Why I Don't Like the Forgotten Realms (as the Default 5E Campaign Setting)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 6 июл 2024
- Today I pour a nice, tall glass of Haterade and lay out my issues with the Forgotten Realms as presented in 5th Edition game products.
Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 40% off any annual membership!
www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro: Forgotten Realms Bad?
01:52 - What’s the Deal With the Forgotten Realms?
04:11 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have a Clear Premise?
05:16 - What Do I Mean By Default Setting?
07:33 - A Word From Our Sponsor
08:39 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have a Distinct Tone
11:42 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have Iconic Imagery?
12:34 - Does the Forgotten Realms Provide Character Creation Inspiration?
15:59 - Does the Forgotten Realms Offer Plot Hooks?
17:16 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have Daunting Lore?
19:04 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have Blank Spaces on the Map?
21:17 - Final Thoughts: Forgotten Realms Good?
22:15 - Outro
PATREON: / supergeekmike
DISCORD: / discord
NEWSLETTER: www.supergeekmike.com/newsletter
____________________________________
WEBSITE/BLOG: www.supergeekmike.com/
WISHLIST: www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls...
Address for Packages:
Mike Christensen
100 W. High St., #1326
Moorpark, CA 93021
- PLEASE don't address things to "SupergeekMike"; I need to show I.D. when I pick up packages, and that isn't the name on my driver's license
Address for Letters:
Mike Christensen
P.O. Box 1326
Moorpark, CA 93020
TWITTER: / supergeekmike
INSTAGRAM: / supergeekmike
TIKTOK: / supergeekmike
TWITCH: / supergeekmike
____________________________________
More Links, including my One Funny link: www.supergeekmike.com/links 
Игры
![Eminem - Tobey (feat. Big Sean & Babytron) [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9xn0OHEZZ8Q/mqdefault.jpg)
My biggest issue is the fact that Wizards pretty much ignored the rest of Realms.
You could say… they forgot it….
There were other realms?
@@firelordeliteast6750 the Dalelands, Alaquim, the nation's that were across the ocean. I should have said the rest of Faerune.
Ignored even the rest of Faerun other than the sword coast
A couple of notes:
1. The Forgotten Realms used to not center on the Sword Coast. The 2nd Edition box set fleshes out the Dalelands as the starting region for new players. Of course, using the Sword Coast in that role kind of works as an homage to the setting's roots, since Ed Greenwood's first Realms stories were set in that region.
2. Before 3e, there were literally blank spaces on the Forgotten Realms map where DMs could put their own towns, cities, and nations. The 3e Realms team apparently decided that they wanted the map to be less sprawling, so they took those areas out.
3. The Forgotten Realms was originally supposed to be a setting without a reliable canon. The idea was supposed to be that everything you read about the realms came from either Volo (who's kind of an unreliable person) or Elminster (who was forwarding information from sources who may or may not be reliable). If the DM decided to change something, they could just tell a player who had read the material that the book's sources were wrong. Of course, the setting evolved into a canon lawyer's dream in the 2e era and beyond.
3. That is exactly how I run it now. Read a lot of basic wiki info and still dig down from time to time for inspiration, but generally rulebooks lore is just stories circulating in the world. Stories that often turn out partially false in the end.
Yes, I seem to remember the Dalelands or thereabouts (?) being intentionally largely left undescribed, for the DMs to flesh it out as needed. I have always imagined that this was supposed to be the real meaning of Forgotten Realms. It seems now, these are really forgotten, even by me...
@@trondbirkeland8094 most of the dalelands were described. It was Sembia, which was just south of the Dalelands that was deliberately left for GMs to flesh out.
Yes, Sembia was left vague but Cormyr, the Dalelands, Myth Drannor and Zhentil Keep were all more defined, and that area north-west of the Sea Of Fallen Stars was kind of the home territory of initial play. I liked it, partly because the inner sea is geographically more interesting-looking than the rather straight north-south line of the Sword Coast. It's also more central, so you could head west to those ocean trading ports or east to more forbidding lands like Thay.
True. Honestly I don’t get this video at all. Most points mentioned I don’t get and even contradict themselves. Some points are even setting independent and more about the products are structured, with basic rules, adventures, source books, etc.
I know an absurd amount about Toril, including that Toril is the name of the planet. I feel confident in saying that even with the benefits that weapons-grade nostalgia provides, the Forgotten Realms setting is the box-art on a LEGO set. It's a polished and reliable option that comes with complete instructions, and for some people it's exactly what they're looking for, no shade. But for me, the real value of LEGO came when I stopped just making the thing on the box and started exploring my own creativity, using what I learned from following the directions to make something uniquely my own. Forgotten Realms is a complete setting, but that means it's pretty well contained by its own well-defined boundaries. You can break it apart, though, and use any of the individual pieces that excite or inspire you while making something that's exclusively your own.
@@BreadDestroyer Yeah, that's exactly what I was driving at. My point may have drowned in my well of text; I can be guilty of over-explaining.
I think part of the issue isn't just that "There are no blank spaces on the map" but also its corollary "All the important NPC VIPs are written." If you're in Waterdeep you HAVE to take into account the likes of Elmisnter and Khelben Blackstaff. If you're up north you're going to eventually run into the likes of Wulfgar, Catti-Brie, and Drizzt. This runs the risk of going into R.A. Salvatore-levels of narrative wankery where these exemplars are the most important people in the room at any point. I mean, I certainly felt that way. My party certainly did when we ran afoul of a tribe of Gnolls and the DM had our asses saved by Drizzt. Ten minutes of "Drizzt's scimitars flashed and another five Gnolls were cleaved in twain!" and we knew what the score was, especially when he had Drizzt escort us to the end. That's boring. It kind of feels a little suffocating, knowing no matter what happens your character will never measure up to the named characters.
This
Well Toril was short hand for Abeir-Toril. And the shenanigans with 4E basically allowed Abeir to be removed from the mix so silver linings I suppose.
The Forgotten Realms being so well known that players know it better than DM's... That's me. I'm the DM that knew nothing, and had a player with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Sword Coast. It was extremely daunting. I almost stopped DMing because I felt inadequate since I knew literally *nothing* about this place and my player was basically telling everyone else about the city they were visiting. Thankfully got past that and now I'm in a group that really doesn't give a damn if I go by the "true" history or just make up my own.
I have the opposite problem. My players don't know anything about Forgotten Realms and they don't really care because it's not very interesting. The setting feels very generic, it has everything... and that's a problem because nothing feels special.
You got the point: Forgotten Realms' lore is overwhelming and is difficult to find a blank spot where GM's personal imagination can find its space freely. As fanatic fan of the old classic isometric games like Baldur's Gate, I got so affectionate to that world that I lost entire nights of sleep confronting sources from 3e, the Sundering, 5e, Salvatore's and Greenwood's publications, just to get prepared enough for a campaign in the Forgotten Realms. It was a comparable efford I could put in a deep historical research for my job. But the group exploded in excitement when Jarlaxle, Elminster, Rautholim appeared in their full magnificence... It was a moment of personal joy for me, indeed.
Ed Greenwood has a literal basement full of unpublished notes - one author remarked in a novel that when she asked him for a brief set of notes on the War Wizards of Cormyr, he obliged by cutting down the stuff he had on them... to FORTY-NINE A4 PAGES.
There are PLENTY Of less explored areas. And even many explored areas that not too much is known and danger and opportunity can be found...
I’m curious: did your players know those characters from playing D&D? Or from reading novels or playing videogames or some other non-RPG source?
I care about exactly two Realms NPCs:
Minsc and Boo.
This is the reason I prefer working on homebrew campaings, there isn't that much lore I need to understand for me to enjoy it. The prep work I need to do on my own for worldbuilding is harder, but I can take it on my own pace because I can work on that whenever I feel will be important.
I've never homebrewed a world before, but now that I've started using chat GPT I feel much more empowered to come up with lots of ideas and flesh things out fairly quickly. I'm kinda tempted to start a homebrew campaign, or at least I could do a world based on the Forgotten Realms that also can stray from the original at my discretion
@@danielhughes3758 Do it! I'm kicking off my first homebrew campaign tonight after many months of work. Pulling some deity and faction stuff of FR but otherwise all my own stuff. One of my players has a LOT of knowledge of the realms so I tried to keep the usage light but you can always pull from or being inspired by anything (and not just FR!)
This. So much this. Homebrew settings are great, because you can take it at your pace, develop what you need of the world for any given moment, and let the rest come as you need. Even better, IMO, is getting your players involved. My fiance created a homebrew a few years back with one of our game groups simply dubbed "The Hunters' Guild," which was basically a mash-up borrowing from The Witcher, Bloodborne, and a few other pieces of media we enjoy, centering on a bunch of highly trained monster hunters in a world which the gods seem to have abandoned, and in which true magic has been lost, leaving only those who make warlock pacts able to truly use anything resembling magic. He has plot and a few overarching concepts, and typically pre-generates the PCs (handing them out to the players he feels will create the best concepts around what he gives them), and then plays a sort of round-robin world generating session zero, where he'll pick a player and ask them to describe a part of the world centered on a broad guideline, such as "there's an impassible region to the south where no one ventures. What is this, and why does nobody venture into this place?", and lets the player spin the idea from there. We've done this with two groups thus far (three if you count one that a player from the first Hunter's Guild campaign started), and have gotten incredibly different worlds that have great detail, and it really helps get the players invested in this world that they have helped to create.
Most of all my DM’ing for the past 30+ years has been centered in FR. Homebrewing an entire world is a long term and daunting task even for experienced DMs. For 5E WoTC gave new DM’s absolutely nothing for materials in helping in world building. As WoTC goals were to maximize profits with sales of player based materials. Beyond that WoTC NEVER encouraged DM’s to refer back to older materials for FR lore which there are 1000’s of pages of materials spread across previous editions.
Yeah. Even when something is as open ended as something like Yrth is, with some mysteries that the GM is clearly meant to fill in with whatever they want I get this nagging 'but what if I get it wrong' sense in my head, and I suspect I'd feel the same way if I ever decided to read Hârn, the publishers of which have explicitly stated they're never going to go past a specific year so you're canonically safe starting in that year with the established plothooks. I don't mind there being an established setting, I'd just rather one that feels like a rough sketch of one - A few details to riff on, but nothing so concrete as to feel intimidating.
Honestly, though? I'd rather just make something up as I go along - Ideally with my player's involvement. "You want to play a dwarf? Sure. How do you envision dwarves working in this setting? What do you want their culture to be - Are we going with industrious miners? Snow white... things? Master artisans working in metallurgy? Gorons with the serial numbers filed off?" - Either implicitly or explicitly. And as a player? I know I feel more engaged with a setting when the GM leaves an entire chunk of it open for me to stamp my mark on, or we as a table create it during session 0, even if where I'm stamping my mark on is way off camera for the purpose of the campaign. (Same reason I always gave canonical characters a wide birth when I was doing fandom roleplay and writing fanfic in the early 00s, honestly)
I am currently running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, as someone who knew very little about the Forgotten Realms aside from passing familiarity with the main cities, and I am completely of two minds about it. On the one hand, it writes the city of Waterdeep so. well. It has a whole section (supposedly written by Volo, of Volo's Guide to Monsters) that reads as a traveler's guide so evocative I wanted so badly to be able to actually visit. The book as a whole gave enough depth and character to Waterdeep that it didn't feel like just "generic city," but still left enough room for me to improvise whatever I need to. I love it as a source material, and the adventure is well written, as well.
And on the other hand, I am dreading the second the players decide to leave the city for one reason or another. Everything outside of Waterdeep feels exactly the kind of 'too much, I know I'm going to get it wrong' intimidating you were talking about. And one of my players HAS read the Drizz't novels, and IS playing a Drow because of it, so there are parts that I worry about getting wrong and ruining his fantasy. So far, it hasn't been a problem (my players have been great, they're flexible, I honestly don't anticipate push back even if I just fully change elements of the lore.) But at the same time, I definitely did some fan wiki deep dives into recent Forgotten Realms history when the book referenced events I didn't know much about, or when one of my players chose a god to follow that had a complicated history. It wasn't terrible, but it was a lot of work, and I know if we leave Waterdeep, I'm going to start feeling overwhelmed.
You could retire the characters at the end of the book and move on to something else. In theory the next place to take the characters is Dungeon of the Mad Mage, but in my experience it's not a very compelling adventure.
Or they could be kidnapped and enslaved by the Gith'yanki, overthrow the slavers and take control of the astral ship only to crash it into a completely different Prime Material Plane (read: your new homebrew setting) with the goal of getting back home.
Or something completely different happens. You're the DM. You control literally everything about the game that's not the PCs. Screw the rules, you are the rules.
Either way you should discuss how you feel with your group and see what they want to do after you finish Dragon Heist.
what you do is you let your Players know it takes time to make a days session and that if we go there it well be there nowhere else for that day that's it. ask if there is somewhere they like the campaign to go? if so where let them know that it will be at the next session you now have a week are more to learn all you need about one spot on the map, not the hole thing. Look up RUclips videos on that place or area, look up wikis on the things and people there and who or what has been there, find your hook there.
Honestly, just make it your own place outside the city. Who cares what the official stuff says. Use what you have read in the book as a starting point and build off of that. When your players step outside the city, describe a world that you imagine the city resides in and let them draw a map based on that description - you could give them the opportunity to look over the landscape, maybe from a tower or a wall/window at the edge of the city and describe some key points of interest they could see (a distant mountain peak, a forest, a small village a day or twos ride away, maybe the surrounding farm land) and let them draw a rough map from that. Make them sound as dull or as interesting as you like. You'll soon work out what your players are interested in doing and where they'll be going. Your FR is your own, offer your players as little or as much of it as you want to. Don't worry about what the official stuff says, it's yours, not WotCs.
If you're players want to leave the city, they'll likely have an objective in mind and you can make that as close or as far away as possible. You can offer up little distractions and sidequests along the journey. If they say, "I want to leave the city to find this artifact or this person". Tell them they can ask around for information about it. In the sessions they are asking you can do your prep for where that thing is. You can get an NPC to tell them "oh I heard it's over this mountain range" or "beyond this forest" and the players can go to a high point and look for that location to add to their rough map. Or the NPC could say "oh, I heard that they have just returned and are on the other side of the city in this location" and then you keep your players from leaving the city and make them look around an area they haven't been to yet or is difficult for them to go to. And you can always do what Critical Role did and just allow them to discover a fast travel system - a portal or a air ship. Then you can skip straight to the location that the player wants to go to. You could even have the fast travel system break on arrival so that the players have to figure out a way to fix it or maybe they only have the money for one directions travel and they have to figure out a different way back.
If you want, you can make this new place a good reason to grab another book and add in the reason for going there into that books map and lore. But it might be easier to just build as much of the world as you need for your players to explore and build it out as you go.
Just, don't allow yourself to be constrained by the official books. They are a starting point for your own world and story. The trick is to get comfortable with building off of them. Every session you should try to add in extra details or locations to the campaign setting you are using. Details that are inspired by your players interests. Locations that tie into things your players are looking for or have mentioned in their backstory. Things that will make your players want to go there and give you a good reason to try out expanding the world.
Yeah, after Dragon Heist, retire that party and start another module. You got a Drizzt fan, so you should look into Rime of the Frostmaiden, which takes place in Ten-Towns and Icewind Dale.
I'm a new GM also running Dragon Heist with minimal knowledge about the setting, and I completely feel you. I've communicated to my players that this campaign is scoped to Waterdeep so they probably won't go out of range without giving me a major heads up, but (even with the slow tempo of my game) I can't help panicking about what to do next. However, I try to remind myself that that won't be my decision but will have a discussion with the players about what they want after the Dragon Heist story comes to a close and adjust accordingly.
I don't have anyone familiar with the lore at my table, but in your case think it's best to talk with that player to get a feeling which stories and aspects are important to them. This will help you put bits of that into your own campaign for them to enjoy that fantasy, while also communicating "listen, I can't read everything you have and tailor the experience accordingly, so expect inconsistencies and changes in the world we're playing". A Drow player like that can also help you steer the adventure to something you can prepare if others are onboard - either to somewhere like Luskan via Jarlaxle, or towards the Underdark exploring the environment in which Drow society lives amongst various other dark and scary creatures. That's just an idea, maybe your players want something completely else.
I am so glad you made this video. I am still new to D&D, and I started a homebrew campaign based in Neverwinter because we started with the Essential Kit, and my biggest problem has been trying to understand the Sword Coast without all the previous lore knowledge as a base and it has been daunting. Glad to know that it isn't just me.
I had a similar experience when I started DMing. What helped me was learning to say "this is my Forgotten Realms, it may differ from the published Forgotten Realms". Reaching for the existing lore as inspiration when I wanted to, but feeling free to ignore it and/or add my own stuff as well.
As a DM, the huge wealth of lore and information available in FR makes my game building much easier. I can look anywhere on the map and find tons of ideas for adventures. I don’t have time to make up a world and have an answer for every question or location that comes up. I love that it is possibly the most developed fantasy world of all time. Whatever happens in the future is up to me and my players.
The Dawn War pantheon is certainly the best pantheon. I still use the 4e lore for the Raven Queen.
She’s the best 😁
4E Raven queen was the best version of that goddess.
100%. My favorite goddess was the 4E Raven Queen.
Raven Queen is one of the best deities created for D&D and I use that in all of my games, whether it's Greyhawk or Eberron. The lore is strong enough to fit any D&D cosmology.
@@Guts-the-Berserker I joke that turned into a real thing was the Raven Queen communicated with her followers through Tweets.
The major issue that I feel you have is that how Forgotten Realms has been handled in its current iteration. Most of these concerns are addressed in previous editions especially third edition. Wizards has ripped out all of the information and exciting parts of the setting to be more Vanilla. The Sword Coast (which is all they talk about) is such a Tiny part of the realms and is the most boring section. Please, I beg you, at least find a pdf copy of the Forgotten Realms: Campaign Setting for third edition. I feel like this will shed so much more light on it.
I suggest the campaign supplements from 1e/2e. Each one came with poster sizes maps of each region covered.
Ok I think I realized why I do like the Forgotten Realms, and that's because you and I look for the opposite things in settings to run. I feel much more at home running a campaign, not just in a dnd setting with a lot of established lore already in it, but in the world of fictional works that I and my players are already familiar with, like Hyrule, or Middle Earth. I want to point to familiar places and people so that my players already know the history that it probably makes sense their characters would know too (and it's less work for me muahahaha)
@@arklainquirk But that player is just so dumb. Honestly. A DM should not be required to run a world after its lore. They should be able to adapt and alter it to their tastes. I might be the third kind of DM. I prefer settings with a lot of information, so I can choose what to take, what to drop and how to alter everything according to my players. I really don't like worlds and adventures who leave blank spaces. Feels cheap to me. After all it's easy to drop and alter if you want to but hard to make things up on your own.
I really like playing on he realms as it creates a shared experience across many tables.
I can comment you how my fiancee’s character successfully did a saving throw against Mordenkainen and you know why it is a big deal
(Tho that wizard is from greyhawk but you catch my idea)
@@arklainquirk Ugh. Hang in there, mate, and good luck with your players in the future. 5e really seems to have a weird kind of spoiled TTRPG players, who don't have a clue about the important parts of the social contract. No wonder, there is such a DM shortage if enough players behave like that.
@@JoniWan77 " A DM should not be required to run a world after its lore."
Sure, but some of our brains just don't work that way.
I *know* that when my players leave Phandalin and decide to check out Neverwinter while they run down some supplies, that I could just make stuff up about Neverwinter - but my brain won't let me do that. I keep worrying about messing stuff up, or getting things wrong and the players not knowing what's going on because a faction isn't acting in a characteristic way - and it puts a lot of strain on me mentally because I don't understand *why* things are as they are in the setting.
Whereas, if it's a "fake" city, and I've just got basic motivations for factions written down - I can not only improvise - but I can let the players unknowingly develop things. "Is there a mage's college where we can go talk to some one?" - "Um.... yeah, there is, north side. Wizardface, you've heard the headmaster is a jerk".
The existence of lore makes me feel like I need to know all that lore, and I just end up spending sessions with lots of long pauses where I'm looking things up.
" After all it's easy to drop and alter if you want to but hard to make things up on your own."
For me, it's the exact opposite.
@@rich63113 Fair point. I always had trouble understanding this sentiment, so I might have misappropriated my own feelings on this upon everybody.
I take the perspective of "my" Forgotten Realms. The last game I ran (9 months bi-weekly with us finishing the game with lvl 6 PCs) was "homebrew in the Forgotten Realms". I wanted to run a game in a desert and found the Anourach Desert in Faerun and decided that'd be my biome for the game. I used the Forgotten Realms Wiki for inspiration and ideas, but wasn't afraid to ignore/change/throw out anything that i didn't like or didn't fit.
EDIT: Another way of saying this is that I enjoyed using the Forgotten Realms as a premade setting to create my homebrew adventures within.
Right on. I did not even use D&D rules. I used Fantasy Hero.
I see DnD lore and settings as "narrative lego": Enclosed are the parts and instructions for making what is in the picture on the box, but you are free to just tweak that spaceship to your liking, or make something completely different altogether.
Spot on! Make it yours! If you want crazy historical ideas check out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_History_of_the_Realms
I’ve been doing this in Elturgard. “My” Elturgard bares some resemblance but lore-wise I’m sure it’s a mess.
In defense of Forgotten Realms, while I also like "DM's sandbox" -style settings with a lot of mysteries left unanswered and giving the DM freedom to do anything they want, it has a really interesting good side to it! If you want to run a prep-light game with lots of interesting characters at your disposal with a quick search from the wiki, Forgotten Realms has so many hooks, twists, turns, characters, items, and history to build your story around. You can take any location, any faction in the setting and there are interesting tidbits around its history and the characters within to build entire campaigns out of. My current campaign is set in the Sword Coast, with a civil war within the Lord's Alliance (ie. the three main cities) as the backdrop for it, and it's been such a fun journey to see how I can mix and match the campaign I wanted to run within the existing lore and history. Any prep I need to make, I can search the wiki about the locales to be featured and the characters around there, and build from there how they might be connected to the main plot or any subplots. If anything unexpected happens, I can again use the wiki to help with the coming up with stuff on the fly. It's a very unorthodox way of playing, I guess, but it's amazing how many possibilities for depth and cool stories and beats there are when you're willing to read a few wiki pages before a session. And yes, it takes some mixing and matching with the information available, and sometimes the articles on the wiki might be long and there might be lots of them in prep, but then again, as a DM, who doesn't like learning about lore? Who doesn't need to adapt existing stuff for their exact needs in their campaign?
tl;dr: Use Forgotten Realms wiki for building adventures mixing and matching info from locales, factions, and characters kind of like writing a fanfic, or doing an improv with setting info provided. Worried about your worldbuilding skills, or if you have enough points and characters of interest? Use Forgotten Realms wiki and you'll never run out of stuff to use for your campaign.
This is how I use it too. Honestly id be even more intimidated trying to use Middle Earth than the Realms.
I think the appeal of the Realms isn't that you can make a character that's specific to the Realms, but rather that any character you want to make can fit into the Realms somewhere.
I could see that logic, for sure (especially in the 5e version)
@@SupergeekMike It's true for 3e as well.
My first campaign was set in the Sword Coast because I ran the Lost Mines of Phandevler adventure. I honestly enjoyed running the setting for a time since there was so much established lore, I could find details about any corner of the world and use that for inspiration, changing details as I saw fit.
Once Explorers Guide to Wildemount came out, I immediately switched to Exandria because A) myself and a few of my friends are critters, and B) EGtW does the “leaving blank spots” / “leaving unanswered questions” things so well! All my 5e campaigns will take place in Exandria as far as I’m concerned
As a new DM playing with new players, there is so much to learn just with game mechanics and figuring out how to run a starter set that I didn’t have the brain-space to devote to learning any of the lore before playing. When my players had some lore-related questions in the first session, I just decided to use a combination of Greek and Celtic mythology to explain things, figuring I’d look it up between session. But when I looked, I was so overwhelmed with all the info and no easy, quick overview I just bagged it and went with my own made-up stuff.
Check out ShadowDark RPG kickstarter. It will be my new goto for RPG in Forgotten Realms.
I think something you're missing in this conversation is the fact that for the longest time, the Forgotten Realms books and videogames were much, much popular than D&D itself, and only recently has that paradigm shifted. It was never about expecting new DMs to have to go through all the lore, but rather, that you'd expect only hardcore fans of the lore would want to pick up the game. I for one have been running games in Mercer's Tal'dorei for years now, because I find it new and exciting, as well as easier to make mine, but the second a seasoned player jumps in, I am asked whether the classic factions of the forgotten realms or the red mages and rose knights of the dragonlance settings, with an expectation that they or at least a parallel will be found in this game. There are some aspects that are just too iconic, and it doesn't matter what setting we're playing on, if my players go underground chasing after dark elves, I owe it to them to face them with the twisted splendor of Menzoberranzan, because they deserve to have that shared experience with the players who've loved the game for decades before them.
Hmmm…interesting.
Was that hyperbole, or have all (or nearly all) the “seasoned” players you’ve played with been deeply familiar with the Realms?
I’ve been playing D&D since before the FR was published, but even when I’ve played with people who were younger (but still experienced D&D players), I’ve almost never encountered people who were particularly familiar with or fans of the Realms. It used to be (in the ‘80s and early ‘90s) that if there were any expectations like that, it was that elements of Greyhawk would show up in every game. And other than Phandelver (which I only in this video found out is set in the Realms), I’ve never run or played in the Realms-and AFAIK, nobody I know has ever run FR or played in it in a home game. Though, interestingly, most of the gamers I know who are the right age have played the FR-based computer games.
So I know that FR must be popular-if for no other reason than WotC wouldn’t keep publishing so much content for it if it weren’t-but I’ve never encountered anybody actually gaming in it, outside of adventurers’ league games at conventions.
Point being: it _is_ possible for people to be seasoned D&D players and not be Realms aficionados, or even particularly familiar with the Realms. I don’t doubt your experiences, I’m just wondering to what degree they are representative of the D&D playerbase as a whole?
I enjoyed the forgotten realms stories when I was 12. I tried to reread the Drizzt books last year, and it probably took me 6mos to get back through one, and I quit halfway through the second. They did not age well for me.
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
I would love for you to cover Greyhawk CY576 as covered in the 1983 boxset as a starting campaign World.
Greyhawk will probably always be my favourite D&D setting.
As the home of Mordenkainen, Tenser, and Bigby, it really should be the default setting.
It's definitely underated and underutilized, lots of great 2e modules in that setting, it should of gotten reboot for 5e
What I liked about Forgotten Realms is becoming lost. You started off in surroundings that, while fantasy themed, were largely familiar, like an unassuming town in the Dales, and as your character explored and grew in power you discovered with him a world that was far vaster, stranger, and more and more dangerous than he ever imagined. But, alas those days are long gone. At some point around in the reign of 3ed, D&D lost this concept of a character arc that went from familiar to fantastic, and in the process the setting when from familiar to generic, and I do think there is a subtle difference. When everything is fantastical nothing is.
Your description of the Forgotten Realms as a land forgotten by our world was the first time I’ve ever been interested in the setting. The idea of our half-remembered real cultures and gods being present in this world as fossils to be dug up by adventurers is brilliant. I’m imagining the awakening of Ra, will he snatch back the sun from Amaunator?
The egyptian gods actually exist in the setting. My favorite PC is a paladin whose whole shtick is that she's a mortal vessel for Ra trying to enact his will on the world. Actually, for most of my PCs the inspiration was digging in some obscure native cultures and constructing the fantasy version of that in the setting. ^^;
yeah the original FR concept was very heavily tied into the idea of being remnants of our real world cultures. this is why there's like a few irl pantheons that exist canonically in FR and not only that, explicitly arrived from "another world" (ours)
Your point about the daunting lore, and the possibility of your players knowing more than you about the world, was exactly the train of thought that led to me using a home-brew setting for my first DMing experience. My brother-in-law (who has been a forgotten realms fan for quite a while) knew so much about it, that I knew I couldn't give him a good experience in it that lived up to his prior knowledge. So I started in my own, and we all discovered it together. It was great!
My first experience with Forgotten Realms was as a player. One of the other players just kept fanboying the entire session and I felt left out. There was no sense of discovery or awe, it was just listening to another player gushing about things I'd never heard of.
The problem there is the other player Metagaming, not the setting. Tell that guy "Your character is 1st level!, he doesn't know jack about X!" :)
i really dislike it when my players do this to other players. an extension of this is them constantly talking about older campaigns i ran for them while playing in another game with new players. "yeah that's cool, i like the inside joke, but can we not make it super awkward for the other players"
Yeah, I've been there. I prefer Homebrew worlds for the 'act of discovery' you mention.
Yeah, you need to read the FR 3.x material and see how that addresses most, but not all, of your concerns. Even the FR 1e/2e add-on books would help out. Maybe that's why WotC didn't (re)publish all that content - it's just sitting there waiting to be picked up (and the 3.x content is, IMO, some of the best ever out out by WotC)
IMO, the FR isn't just one setting... it's a whole bunch of settings kind of crammed together with the idea that you can pick and choose to work in a specific locale (so my current campaign is set in the Celtic-themed Moonshea Isles off of the Sword Coast) yet have the scope available to travel to other places in the world.
My first encounter with the Forgotten Realms was back in 1987 with the 1st box set. Loved it back than, stopped playing during the end days of 2E and came back in 2020. I was excited to get back to DMing in the Forgotten Realms, as I had many fond years of adventuring within it, but before long I began to feel locked into the existing lore, more than 20 years worth, that the realm no longer had that wild feel, everything felt packed to the gills, it was no longer the point of light setting it once was. I think its great that there is love for FR, but for me as a DM, I want to have a world of exploration and mystery that I cannot go read about in tons of places, I wanted something wild once more, something grittier, which is what led me to stop running campaigns in it. Now, I do still love FR and love to read about it, but as for a setting for me to run games in, it is way too charted and I would rather not ret-con, destroy, or ignore that which has already been created out of respect and a love of the setting.
I am a huge fan of the realms. I have collected realms books for years and have almost all the novels. Honestly it's a lot and I definitely understand where you are coming from. The best thing Wizards could do is make a real setting book for this edition and not just the tiny sword coast book. There are so many cool locations in the realms. As for places to get started for fun and interesting lore goes try the first box set for the realms on drive-thru rpg and the 3.0 campaign setting books those are my favorite books.
Yeah, it's mostly the DM Guild fleshing out the setting now. Good books, but still. I think a proper campaign setting book would be enough. Or they go the other round, just publish one book about one part of the continent and let the rest for the imagination for the groups. Worked with Wildemount and other settings.
You have many valid points, especially true about high level npcs.
In starting adventures, for example, essentials kit (and its continuation)- the bad guys threaten the whole sea-trade route, there is no reason why Neverwinter won’t react to it, it’s a port city that thrives on trade. And mind it as it’s written in the setting it’s about one and a half days on foot, or like half a day on a ship
@@BreadDestroyer this is a huge pet peeve of mine. While I think there's merit to showing low level PCs the kinds of problems that they might face at higher levels, to give a sense of progression and potential, so many settings completely blow past that and make things that should feel fantastical and dangerous feel routine. Unless you separate these epic events from the present by centuries or millennia, they're going to outshine the current adventure
I think my problem with the forgotten realms is that I found it really hard to find any information on basically anything besides the sword coast book.
Like, I don't want to read adventures because one day I might play them and I don't want to be spoiled, and I also don't want to go out of my way and download pdfs from older editions.
Anytime I had any interest in one aspect of the lore, I had to search on a wiki that didn't explain much.
you mean "current" information? There are 35 years of lore about the Forgotten Realms. There are few areas that are devoid of additional information.
I use the wiki a lot, and it really helps
i know what you mean, we ran a game set there recently for pathfinder and had a hell of a time trying to find information about places etc
yeah unfortunately 5e seems to be obsessed with only the sword coast areas From Icewind Dale to Candlekeep (which in my opinion are kind of overdone at this point), if you look back to older editions they flesh out areas like The MoonShae Iles, the Northern icy mountains of Bloodstone, Vasa and Damara, to the Silver Marches, and Anauroch, onto the Dalelands, Moonsea and Sea of Fallen Stars, The Dragon Coast and Thay, all the way South to Calimshan, Haluraa and Jungles of Chult, out over the great grass sea to East and the mysterious lands of Kara Tur.
3.5 pdfs are easy to find, you know.
I suspect that them picking the Forgotten Realms as a default setting and bringing Ed Greenwood and R. A. Salvatore to help was a way to make emends about 4e. They wanted to show that they were making big changes to the game and picked Forgotten Realms because of how criticized the 4e version of the setting was.
It's also interesting how the Sword Coast is the most popular area of the Realms. I suspect this actually happened because of the popularity of the Baldur's Gate games and it was not true during AD&D days. Ed Greenwood's original campaigns were set in Cormyr.
i have the 2nd es. forgotten realms box. the focus was around the north-west moonsea area. Cormyr, the dalelands and zhentil keep.
people miss many of the best areas of the FR focusing too much on the Sword Coast
Ed Greenwood's first stories were set on the Sword Coast, specifically about Mirt the Moneylender wandering the coast road from Luskan down to Baldur's Gate and getting into hijinks, and eventually settling in Waterdeep. His first home AD&D campaigns a decade later were also set around Waterdeep. It was a second campaign he started in his public library job that introduced Cormyr, and then his OG roleplaying party started a second campaign in the Dalelands. His various adventuring parties visited other parts of the Realms, but they tended to based in those regions (to the point where he himself has said he's never actually run in-depth campaigns in many parts of the Realms, despite inventing and writing about them, which is how they ended up being fleshed out by other writers, sometimes not very well, after TSR bought the setting).
It is the case the BG made the Sword Coast more popular. In fact, the Sword Coast was originally just a small part of the coast between Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, and as the term became more popular it expended to incorporate most of the west coast of Faerun from Icewind Dale to Tethyr, and in 5E also inland to the Great Desert. So this very specific term now applies to about 1/6 of the entire continent and incorporates two massive regions (the North/Savage Frontier and the Western Heartlands).
However, it is also the case that 1E and 2E specifically refer to the Realms in two stages: the "Heartlands" or "the bit Ed Greenwood fleshed out in massive detail" and "Beyond the Heartlands" ("the bits he created in not as much detail, so can be outsourced to other writers of wildly varying ability level"). The Heartlands were Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, the Sword Coast, the Western Heartlands, Cormyr, the Dalelands, the Moonsea, the Dragon Coast and the Vast (the North got later absorbed into this area). So it was always the centre of events, the difference is that those "beyond" regions got some development in 1-3E and absolutely none at all in 5E.
What would you change about the Forgotten Realms?
Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 40% off any annual membership!
www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
Honestly. You're not wrong, like 5e tried take make things simple which is unfortunate especially with using forgotten realms. Like MrRhexx with his "what they don't tell you" series paints a much larger picture with plenty of ideas that can be used. Like I have two character ideas that stem from the idea of a wizard serving the a dracolich who earned the title the creeping Doom. One of these characters is a character hope to play soon being the soul of a wizard sent to the realm of Strahd before possessing a body and becoming a warlock
Your issue with the cultures and such is more a function of the edition than of the setting. Look at the 3x version of the setting. There are several different human ethnicities, complete with their own cuisines, languages, alphabets, and even pantheons. And that’s just humans. Same with the other races. 5e is just such a watered down edition they stripped out all of the flavor in favor of streamlining it. It’s why I still play 3x. I feel really bad for how much flavor they stripped out of the game. They even had regional feats which were only available at first level to flavor your character for its culture and racial/lineage feats for spicing up the racial traits. It’s just 5e.
9:55 That's not a problem of the Forgotten Realms.
That is a problem of the D&D (and Pathfinder) rulesets which produce way too powerfull characters - which unfortunately results in a vast amount of creatures that would utterly desctroy every possible and at least somewhat believable ecosystem.
Even worse: All character progression in D&D is solely focused on combat which is a huge problem. The best change that was made with the release of 3.0 was the introduction of the skill system with many skills that where not combat related...but unfortunately that skill system was completely neutered with 5e. Now it is all back to combat and combat alone. Other RPGs, like The Dark Eye or GURPS, do a far better job on creating interesting, capable characters that do not destroy the balance of the entire world just because they killed a gazillion monsters and are therefore high level.
This form of character design is also a huge hindrance when trying to develop believable characters that are not entirely one-dimensional.
The early versions of the setting, before the novels and video games, focused much more on the Dalelands and Cormyr, and there were explicit blank spaces on the map for DMs to use. That version had a very different vibe, and honestly it was a bit too empty for me. The Sword Coast in that era was one of the faraway, exotic locales. That all changed as the more popular adaptations focused on the Sword Coast and filled in the blank spaces.
A lot of the Realms novels also focused on explaining the various rule changes between each new edition of the game. Rather than just handling rules changes in an abstract way, TSR & WotC published a LOT of novels to provide in-universe explanations of the various changes to the magic system, classes, races, and so on. That's where stuff like the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague came from. There was also a whole thing about introducing Dragonborn to Toril.
6:10 “It was a perfect pantheon”
TOTALLY AGREE! The first time I made a character, I wanted to pick a god… but all I had available was the 5e handbook… and all of those felt either bland or cumbersome.
I was so entranced by the Raven Queen on Critical Role, and I was happy to see that they were using (and reclaiming) 4e’s pantheon… WITH ONE EXCEPTION: Sarenrae. That’s a carry-over from Pathfinder :) Ashley/Pike didn’t want to switch.
I think the CR crew's earliest sessions were D&D 4e. Then they switched to Pathfinder 1e, and then switched to D&D 5e for streaming. So I wouldn't be surprisded if the whole Exandrian pantheon is kind of a mismash of 4e and PF1 gods, with names now changed so they can independently publish setting material without violating anyone's intellectual property.
If none of the gods that were available worked for you, your DM should have worked with you to create a god that you liked. That's a failure of your DM, not Forgotten Realms. I'm assuming that the god you would have preferred would have been no more active with his followers as much as any other god isn't very active with their users.
I love the FR because of the amount of detail. Sure it doesn't always line up with what I am trying to accomplish at the time of the campaign I'm running, but as a DM I'm free to change what I want. Having so many years of lore baked into the setting allows me to find great plot hooks for my own campaign. The issue I have with a lot of bare bones settings is its just that and puts the majority of the world building up to me. That takes up precious prep time having to fill in the gaps the world leaves, while in a place as detailed as the sword coast all I need is a quick google search to find out whats going on in the area and what my players can expect or be surprised by.
I grew up with the Realms, reading the books in highschool. The appeal for me, would be the same for anyone reading Tolkien, and wanting to play in Middle Earth. There's so much lore, any character could fit into the world, and you could drop a setting anywhere in it. Sadly I haven't played much in Faerun.
I'll always care for the Forgotten Realms because of Drizzt Do'Urden. RA Salvatore's novels were my first exposure to D&D
I think Mike's base premise wrong. The FR is a fine setting for the base setting. The problem is the lack of support coupled with people thinking they have to stick to canon.
There should be a Campaign Guide instead of lore scattered across adventures or in products on the DMs Guild. That's a "WotC doesn't know what they are doing" problem, not a FR problem.
Aa far as novels, I would recommend:
Waterdeep: City of Splendors
The Haunted Lands trilogy
The Sembia series
The Erevis Cale series
House of Serpents trilogy
Literally every reason why you say it doesn't work as a default setting is why it's a default setting.
The Lore is all filled out, so new DMs or someone who doesn't enjoy the macros of worlsbuild this is a perfect setting.
The theme is just default general fantasy for this fantasy table top game.
There plenty to draw character inspiration from, you can be a theif from the Xanathar's Guild, a Scholar from Candlekeep, a Bard Street rat from Balder's Gate who learn how to survive on the streets using his charm and talent.
While there are much more out their setting, Eberon with its weird magic punk nior setting, Dragonlance for its brutal war setting, and Exandria which is trying to examine the classic troops and make us think, but Forgotten Realm is just the generic default fantasy setting.
@@arklainquirk it is. Jeremy Crowfort and Chris Perkins have stated thus.
Majority(all but like two maybe three) pre-written are based in forgotten realms.
All lore written in the books are for the forgotten realm. That's why Artificers was introduced in the Eberon Book because Artificers were an eberon only class in the dnd multivers lore.
Even in the books they call out stuff like this. Drows are evil in forgotten realms because of Lolth and the culture that was built around her worship. But this is not true in Eberon.
So yes, Forgotten Realm is the default setting and all expression books must be written with the lore for forgotten realm. While campaign settings are to detail how the lore differes.
And really it's the DMG that talks about homebrew, not the PHB as much.
@Arklain Quirk
Starter sets to introduce people to the game are based in forgotten realm
The movie is set in forgotten realm.
The list in your evidence starts with forgotten realm, nor Dark sun which would be first alphabetically, and not Grey Hawk which was the first setting, and not Dragonlance which is the most popular setting.
The mini line is called icons of the forgotten realms until they changed it.
The video games is set in forgotten realms.
The novels.
Looks up what is the default setting for dnd and its just about forgotten realms.
You cant point to the blurb at the front of the book(that also prioritizes theforgotten realms first) that's purpose is about explain what dnd is and its 50 year history. It's the defualt, all th3 branding, marketing, third party media, and characters used are based in forgotten realms.
A good setting is a multi-course meal, or at least a buffet. There are many options, and they maintain their distinct flavors. Forgotten Realms is like taking a seven-course meal, running it through a blender, and making NutraLoaf from the remains. Greenwood probably didn’t intend his setting to become so genericized.
18:32 Completely agree. The "Points of Light" in 4e was great for this exact reason.
Love that you picked up on this topic, as it's one that I'm very interested in. I love sword coast, but it's daunting as a GM to find a "new" campaign premise for adventurers in the forgotten realms, and I'm bullocks at building from scratch. So far Eberron is my favorite published setting, but I'll have to take another look at the 4th edition setting!
5E has been more light Lore written in their hardcover products instead lore inspiring. Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep was more inspiring than the three Spelljammer books. As DM from way back in 1E the few points of light trope is more inspiring than having 3 sentences of let us not tick people off to describe a whole region of the realms.
And the number of published races 73 with 106 subclass is too many options. As the speeder kid say, “When everyone special no one is.” In fact, the Realms has going way into cartoon/anime land of anything is possible but no one cares.
Never been a fan of FR, and you hit the nail on the head with the barrier for entry all the lore represents. If I want to play a game set in a world where generic fantasy tropes are generally true, it’s a lot less work just to mad-libs quick-brew it. “Great, you’re from the town of [town name] in the kingdom of [kingdom name]. The town is built around [feature]. While life is generally pretty okay there, the presence of [complication] threatens it.”
Roughly the same value-add to my game as FR and a ton less work on my end. Sure it won’t be as deep as Faerun, but I don’t need deep when the setting isn’t going to do anything with that depth besides “uhh, there’s an angsty elf”; I need a complication I can set my adventurers to interacting with.
If you’re going to lore bomb me, you’d better be giving me something I couldn’t pull out on the fly in exchange for that work. Take Ravenloft or Ebberon for example. Those worlds have a distinct feel to them that FR lacks. Greyhawk as presented in 3.X was super boring, but it also filled a couple of pages in the PH, so no real investment required.
The Star Trek Dilemma ("You're the only ship in the sector" "But, we're only three days from Earth!") element is strong in the 5e Realms adventures that's for sure - I hate both the pacing and the inaction of high level residents.
One of the players in my campaign did something dishonest enough I felt a god of lies needed to get involved. I chose Cyric and had him show up for one scene to do what I needed.
When the session was over, my player informed me of Cyric's extensive backstory and how different my Cyric was from the real character.
My player was cool about it, but I agree with Mike that my player knowing more about The Forgotten Realms than I do puts me at a disadvantage.
I started DMing my first campaign with Dragon of Icespire Peak. My players (all newbies) and I wanted to continue the story and had backstory ideas - so after finishing that adventure I started homebrewing the world with my players to be able to create a more character-focused campaign. So now the only parts I took are Phandalin, Neverwinter (though there I homebrewed everything but the name) and a few gods that my players had already expressed interest in. I am really happy with that approach, but I was incredibly lucky with my players and their interests, especially because they're all first-timers.
So I will say I didn’t realize for a long time that Forgotten Realms wasn’t exactly what you think a D&D campaign to be. I thought it was just some generic coast where mainline adventures tend to take place and a whole world for the DM to make stuff up. However the more I learned about it I just decided to make my own homebrew world anyway with a similar vibe. I wanted a kingdom rather than a like of citystates for a more medieval vibe.
This video was really helpful. I'm currently running a campaign that's a successor to some old games of my group - which started with Lost Mines of Phandelver - which has thus far taken place in the Outer Planes but will soon have everyone returning to Sword Coast. As I anticipate the upcoming setting shift, I can't help but feel locked down by all the issues you've raised here. Some major conflicts will be taking place in the cities and I find my challenge is less learning about these cities as much as trying to make them distinctly interesting.
I have a few good plans in mind, but seeing this takes me back to my very first time DMing, which was a one-shot. The idea for it sprang up from me just inventing lore in a notepad, line by line, based only on some basic fantasy knowledge. To this day, that one-shot has no clearly defined setting that's beholden to anywhere and it was still the most liberating experience I've had as a DM. In future, while I'm happy for now to work with the current setting I have and apply some creativity to the issues with it, I would like to just do more world-inventing to ensure any future campaigns I run aren't too limited.
And I'm not gonna lie, but I will keep it vague in case any of my players read this, I think reflecting on all of this has given me a new inspiration for how the campaign will end. There's an aspect of it that my players may have you to thank for, whenever we get to it!
Great video, thank you. When you were saying that the cities don't have a lot that separates them I was reminded of a 1st edition game I played. My character was part of a team out of Waterdeep that pooled all our money together to buy 2 draft horses and a cart and then we went up the road to Red Larch to buy horses. Red Larch is not the suburbs of waterdeep, more like the sticks, meaning we weren't far from civilization (there was a road after all) but we were far enough to feel like we'd set out and were on our own. We come into red larch hot and tired and was treated at the inn to some roast phoenix (a jealous favorite of inn keepers apparently, as the bird comes back to life again no matter how many times they cook it) and the next morning had to negotiate with stable masters and farmers to buy up all the available horses in town (at a discount from PHB prices). At last, we set off northward with our wagon and a team of like 15 horses. After weeks on the road we arrived in Mirabar, up in the north (our GM didn't want to research anything about the town if all we were going to do was buy and sell and stay at the inn before moving on, we agreed, and so admittedly, Morabar was boring) but without taking time to see the sites we sold most all of our horses (at a premium) and bought up all the iron we could with our profits (at a discount). We had random encounters on the road coming and going from Mirabar but for the sake of brevity we made our way back south again but this time we came around and arrived in Luskan. The sign outside read, all Humanoids will be executed on sight, all Humans will be mistrusted. Luskan is a pirate city with castles shaped like skulls, and an island clouded in a wild magical storm from some experiment gone wrong, then there was the Host tower (a freaking massive, dead, tree that housed evil wizards). Pirates were at our backs around every corner. Someone was always trying to figure out where we parked the wagon, what goods we carried, how much money we had, why the one guy in our party always wore his hood up despite the heat of it being summer, (he was an elf of course and he had to hide his face and especially his ears). Pirates were everywhere - and these pirates hated those pirates - anyway, long story shortened, we get out of Luskan with our party still alive and our goods still in our possession and head down the road south again. When we arrived in Neverwinter, the last big city before getting home to waterdeep, we were contracted by the temple (Torm I think or Helm) to do some policing jobs around the city. We healed and fed the poor people contained inside the Beggars nest who hadn't enough money to live or pay taxes and we patrolled the streets full of townhouses and greenhouses stacked next to and even over each other. We had such a great time stopping in Neverwinter that no one wanted to go back to waterdeep. We sold our iron (at a premium, cha-ching), split the prize, and my character bought himself some land inside the city and retired - Those were in the days of 1e tho.... when adventure had much less to do with saving the world and more to do with just making a living and staying alive.
I'd say you're not wrong. There's a lot of preexisting material for the Forgotten Realms and when the modules reference it they do a poor job of putting it into context and that can be a pain in the ass for someone not up to date on the complete history of the Realms trying to put it into context for your players.
An example of this is in Lost Mines of Phandelver. If your players go to Thundertree, part of the lore about the location is wrapped up in the eruption of Mt. Hotenow and the Spellplauge. This stuff is all just referenced in a STARTER BOX for the game with no context as to what any of that bullshit even means and they expect someone who is very likely a new DM to just say that stuff out loud with enough conviction to make their players who are also very likely new to the game buy into it.
I think the milage you get out of FR as a default setting largely depends on how fast and loose you like to play things, which goes largely with how confident are you as a DM. I've been running games for a long long time, and so I've come to the point where I don't get intimidated by someone "well actually-"ing me at the table. I just respond with "yeah, that played out differently in my world" or "yeah, see, that probably how the myth goes, right? But you're bout to find out that's not EXACTLY how that articular god works."
If you make it clear some things might be shifting around, the FR then does become very easy to run in, just because if I want to run a campaign or module set in, say, Waterdeep, I can likely five 15 high quality Lore and Setting Info video to send to players with one search. Beats having to write and dispense all that background info myself.
But also, I agree that the PHB and DMG don't actually do a great job of leveraging the FR as a good "default," and being comfortable with it either requires digesting a LOT of lore or being ok with shutting down players trying to hammer you for "doing the setting wrong." Neither of those are things most new DMs want to deal with.
There's a good saying there: "Oh, you know lots about the published Forgotten Realms? That's nice. But you know jack about MY Forgotten Realms."
"Tripped down the stairs carrying a basket of typewriters" 😆 love it.
Though I'm sure there are plenty of daft names in FR, I would be cautious saying that sounds "would not occur in human language". Coming partially from a non-proto-indo-european background, and having consulted an actual linguist (I'm lucky, he's my brother) in designing my own fantasy world - I can say definitively that just about any sounds can exist in human language!
What *is* important and the vast majority of fantasy worlds do wrong is to not be _consistent_ in naming within one country even. And I'm sure Forgotten Realms has this, though the region I'm most familiar with - Icewind Dale - is actually OK there. The place I've recognised it most recently is in a world called "Golarion" used for a campaign I've recently started playing in. The naming is seriously unhinged!
It's one of my big criticisms with Exandria also, though. "Emon" "Byroden" and "Westrun" can just about hang together, but in the nation of "Tal'Dorei"? And then "Rexxentrum" and "Zadash" and "Nogvurat"? Hrm. And I have to mention Exandrian norm for naming shops/inns/organisations that looks like a someone ran a dictionary through a shredder and just stuck the resulting strips together at random.
Ultimately, though, bad naming doesn't make a bad world. I love Matt Mercer's detail in storytelling, and he can describe things so evocatively you can look past the sometimes threadbare stitching of the world.
Regarding Forgotten Realms, I'm largely on board with most of the criticism here. The sheer scale of the lore, especially - often written very inconsistently - is awfully intimidating and yes, the sheer prevalence of powerful characters everywhere _not saving the world_ has made for a real disbelief suspension problem when running games in that setting.
Hey Mike, I agree that there is so much to know about the forgotten realms(sword coast). I got into D&D in 5e. Funny enough forgotten realms novels were in my family’s home sense the first book was written. I just never read them until I had moved away and found out that was D&D. What I like about forgotten realms is that I can go online and get background info on almost every town. I can pick and choose what info I will use and what I will change. As long as I keep in mind and the mind of my players that it’s my own homebrew forgotten realms.
You are 100% right about the bar to entry being too high in the forgotten realms. The dritz books are fun I've read a few I'd say they're on the good side of average. They're definitely more thoughtful than I expected and I mean that in a good way, they talk about ethics in interesting ways that a lot of other similar novels don't.
TLDR - Love the FR, liked the video, disagreed, but still liked it.
Personally I love the FR, and I actually disagree with you here - however your points were really well stated and I still enjoyed the video. Credit there! I can kinda see where your coming from and understand why you'd feel that way. Even though I love the realms, I would not dislike if the 'default' for DnD was something else. It would give new DMs the feeling that they can choose what they want to do. Per your request: I highly recommend the MrRhexx lore series. It's a good audiobook/podcast audio experience but if you do watch the artwork is incredible and inspiring. My knowledge of FR is almost exclusively from that series and I only found it about 3 months ago (June 2023). To me this series is what makes FR the inspiration and reason I actually moved my campaigns into it. Context: I've been DMing since before 5th edition (I skipped 4th came from 3.5) and (until next Friday) have never run any official DnD modules/content. Literally everything I did was homebrew/homemade. Next Friday I'll run Curse of Strahd for the first time - my first module and FR content. Again I love the realms and there's plenty there for old DMs and plenty of room for new DMS but!!! It all depends on how it's presented.
Most of the AD&D books detailing the Sea of Falling Stars area - Cormyr, City of Ravensbluff, etc - are full of great detail. Ed wrote much of this and he references the regions fairly often when he talks about the Realms. Definitely changed my perspective towards the Realms to more positive.
While I'm not sure if you'd like it, I really love Pathfinder's Golarion as a default setting. The lore in the books is all built around it and it's a fantasy kitchen sink setting with a lot of unusual stuff in it.
My online game is all homebrew, including the setting, so this hasn't been an issue.
But in the in person game I am in, I seem to be the only one not to know anything about forgotten realms. I just never got into the books or lore much. I do feel a little left out & even behind the learning curve, but I deal and don't worry about it too much.
I kind of play my character in Dragon Heist as one who isn't too aware of his surroundings and rather bad with names.
The best 'default' fantasy campaign setting I have ever played in is RuneQuest's Glorantha. Very immersive & evocative. Full of backstory & powerful NPCs & histories but the emphasis is still on the the fact that the player characters have the potential to do great things.
Not very helpful for the 5e discussion but definitely a great example of how to do a setting properly if you are looking for inspiration.
Kato
This is definitely a subject that I think about often, myself. I definitely agree with most of your points, especially how convoluted and intimating the lore has gotten. Now, I don't hate The Forgotten Realms, I read several of R.A. Salvatore's Drizz't novels in my teens alongside those from my actual favorite D&D setting (Dragonlance), and I mostly enjoyed what I read. I also grew up playing the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights games, which hugely influenced my love of RPGs today. That being said... I cannot say that I have ever really identified with the setting itself, usually just specific scenarios and characters. I never really felt the drive to run my games in The Forgotten Realms, even before it became the overcomplicated hodge podge it is now. It just never stood out to me like Krynn from Dragonlance.
I would also honestly say there is a non-0% amount of salt on my part stemming from the seeming preferential treatment the setting has received over the years. Meanwhile Dragonlance got sabotaged by TSR and then abandoned in the 90's, brought back briefly in 3.5 edition by WotC (just to be ignored as a setting again until 8 years after 5th edition came out), and then only kept alive by the occasional side novels and free content from talented 3rd party creators (with the blessing of the original authors) until the most recent release. Considering how influential the setting was, and how important it was for D&D as a whole (Dragons Of Autumn Twilight was literally the first D&D novel ever published, and Tracy & Laura Hickman used the setting to add more roleplay and story into the game when it was mostly just a dungeon crawling, kill-and-loot game at the time) the way the setting was treated by both companies, and the fact that it has faded so much into the background since those times... just really makes me sad, and admittedly a little resentful.
Oh and don't even get me started on the legal drama around the current Dragonlance book trilogy and WotC torpedoing their brand (OGL drama) right after finally bringing Dragonlance back and opening it up for use on DMs Guild...
Anyways, I would definitely have been ok if Nentir Vale was just created as the default setting in the Player's Handbook, and The Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance were both still campaign settings. I just wish most of D&D's important settings would have received more equal attention over the years, instead of being largely ignored in favor of the 132nd Forgotten Realms sourcebook or adventure.
Sorry, I needed to vent. Anyways, great video as always. lol
I am in 100% agreement that the other settings should have got the love they deserved and FR should be a campaign setting and not the default. When you look back to when it was its own setting and Ed Greenwood's input actually meant something, Toril was very a very fleshed out setting just like Krynn (and the lore made sense). Making it the default setting has made it very incoherent and them having "world changing" events every time they want to introduce new rule sets and races etc.... has really turned it into quite the mess and doesn't feel like the world that all the books published in the 80s and 90s were set in anymore.
I 100% agree with something you’ve said in a previous video, the gist being “Forgotten Realms feels like a world created specifically for adventurers.” That’s why I’m not a fan of it; the world itself seems to know you are an adventurer and wants to give you magic items.
The mostly low-magic way it’s presented in Baldur’s Gate 1 is a lot better in my opinion, though I have to concede that the overall generic feel and abundance of magic stuff does lend itself to a default setting feel: You can’t avoid doing D&D stuff while you’re playing in FG.
The high-magic vibe is what I think really bothers me about it. Every major NPC has tons of treasure and magic items and, whether true or not, it feels like there is a magic shop on every corner of every town.
The funny thing about this is that I’ve always felt they could make it work, make it make sense, if they just leaned more heavily into the Time of Troubles. Explicitly tell me that the world was low-magic BEFORE the ToT and I probably wouldn’t complain.
And yeah… names like “Lord Nasher Alagondar” are awful. Great video!
I'd say the amount of lore is also the Forgotten Realms' biggest advantage, new DMs planning an adventure there can fairly easily find information about a lot of stuff without having to make it up themselves. Of course, that also means there's danger of more experienced players knowing more about it than the DM...
Thank you so much for doing this. The proper names thing you so eloquently spelled out at 10:51 and your biggest complaint 17:15 is exactly what made me look up this topic of video in the first place, and your video is so well paced and on point.
I am finally after all this time doing my first proper campaign as a DM and as I began prepping I started to really get this feeling and I couldn't put my finger on the exact word of what was bothering me about running in this as the default setting, and you nailed it right on the head. Daunting.
Im planning to just simplify the names of NPCs and keeping things generic (i.e. in the mountains of 'these lands' , nomadic tribes of these mountains) and have PCs discover things about the world organically through playing instead of in lore dumps, to eventually work toward this vision for a dnd setting I have.
Was having the same problem with some of the celtic settings, and the ancient myths from 2e, 5e and real life. The proper nouns are so foreign to our non-Gaelic speaking ears, keeping track of stuff was becoming burdensome to me and my playtesters, so scrapped doing it with the names from those settings at a minimum, and put prepping those adventures on the way far backburner.
Ps. If anyone's interested and got this far theres a nifty campaign setting done by this Celtic Archaeologist really well researched and does 5e well , adventure path for it still being written though.
What book do you reference for the Nentir Vale Pantheon? Would like to have a look at it. ty
The 4th Edition Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide, or the 5th Edition “Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount” or CR’s book “Tal’dorei Reborn” book both include the Pantheon (with the addition of “Rae,” because they were still using a Pathfinder goddess for their campaign and has to include her under a different name)
The thing that got me interested in the Forgotten Realms was pulling out the vast maps of the continent of Faerun and finding some random location. Then diving into that specific location to find out more about it. Like throwing a dart at the map, hitting a place like Cormyr and just diving into the lore of it. Finding a place called The Dungeon of Death or Hellgate Keep and finding out why these places have such names.
These days there’s a great wiki page for the Forgotten Realms so you can just Google most things found in the Realms to find articles and sources for the content, whether novels or video games and setting books.
As someone that has played in the Realms, read novels, obsessed over characters, and created my own lore for them for almost thirty years, my heart is in the nostalgia. With every new iteration of DnD I look forward to seeing how they move forward with the classic characters, and have lamented many that have no stat blocks even to this day.
I got into the Forgotten Realms as a new DM a few years ago, running Lost Mine of Phandelver for family. I didn't feel overwhelmed by the setting information needed to run it, and had such a great time that I started reading more about the Forgotten Realms in the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, the online wiki, and the Drizzt novels. It felt to me a world like Tokkien's, only with more magic, that I could be a part of shaping and get to play in! Before we even finished that adventure, I knew I wanted to run another, and dove into reading Dragon Heist and learning everything I could about Waterdeep. Now I'm running Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which I've set on the Sword Coast. Each new adventure enriches the world for me and for my players, and I love that connectivity.
I’m glad to hear that!
As someone who is not familiar with the setting, I find myself not wanting to run a game there as there is just so much lore to learn.
From learning all the gods, to the various histories and important characters, locations and creatures... I feel like learning all of that is almost as hard as creating my own world from scratch, but with the added negative of having a bunch of content that I don't like attached.
So I have 3 options:
1. Learn everything, and spend months or years on the process
2. Learn enough and change what I need, potentially breaking the immersion of players familiar with the lore
3. Create my own setting/use a different setting.
I think the issue is that there is so much lore that I do not know where to start. I'm not super interested in running a module, I would just like a book that gives me a map with towns and settlements laid out and some important NPCs, locations, and cultures.
Also, I am reluctant to buy books for things that might get retconned. I bought Volo's Guide to Monsters and now DnDBeyond lists all or most of the monsters in that book as depreciated, with a note saying I should buy another book for the newer, less interesting stat blocks and creature details.
I find this to also be mostly a 5e sourcebook problem, lots of flavor not a lot of usable content
I think most of my friends and I are on the same page when it comes to running an original game. we tend to create our own worlds simply taking a lot of the theological and more metaphysical aspects from the forgotten realms. its just been easier on us to look at the PHB and know that there is an Abyss in most of our games, while still getting to learn about the world whoever is dming has crafted, for example.
That being said, I still love to hear about all the crazy lore of the forgotten realms that's been thought up over the years.
Great video btw :)
This was great! Do you plan on doing any non- D&D settings? If love to hear your take on my favorite fantasy setting: Creation, the setting for the game Exalted
What I have found is irritating is the size of places and the distance between them varies in the different material. So when I bought old maps of the forgotten realms to show the players the distance between cities varied so much from the campaign I was running that I got very frustrated.
I almost feel like there doesn't even need to be a default campaign setting. Writing an adventure like LMoP wouldn't be hard to do in a setting-agnostic way (at least, widely applicable to many different settings). I feel like presenting it as part of FR kind of impresses on DMs that they should really know more about this setting to be able to answer player questions about the world from a position of authority. Furthermore, I always see tons of weird comments online where people are asking if X or Y are permissible to do in their games when those are FR-specific bits of lore rather than actual game mechanics; many newer D&D players don't really fully understand that the game mechanics and lore can be completely separated from one another.
Setting-agnostic starter adventures allow you to drop them in to any other setting without much or any work really needed, and also make it much more explicit to new DMs that they are encouraged to build their own worlds in which to run their games.
This was always the way D&D worked. The original 1974 material had zero mention of any kind of setting at all, and Arneson and Gygax were confused when people started asking them what world these things were going on in. "World? You're going into a dungeon to steal treasure from a dragon, why do you want to know about the geopolitics of the local village?" But it's a question that kept coming up and their own players started asking them, so they created their own settings at a low level of detail (Gygax infamously couldn't be bothered to create something, so traced over a map of Michigan with the Free City of Greyhawk as Chicago and turned the map 90 degrees and called it a day).
Greyhawk got some vague mentions in adventures, particularly in the late 1970s, but Gygax didn't release even a brief setting guide until 1980 and a full setting guide until 1983, so D&D literally spent almost the first ten years of its existence without any kind of campaign setting, default or optional. And then the floodgates opened and TSR released Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, Mystara, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright etc. But none of them were default.
3E nominally used Greyhawk as a default setting but really didn't flesh out the setting at all in any of the basic books (it only got fleshed out in a brief Greyhawk Gazetteer and later the Living Greyhawk sourcebook and that was basically it) and the Forgotten Realms 3E range massively outsold it (and to be fair the 3E FR Campaign Setting book might be the best worldbuilding book either TSR or WotC have ever released) so mentions of Greyhawk vanished quite early on, but it still wasn't default. 5E is the first time that FR elements are mentioned in the PHB, DMG and MM.
Mid-5E it did feel like they were moving away from FR as the default setting, and started fleshing out things like Saltmarsh as a generic campaign location (it is very nominally set in Greyhawk, but given there has been zero Greyhawk material released for almost twenty years, they really don't dwell on that) and bringing back other settings in one-off books like Eberron, but they do seem to have recently snapped back to FR, possibly because of the movie and Baldur's Gate III.
Such a great video! I feel like I'm in the middle of these three examples of GMs you gave: The ones who are intimidated, the ones who are interested in challenging themselves to get more knowledge about the world lore, and the ones who create stuff into the Forgotten Realms, making their own. I'ts also a mix o feelngs being into the middle of everything! xD
The "default setting" for 5E is the multiverse. This detail somehow gets missed by most people, but when you go back and read the Player's Handbook and the DM Guide, it becomes more apparent once you know.
The more of these I watch, the more I feel like I'm doing pretty well as a DM and the more I want to recommend your channel to a friend who could really use this advice
Never played D&D until 5e, but I got into the Realms (and Dragonlance) as a teen in the 90s, through the Drizzt and War of the Lance series respectively. I love the Forgotten Relams, but I also understand where you're coming from with this. Honestly, even though I know the lore of the world, I've never used it as a campaign setting.
What I like about the forgotten realms is that is has some cool aspects of other settings merged into it. It gets all the excitement and variety plus you can technically travel from ravenloft to spelljammer in the same campaign. In addition to those two, it also has the underdark from greyhawk, dragonborn and plot-driven adventures like dragonlance, and it’s moving away from races having typical alignment like exandria.
And I’m sure some of that’s inaccurate, but 5e is my first edition, and forgotten realms was my gateway into fantasy.
Absolutely keen to see you talk about the Greyhawk setting!
My own introduction freely mixed locations and monsters from Toril, Krynn, Oerth, Mystara, unnamed fantasy worlds from other sources, and the imaginations of not just the DM but the entire table. I was allowed to play a two foot tall anthropomorphic fox with bat wings, a Paladin who had been an apprentice wizard. Every single dungeon used a map suspiciously similar to the HeroQuest board with the doors (we had to search for) being on different segments of wall. We loved it and played multiple campaigns.
Being 13 and younger, we had a pretty loose grasp on the rules anyway. A full caster could always cast 3rd level spells at level 3, 2nd level spells at level 2, and 1st level spells at level 1. We still found martial types and healers to perform the best in spite of what's objectively a huge buff to arguably the most powerful class (from the perspective of those with deep mastery of the rules, of course).
As someone who was only familiar with FG in passing but a deeply invested D&D player when 5e came around, I think everything you've gone over can also be the strengths of the setting.
It's generic fantasy (save for a few things like the weave) and the general public will have proper expectations of what should and shouldn't exist in the world. Most of the published adventures do a decent job of name dropping famous things (Yawning Portal, Baldur's Gate, Durnan, Masked Lords, the five guilds, etc.) without getting too attached or lost in the weeds, especially in the starter kit adventures. And there's a ton of material out there if people want to dive in and get more invested in specifics if they so choose; no extra work required!
While I can understand that it's sometimes daunting for new DMs to jump into such an established setting, I think this is more an issue with fear of the knowledge gap. Rules are the perfect example of this where players overconcern themselves with making sure their rulings are 100% according to the book, even through 5e was supposed to get away from "the one true rule" mentality that players have inevitably dragged the game back into because of this very fear. I have this same fear when I play Star Wars games because I enjoyed the original trilogy and while I'm familiar with the other six movies I'm not super invested in them, and care very little about the EU, KOTOR, and the like. I just make sure expectations are set with players that I'm not Wookiepedia and see Star Wars as pulp space fantasy so we're not getting lost in the minutia of hyper drive specifications or if my depiction of Ewok culture goes against the Lucas deep-cut never aired pilot of a scraped miniseries that was fan leaked for private screenings 12 years ago. The setting is only as daunting as you make the expectations be.
I think the most obvious downside to FG is the lack of space for D&D's roots: dungeon crawling. There are locations like the Underdark and the Undermountain, but for the most part I have trouble imagining adventurers having a lot to do in a world like Faerun because I don't imagine it to be a world where random dungeons are littered across it, unlike somewhere like the Nentir Vale. Faerun feels discovered, young, and safe as opposed to mysterious, dangerous, and built upon civilizations long past whos ruins are worth exploring. And even then, for better or worse, the not so squeaky clean parts of FG are being scrubbed clean of problematic content which, while being more welcoming to people of the not white male persuasion, does get rid of many points of conflict in the setting.
In effect, Faerun is a PG13 setting with enough history to evoke either deep nostalgia or wide-eyed wonder and curiosity, which is _exactly_ the sort of setting a large corporation wants to amke its primary reference point when saying "this is the Dragon Dungeons from the 80s kids show!"
Funny about thinking everything in FR had been decovered as cononicltly the coast sits atop the ruins of about 10 previous civilizations with most dungeons are still uncovered with monster infested wilderness. The problem is that when looking at a official map, the number of named locations gives the impression they are the only existing locations. When you investigate the scale of the world deep, you find a laughably low population of humans and a massive expanse of monster infested wilderness even if you stick to the main trade roads.
My experience with the Forgotten Realms is somewhat limited, and also partly homebrew: One of my DMs does an extremely great job of adapting existing campaign settings to fit a specific story he wants to tell, and those campaigns are...super, super fun. But aside from his extreme expansion of Curse of Strahd, and the way we handled it causing enormous ripples he made two and a half additional campaigns out of, I don't know that anything he did strictly needed to be the Forgotten Realms campaigns. Realizing this is what made me really appreciate your point that the FR does not need to be the default setting.
I really like how you address the things about the setting you think are good when you state your opinion. It's something I see and appreciate in most of your videos.
I suppose at the end of the day the thing I can most confidently say is a strength of the Forgotten Realms (specifically the Sword Coast, as the rest of the world is not nearly so well-defined), is that it has a really solid map to look at, and as long as you don't have someone too obsessed with the lore of the Sword Coast at your table, you can use that already-completed, detailed map for inspiration to tell your own story.
Oh, also Luskan is cool, and pirate kings controlling the city is rad as heck. Although...now that I just looked it up real briefly, it seems that city in particular was heavily modified by my DM, specifically it seems like he made a pre-spellplague version of Luskan in a post-spellplague world.
The elevator pitch for the Forgotten Realms is basically, "40 years ago we made a kitchen sink setting. Want to see all the cool things we stuffed into the sink? The deep lore, the interesting characters, the neat gods and fantastical locations? Well, you can't because we jammed most of that cool stuff down the garbage disposal. Now all we have left is the most basic, vanilla & boring portion of all that cool stuff we created. Have fun."
I've been playing D&D PC games since the 90's and I had no idea that Forgotten Realms was ever supposed to be connected with Real World Earth in any way or at any point......
I completely understand why a setting should ideally have a lot of unexplored potential (thinking about the Tales of the Loop ttrpg specifically) but I personally love being able to drop into an established setting with a ton of lore and work with that, it feels, oddly, a lot less daunting than being given a blank canvas to make choices on. Maybe that'll change as I get more comfortable as a DM. HOWEVER, as much as Baldur's Gate III has made me fall in love with the Forgotten Realms, gods is it messy. There is no sense of stability for me to latch onto there because some things, like drow lore and culture in Menzobarranzan, is so wildly detailed compared to lore on, say, that one planet that has a ton of illithids and tarrasques on it. It both encourages me to make stuff up on the spot and to have an exhaustive knowledge on its lore, and I wish it would pick a side. Also a thing that bothers me a ton is that somehow the setting in the "present day" takes place only a few years after what amounts to an apocalypse scenario in the world with gods dying and being reborn and nobody seems to like... care about it? Final bit I wanted to add is that yeah, first time I tried to get into DnD I looked at the sheer amount of lore of the default setting and decided it was far too much work to try and get into it. As much as I like the Forgotten Realms (and oftentimes really only the idea of it) I agree, it should not have been made the default setting for DnD.
I am about a month into my first ever dm experience, and I found the established lore of the forgotten realms very comforting because I had lore that I could fall back on if I needed it. That being said, my next campaign will either be set in a homebrew setting or in Exandria. All depends on how much work I get done on my homebrew.
What do you think of Eberron(the best setting)
so the problem isn't really the FR; it's the book(s). if the PHB/modules had a map and a short blurb on what the major races/locations/conflicts/factions were in each region, DMs would have enough details and enough blank space to make their campaigns, and the players would have enough inspiration to make their characters. problem solved.
I'm fairly new to D&D, and what I really missed with my first group was some background info on the world. We were playing Lost Mines of Phandelver, and I wanted my character to be connected to the world. I want the details to be right, so as a cleric I want to make sure there is actually a temple for my deity in the town/city I'm from. I don't know about the available info for other settings, but I actually found it quite difficult to figure it all out with what the internet gave me. Now, the DM from my second group had the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide and that helped me somewhat for creating that character and his background, but it still didn't tell me what it was like living in the region and most of the history. Also to be fair, I didn't even know there was apparently a lot of lore, and that has gotten me curious but I wouldn't even know where to start. So, any tips for like glossary documents about the lore would be greatly appreciated!
What's funny is, I started writing this comment before watching most of the video and Mike keeps highlighting the things I've struggled with. So I guess I can agree?
Try and get hold of the third edition campaign setting if you are looking to dive deep. It's still the gold standard when it comes to setting books.
@@benjackson-ellery4267 thanks, I'll check it out!
Problem with FR is it's Over Developed, it was one of the Big Two Canon (and eventual Three with Dragonlance) worlds for AD&D 1E, Garry wrote OA for 1e and before he could decide where he wanted to put it, it was dumped in to FR. Come 2E it became the default setting, after they forced Garry out they soon turned on Ed and they had a major "Event" to brake Ed's Realms from the "New" realms and the new writers.
Also in 2e despite already having a Arab & North African region in the Realms when they made AQ it was dumped in to the Realms.
in 1E the Drow where meant to be a GH thing, there was already a very successful Campaign about the Drow set in GH Loth was going to be a rising big bad for GH but she and her Drow where stolen for FR
As I said if you don't like the overdeveloped Sword Coast check out the Dalelands and the Moon Sea
We are going to start Rime of the Frostmaiden soon. Icewind Dale definitely helped me make a PC that would specifically fit into that setting.
remember that Greenwood's original play group ("the knights of Myth Drannor") were located in the Dales, specifically Shadowdale, NOT the Sword coast. I find the Dales (with small, isolated settlements and plenty of old ruins) fit with the old-school, "sandbox"-style campaign much better than Waterdeep, etc. As a drowsy, forest-shrouded back-water, you get the "intimacy" and detail you want.
I like forgotten realms and I liked it since 3 ed. I love the setting and I played my very first campaign in it. I collect merch of it and novels and it's my setting of choice. Still, I left dnd for a while and when i returned I discovered 5e and started to look into it again. And I found a spellplague, PLACES THAT DISAPPEARED and stories that potentially don't exist anymore. It's not like other things like the silence of lolth. This seemed to me like a child that builds the most perfect sand castle and then is compelled to destroy it only to understand it's not playable anymore. Now I found out that the creator of Toril has nothing to do with the spellplague.. I still like it, but I'm finding it hard to understand some choices of the setting and of the company in general. It's just as if they need to make a mess out of everything.
Ed Greenwood, the creator of Toril also didn't like the Times of Troubles and doesn't like the fact that Gods on Toril play an active role in events. He wanted them to be more background and not involved in matters, or at least involved very directly. Similar to GRRM's pantheon on Planatos. From what I heard from Ed himself is that WOTC can't change any thing or add anything to Toril without his permission. So he probably agreed to those things but he has been open about not liking them.
For me, Forgotten Realms ended with 3.5e. 4e and onward has been just a bastardization of his work.
Thay is one of my favorite regions in FR. A large amount of lore, plenty of potential plot hooks for adventures, a particular vibe to it. The issue of a "default" setting cuts both ways, on the one hand you get a fully flushed out world but with the burden of learning about all of it, or on the other end of the spectrum you have an blank/mostly blank slate but with the burden of building all the details that make up that world. Finding that sweet spot between them is a herculean task. The flushed out world atleast usually has a wiki and maps ya can download, etc to help with questions about it.
You're on the mark with Greyhawk's involvement with 3.0/3.5
Thanks! That’s a relief to hear ☺️
i watched this video after reading a bit of Pathfinder's Lost Omens World Guide. I can see the reasoning behind your words! I was especially surprised when i skipped to the section on "Old Cheliax" and found backgrounds for characters related to lore. e.g., "Bellflower Agent" where you work to free slaves, can choose 2 ability boosts and gain feats! Then on the next page you can choose Hellknight archetypes, where ig your mission is to hunt for these slaves. And they're all specific to "Old Cheliax." It's amazing. The world of Golarion is pretty dope.
looking for a good starting point for "Old Realms" try the Novel "The Pools of Radiance" and it's sequels "The Curse of the Azure Bonds" "Secret of the Silver Blades" and "Pools of Darkness"
there is also the 1E Adventures FRC1 "Ruins of Adventure" (A.K.A. "The Pools of Radiance") and FRC2 "The Curse of the Azure Bonds"both are around 100 pages and are more short campaigns, the first can be played with characters of first level, but smaller groups should be around 3rd, the 2nd is for characters levels 6-9. FRC2 was published just before the release of 2E and the FRC adventure line was dropped when they went to the new edition since the writing on the adventures was not finished at the time.
the Novels and adventures are set in the Dale lands and around the Moon Sea.
it's all based on the old SSI Computer Games with the same Big Bad, we got novels (Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness) for the other two computer games but not AD&D adventures, if you wanted to follow the Heroes of The Pools of Radiance their Trilogy was The Pools of Radiance, Pools of Darkness and Pools of Twilight.
Really like the idea about this series. If you are going beyond TSR / Wizards, I'd really like to hear your take on GURPS Banestorm. It's almost entirely system neutral (aside from some example stat blocks), but has a very different, very grounded take on the whole "separated from earth in the past" concept. (And it's only 1 book as opposed to the reading list you'd get with some older DnD settings.) The short version is that the elves created a giant magical storm / wish spell to bring destruction upon the orcs. It opened a bunch of portals to medieval earth and dropped a bunch of people and sometimes entire towns into the fantasy world. And then the setting has history from there.
FWIW, in terms of official DnD settings, I've always been curious about Mystara / The Known World.
I think it would be a really fun series looking at different dnd settings and compareing them
Wholeheartedly agree. I personally don't care for Forgotten Realms, though that may be mostly due to unfamiliarity on my part.
On a related note, I'm super curious about your thoughts on Eberron!
the easiest lesson I can teach you about FR follows the most common question one might ask "Oooh, what's over there?" Oh, that's a long ago explored forest, it has a ruined castle just picked clean of any loot you might want.
Nothing is unexplored, everything is already discovered.