There’s a great interview over at io9.com with Erin M. Evans and Troy Denning, two of the authors whose books will be part of the Sundering series of novels. For those who don’t know, the Sundering is Wizards of the Coast’s big event to re-roll out the Forgotten Realms as the official setting of D&D Next (or whatever it ends up being called). Here’s a few quotes, but the whole thing is well worth reading.
There’s huge things happening, nations going to war, gods changing the way they view their worshipers, or feeling like they’re going to be replaced. But the stories are about these people on the ground.
Of course having written Waterdeep, Crucible, a lot of the stories I’ve written have involved gods acting as individuals and exploring their personality. So even when you’re writing on that grand scale, you have to bring them down to something that a person can understand. Just as when you’re writing Star Wars and you have to write an alien, you have to find something human in that alien for people to relate to.
It’s important to realize we’re doing two things. We’re telling a story on a grand scale of the world, and to get the idea of what’s happening on the grand scale, you have to read book one, two, three in order. Because what’s going on in the world directly affects the characters. But then the story is how the characters deal with what’s happening in the world.
I did read the first book in the series, and thought it was… okay. I should do a full-blown review sometime soon.
Looking forward to your review of Book One.
Should be interesting. I wonder, with 4e's Spellplague and now the Sundering…what happened in Kara-Tur, Maztica, AlQadim? They've got to be sore about all the stuff happening in Faerun. 😉
As far as I know, Kara-tur has still been around even after the Spellplague, etc.; Faerun and Kara-tur just don't interact that much.
Maztica literally disappeared entirely, though; a lot of fans are hoping that the Sundering restores Maztica to its former locale.