Coronoides wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 11:07 am
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.
Coronoides wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 11:07 am
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.
Coronoides wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 11:07 am
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.