Copyright 2011 Wizards of the Coast.

This is another introductory chapter that goes into a little more detail about the setting, but not too much more. It starts with a summary of the relevant places in the region, then moves on to the obligatory super-long historical timeline, and ends by offering campaign advice.

Neverwinter

Despite assuring the reader that no knowledge of the wider Forgotten Realms, this section kind of assumes you’re familiar with the region already, probably from reading the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. Having played the Neverwinter Nights games was enough for me, but as they’re very much In the Past at this point I would have preferred if they assumed no prior knowledge and had a more basic summary of the region. In the following paragraphs I try to summarize it for people who wouldn’t necessarily have prior FR kwowledge.

Neverwinter is a coastal city-state located in a region referred to as “The North”, with seems to be a typical Frozen North type of deal but with less vikings. It’s built on the mouth of the Neverwinter River, which is warmed by underground heat sources and thus never freezes. This makes the city’s port viable year-round, and brings it great wealth from trade. A series of canny lords invested this wealth to make a solid industrial base for the city and strengthen its defenses. It became a beacon of prosperity and stability in a dangerous region full of monsters and slumbering ancient threats.

The computer games end up being mostly about keeping it that way, but in this book all of this is in the distant past. The Neverwinter in our book is a destroyed city struggling to get back on its feet and threatened by foreign interests and evil conspiracies alike.

The Forgotten Realms setting has a tradition of marking edition transitions with world-shaking metaplot events, which usually try to give in-setting explanations for why the rules changed. They tend to make lasting changes to the world’s geography and pantheon, usually involving the death of the current goddess of magic. The big change that heralded 4e was The Spellplague, which caused a bunch of horrible mutations and a planar conjunction that brought in a whole continent from a parallel dimension. That was a hundred years ago, and it actually didn’t affect Neverwinter all that much.

What destroyed the city was the eruption of the nearby Mount Hotenow, about thirty years ago. The eruption caused a river of pyroclastic magma to flow through the city, killing half its population outright and leveling whole districts. Over the next decades, the people who fled the city began to return, along with new waves of opportunists who came to loot and decided to stay, and together they’ve managed to start rebuilding.

There are still plenty of scars from the eruption, including a huge chasm torn into the earth, but Neverwinter managed to rebuild enough that it drew the attention of one Dagult Neverember. This guy is one of the Lords of Waterdeep, a big metropolis to the south, and he has an expansionist streak a mile wide. He arrived with a dubious lineage claim and a mercenary army, and then declared himself the Lord Protector of Neverwinter, clearly intent on adding the city to his personal domain. The people who live here are divided over whether that’s a good or a bad thing, and it’s one of the main plots of the campaign.

Other Nearby Locations

Several other places in the region should be familiar to Neverwinter Nights players, though the combined damage from the Spellplague and the eruption means they’re generally in a worse situation than they were back then.

Lots of smaller towns and cities have simply been emptied or abandoned. Port Llast became a ghost town after its port was ruined by the appearance of the nearby continent of Abeir. The mages that ran Luskan were killed off by Drizzt in some novel, and now the city is just the pirate-riddled cesspool it always appeared to be. Other towns and locations that were important because they facilitated regional trade were abandoned after the destruction of Neverwinter halted that trade.

The mysterious Neverwinter Wood now contains both an eladrin city returned from the Feywild (Sharandar), an ancient sky island crawling with remnants of its original owners returned from the Shadowfell (Xinlenal), and an incomplete necromantic fortress of unspeakable evil inhabited by people trying to complete it (the Dread Ring). The Mere of Dead Men has grown bigger and more dangerous, making it harder for supplies or help to arrive by land from the south.

There are legends of some ancient dwarven city named Gauntlgrym, but no one has managed to find it yet. And then you have your standard stretches of hills and mountains infested with ogres and dragons. The general thrust of this section is that the Frozen North has gotten even more “frontier-ish” and dangerous than it already was.

Regional History

While Neverwinter is extremely focused on the region’s current situation, it wouldn’t be a FR setting book if it didn’t include a historical timeline stretching back tens of thousands of years. I’ll try to summarize this whole thing and focus on the bits that are relevant to today’s adventurers.

In very ancient times this region was dominated by an elven empire (Iliyanbruen), which after thousands of years of hegemony fell after fighting back an enormous orcish invasion. Most of its inhabitants called it quits and “traveled West” much like Tolkien’s elves do, but some of them fled into the Feywild instead. These refugees built a city over there, and this is relevant because that city has returned to the world and is the region’s main source of eladrin characters.

During the time of the elven empire, you also had a dwarven empire (Delzoun), which had several big underground cities in here. Its fabled capital was Gauntlgrym, which started out as a big mine and got converted into a city later. The empire collapsed after the big orcish invasion and the underground mind flayer invasion that followed. This is relevant because it leaves a whole bunch of lost dwarven ruins underground.

You also had a human empire (Netheril) that was ruled by archmages who loved to show their power by building flying islands. This one fell quite suddenly due to Metaplot Shenanigans elsewhere in the world, and one of their flying islands crashed into the Neverwinter Wood. It’s still there! The survivors from this empire are the ancestors of most of the present-day humans native to the region. This includes the Uthgardt barbarians, but also other groups. Some of these survivors settled the city of Illusk, which would become present-day Luskan after being sacked and rebuilt a few dozen times. Neverwinter would be founded much later by other descendants of Netheril who first settled islands to the west and then sailed here.

The “Modern-day developments” section includes quite a few spoilers, so players beware! I do find it cute that it made a point to mention the plot of the first Neverwinter Nights as a significant historical event.

Anyway, after the Spellplague pulled the Realms into Fourth Edition, the descendants of Netheril survivors who had fled to the Plane of Shadow came back and started conspiring to take over the region by infiltrating Neverwinter’s power structure. They got sidetracked when another conspiracy crashed into theirs, but are still hanging around the ruins of that flying city.

That crashing conspiracy is a doozy, by the way: a bunch of evil wizards (the Red Wizards of Thay) tried to build a necromantic fortress of ultimate evil in the Neverwinter Wood and caused the volcanic eruption to destroy Neverwinter and use the deaths to power the fortress. Their plan was foiled (probably in a novel), so the fortress was never completed. It’s still there, half-finished.

Gauntlgrym is lost but still inhabited, and over the last few centuries it changed hands several times. The current owners are duergar. Its big secret is that it houses a slumbering primordial (Maegera the Inferno), who in ancient times was used as a geothermal power source by the dwarves and the mages of old Illusk, who cooperated on the operation of the power plant.

Running a Neverwinter Campaign

This section describes how the book works as a tool for running a campaign. It restates much of what was said in the introduction, and it does so in a way that makes it clear it’s taking a different tack from your traditional FR supplement or adventure.

As we already know, it focuses on the Neverwinter region; it also only includes details that are useful sources of inspiration rather than trying to list the names of every innkeeper in the city. The characters presented in the book are active and won’t sit around waiting to respond to the PCs. The PCs, in turn, will have access to character themes that will get them involved in the campaign right away. The campaign is also open-ended - it doesn’t assume an end state that the characters must work towards. PCs are free to set their own goals, confident that their actions will have an actual impact on events.

There’s a text box here that should make critics of previous versions of the setting quite happy: it’s titled “Killable Villains”. It says that while it might make sense to stat up the main villains of the campaign as epic threats due to the scope and reach of their machinations, this often results in the players feeling like they can never truly defeat those villains until they are themselves epic. Until then, they remain trapped in conflict with an endless series of underlings.

For this reason, every opponent here, even the main villains was given stats that are “within reach” of heroic tier adventurers. While some of those major villains might make for tough boss fights for 10th-level characters, those characters still have a chance of defeating them. Of course, GMs who want to stretch their campaigns beyond the heroic tier are free to level those villains up or use other appropriate stat blocks for them.

GM advice for running the campaign centers mostly around being flexible. There are a lot of plot threads flying around, so it’s okay to remind players of where things stand (from their PC’s point of view) if they get lost. It’s also okay to change the facts of the campaign if your players end up coming to a “wrong” conclusion during their investigations - particularly if their theories are more fun than what’s written on the book! And finally, it’s okay to do what feels right even if it contradicts what’s been written. Don’t sweat it if you forget some detail and end up changing it in play.

Finally, the book really recommends that players make new characters for this campaign, so that they can take advantage of the several themes available to them. It does have some advice for bringing existing characters into the campaign, but my feeling is that this is a very sub-optimal approach.

Impressions

I’m not the biggest knower or enjoyer of the broader Forgotten Realms setting, but I do have good memories from the games, so a lot of the places mentioned here were familiar to me.

I loved the emphasis the book put, both in its introduction and here, on the fact that your PCs will get the chance to do important and world-shaking things on their own, and that even the top villains of the piece have no plot armor and are defeatable. There’s a reason why I often refer to an excess of invincible official NPCs as “The Elminster problem”, and I’m happy to know they’ll be trying to avoid it here.

The material here does a lot to bring this region closer to the “points of light” model prevalent in 4e, as a lot of what used to be safe places are just gone, and there are a lot more dangerous ones. There’s quite a lot going on in the Neverwinter Wood, and inside Neverwinter proper as well. I could have done without that timeline section and its attempts at summarizing novels, but I suspect we’ll see more details about the region’s present situation soon.