Bringing the Nether to light

Dungeons and Dragons was first published in 1974; a role-playing game that essentially grew out of table top strategy games. It certainly wasn't the first role-playing game, people had been acting out "cowboys and indians" or "cops and robbers" or some equivalent for time immemorial. D&D, however, was one of the first to successfully take a fantasy setting and apply some rules to the role play, borrowing it's strategy heritage to give players a chance to think through a sword and sorcery simulation. It was a powerful new experience: players wrote their own Tolkien-style story on the fly.

The same year, "Happy Days" and "The $6 Million Dollar Man" started their runs on television, "Blazing Saddles" opened in theaters and Dorothy Hamill won the US Female Figure Skating championship. The World Trade Center opened in NYC, at the time the tallest buildings in the world. However, there was nothing magical about 1974. It was a year potential players suffered through an OPEC oil embargo and dodged tornadoes in a 13-state path of destruction. The Watergate indictments were handed out, Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Khomeni rose in Iran and Ceausescu in Romania. After a long, bitter struggle in Vietnam, the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon. If there was ever a time that demanded an escape, this was it.

The game borrowed the sword-swinging medieval ages and added a Merlin-enabling magic system for a feel of playing in an age of Arthurian legend. Upon English knights and castles, players quickly added the fantasy flavors of greek and norse myths. We followed the torch of J.R.R. Tolkien as our modern trailblazer. In a social blink, we were all playing out heroic archetypes in a way that must've made Joseph Campbell smile.

Our imagination has grown since then. With the application of fantastic creativity (and mind-blowing special effects), we've bought into stories that gave back more than we knew. We learned new views and saw a wider palette of magical possibility. We've recognized that magic could do and be so much more sophisticated than crystal balls and fireballs.

That leads us to Netheril, the greatest magically-based empire anywhere. Netheril found its way into the D&D paradigm, but it's not really a D&D creation – it's a reflection of a common sociological theme, an icon synonymous with power and magic and dark history. It comes from bringing the unknowns of the Nether world to the surface. We can't underestimate the D&D spin though – it has gone on to influence other fantasy (google "Nether" and see how many World of Warcraft references come up).

The Echoes of Netheril is a rethinking of D&D's take on the culture of magical power. It's an exercise in theory and an exploration of something very alien. Use of magic is perhaps closest in our real world to the growth of science and technology, but the products of magic are more powerful, accessible and pervasive.

There is similarity to the real world in that human psyches are involved, but this realm has a different dynamic with no direct analogue in human experience. We, in the real world, haven't faced serious non-human threats since before regularly recorded history. In warfare, we've had to separate – dehumanize – opponents to keep our empathy from interfering. In this fantasy world, the opponents need no dehumanizing; but there are still degrees of empathy and antipathy across racial boundaries. How would those connections sway the realpolitik of such a world?

Further, in our real world, once humanity gained the upper hand from traditional natural threats (being eaten), our existence as a society was never threatened again. In this fantasy setting, there is no such guarantee. Would this regular, external threat bring disparate human groups together?

Around religion and miracle and sociological force in the real world, religion has taken legend of a few comparatively sporadic miracles and built world-shaking artifice around them. In a world where healing and destructive miracles happen on a daily basis, from a variety of deities, how would it change the landscape of belief?

On that note, real-world humanity has operated with the attitude of global entitlement. Right or wrong, we operate above and beyond natural cycles, the righteous and undisputed owners of this world. How would the natural, philosophical evolution of humanity be different if we weren't the biggest, the prettiest, or even the most developed race on the planet? How would that change our motives and attitudes? Netheril becomes our petri dish for the study of theoretical, alternate human development.

However, even in fiction, Netheril did not grow in a vacuum. There was a history that couched the birth of an empire and an aftermath from it's fall. We'll peel back the surface and look at the context that led to the rise of a culture. For that to work, though, we have to scrape off the faded varnish of previous versions. We must start fresh.

TSR released its treatment of Netheril in 1995, placing it as a historical culture in the "Forgotten Realms" fantasy world they'd already built (released in 1987). It was meant to be a backdrop for their current scenarios, a resource to add color and depth. The legends surrounding it sounded right: it was the greatest of human empires, then or since, and it wielded unimaginable magical power. Or at least that was the theory.

The treatment was a product of being planned and written in 1994 – the year Newt Gingrich led the G.O.P. to take Congress, balancing out a liberal president. At the time, the game itself was ebbing, TSR was struggling as a company and the D&D culture of imagination was under fire. When the Netheril effort hit shelves, it was a victim of the times; a child-safe historical summary, written to be politically correct and socially conformist – there had to be morals to the story. It was necessary for business, but the concept became a token sacrifice, it's history and potential alternately over-simplified, sugar coated, slandered or some convenient combination thereof.

Wizards of the Coast would purchase TSR in 1997, but even their subsequent treatments haven't strayed far from the 1995 foundation – the "canon" if you will. Blurbs in the FRCS and a chapter in the Lost Empires cleaned and reconciled a few story elements, but they couldn't start fresh, each successive version of their franchise built on the last. Kind of like MS releasing new versions of "Windows", the latest version had to have some backward compatibility – if only for Netheril to fit in to an established timeline.

To a degree, our examination of Netheril must also fit within the constraints of that greater context. It's an exciting challenge: we take a long but simplified history and look at it with a new emphasis on realism. We don't take gratuitous liberties, but we don't cater to retroactive continuity. Instead, we make changes all along the timeline where logic dictates a more rational causation. We do our best to discover the deeper reasons behind the unfolding of history. It's a little like studying revisionist textbooks and trying to divine the real truth by reading between the lines.

With all this emphasis on political, social and psychological realism, we'd be missing a terrific opportunity if we didn't consider scientific realism as well. The inclusion makes perfect sense, right up to the point one remembers we're talking about magic. It's an understatement to say reconciling the mechanics of metaphysics with actual physics is overwhelming. If magic were here, in our world, the evidence would surely show it at some level. Dark energy not withstanding, there's nothing to indicate magic is part of the cosmological equation. Further, humanity as we know it is inextricably linked to the set of rules that guided our evolution. How, then, do we superimpose a complex, flexible and rational system of magic to work through natural-law systems we already know? It's the ultimate mental exercise.

Realism in gaming is already controversial in some circles. Does it diminish the gameplay; the experience of the escape, or does it allow easier suspension of disbelief; the ability to better immerse yourself? Simply applying rules to magic makes the mystical mundane. Whether it's action or arcane, at what point does realism mire a game in minutia? If a game's rules are crafted to create a balance between character types, does realism inherently upset that? Finally, we're exploring a realm filled with epic possibility, where mythic becomes merely historical. How do we reconcile a timeline filled with apotheosis, characters literally moving heaven and earth, with the trivial bolts of lightning a player-characters is allowed?

For this project, once we took a bite from fruit of the tree of knowledge, we were duty-bound to choke down the whole thing. The end result is a ground-up reimagining of Netheril. We take a comprehensive approach to examining it's place in the history of Faerun – and it's place in the present D&D universe. We'll follow the rise and fall of empires, travel to places that can only exist in a world of magic and meet a few interesting characters along the way.

Please enjoy.