[quote="Kris":s2dseg0t]Hello. I have only recently read the 4th edition rules and lore after reading The Lady Penitent trilogy and I'm quite confused. Eilistraee is (or should I say "was") one of my favorite deities, but as far as I undestand she's currently dead, right? (just like the rest of the Drow pantheon, except for Lolth) It would be a great shame, drows and their deities are my favorite thing in the FR...[/quote:s2dseg0t]
WotC did kill lots of deities. But deities die and get reborn (or replaced) all the time in the Forgotten Realms.
There are even "official rules" for bringing back deities. It takes a year and a day for a church to import a new deity into Realmspace (or another crystal sphere) according to [i:s2dseg0t]CGR1 The Complete Spacefarer's Handbook[/i:s2dseg0t] from the Spelljammer product line and Jeff Grubb co-wrote a novel called Finder's Bane which included a mortal woman who was attempting to facilitate the return of a god.
I've not kept track of things, but as a goddess Eilistraee had the power to create avatars, Chosen of Eilistraee, magical artifacts, empower clerics and do lots of other things that touched the mortal world. Any of those things could have involved Eilistraee putting part of herself into an avatar, mortal or magic item. Any of those things could either be used to recreate Eilistraee or allow a devoted follower of Eilistraee to become the adopted daughter of Corellon Larethian and take her place as the new Lady of the Dance.
There are a ton of drow ([url=
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_elf:s2dseg0t]Miyeritari[/url:s2dseg0t]) who were returned to the condition that the drow were in before the race was tainted with Wendonai's blood. They now have brown-skin and black-hair and lack darkvision, but they were all Eilistraee worshippers before they were redeemed. I don't see why they would turn their backs on Eilistraee [i:s2dseg0t]after[/i:s2dseg0t] her body was killed.
The Miyeritari could be up to all sorts of things trying to locate part of Eilistraee, so that they can bring her back or create a replacement version of her. They might not know how to bring her back and it could take them a long time to learn or stumble onto a way to do it. The story of uncorrupted drow (who would presumably finally be free of the sort of stuff that Lolth imposes on the race) could actually be pretty interesting. But the 4th Edition time-jump (that occurred as part of the backstory of the Spellplague) has moved the setting so far into the future that it is pretty much disconnected from the 3rd Edition and 2nd Edition parts of Toril and Realmspace that I am [i:s2dseg0t]more[/i:s2dseg0t] interested in. So I've not really bought much 4e material (just two non-core books) and do not really know much about 4e.
I do not "hate" 4e as some fans do, but I do find it to be mostly useless to me, because it is just too far into the future. So I use (and will continue to use) 3rd Edition. And for that reason, Eilistraee is still alive to me. Not because I deny that 4e happened, but because I treat it as a "possible future". Maybe some Miyeritari could return from the future Realms and warn Eilistraee about the events leading up to her death. Maybe a very powerful Miyeritari worshipper could knock out Eilistraee, steal some of her power, disguise herself as Eilistraee and then take her place (risking what Eilistraee originally risked to try save her deity). In a game set in the 3e Era anything like that is possible. Who knows? Maybe the Sundering might even have some sort of plot-twist similar to that.
[quote="Kris":s2dseg0t]Excuse me if the answer is obvious, but I keep finding so much misleading information on the Internet right now.[/quote:s2dseg0t]
Back when 4th Edition was out, Wizards of the Coast said that they would be bringing back one campaign setting per year. I think that was an attempt to get fans of those out of print settings to buy the core 4e books and wait for their settings to get printed. In the end they only actually brought back Dark Sun.
Now that 5th Edition is coming out, Wizards of the Coast are saying that they are going to restore the Forgotten Realms to a condition it was in before 4th Edition. I am not entirely sure what this is, but I'm guessing that they are hoping that the fans who have ranted about the Spellplague since 4th Edition came out are all going to run out and buy the core rulebooks and wait to see what WotC does for the Realms.
I'm sure that WotC has got plenty of people who want to deliver. So we could well see the return of the dead gods (including Eilistraee). But WotC also has the habbit of randomly sacking people. So a promise made now might not actually be deliverable in a year's time. The only thing we really know is that the current management think that the 4th Edition Realms was a mistake and that they hope to connect with the 1e, 2e and 3e Realms fans.
I'm not suggesting that "it is all a trick", because WotC want to actually make products that people want to buy, but they were also making products that they believed that fans would want to buy during 4th Edition and that did not turn out as well as they had hoped. (As well as alienating some Forgotten Realms fans with their "Points of Light" changes, they also shut down Living Greyhawk and alienated the Greyhawk fans by telling them to play Living Forgotten Realms instead.) In a way I kind of feel sorry for the 4e fans now, even though I never bothered to learn how to play it, because WotC have dumped the core 4e world (Nentir Vale) and are going to use the radical events of the Sundering to remove the radical events of the Spellplague. However, it just seems to me that there is an endless cycle of blame being used to justify a switch to "new D&D". I don't see this 5th Edition "revamp" of the Realms as any different from the "Too many settings killed TSR" mantra that got thrown at 2nd Edition, back when 3rd Edition was first launched.
What I would really love to see from WotC is an end to the "blame the old stuff" culture and a move to a culture where new D&D products enhance the experience of fans of old D&D products as well as working for fans of their new fangled rules.
I'm going to wait and see. I won't be learning the 5th Edition rules (I'm sticking with 3rd Edition) but if they do manage to turn the 5th Edition Era Forgotten Realms into something more acceptable to me there might be a [i:s2dseg0t]few[/i:s2dseg0t] non-core books I might want to pick up at some point. As a fan of Realmspace, Al-Qadim, Maztica and Kara-Tur I would actually be interested in buying 5e Realms books that document parts of the world that have not been used in the past. Or if they did something like an Underdark for Kara-Tur with drow ninjas that would be something I might buy too. But I am more interested in grabbing old 2e material (and working how to make that work with the 3e rules) right now.
But from what I've seen of what WotC say they might do and what actually happens, I'm not really going to have a fully formed opinion on 5th Edition...until 6th Edition is published!