D&D Trailer: The Sundering

The Sundering is a series of six standalone novels set in the Forgotten Realms.  Each of the books is done by one of the Realms' more popular authors, which is interesting primarily because they got Paul S. Kemp to come back and write another one for them.  That's great; I like Kemp's stuff a lot.  But it sucks because they didn't get Elaine Cunningham back, and she's my favorite Realms' author.  Hopefully that means she charges too much, and they decided that they couldn't afford her, but with Corporate America making the decisions, truth is there's just no knowing.

Promo art for The Sundering.  Looks good.
Drizzt and Elminster are in the center.  I don't know the rest of these guys.

Anyway, this trailer caught me a little by surprise even though I know I must've heard about the series somewhere.  Certainly I was aware that R.A. Salvatore had a new Drizzt novel,  The Companions, and as I'm thinking about it, I realize that I knew it was part of the Sundering series as well.  What I didn't know was that Salvatore isn't writing the whole series homself.

Cover art for Godborn, Paul S. Kemp's
new FR novel.  I quite like that.

And looking... I see that the early reviews are positive.

Salvatore's hit-or-miss for me, but when he's on, his stuff is a Hell of a lot of fun.

Anyway, in looking at this trailer, it looks to me like they're undoing everything that they did storywise with D&D's 4th Edition.  Which is a shame, I think.  Not that they're restoring the Weave of magic--and presumably Mystra, the goddess of magic, along with it--or even Bhaal, the god of murder, but more that they're seemingly doing away with a whole generation of storytelling, some of which was pretty darned good.  For example, I liked the Swordmage and Chosen of Nendawen trilogies quite a lot.  Likewise, I thought the whole idea of the Spellplague and of spellscarring in general had legs.  I would agree with those who say that they didn't do as much with the idea of spellscarring as they could have, and the actual mechanics that supported the use of spellscars in the game itself left quite a lot to be desired, especially in its initial incarnation in the 4th Edition's Forgotten Realms Player's Guide, but that doesn't mean that the idea of spellscarring needs to be jettisoned wholesale.  I personally liked the Spellplague and used it extensively in the game I ran for 4e.

It'd make me happy if they continued to support it going forward in the new edition.