Talk:Black ice

Merge
Saw that someone added the merge template but never started a discussion, so I'll throw my opinion in.

Can someone explain why this should be merged with chardalyn? Near as I can tell chardalyn has been around for millennia, while black ice is rather explicitly a recent phenomenon. Beyond that, I don't see anything to suggest they're related. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 01:29, October 6, 2020 (UTC)
 * Frostmaiden openly states they are one and the same, suggesting that when black ice appeared in the realms it somehow merged/corrupted chardalyn making them one and the same. the chardalyn described in Frostmaiden has appearance and properties of black ice. Early promotion material and the recently released dice set shows that the change from black ice to chardalyn happened sometime late in the adventure's development for one reason or the other. On top of what states in the book, Ed Greenwood confirmed this too be correct. The new lore, however has not been added to the wiki as far as i know. Artyom.pavlov (talk) 01:46, October 6, 2020 (UTC)
 * Good to know, thanks for clearing that up.
 * Still, it seems to me that even if black ice is a corrupted form of chardalyn, it's probably still better to keep the pages separate unless all chardalyn became black ice. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 07:24, October 6, 2020 (UTC)
 * It did.Artyom.pavlov (talk) 12:11, October 6, 2020 (UTC)
 * As of now it feels like poor editing more than anything else, but see https://www.sageadvice.eu/2020/09/30/the-mistery-behind-the-dd-black-obelixes/, Ed Greenwood may have a plan?
 * While we don't consider Ed's tweets canon for wiki purposes just yet, it is being discussed on the forum. I am all for including Ed's insight if and when we decide to bring his twitter contributions onto the wiki. Thank you Artie for bringing that up!Ruf (talk) 23:48, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
 * It's absolutely a weird last minute editor thing. The opener in the frostmaidden basically says that they are now one and the same... I dont like that, it's just ridiculous. But it is what it is...(heh didn't know Sage advice picked up my Q for Ed)Artyom.pavlov (talk) 01:00, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

Finally checked out Rime of the Frostmaiden myself, and my take, at least, from that section on chardalyn in the opening is that black ice is just being subtly retconned into a modern type of chardalyn. It talks about how the chardalyn in Icewind Dale is suffused with demonic magic, then about how chardalyn in general can be suffused with magic from the Upper and Lower Planes, and then at the end says "Long before Akar Kessel left his mark on Icewind Dale, Netherese wizards created their own chardalyn." If what it's saying, therefore, is that black ice is just a specific type of demonic-infused chardalyn created by Cryshal-Tirith's destruction, then it seems like black ice should probably remain on its own page but with proper links back to chardalyn. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 02:58, 14 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Without going fully in-depth, that's how I took it as well. We could definitely use a point-by-point comparison of each mention of 'black ice' and 'chardalyn' and compare each iteration. I'm fairly well-stocked in sourcebooks but do not have many Drizzt novels. Do you know offhand which novel(s) mention chardalyn or black ice? Ruf (talk) 10:02, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
 * None of them, as far as I can tell. The Icewind Dale Trilogy sets up the events that create it, but black ice itself only shows up in a couple of adventure modules and a video game. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 19:07, 15 October 2022 (UTC)