Does Forgotten Realms 3e Still Hold Up?
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- Опубликовано: 16 мар 2024
- A retrospective on the third edition Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms Campaign setting. I’ll talk about what’s in the book and give you my thoughts on whether it might be useful to you.
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That book is a masterpiece. My favorite rpg book by far
Would like to hear more in-depth thoughts about the 3e version.
Thanks for watching and the comment. The second half covers this more than the first half, but the video is intended as a high level overview with some basic reflections. It’s often a balance between making a video that’s not too long (and potentially boring) yet covering the pertinent details. Useful feedback though, if there’s appetite for a more in-depth commentary on it!
3e was rad. That made the the gamer I am today.
as someone who has never played 3e, I LOVE this campaign setting book.
I love the amount of detail, like there is a table of starting equipment according to your geographical region! That rules! It even includes possible regions for your race, so you can start thinking about your background by looking where did you live and how life works in that place.
The fact that it lists pretty much every major location in Farûn with a brief summary of their racial distribution, government, exports and imports also serves to see at a glance what that city is all about.
My players on a 5e campaign are currently traveling throw the southern side of the Sword Coast (around Greenest and recently arrived at Berdusk), having this + the 2e campaign setting has been SO useful.
The only thing I wish it had would be listings and tables of possible encounters, quests and adventures per location. And the only problem I have with it is the fact that being 3e, all their NPC stat blocks use SO much space.
The 3e Forgotten Realms DM screen came with a pretty decent encounters booklet, which probably should have been included with the setting
@@Lo-Fi_Gaming_ I went and checked, and yes! This helps a lot! thank you!
A quick question tho, the tables are labeled like "Northen Hills (EL 4-9)", What does the "EL 4-9" means in 3e lingo?
@@azzaelulbrinter it means 'Encounter Level', so it will be a challenge for characters of levels 4-9
I'm so glad someone's currently making video content about 3.0, not just 3.5. I first played AD&D 2e in Boy Scouts, but my first books were 3.0. I never purchased any of the 3.5 books, and only played 3.5 once or twice (and don't love the heavier math and character builds), so I'm glad to revisit my 3.0 nostalgia.
Same. Do I know you?
Glad you’re enjoying it!
I absolutely LOVED the 3e aesthetic. Every book looked like a mystical, ancient, fantastic tomb. The handbooks looked like they were made from stone covers with arcane locks etc. You really felt like you were in a different world.
Reading the books via website just can’t give you that feeling. (Although a cyberpunk setting could benefit from a dope website!)
They absolutely nailed it eh.
The 3E FR book was top notch, beautiful design. I remember that book well. My biggest gripe wasn't reallly with the setting itself, though I agree, it definitely hammered down that there are so many cooler better people in this world than your party, and you'll never be more than a footnote in the massive history. But mainly it was just that it became the default, go-to setting for everyone I played with in the 3.0 era, and I could never get players to try anything else. No homebrew, no other settings. Sometimes it was just least common denominator, sometimes players actively revolted at the idea of playing anything else.
Maybe I was lucky, but my group was always pretty open to other settings, including homebrew. We did seem to spend a lot of time in the Forgotten Realms - like you say, 3e leaned into that pretty heavily
@@Lo-Fi_Gaming_ I couldn't articulate it so well at the time (I was just a kid) but it suffered a bit of what I call the "Star Wars Problem". If I'm not allowed to deviate from "existing lore" (mostly from PC "well actualies"), and that existing lore is always the most important and coolest thing happening in the setting, then you, the PCs, will never get to be as cool or important. There just isn't a lot of breathing room
100% agree @@JonThysell
I totally agree! And I was a part of the problem. Since 2e times I loved FR and that setting book as well as others were cherished. I was very excited about 3e itself though that FR setting book was my first foray into that system. I realized only in the last few years however that 3e killed my DMing, probably also those things you mentioned about the FR as a setting. Only in the last few years through the OSR I've found my connection to DMing and what is it that makes a setting or other rpg products actually usable.
Forgotten Realms has always been my favorite setting, in large part because the sheer depth of lore of a huge setting in which most of the published stories and characters come from one region, the north west, but they don't skimp on fleshing out the rest of the continent. this is important to me, and a lot of the folks i played with as i loved having all that to pull from for stories and such, but i didn't like playing in that part of the world. those stories and characters were already well covered, they are all doing their thing up there but there is so much more of Faerun to explore and it's all pretty well documented. this is a shortcoming i found in a lot of other settings, that only the pieces that were covered in novels and such really got focused on in the printed resources. ran multiple full campaigns that never once set foot west of the Anauroch or north of Amn and that was just fine. it let the players feel like their characters at higher levels really were a part of that world and rivaled the named characters from all that lore, but didn't have the problem of not being mentioned in any resource alongside those named characters, as they came from hundreds of miles away and their exploits hadn't quite reached that area yet. Forgotten Realms also is the only setting in ANY fantasy game that ever "fixed" the one major fantasy trope derived from Tolkein that i HATE, from Tolkein on in any setting it's always past the time of elves and dwarves, who's ancient kingdoms are now hollow shells of what they used to be and their entire civilizations are on the decline and that's that. it always felt like the magic of a setting was slowly dying away with that trope, but this edition of FR fixed that, they specifically cover the relatively sudden (by dwarven standards anyways) spurt of increased fertility and dwarven births that included the almost never before seen twins, and a lot of them, and the dwarves called this the thunder blessing and was seen as a resurgence of their dwindling culture. and the elves, most had abandoned their faerunian cities and taken off to evermeet, with small and dwindling populations left behind. this edition covers the growing change of heart of some of the elves on evermeet that maybe abandoning faerun was the wrong idea and that they should return and help fight the ever growing evils.
I prefer Drizzt's foil Artemis Entreri, as a character, precisely because he's nominally evil, but has nuance and even does things outside his character if they help him accomplish his goals. Drizzt has always felt like an unapproachable ideal as opposed to a real character.
FR is probably my favorite overall setting, with Dragonlance being a close second. I've also got a soft spot for Dark Sun and Birthright.
I was a fan of these books, even though I never bought them. I held off on transitioning to 3E as by the time I was finally done with my long-term AD&D campaign, 3.5 was coming out and I saw no reason to buy materials twice over.
Good point about Artemis. Dark Sun was always a setting I liked the look of but have never delved into much
Fantastic video, thanks for the gift!
Much appreciated! Thanks for watching 🙏
You seem to have a gift for concisely conveying the overall feeling of things with good examples. Also your insights about what is good and what's bad about the setting book gave a great guide for whether you might want to use it or not. Best of all you did it quickly into the point instead of taking 45 minutes and adding a lot of useless verbiage.
Thank you very much! That’s very generous feedback
This book had a great things going, which was more likely to happen in 3.0 books than 3.5 ones: it was immersive. It made you love the world. Same thing for the ELH - it was bugged and many things didn't work but the tone just PUMPED you toward high level play and there was enough to have a lot of fun.
The fact that this FR book had a trade network just shows the mentality and care of the designers back then.
I've DMed since 1992 (all editions but 4) and I will always say FR Campaign book is the best D&D product ever. 3.5 Draconomicon comes second, but not close.
The effort, attention to detail, and artistic direction is impressive
Ok, I say this as someone who, as a 13-year-old, had this book memorized: It cannot be overstated how useless this book is as a text to run games from, and the setting text is dry as a bone. I challenge anyone to take a look at any of the major cities described in this book and show how they are meaningfully different. There's like 100,000 words of lore with no color in it. I remember the month that the Eberron guide dropped, it was like we were tripping LSD. Most of us were like "Holy sh&t, THIS is what we've been missing!?" and we never picked up FRCG 3rd Edition ever again.
The text to compare this to isn't the SCaG, but rather the adventure modules like Dragon Heist, Avernus, and Rime of the Frostmaiden, which thematically boost and amplify the playable content of the regions to the EXTREME. But as gorgeous as this book was, and as neato as some of the tools were as well, I don't think it still "holds up" in the slightest.
Yeah Eberron seemed super revolutionary when it came out. It really did add something different to the 3e experience
3.5 wasn’t different enough that this book was effected at all. I started playing D&D a lot in this era with 3.5 and with our Forgotten Realms adventures we used that book for reference.
Yeah us too, but some of the later 3.5 books ‘superseded’ the race and class content. Never used it tho so I can’t comment on how it played comparatively
It should be used as the template for how to write a setting book.
I miss the 3e design. The books are sooo beautiful!
I agree! So good huh
Love that book. So glad that I have it !
The Included map is fantastic as well.
Yeah, so good. Excellent cartography
It is good, but its scale is wrong, if compared to the 1e and 2e (and 5e, which took back the old "correct" scale). Faerun has been sort of squeezed, so for example 3e Moonshae Isles are almost south of Baldur's Gate, while originally (1e/2e) they were north of it.
Despite this error, it's still very good looking.
@@mrmaster9801 huh, didn't know that
The 3e FRCS is easily one of the very best D&D source books that I own. It's fantastic from an art, design, presentation, and information standpoint. It's wonderful to just flip through and read but, more importantly, you could easily run multiple campaigns in the Forgotten Realms using just this book. And, despite my having similar issues with the campaign setting (and some of the characters in it...) as you, I have. And, if I were to ever do so again in 5E, this would be the first book I turn to.
It's quite a shame Greyhawk never got anything quite in the same calibre, but, at least the Eberron Campaign book was almost equally as good. Though, for me, the art simply did not match up with what was in the FRCS, even though I like Eberron as a setting quite a bit more.
The FRCS is a worthwhile addition to anyone's D&D library, whether you like the Forgotten Realms as a setting or not.
It sorta makes me wonder what Greyhawk 3e might have been like if they went all in like they did for Forgotten Realms. I would love to know what went on behind the scenes as the production was head and shoulders above everything else published in that early 3e era.
And I agree about Eberron. Super cool, but not quite the same caliber
Imagine if WOTC gave us a book with this much detail in it for 5th edition…
Um, Drizzit has very pronounced rage issues. He's just learned a constructive way to channel it ( killing monsters ). And the evils that some of have faced have only made us more determined to be good people ( so that evil won't beat us ). Even as we struggle against the shame of sometimes losing control. Being "good" is about embracing a lifelong struggle to be good.
If that’s the narrative angle, I think it would have been more convincing if there was some sort of redemption arc instead. I.e. when he left the underdark/went on his own he went on a spree or had no qualms killing humans and elves until he began to discover how warped his kin and their ideologies were. Then his struggle to embrace ‘good’ could have began. To me that’s a more compelling narrative
3e period is phenomenal
Going to do an overview of the OG Forgotten Realms box set then? 😊
Would love to! Don’t own it anymore however
I can't stand 5E, and I know the numerous issues 3E has, but the FRCS time is hands down my favourite setting book.
Subbed.
Much appreciated!
The GOAT
For me D&D is the same as Forgotten Realms never got warm with any other setting ...
You’re not alone with that perspective. I think that’s true for a lot of players
There's way more in 1st/2nd Edition. You didn't mention the FR series which had 16 books, the FOR series which had 13 books, and 33 additional books and boxed sets about the Forgotten Realms. 3e does not hold a candle to the 2e for volume of books. And the less said about the 4e books, the better. Not that I'm a 4e hater, but they were awful.
Fair point! I have never done a side-by-side count of the AD&D vs 3e FR material to see which has more, but it always intuitively felt like there was more in 3e - not sure why.
It never "Held" in the first place.
Hahaha
Elminster is a fun self-insert of Ed Greenwood. A man of great passion and lore for this game setting. I take it in fun and appreciate all his works. It's sad you have such disdain for his world and works, and it taints your video.
Even though we clearly have a different take it’s good to have your counterpoint perspective. I wish I could see it like that! And yes, absolutely, my preferences in fiction and the way that fiction is presented is inevitably going to influence how I make a video like this, but it’s how I genuinely feel and, as I outline in the vid, my reasons are not baseless
Hard disagree.
Elminster was a DMPC, and I abhor DMPCs.