humans for Council of Wryms? The dragons' Isles must have sunk Atlantis style before the FR present

Or still be existing, just isolated from the rest of the world. There are at least 3 continents beyond Faerûn that Faerûnians know nothing about them. For instance, Katashaka: humans in the Realms originated there, still present day (1490s DR) Faerûnians only known the name of the place. They even don't know the actual location of that continent.

Netherese and Imaskari humans were so OP that they even blocked gods entering Toril (at least, until the gods became serious and owned the Imaskari). So, yeah, I can see the dragons from Io's Chain wary about them.

Yes totally. The Arcane Age would only be preferable IF there was aspects of it that made it feel like it is in the past such as feeling a bit like the Roman Empire or having only early Iron Age technology.

Perhaps you would prefer one of the campaign settings from the Historical Reference product line.

[Big Mac]

I don't think there's anything in Council of Worms that suggests it's in the distant past other than a single line stating that it's set in the past. I read it like I read Star Wars's "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," just a rhetorical device meant to indicate that it's separate. It could easily fit as a distant land in a contemporary D&D setting.

Isn't there some sort of time-travel rules in one of the Arcane Age products?

Maybe Council of Wyrms could be "connected" to another D&D world via some sort of time travel portal, with humans (or some other faction) arriving from the distant future of Io's Blood Islands to try to change the timeline.

[ripvanwormer]

You also might take a look at the Dawnforge setting, which is basically "D&D in the ancient past." The ancestors of the drow have not yet been driven underground, the yuan-ti empire has not yet begun its decline, there's a kingdom of giants, the schools of magic were different, etc.

[willpell]

You also might take a look at the Dawnforge setting

Sounds pretty cool, although I'm not sure I could really get into the primordial spirit of things.

[Coronoides]

Thanks everyone for the comments lots to think about.

[Big Mac]

You also might take a look at the Dawnforge setting

Sounds pretty cool, although I'm not sure I could really get into the primordial spirit of things.

If anyone is interested in Dawnforge, we have three topics about it:

• Dawnforge (Fantasy Flight Games)
• Other Dawnforge Websites (& Free Downloads) and
• [Dawnforge] Races of Dawnforge

The first topic is a "starter topic", so might have some information that helps anyone who hasn't heard of Dawnforge before.

The second one has a bunch of links to websites and freebies, where you can learn about the setting.

The third is a regular topic, asking about the bespoke races of the setting.