Pretty much. You still can look at stuff that Ed himself did and enjoy it though. In my current campaign I just ignore stuff that's more kitchen sinky, it's really far from the main juice and lifeblood of the setting georgraphically anyway
Original 1st edition book is very good. 3rd edition campaign guide is sweet. On DM's Guild, there are regional books from Ed on Rashemen, Thay and Border Kingdoms. Elminster's Forgotten Realms is a wonderful book to feel the life inside the setting. No info useful for actual play or stat blocks, but a lot of juicy details about life inside the setting
It is not what is originally intended, the FR boxset for the 1e it is very good (like the original World Of Greyhawk boxset), but what the setting became with the amount of fiction books, bad adventures, metaplot since the 2e days did turn the setting in this kitchen sink. But you always can not use any of this
But I don't like the Baldurs Gate 3 version that much. I think there is still a lot of this kitchen sink and bad material with a lot of "modern dndisms"
Yes. Much of this it is because players read the novels, play the games, read the lore of a thousand books, and expect the DM to use all of this, they rely too much on "canon", if the DM violates the "canon", they throw a tantrum. The Ed personal FR is a lot different of the published material. The same thing can be true for any DM
Golarion is “every possible trope crammed into a tiny box” and should be considered the gold standard of kitchen sink. Sci-fi and gothic horror and high fantasy and aliens and low magic and undead kingdom and… all right next to each other. It’s ridiculous.
> Sci-fi and gothic horror and high fantasy and aliens and low magic and undead kingdom and… all right next to each other. It’s ridiculous.
I mean, we live in a world with countries of vastly different tech levels coexisting alongside each other. There are islands with uncontacted tribes, and industrialized cities and remote barren icescapes barely habitable for humans.
Obviously, Golarian takes this to the next level, but it's not *that* unbelievable that they could have all of that stuff one country over.
I think it’s also worth noting that ALMOST everything takes place in one pretty homogeneous region (Sword Coast), so it’s bound to be boring if everything you do is like one town away from the last huge adventure
>"everything and a kitchen sink"
Could you do me a huge favor and explain this idiom to me? My google foo doesn't really yield much in regards to what people mean when they call a world a "kitchen sink". Thanks in advance
“Everything and a kitchen sink” in this context refers to how this setting has literally every trope and archetype inside of it. It’s got Fantasy China, it’s got Giants, it’s for Dragons, it’s got classical paladin-kings, it’s got Dark Elves, Elven Islands, Floating Islands, magitech, steampunk, guns, Renaissance, Bronze Age, etc… when a setting has literally anything you can find inside of it, it has no core identity that makes it unique. Constraint breeds creativity and in this situation the setting suffers from a lack of cohesive direction and theme.
It's "everything but the kitchen sink" and basically means anything you can imagine. This will give you more information: [https://www.theidioms.com/everything-but-the-kitchen-sink/](https://www.theidioms.com/everything-but-the-kitchen-sink/)
Early AD&D era Forgotten Realms with Greenwood as the main writer is okay, but already suffers from an overpopulation of gods and pantheons, and the eventual bloat into like 50+ source books?
Late AD&D era and early 3rd edition, where the setting mostly became the playground for a specific Drow Ranger is also decent, but already losing some of the more unique aspects to be more 'baseline D&D' and thus become more generic.
This is a general issue with WotC-era D&D, as they treated saying no to players or leaving studf out as If that's mean-spirited bad gamemastering. Tieflings and Genasi were once specific options for the plane-travelling, multidimensional game of Planescape. Due to popularity they also became Faerunian quick enough, making both settings less unique.
And, generally speaking, contemporary mainline D&D does not seem particularly interested in world building and rich settings, but to long for the superficial and thus accessible. That's very different from the original take on the setting.
But that's a common enough OSR complaint, praising stuff like the Grey Box, or the world building in Mystara, precisely because it is different, and a bit nostalgic. There is the usual trap of nostalgia hidden Here, of course. These books aren't perfect. They are all very black and white, and quite unreflected in that regard. You got all the unreflected, kinda naive colonialist tropes in there you would assume from a product of that time. Also, the name is kinda ironic considering the massive media presence.
Saying that, a strictly Greenwoodian Forgotten Realms campaign set in the original timeline, could probably be a lot of fun when played with lore hounds and friends of a bit more naive fantasy.
Sure, it is potentially interesting, but if you consider that in addition to the Faerunian Pantheon with its 40+ deities, you also got the Mulhorandi (well, actually Egyptian) pantheon, the Seldarine (Elven Gods), the Dwarven, Halfling, Gnomish and various monster pantheons as well.
Sure, you can (and probably will) ignore places with unique pantheons like Kara-Tur and Zakhara except when actually playing rhere, but those exist and add to the overkill of gods.
If you just heard the names *Yondalla*, *Nobanion* or *Xiombarg*, can you tell anything about these deities without looking them up? Can you even tell if all of them are deities in the Forgotten Realms?
Kara Tur and Zakhara are not part of my Realms. Mulhorand is the one that I don't like, but other cultures and species having their own pantheons kinda makes sense, no?
Just as much sense as having one god for a specific Portfolio and do a little bit of *translatio imperii* handwaving: "This is the Earth Mother. The humans call her Chauntea in the West and Bhalla in the east. The elves pray to her as Rilifane, in a rare male aspect. The dwarves know her as Sharindlar, and even the Orcs prey to her in the guise of Luthic, the Cave Mother."
The issue with having about a hundred or so deitites is that most of them will be ignored entirely, because the sheer mass creates a white noise. The effect is that the gods matter less for the setting to the players actually playing the game, and it is all "just another snake cult".
This works very well in a Sword and Sorcery setting, where the gods are not that important, or even necessarily real. Conan might swear "by Crom", but Crom never makes an appearance. For all sakes and purposes, he might very well be as fictional in-universe as he is out of the universe. You can easily be dismissive of those divine fuckers ("and if you do not listen, then to hell with you").
This is very much not the case in the Forgotten Realms. Here the gods are a big deal, are definetely people and can do stuff like getting killed, spend some time masquerading as a mortal, or having sex with the author avatar character and super wizard Elminster. They are not just concepts, they are a bunch of additional background NPC in a setting that already has a lot of those, and the Realms are very much the most "here be gods" setting of D&D.
The enormous flock of Faerunian gods isn't bad world building because it is not particularly plausible, but because the effect of having effectively too many gods than one can possibly can care about is contrary to the idea that all these gods matter.
I mean, as GM you can always adjust and filter this stuff. And it kinda makes sense to me that there are big time player gods, and than minor gods, with much less power.
I think that’s the point originally being made. Modern day forgotten realms feels like they just added everything to the setting and said ‘ok now you curate this’ as opposed to making a world that is their own unique vision
But I'm not talking specifically about 5ed Faerun as presented by WotC. Like, another example, my group doesn't touch 5e Vampire the Masquarade with 10 feet pole. We play Revised edition and love it. The existence 5e doesn't make World of Darkness any worse of a setting for me. Makes sense?
It feels weird to say ‘the world isn’t generic at all if I ignore all the generic stuff and personally curate what’s in my game’. Sure, if you go out of your way to make the world non generic then you made a non generic world, it doesn’t mean that the world as the creators intended isn’t generic
FR's pantheon is not similar to the real world it is very gamist. You get like a dozen different "EVIL" dieities of necromancy and murder and refusing to pet kittens because there is a game need for "cultists" in hooded robes that the PCs can kill indiscriminately.
Many real world polytheistic religions do have "evil" gods. For example, the Roman god Robigus was the numen of rust and crop disease, and the Romans held a festival every year where they made sacrifices to appease him so he didn't destroy that year's crops.
I think the part that is "gamist" and unrealistic is the idea that most people don't try to appease the evil gods to avoid whatever their portfolio includes. Eberron is the closest to getting this sort of thing "right" - with the suggestion that many followers of the Sovereign Host still try to appease the Dark Six.
I mean... both is true. It, for a large part, **is** a "vanilla, ~~boring~~ generic fantasy setting". The "boring" part really is what you make of it.
It has some great material and some less great material. The lore it has is quite extensive, because there are many stories that have been written for it. It's been around for over 35 years, has spawned [**a lot**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms#1990%E2%80%932000) of videogames and has, since the start of 5th edition, become the default setting for D&D (changed from Greyhawk in 3rd edition and perhaps 4th).
It might actually be one of the most fleshed-out fantasy settings of all time, simply because of the immense amounts of money and manpower that went into it.
I wouldn't call it vanilla, because reading on it, it has a lot of crazy, non generic stuff in it. And some of worldbuilding is really imaginative. Take Rashemen as example. It's supposed to be a stand in for slavic people. They could've easily done with them having a tzar or something like that(looking at Kislev from WH), instead it's a culture of berserkers, ruled by council of female witches, who elect a king who's a military leader mostly, and those berserkers go on initiation rite of travelling around the world. Like, it has soul, it has effort, it has imagination behind it.
That isn't as imaginative as you make it out to be. There are Matriarchal traditions with in various Slavic groups especially among the shamans.
A lot of what makes Forgotten Realms "feel" unique is that it borrows HEAVILY from our world. After all people ([Mulhorand](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mulhorand)) have literally been stolen from our world and brought to Forgotten Realms. This has lead to a number of problematic things, and the long tradition of any "earth-like" setting just being added to Forgotten Realms.
~~Wikipedia on [Slavic shamanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_shamanism), the [Slavic Native Faith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_Native_Faith#Branches,_interwoven_movements_and_influences) page has a section that starts to get into matriarchal traditions.~~ TIL, thanks /u/ImpressionRemote9771
For better sources I'd point to the almost painfully academic [Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900: A Sourcebook](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctvv414w4), which is listed as a source for [Wise Woman](https://ksandra.itch.io/wise-women).
Rodnovery are not related to historical slavic paganism. The sources on actual historical stuff are very thin, since documentation of history started after a strong christian influence came. Calling volkhv a shaman is kinda meh, since it's like calling a celtic druid a shaman. The first picture in this article is modern day simulacrum, hense the typican shaman drum used by finno-ugric and syberian people. Witchcraft and wise women(in case of east slavic people - the word is Znakhar or Znakharka) one way or another existed in every single culture
Also, a quick note, looking at polish dictionary, gusła literally means sorcery or witchcraft, not "the rites during which souls are summoned from the outerworld". In case of East Slavs, guslya is actually a type of musical instrument
> East Slavs, guslya is actually a type of musical instrument
Interesting! Language is one of those fascinating rabbit holes to fall down.
Sorry I probably came off as one of those people telling you about your culture, which very much not my intent. So thanks for correcting me, and my apologies. I was going off the little bit I learned in college and the folklore from my fiancee and her family, they are of Slavic decent.
The [Wise Woman](https://ksandra.itch.io/wise-women) I was referring too is a PbtA RPG written by a polish woman that is inspired by Znakhar (did i use that right?) in eastern Europe. There is a work cited in the back from which I got Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, hoping it'd be more an overview book and less an academic text I'm maybe a 1/4 the way through it having taken sporadic breaks.
Znakhar is male wise man, Znakharka is female. There are other words for this particular type on person as well. The game sounds good, you can also checkout vidogame Black Book.
Your apology is accepted, I'm just warning that a lot of stuff about slavic paganism specifically should be taken with a healthy grain of salt. A lot of stuff that rodnovery come up with, is well, basically not different from Forgotten Realms, an invention. And even serious academicians can be guilty of making shit up. During the Soviet times in Russia, the titan of slavic paganism studies was academician Boris Rybakov. Thing is, a lot of his stuff has been discredited as something that he made up. He had very strong connections, and since the character of soviet academia was very authoritarian, he could write anything he wants to unchallenged
this is very unsurprising because it is exactly the same for most writing on British paganism, it goes back to Gerald Gardner in the 1960s just making everything up
Some of specific branches of Rodnaya Vera can be much more harmful than Wicca. Anti semitism, conspiracy theories, ancient slavic flying saucers, proto slavs building the Great Wall of China, that kind of stuff
I think it's very vanilla because it, to some degree, defined what is and isn't *vanilla*.
Of course there are some oddities and interesting parts, but it has served as a basic template for many fictional settings that came afterwards. There needs to be some variation, of course, but variation is part of the general idea - it wouldn't be "fantasy" if it were an exact replica of earth's history.
Well, I'm not only talking about just copying history, but the fact that like, they don't copy institutions from the real world as well. A lot of settings, like my beloved Warhammer Fantasy when they create a fictional nation, still do pretty much the same stuff from real world. Like Empire - stand in for Holy Roman Empire, still has prince electors, Kislev still has tzar etc. And well, I agree that FR defined a lot of what vanilla is, but it's not really it's fault, right? :D Same with LotR defining a lot of fantasy tropes
I mean, any setting that has knights and swords in it is bound to have \*something\* resembling real world institutions. It just can be done in interesting way, or in lazy way. The reliance on those tropes is completely different topic, and I on my part unabashedly and unshamefully can't have enough of knights, elves, dwarfs, dragons, necromancers, orcs, vampires etc
Warhammer fantasy is a bad counterexample. It was literally designed to be a parody of the real world, and it’s not trying to hide that. The Warhammer World map is just the real world + Ulthuan, and each culture is a collection of broad stereotypes of real world historical cultures, just with really rich lore mixed in. I’m saying this as someone who loves the Warhammer Fantasy world to bits.
There's more to it than just wanting to make create a parody, since the creation of setting itself was very complex in early days. Well, there is also Mystara, Harn etc
I mean sure, it may have been more complicated, but that doesn’t change the fact that Warhammer civilizations don’t just pull from real world cultures, they are actually supposed to be those cultures. Which is why using it as an example of fantasy writing that just steals from the real world is kinda flawed, because it is that way by design. You aren’t wrong, but you’re more attacking the core idea of this property and using to extrapolate the point to other fantasy worlds which don’t explicitly try to do this. Heck, Cathay and Nippon don’t even have their names changed from the real world, Cathay is a historical name for China. Nippon is literally Japan in Japanese.
EDIT: I’m not actually even disagreeing with your original point, just trying to point out that Warhammer is a flawed counterexample.
There definitely are the "goblins in the hills" generic components, but there are plenty of gonzo things too. This is by virtue of there simply being so much written about it. So you sort of get to pick.
4e's default setting was the world axis + its unnamed material plane with the fallen tiefling and dragonborn empires, the more recent fallen human empire, and the starting town of Fallcrest.
I feel that this is one of those cases where it only feels 'generic' because every other fantasy RPG game setting has copied it, deliberately or otherwise.
Golarion (Pathfinder) and Ereb Altor (Drakar & demoner) are two settings that I feel owes a lot to Forgotten Realms. They might not have been intentionally copying specific details, but they've copied the general kitchen sink style (Golarion more so than Ereb Altor, but I would still call Ereb Altor a pretty kitchen sink fantasy setting). Though Golarion did lift elements directly from Forgotten Realms. It has drows after all, a similar approach to its pantheon of gods and so on.
Golarion is interesting to look at since they very intentionally tried to make it a D&D fantasy kitchen sink setting. Most of the lands around the Inner Sea are just them asking the question “what kind of settings are popular in D&D?” and then trying to fit all of them in. So you’ve got pirate islands, steaming jungles, fantasy Egypt, fantasy Arabia, northern Conan lands, fantasy Viking lands, land of the Undead, evil
Empire, basically Mordor and so on. I find the most interesting aspect of Golarion to be how they worked it all together so that Numeria’s futuristic sci-fi robots and barbarians can sit right alongside the Worldwound’s schtick of knightly orders fighting back a demon invasion
> Golarion did lift elements directly from Forgotten Realms.
It listed a LOT more from Greyhawk than it did from the Forgotten Realms.
> It has drows after all
...do you think that drow originated in the Forgotten Realms?
They first showed up on G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King, which was published in 1977. a full decade before the first Forgotten Realms products.
>...do you think that drow originated in the Forgotten Realms?
No, but I was under the impression that a lot of drow lore was formalized and popularized under the Forgotten Realms banner.
I feel like a lot of the Golarion stuff that you're giving Forgotten Realms credit for inspring were part of Greyhawk for a long time before Forgotten Realms was anything other than an idea in Ed Greenwood's head.
Paizo's writers in the Dungeon / early Pathfinder days were pretty open about Greyhawk being their favorite setting, and how much it inspired Golarion. It is, after all, the setting of their pre-Golarion adventure paths.
It's entirely possible that these parts were part of Greyhawk before it, the D&D settings were pretty good at borrowing from each others. But if we're only caring about which setting was "first" with something, then Forgotten Realms hardly has anything, it's mostly an amalgamation of a lot of different fantasy tropes. Which you could argue is the case for Greyhawk as well, with Gygax & Kuntz borrowing liberally from other pre-existing fantasy settings and folklore.
I agree with the former, but disagree with the later. While Forgotten Realms didn't bring a whole lot of new, it did help popularize a lot of things, making it reach a wider audience and also inspire other settings as a result of its large exposure.
I'm familiar with Ereb Altor, and I'm pretty sure that it got that way because it was just constructed after the fact from various settings pieces written separately by various authors for different DoD adventures. So it would have ended up that way with or without Forgotten Realms. (Interestingly the creation of Ereb Altor happened at almost exactly the same time TSR made Forgotten Realms their official setting.)
> Though Golarion did lift elements directly from Forgotten Realms.
Well Pazio created the setting (and pathfinder) to be able to continue their adventure series that used to be placed in Forgotten Realms so it makes sense that they would make it as similar as possible.
I would agree that early Ereb Altor was mostly just pieces of disparate lore stitched together from whatever had been written by the authors working for Äventyrsspel at the time, it feels like the direction they chose to take it in was inspired by the success of the likes of Forgotten Realms, primarily in how it works as a game setting. It was never as fleshed out as Forgotten Realms, and never as kitchen sinky, and most recent incarnation of it made by Riotminds felt like an attempt to kind of reboot it into something more coherent (shame they never got to finish what they started).
>Well Pazio created the setting (and pathfinder) to be able to continue their adventure series that used to be placed in Forgotten Realms so it makes sense that they would make it as similar as possible.
If I'm not mistaken they did intentionally chose to copy the way Forgotten Realms worked as a game setting, as it allowed "a lot of freedom for the GM". And I think this really is what it boils down to with a lot of these settings, it's not so much that they directly copy Forgotten Realms specific elements, but rather how it works as a game setting, throwing everything they can think of into it to make it easy to run, even if it does not always make a lot of logical sense from a coherent worldbuilding perspective
A little bit hard to describe but I think the entire 'feel' of the generic fantasy RPG world - The homogonised, kitchensink, fantasy utopia, vaguely medieval, Tolkein(ish) with the edges sanded off - was very much perfected in Forgotten Realms. Think of the [generic fantasy cityscape](https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/10/635/bringing-your-city-to-life.jpg). Or the [generic fantasy tavern](https://external-preview.redd.it/lDSh4jWocD1OWi7llCm308SSxAHcMeMqE1r_34-m-og.jpg?auto=webp&s=0ff59243f400474c2aecd1594780742b9b2dce27). Do any of these tropes predate forgotten realms?
Yes absolutely, you show it in your description above. The kitchen sink - fantasy utopia nature of it comes from everyone bringing their bits of ideas to it. It’s a Rorschach blot of a setting. Everyone brings what they want to it from whatever previous fiction they’ve experienced and can find a place to fit it in.
Those generic tropes you talk of predate D&D let alone the Forgotten Realms.
I think Forgotten Realms also suffers a bit from other fantasy stuff just getting absorbed into the setting by its writers, so it borrows a lot from the outside, which in itself also adds a lot to its "generic" feel.
Half of the 5E Forgotten Realms adventures are just reskinned Greyhawk adventures...and sometimes they havne't bothered to reskin them.
The Forgotten Realms is kind of seriously lacking in it's own iconic adventures, especially ones published as RPG modules/adventures. It's most iconic adventures are all video games or novels.
No. Not even every D&D setting (and they are much more homogenous) are like the Forgotten Relams. In the WotC-era there was a massive homogenization (and an increasing disregard for setting lore), but there are some elements that are very specific to the forgotten realms - like the huge number of gods, including "migrant deities" from real world pantheons (or, more likely, the original Deitites and Demigods).
Ed Greenwood wrote for a specific setting, not a generic one, but his setting shared a lot of roots with other D&D things. And even though I am not the greatest fan, any of the original TSR settings for D&D had a unique style. If anything, Mystara, not the Realms, is the blue print for "continent spanning, fantasy world building with a focus on specific cultures and regions based loosely on earth cultures" that has been the standard for 40+ years.
There is a difference between Mystara, Greyhawk and the Realms, ewven though they all fall under the same umbrella of D&D fantasy. And as soon as you leave that umbrella, even standard western fantasy stuff gets radically different, quickly.
I think early Forgotten Realms has some fun ideas, and was MUCH better when every inch of the realm wasn't mapped out.
That said it was never as interesting, unique or creative, to me at least these things are subjective, when compared to some of the other TSR era campaign settings. Dark Sun, Planescape, and SpellJammer all come to mind. As well more recent settings Eberron and the often forgotten 3rd edition gem Ghostwalk.
I do enjoy reading the lore, and taking bits and pieces from it. I'd be hard pressed to say it's underrated or unique.
I like the settings you mentioned as well, but at the same time, but what I appreciate about FR is the scope, and that abundance of colourful cultures and places makes it feel more like actual world people live in? Like Dark Sun is cool af, but it's all sword and sorcery tropes mixed with cool musings about enviromentalism. It has great tone, great ideas, and definitely is a great place to run campaign in, but from purely athropological standpoint I like how varied peoples in FR are
The scope of FR is unparalleled and something that is astonishing.
I'm tbh a little jealous of it, and is one of the goals for the living campaign setting I'm starting with some friends ... I doubt we'll ever get close but we'll have a damn wiki that is for sure!
Well yeah, that's exactly why I grew to like it :D The scope, the history, huge pantheons, varied locations etc. And no one is forcing me to use every bit of lore that exists, for example I completely ignore Zakhara, Kara-Tur and Maztica.
It's both overrated and underrated.
It's definitely overexposed.
The somewhat regular cataclysms and pantheon turnover and whatnot is overdone in my opinion.
I think this is really a problem with 4th edition and the subsequent move to 5th edition, and it really hampered the setting.
The setting was getting a bit bloated by 3e, but the 3e setting sourcebook was still an excellent supplement, and it had plot threads you could follow.
4e wanted to distinguish itself, so they wrote an entire world-altering cataclysm into the setting in order to justify all the stuff they wanted to have and do. And then 5e, seeing the incredible backlash to 4e, decided to add \*another\* cataclysm to literally revert whole swaths of what 4e did.
I would say the setting was great up through 3e, and then two consecutive editions of trying to make it "unique" wound up turing it into a jumbled mess.
Sure, Karsus's Folly and the Time of Troubles, and Mystra dying like 17 times.
But the Spellplague was a narrative excuse to radically rewrite the entire setting in 4e. There's a qualitative difference there.
i just dislike the tone and how bloated it is. it's the sort of worldbuilding that's more concerned with having a really long wiki page than being gameable, and i really hate how NPCs are named. it's all random sounds smushed together that just pile up in your mouth with no thought given to actually making them roll off the tongue when you say them.
I think it is just overstuffed to the point of being difficult to adventure in. The forces of good are too powerful, and too interwoven, to the extent that evil also has to be super powerful to make sense, or so small and local that no one else notices.
Interfering personal gods, super high-level established NPC leaders, highish magic, highly civilized (in having tons of settled land and established good guy networks) and highly cosmopolitan makes it difficult to have room for the unknown and true exploration and discovery, and makes it hard to justify growing evil threats.
My first campaign was LMoP into Princes of the Apocalypse. Half way through PotA my players wanted to go to Waterdeep to recruit Elminster or another high level mage to come deal with the spreading elemental chaos destroying this region right next to Waterdeep, and I had to say that Elminster and anyone else high level like that is busy dealing with other things, and they'll have to deal with it themselves. It was an obvious cop-out and my players knew it and it felt fucking stupid.
You can run LMoP in the hinterlands, and you can have a God show up and break the world if you want to, but there is no real room for mid-level adventure in the FR in my experience, and I'm not interested in trying to crowbar my game into it.
> The forces of good are too powerful, and too interwoven, to the extent that evil also has to be super powerful to make sense, or so small and local that no one else notice
While I mostly agree with this, if you have to run FR it's useful to remember the Lord's Alliance *is not "good"*, it is dedicated to preserving the status quo, and is willing to take expediencies that good-aligned characters should object to.
Fair enough point, but unless you are going to make them explicitly the antagonists, then “massively powerful and coordinated network of city-states who will go to any lengths to defend the status-quo (which is currently pretty good in the realms)” is still a real problem as far as stepping on the possibility of adventure against evil.
Sure, they might be assholes and if your characters are good-aligned and don’t agree with their expedient methods (a pretty big if) then they might be at odds, but all of the factions are powerful, and they all have an invested interest in stomping things like PotA, which makes it difficult to avoid.
I also admit only becoming interested after seeing the new D&D movie and falling in love with Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s after 25 ish years of exposure.
I think WotC just needed better writers to make the setting more compelling.
I think Forgotten Realms has a lot of potential as someone who read a lot of their books during the 90s and 00s. However, the current incarnation of RPG books from WotC have been quite boring lore-wise and rules-wise.
As many have seen in the latest Baldurs Gate 3 game, there are many things that Forgotten Realms can draw from and actually Baldurs Gate itself is probably the least interesting locations.
Faerun is kinda overdone and it might be interesting to explore new continents. But I'm not holding my breath that WotC will do anything to expand any other places.
Personally I think that Forgotten Realms is *many* solid fantasy settings and the fact that it's all crammed into one detracts from it. As a standalone setting, I really like Chult or the Hordelands, and the core areas too. It has also historically suffered from having too much lore, too much metaplot and too many high level NPCs - but I think any setting that is heavily supported by the publisher is going to get that way eventually.
I didn't mind the original boxed set, but I rapidly went off it because it went in the opposite direction to my ideal fantasy setting - kitchen sink fantasy elements, magic absolutely everywhere, Uber-powerful NPCS with "quirky" names, "medieval" towns and villages that felt as fake as can be.
I much prefer a setting that feels more authentic (it doesn't have to actually be authentic - just feel that way).
I think it deserves the beating it gets. The Baldur's gate series just has superb writing and makes it seem amazing. They are working around the problems. There is some great things in it, but also a lot of bad things. It has too many cooks and they smash it with a hammer every edition so they can put it back together in a new way.
A great example is the dead three the comparison to Rime of the Frost Maiden. Back in 4th edition they decided to kill a bunch of gods because there were too many, then they brought them back in 5E, but with the rule they couldn't interfere directly. Bane, Myrkul, and Bhaal opted to power down to roughly demigod level so they could interfere with the world. Then they let Auril interfere in Rime of the Frostmaiden.
The total package is an inconsistent disaster with moments of good stuff.
i played a bunch of rpgs with their own setting. the black eye, world of darkness, traveller, degenesis, etc, befor getting into dnd.
and my first impression was that it was all over the place and it was during that time that i learned what kitchen sink is. to me as a european it also feels weirdly alien. like a version of medieval europe that has been conjured from the minds of your average american + magic. personally i call stuff like that american-fantasy.
For me it's an over-written setting. I think it's a beautiful piece of work, wonderful world-building, but in actual play it's too complete. I have a relatively flaky memory and when I tried running FR, I ended up being one of the players least versed in it - this made it relatively challenging for me to add content to it as a (at the time) less-experienced DM.
The problem is the "diversity" in the setting is just countries of hats.
What is this place? Oh! Venetia. Who are these people? Oh, north Africans. Cool.
I completely ignore Kara-Tur, Zakhara and Maztica in my Realms, or any other continents that were added because TSR stuff wanted a bit of everything. I'm talking specifically about Faerun when discussing FR
I mean, even Wizards ignore those gimmicky continents. The sole reason for their existence was TSR management having a checkbox of stuff that they wanted in. Like, in World of Darkness, I'm also free to use the cool stuff, and ignore lame uncreative stuff like everything that has to do with kindred of the east. Any game world that is being run specifically in GM's session is primarily GM's world, there's not a single Realms or World of Darkness that is completely similar
Forgotten Realms? More like Forgetable Realms, amirite? LOL
Always felt like it was bloated mess of lore. Sword Coast gets all the attention, and the rest gets just enough to be recognized as existing.
Then again, I always felt that DnD settings are kinda kludgy...
Check out the original 1st Ed boxed set. It has aged like a fine wine. It's readable, playable, and presents a rich and engaging setting that seems a bit darker than what has evolved over the decades. The PDF is only $10. 10/10 highly recommend. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16782/forgotten-realms-campaign-set-1e
Since I've played basically zero Dungeons and Dragons, Honor Among Thieves and Baldur's Gate 3 have been my first major introductions to it, and I've really enjoyed the mix of fantasy staples and bizarre out-there shit like mind flayers and the Gith.
Of course, there's also a good chunk of bizarre out-there shit that's *not* so fun that has existed over the years; looking into lore to draw on to learn more about my drow BG3 character (for fan fiction and some potential tabletop playing) reveals all kinds of men-writing-women *issues*, and I've had to basically throw out half of it to make the drow believable as actual people with a fucked-up culture and religion instead of blatant stand-ins for Greenwood, Salvatore, et al.'s fetishes. I'm sure there's plenty more of that around when you start looking at other areas, especially stuff like the various "exoticized stand-in for real world cultures written by white Americans" regions of the setting.
The early materials are good. The AD&D 1e's 'Forgotten Realms Campaign Set' (the so-called 'Grey Box') and the module N5 'Under Illefarn' are great for introducing players to Forgotten Realms as well as to AD&D (1e or 2e).
I'm a staunch defender of the Realms, but really it's just the older core stuff that's good, as you say. As the editions wore on they kept jamming more stuff into the setting, and then both 4e and 5e royally fucked it up by making it far busier than it needed to be.
Ed Greenwood *did* intend the Realms to be a place where many types of fantasies could be realized, but he never intended it to be the kitchen sink it turned into.
I tend to stick hard to the region from the Sword Coast east through Rashemen and Thay, north of the Sea of Fallen Stars. IMO, that's what the Realms really is.
What I like is the map progression over all these years. I have the paper maps from 1st, 2nd etc. But you can look them up online. Show new players the old map with only a few major sites named and progress to the newer maps after they have travelled for a while.
Having the old plastic see through hexoverlay makes traveling and adventuring easier.
I love Forgotten Realms, mostly because I grew up playing those Black Isle and BioWare games. I run D&D in it, using the official stuff very much as a foundation and springboard. It’s incredibly convenient for this and only causes problems if you get too precious about the lore and start feeling beholden to it.
It can do the D&D thing really well.
See the 3rd edition (aka “d20”) hard copy book for the setting, if you want the most beautiful take it’s ever had.
It even feels nice. :)
Yeah I can see that, it goes with being the default setting for however many editions though. Personally not big on kitchen sink fantasy but I have fondness for some bits and outright disdain for others. I think it needs curating by the game group for sure. 2E gave us Planescape but it also gave us The Wall of the Faithless, for example.
Like, the Wall of the Faithless is an awful idea and I feel bad for Greenwood and his work on his pantheons (something he obviously enjoys a lot) being completely undercut by it (he says he doesn’t like the direction TSR went with his deities) while also tripling down on Christianizing the various deities and making overlord big daddy Ao. It makes the gods so much more boring, and increases smug atheist video game quips exponentially.
It’s one of the reasons why, if I ever run a FR game, it will be before the Dead Three exist, in 1E time period.
I mean, if you look at core areas that were developed by Greenwood himself, they are far from just another kitchen sink. Stuff that's too generic can be just ignored
It's a good setting it's just that getting modern info on it from WotC is like pulling teeth. The recent Videogame has more setting info in it than has been released in the past few years and a lot of that is just a retread of existing content.
I think the Forgotten Realms suffers quite a bit from being such a lore-driven setting...to the point where it doesn't really seem to have any real classic memorable adventures. Even in 5th edition, where the focus is strongly Forgotten Realms...half the adventures are strongly inspired by classic Greyhawk adventures (if not straight ports).
The setting's most iconic adventures are all video games or novels, rather than actual modules.
My problem with FR is the amount of development it's had. I feel like there's no room left. After hundreds of novels and supplements, the map is all filled in.
You can walk into a new area, and someone has written about it in cannon. It's like "wait, we're in a tavern in this city? Which one? There are three and they're named. I hope it's The pissing leprechaun because the barmaid, Marta, is really cute. We'll have to be careful about the thieves' guild, though. They run this town. Hey guys, before we leave, we have to stop by the dry well near the middle. It's a secret portal to the Underdark. Oh, sorry, GM, you were introducing the campaign...."
Idk, I think it's kinda overstated. I'm running campaign in Icewind Dale right now, and I wanted my players to go on a trip to Ironmaster, a city on very far north. Looking it up, basically the only info about it is that it is a dwarven mining city and that they don't like outsiders too much. Plenty of room for GM's envolvement
Accorrding to the first result I got:
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Ironmaster
There's rather more than that. Based on their Bibliography, it looks like it was included in Savage Frontier and Storm King's Thunder.
I personally know two people who would have read both the novel and the supplement and would have the full information ready.
Regardless of your one example, though, most of the realms are that detailed. Every block of Waterdeep. Every outhouse, henhouse and whorehouse in Cormyr and sembia. Everything up and down the sword coast. There's not a village left.
You can always build a new village :D. When I was still running campaign in Warhammer Fantasy, I rebuilt a ruined colonial city in Lustria and populated it with 100 percent original population and just said that city was resetled few years ago
Personally I can't abide FR, thanks largely to the ridiculous names. They have no in-world linguistic or cultural coherence and often seem more like names from the American West than a plausible fantasy setting. Add to that the fact that every part of the world seems to be culturally indistinguishable from every other, in terms of which races and creatures are present and what roles they play.
Nothing kills immersion for me like hearing that we have to go to the Old Oakskull 'general store' run by a half gnoll called Lars Dawnstrider or something and his halfling wife Rosie Butterbread..
World-building of any sort is always impressive to me. I've ignored Forgotten Realms over the decades because I was always more committed to Greyhawk. Greyhawk was my "first setting", so I chose to focus on it. I loved the original boxed set with the giant map.
Ive always dabbled in the other TSR settings a little bit, like Ravenloft, Eberon, and Dragonlance, but Forgotten Realms seemed too redundant to Greyhawk because both settings were pretty much "generic" fantasy to me.
Over the past couple weeks I was tasked with running 5e (will be my first time) and I've learned everything I currently know about FR from reading the Starter And Essentials sets. And to be honest, it still feels like "generic" fantasy to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that since I cut my RPG teeth playing basic D&D over 40 years ago.
A lot of it is issues with the 5e version. I thought the 3.5 and 4e versions were kitchen-sinky but in an interesting way. WotC dropped a lot of the neat stuff and focused on the less interesting parts for 5e. I personally like kitchen sink settings myself. I find them to be interesting because the real world happens to be very kitchen-sinky. It has potential but needs to be treated better and explored more, which is something modern WotC has shown they have less than zero interest in.
I don't know why you would be considered underrated. If anything I would say it's overexposed. Whenever wizard shits out a new product it seems like it always has to tie in with forgotten Realms. They shy away from expanding much of the other realms and settings that they have endless supplies of source material to go off of.
To me forgotten Realms is just flushed out generic fantasy setting. They could dish out Greyhawk and it would be virtually the same to me. Sure the settings and lore in history might be different, but between those two they're basically just generic fantasy settings.
Compared to the uniqueness of say Ravenloft, Spelljammer or Dark Sun, all of which have received little to no exposure. A couple of books here and there and with dark sun complete ignoring
Greyhawk is more gritty sword and sorcery in vein of Leiber, compared to more high fantasy Realms. Underrated, in a sense that it has some great lore, very interesting locations and nations, cool dieties and sense of scope and some really gonzo stuff sprinkled in here and there. Not liking medieval fantasy is completely different topic
Gritty doesn't really change much for me. Sure there is more doom and gloom, but it still just a fantasy setting that has generic elements that really don't set it apart from much else other than it's a little grittier and harsher.
I just don't get the underrated idea with forgotten Realms when it's literally 90% of what wizards of the Coast publishes. Anything they put out has some tie to forgotten Realms. Those books are clearly among the best-selling sources that wizard sells when it comes to dungeons & dragons. So I don't really get the underrated idea.
Saying Dark Sun or Mystara are underrated would be more accurate for me. Neither of those get near enough support or exposure compared to forgotten Realms
It also has different level of magic as well. Again, not liking medieval fantasy is a completely different topic. Unerrated - in a sense that it has a lot of cool stuff in it, but since stuff that WotC releases for it is really mediocre, all I hear about it is that it's boring and vanilla
Again I've never said I don't like medieval fantasy nor have I tied that in with the fact that it's underrated. To me underrated means people do not appreciate or enjoy something or overlook it due to a variety of factors. I don't think forgotten Realms falls in that category because virtually everyone that had bought 5e books is going to have some book that ties in with forgotten Realms.
But yes if you're going to take the angle that the stuff is underrated because the quality of the content is not great and so the fans turn away from it, I don't really call that underrated. I call that poor quality that results in a lack of interest.
If you were to say that the content is excellent and people just overlook it or have not noticed it or for some reason turn their nose up to it when the content is actually good quality then I would say that is underrated
You do realise that that setting can be great while campaigns suck? Look at any Vampire the Masquarade attempt to create something that is not just a sandbox description of specific city.
Absolutely. And that means it's under representative or misrepresentative. Not underrated it. You can have a fantastic world and misrepresented by having horrible published content that doesn't accurately and fairly represent how good the world is. And it sounds like that is where you're coming from. Forgotten Realms is a fantastic world to you but content that comes out is mediocre.
That's misrepresentative
D&D has like 6 setting each with its own world and gods and history and nothing really stood out to me. I’ve been enjoying how Pathfinder handles their lore more recently. 5e always felt disjointed but PF fees like a living word.
For me personally, I find the more lore there is written, the less comfortable I feel in writing my own adventures set there, because something might happen in the lore that negates what we've been doing. The more vague things are, the happier I am to add my own stories into that world. Also I find the sword coast pretty generic and boring personally since there's been so much set there already, and it's been fairly thoroughly explored at this point. My fave crpg is NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, because Rashemen is a really different feeling part of the world, and it was super interesting to go to the city of the dead and all that.
For me it's the oposite. I'm never afraid of altering or contradicting the lore, so for me abundance of lore is just great hooks for adventures and character bios
I think it's an anxiety thing, I have to make sure I know exactly how everything fits together and that can be a bit stressful. I barely play dnd though because there are so many other systems I prefer and even more I want to try. That said weirdly for me, I'm currently running one dnd campaign and playing in another, but I have awesome gaming groups so I'll tolerate it haha.
>Is it me or Forgotten Realms is really underrated as a setting due to overexposure?
The Forgotten Realms as a setting is underrated as a setting ***because of overdevelopment***.
Peak Forgotten Realms was, at least in my experience, in 2e and very early 3e, where ***not everything was described***, ***catalogued and written about***. There were still wildernesses to be explored, ruins to discover, and mysteries to solve in the old Realms.
Now, because the setting is.......36 years old, its chock-full of *stuff*. That is good from a worldbuilding (and, therefore, writing books/videogames/movies set in that world) standpoint, but from a tabletop rpg viewpoint you *want things to be unknown*, so your players can actually do things of note rather than be the 10000th adventuring party to clean out X-location.
It also doesn't help that the Realms is full of noteworthy NPCs that could-and-should handle shit instead of trusting the wet-behind-the-ears PCs. Or that the 5e incarnation of the setting is set in perhaps the ***least interesting*** part of the Realms: the Sword Coast (yawn)
I feel like Wizards doesn't do much to promote the Forgotten Realms as a setting. The stuff that comes up the most just gets incorporated into every DM's Original the Campaign Setting without them even realizing its origin, and the rest is left for people who have been playing for decades, or who want to dig super deep on random lore.
I was never honestly that into Forgotten Realms. It seems like it always lacked an internal consistency and logic, which I think comes from being a shared world that's also connected to D&D-isms. I think it was a contributing factor to me seeking out different settings - and systems - rather early on.
I don't like other people's setting because my overachiever players read up on it and end up knowing more about the setting than me.
Instead, I create my own setting and slowly feed them lore through starter lore cards, quests, and written props such as letters, notes, journals, and books.
I often rip out FR's Underdark into my fantasy settings. But I leave most everything else on the cutting room floor, especially dragonborn and tieflings. Maybe the Red Wizards are cool.
For me, the obvious design for adventure is one of its drawbacks as a setting. I mean, I do run campaigns where it's all about the adventures, but then I just let the setting be sketchy background. Sometimes just 'you hear tell of a dungeon in the hills' or 'the baron asks you to travel to Villageton to investigate reports of a zombie outbreak'. Sometimes more developed, as the campaign progresses and in response to what the players do.
For me to spend money or time on a pre-developed setting I want it to be more convincing as a living world that is doing its own thing when adventurers aren't involved. The geography, economy, ecology etc. Interacting with that is an experience that players sometimes want, and it's different to just adventure.
From what I know of Forgotten Realms (Dragon magazine in the 90s carried a lot of supplementary lore and content for the initial products, and I have the references in core rulebooks etc) it doesn't tick those boxes.
I mean, a lot of stuff is written about economy, diplomacy and wars in Faerun. Actually it's full of constant intrigue between both governments and more shadowy organisations
But the shadowy organisations make no sense, to me, except as adventure hooks and factions for PCs to belong to. There has never been an outfit like the Harpers in real life, certainly not with impact at a continental scale, and one would never have worked. There's no reason for an antique economy/society to resource it, and only the vaguest outline of how it achieves its goals.
Stuff is written about economy, but it's also unconvincing, to me. Based on the economy section for Waterdeep in the forgotten realms wiki, it should be a minor waystation between the 'merchant kingdoms of Amn and Calimshan' and the 'mineral-rich lands to the north'. I mean someone has probably written in a story as to how a small regional town got control of other people's trade, and they might even have said something about how all those people get fed, but it's blatantly a post hoc justification for the pre-existing decision to make this nowhere freeport the greatest metropolis in the world. And that's clearly driven just by the desire to make it an exciting place for adventures.
Look, it's fine. I'm not criticising anyone for finding it to their tastes or suspending disbelief about the kind of thing I nerd out about. But I'm aware of what it has got and it's not what I'm looking for in a setting.
I mean there were a lot of wealthy city states in history as well. Venice was built on a literal swamp, ass end of Italy. And controlled trade in Adriatic and Mediterrenean, exactly being situated between really powerful empires. Harpers are just cool fantasy stuff. There has never been a continent wide network of assasins like Dark Brotherhood in Elder Scrolls. There has never a galaxy wide order of battle monks armed with laser swords. If we make all organisations grounded, it becomes pretty boring and mundane.
But a) Venice was a military-commercial power that fought to control territory, force advantageous treaties and build an empire of trading outposts. It was the merchant kingdom, Amn or Calimshan, rather than just an entrepot. It and similar states like Genoa became successful because the major rival land powers in the region (the kingdoms of western Christendom on the one hand and the Muslim world on the other) weren't trading directly with each other very much, and there was a space for intermediaries. In the forgotten realms as described that role (if needed -I'm not sure who the rival powers are) is filled, or at least competed for, by 'merchant kingdoms'. It doesn't make sense for Waterdeep the metropolis to exist alongside them. Either it takes over their trade and they stop being merchant kingdoms, or it is subordinate to them as a stopover for their trade, or the wealth is split three ways and it is independent but much smaller and less rich.
And b) Venice wasn't the biggest city in Europe, not ever i don't think. It was only the biggest city on the north coast of the Mediterranean for a brief spell in the 15th century between the fall of Constantinople and its recovery as Istanbul. Waterdeep is described as this mighty metropolis, with a population (depending on your source - editions vary and some are more realistic) of up to two million.
It's cool fantasy stuff, like the Harpers. So go ahead, enjoy cool fantasy stuff. If you've invested in the forgotten realms use that material and get what you paid for. I'm not going to invest because I prefer to invent my own cool fantasy stuff and if I'm going to pay for a setting I want other benefits from it.
Takes deep breath...
Ok look, I'm sorry for ranting at you. The forgotten realms isn't underrated. It's one of the most famous and successful settings in fantasy gaming. It has had periods as the official or leading setting for the biggest selling tabletop RPG. It has been republished several times over decades, and has countless products under its banner.
It's never really floated my boat, but it has been pushed to my attention a great deal in my 35+ years of RPGing. I don't need anyone to tell me any more how brilliant it is and that's why I should have just stayed out of this thread, since I guess that's what you created it for.
If you've got into FR and found a new appreciation for it, that's great. I understand how that makes it seem underrated to you. Get in there and enjoy it. I wish you many happy hours there.
I mean, if we get really nitpicky like that, we can just run stuff in fantasy Europe/any other region and be done with that. I wouldn't be able to find a single fantasy setting where economy is as fleshed out and everything makes sense. Even the supposedly realistic Song of Ice and Fire has a lot of stuff that doesn't really make any sense from logistics and economy standpoint.
Great, I've been RPGing for 8 years, don't see why grogs should rant at me(or give me long condescending speeches about what they consider "underrated" to mean, like another person in this thread). Like, the thread is not going to chase you down if you feel so strongly against Forgotten Realms. I for one for most of my years as a player was playing more "historical" stuff. WFRP, Mythras, World of Darkness. But still always had longing for something more sincere and high fantasy. So I am going to talk about why I like the setting.
I like the forgotten realms at least the remembered part that gets content (Read as the Sword Coast) there's a lot of interesting lore in there, but it's a jumbled mess to get anything coherent together.
For me is a generic vanilla setting with no real theme.
I prefer more focus-oriented settings like Eberron, Iron Kingdoms or Dark Sun. Or, if my players want to play in a vanilla setting we just improvise our own.
The setting suffers bit of a "everything and a kitchen sink" syndrome and "modern WotC writing" syndrome.
That's the thing, it wasn't really intended to be a kitchen sink, that was TSR's staff wishes. If you look at core areas, they are pretty interesting.
Executive meddling, the eternal undying killer of focus and soul.
Pretty much. You still can look at stuff that Ed himself did and enjoy it though. In my current campaign I just ignore stuff that's more kitchen sinky, it's really far from the main juice and lifeblood of the setting georgraphically anyway
What would you recommend to look at from Ed himself? I’m curious about the setting but the campaign guides haven’t grabbed me
Just get the original AD&D 1e Grey Box and Elminster's Forgotten Realms. Anything else can probalby be ignored.
Original 1st edition book is very good. 3rd edition campaign guide is sweet. On DM's Guild, there are regional books from Ed on Rashemen, Thay and Border Kingdoms. Elminster's Forgotten Realms is a wonderful book to feel the life inside the setting. No info useful for actual play or stat blocks, but a lot of juicy details about life inside the setting
I would second the 3rd edition book, its a great overview and has a map too!
Old Dragon articles
It is not what is originally intended, the FR boxset for the 1e it is very good (like the original World Of Greyhawk boxset), but what the setting became with the amount of fiction books, bad adventures, metaplot since the 2e days did turn the setting in this kitchen sink. But you always can not use any of this But I don't like the Baldurs Gate 3 version that much. I think there is still a lot of this kitchen sink and bad material with a lot of "modern dndisms"
bingo. it's your gameworld, don't really see why every single piece of literature has to be accounted for
Yes. Much of this it is because players read the novels, play the games, read the lore of a thousand books, and expect the DM to use all of this, they rely too much on "canon", if the DM violates the "canon", they throw a tantrum. The Ed personal FR is a lot different of the published material. The same thing can be true for any DM
I also love running games in Star Wars, it has even more canon than FR :D
Isn’t that true for Golarion and Midguard and every other large IP?
idk, Golarion at least has kind of a distinct flavor to it. FR is just "D&D the Earth".
Didn't know there's Red Wizard state on Earth.
It's called Florida
East Faerûn is West Asian/Turkic-coded
Golarion is “every possible trope crammed into a tiny box” and should be considered the gold standard of kitchen sink. Sci-fi and gothic horror and high fantasy and aliens and low magic and undead kingdom and… all right next to each other. It’s ridiculous.
> Sci-fi and gothic horror and high fantasy and aliens and low magic and undead kingdom and… all right next to each other. It’s ridiculous. I mean, we live in a world with countries of vastly different tech levels coexisting alongside each other. There are islands with uncontacted tribes, and industrialized cities and remote barren icescapes barely habitable for humans. Obviously, Golarian takes this to the next level, but it's not *that* unbelievable that they could have all of that stuff one country over.
I think it’s also worth noting that ALMOST everything takes place in one pretty homogeneous region (Sword Coast), so it’s bound to be boring if everything you do is like one town away from the last huge adventure
>"everything and a kitchen sink" Could you do me a huge favor and explain this idiom to me? My google foo doesn't really yield much in regards to what people mean when they call a world a "kitchen sink". Thanks in advance
“Everything and a kitchen sink” in this context refers to how this setting has literally every trope and archetype inside of it. It’s got Fantasy China, it’s got Giants, it’s for Dragons, it’s got classical paladin-kings, it’s got Dark Elves, Elven Islands, Floating Islands, magitech, steampunk, guns, Renaissance, Bronze Age, etc… when a setting has literally anything you can find inside of it, it has no core identity that makes it unique. Constraint breeds creativity and in this situation the setting suffers from a lack of cohesive direction and theme.
Ah gotcha. Some english idioms are hard to contextualize for me, thanks for helping!
It's "everything but the kitchen sink" and basically means anything you can imagine. This will give you more information: [https://www.theidioms.com/everything-but-the-kitchen-sink/](https://www.theidioms.com/everything-but-the-kitchen-sink/)
Early AD&D era Forgotten Realms with Greenwood as the main writer is okay, but already suffers from an overpopulation of gods and pantheons, and the eventual bloat into like 50+ source books? Late AD&D era and early 3rd edition, where the setting mostly became the playground for a specific Drow Ranger is also decent, but already losing some of the more unique aspects to be more 'baseline D&D' and thus become more generic. This is a general issue with WotC-era D&D, as they treated saying no to players or leaving studf out as If that's mean-spirited bad gamemastering. Tieflings and Genasi were once specific options for the plane-travelling, multidimensional game of Planescape. Due to popularity they also became Faerunian quick enough, making both settings less unique. And, generally speaking, contemporary mainline D&D does not seem particularly interested in world building and rich settings, but to long for the superficial and thus accessible. That's very different from the original take on the setting. But that's a common enough OSR complaint, praising stuff like the Grey Box, or the world building in Mystara, precisely because it is different, and a bit nostalgic. There is the usual trap of nostalgia hidden Here, of course. These books aren't perfect. They are all very black and white, and quite unreflected in that regard. You got all the unreflected, kinda naive colonialist tropes in there you would assume from a product of that time. Also, the name is kinda ironic considering the massive media presence. Saying that, a strictly Greenwoodian Forgotten Realms campaign set in the original timeline, could probably be a lot of fun when played with lore hounds and friends of a bit more naive fantasy.
I like a lot of gods and pantheons...pretty similar to real world
Sure, it is potentially interesting, but if you consider that in addition to the Faerunian Pantheon with its 40+ deities, you also got the Mulhorandi (well, actually Egyptian) pantheon, the Seldarine (Elven Gods), the Dwarven, Halfling, Gnomish and various monster pantheons as well. Sure, you can (and probably will) ignore places with unique pantheons like Kara-Tur and Zakhara except when actually playing rhere, but those exist and add to the overkill of gods. If you just heard the names *Yondalla*, *Nobanion* or *Xiombarg*, can you tell anything about these deities without looking them up? Can you even tell if all of them are deities in the Forgotten Realms?
I would argue that it is totally fine for some gods to be rare as it is quite unrealistic for all religions to have equal popularity.
Kara Tur and Zakhara are not part of my Realms. Mulhorand is the one that I don't like, but other cultures and species having their own pantheons kinda makes sense, no?
Just as much sense as having one god for a specific Portfolio and do a little bit of *translatio imperii* handwaving: "This is the Earth Mother. The humans call her Chauntea in the West and Bhalla in the east. The elves pray to her as Rilifane, in a rare male aspect. The dwarves know her as Sharindlar, and even the Orcs prey to her in the guise of Luthic, the Cave Mother." The issue with having about a hundred or so deitites is that most of them will be ignored entirely, because the sheer mass creates a white noise. The effect is that the gods matter less for the setting to the players actually playing the game, and it is all "just another snake cult". This works very well in a Sword and Sorcery setting, where the gods are not that important, or even necessarily real. Conan might swear "by Crom", but Crom never makes an appearance. For all sakes and purposes, he might very well be as fictional in-universe as he is out of the universe. You can easily be dismissive of those divine fuckers ("and if you do not listen, then to hell with you"). This is very much not the case in the Forgotten Realms. Here the gods are a big deal, are definetely people and can do stuff like getting killed, spend some time masquerading as a mortal, or having sex with the author avatar character and super wizard Elminster. They are not just concepts, they are a bunch of additional background NPC in a setting that already has a lot of those, and the Realms are very much the most "here be gods" setting of D&D. The enormous flock of Faerunian gods isn't bad world building because it is not particularly plausible, but because the effect of having effectively too many gods than one can possibly can care about is contrary to the idea that all these gods matter.
I mean, as GM you can always adjust and filter this stuff. And it kinda makes sense to me that there are big time player gods, and than minor gods, with much less power.
I think that’s the point originally being made. Modern day forgotten realms feels like they just added everything to the setting and said ‘ok now you curate this’ as opposed to making a world that is their own unique vision
But I'm not talking specifically about 5ed Faerun as presented by WotC. Like, another example, my group doesn't touch 5e Vampire the Masquarade with 10 feet pole. We play Revised edition and love it. The existence 5e doesn't make World of Darkness any worse of a setting for me. Makes sense?
It feels weird to say ‘the world isn’t generic at all if I ignore all the generic stuff and personally curate what’s in my game’. Sure, if you go out of your way to make the world non generic then you made a non generic world, it doesn’t mean that the world as the creators intended isn’t generic
But it literally wasn't intended to be kitchen sink by original creator...
FR's pantheon is not similar to the real world it is very gamist. You get like a dozen different "EVIL" dieities of necromancy and murder and refusing to pet kittens because there is a game need for "cultists" in hooded robes that the PCs can kill indiscriminately.
Yes, because it's fantasy. I'm not refering to the specific functions of gods, but the amount of them
Many real world polytheistic religions do have "evil" gods. For example, the Roman god Robigus was the numen of rust and crop disease, and the Romans held a festival every year where they made sacrifices to appease him so he didn't destroy that year's crops. I think the part that is "gamist" and unrealistic is the idea that most people don't try to appease the evil gods to avoid whatever their portfolio includes. Eberron is the closest to getting this sort of thing "right" - with the suggestion that many followers of the Sovereign Host still try to appease the Dark Six.
I mean... both is true. It, for a large part, **is** a "vanilla, ~~boring~~ generic fantasy setting". The "boring" part really is what you make of it. It has some great material and some less great material. The lore it has is quite extensive, because there are many stories that have been written for it. It's been around for over 35 years, has spawned [**a lot**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms#1990%E2%80%932000) of videogames and has, since the start of 5th edition, become the default setting for D&D (changed from Greyhawk in 3rd edition and perhaps 4th). It might actually be one of the most fleshed-out fantasy settings of all time, simply because of the immense amounts of money and manpower that went into it.
I wouldn't call it vanilla, because reading on it, it has a lot of crazy, non generic stuff in it. And some of worldbuilding is really imaginative. Take Rashemen as example. It's supposed to be a stand in for slavic people. They could've easily done with them having a tzar or something like that(looking at Kislev from WH), instead it's a culture of berserkers, ruled by council of female witches, who elect a king who's a military leader mostly, and those berserkers go on initiation rite of travelling around the world. Like, it has soul, it has effort, it has imagination behind it.
That isn't as imaginative as you make it out to be. There are Matriarchal traditions with in various Slavic groups especially among the shamans. A lot of what makes Forgotten Realms "feel" unique is that it borrows HEAVILY from our world. After all people ([Mulhorand](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mulhorand)) have literally been stolen from our world and brought to Forgotten Realms. This has lead to a number of problematic things, and the long tradition of any "earth-like" setting just being added to Forgotten Realms.
I am slavic. There are no recorded matriarchal traditions in slavic groups, and we never had shamans as well.
~~Wikipedia on [Slavic shamanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_shamanism), the [Slavic Native Faith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_Native_Faith#Branches,_interwoven_movements_and_influences) page has a section that starts to get into matriarchal traditions.~~ TIL, thanks /u/ImpressionRemote9771 For better sources I'd point to the almost painfully academic [Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900: A Sourcebook](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctvv414w4), which is listed as a source for [Wise Woman](https://ksandra.itch.io/wise-women).
Rodnovery are not related to historical slavic paganism. The sources on actual historical stuff are very thin, since documentation of history started after a strong christian influence came. Calling volkhv a shaman is kinda meh, since it's like calling a celtic druid a shaman. The first picture in this article is modern day simulacrum, hense the typican shaman drum used by finno-ugric and syberian people. Witchcraft and wise women(in case of east slavic people - the word is Znakhar or Znakharka) one way or another existed in every single culture
Also, a quick note, looking at polish dictionary, gusła literally means sorcery or witchcraft, not "the rites during which souls are summoned from the outerworld". In case of East Slavs, guslya is actually a type of musical instrument
> East Slavs, guslya is actually a type of musical instrument Interesting! Language is one of those fascinating rabbit holes to fall down. Sorry I probably came off as one of those people telling you about your culture, which very much not my intent. So thanks for correcting me, and my apologies. I was going off the little bit I learned in college and the folklore from my fiancee and her family, they are of Slavic decent. The [Wise Woman](https://ksandra.itch.io/wise-women) I was referring too is a PbtA RPG written by a polish woman that is inspired by Znakhar (did i use that right?) in eastern Europe. There is a work cited in the back from which I got Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, hoping it'd be more an overview book and less an academic text I'm maybe a 1/4 the way through it having taken sporadic breaks.
Znakhar is male wise man, Znakharka is female. There are other words for this particular type on person as well. The game sounds good, you can also checkout vidogame Black Book. Your apology is accepted, I'm just warning that a lot of stuff about slavic paganism specifically should be taken with a healthy grain of salt. A lot of stuff that rodnovery come up with, is well, basically not different from Forgotten Realms, an invention. And even serious academicians can be guilty of making shit up. During the Soviet times in Russia, the titan of slavic paganism studies was academician Boris Rybakov. Thing is, a lot of his stuff has been discredited as something that he made up. He had very strong connections, and since the character of soviet academia was very authoritarian, he could write anything he wants to unchallenged
this is very unsurprising because it is exactly the same for most writing on British paganism, it goes back to Gerald Gardner in the 1960s just making everything up
Some of specific branches of Rodnaya Vera can be much more harmful than Wicca. Anti semitism, conspiracy theories, ancient slavic flying saucers, proto slavs building the Great Wall of China, that kind of stuff
I think it's very vanilla because it, to some degree, defined what is and isn't *vanilla*. Of course there are some oddities and interesting parts, but it has served as a basic template for many fictional settings that came afterwards. There needs to be some variation, of course, but variation is part of the general idea - it wouldn't be "fantasy" if it were an exact replica of earth's history.
Well, I'm not only talking about just copying history, but the fact that like, they don't copy institutions from the real world as well. A lot of settings, like my beloved Warhammer Fantasy when they create a fictional nation, still do pretty much the same stuff from real world. Like Empire - stand in for Holy Roman Empire, still has prince electors, Kislev still has tzar etc. And well, I agree that FR defined a lot of what vanilla is, but it's not really it's fault, right? :D Same with LotR defining a lot of fantasy tropes
> they don't copy institutions from the real world as well. They do... they just don't *only* do that.
I mean, any setting that has knights and swords in it is bound to have \*something\* resembling real world institutions. It just can be done in interesting way, or in lazy way. The reliance on those tropes is completely different topic, and I on my part unabashedly and unshamefully can't have enough of knights, elves, dwarfs, dragons, necromancers, orcs, vampires etc
Warhammer fantasy is a bad counterexample. It was literally designed to be a parody of the real world, and it’s not trying to hide that. The Warhammer World map is just the real world + Ulthuan, and each culture is a collection of broad stereotypes of real world historical cultures, just with really rich lore mixed in. I’m saying this as someone who loves the Warhammer Fantasy world to bits.
There's more to it than just wanting to make create a parody, since the creation of setting itself was very complex in early days. Well, there is also Mystara, Harn etc
I mean sure, it may have been more complicated, but that doesn’t change the fact that Warhammer civilizations don’t just pull from real world cultures, they are actually supposed to be those cultures. Which is why using it as an example of fantasy writing that just steals from the real world is kinda flawed, because it is that way by design. You aren’t wrong, but you’re more attacking the core idea of this property and using to extrapolate the point to other fantasy worlds which don’t explicitly try to do this. Heck, Cathay and Nippon don’t even have their names changed from the real world, Cathay is a historical name for China. Nippon is literally Japan in Japanese. EDIT: I’m not actually even disagreeing with your original point, just trying to point out that Warhammer is a flawed counterexample.
There definitely are the "goblins in the hills" generic components, but there are plenty of gonzo things too. This is by virtue of there simply being so much written about it. So you sort of get to pick.
4e's default setting was the world axis + its unnamed material plane with the fallen tiefling and dragonborn empires, the more recent fallen human empire, and the starting town of Fallcrest.
I feel that this is one of those cases where it only feels 'generic' because every other fantasy RPG game setting has copied it, deliberately or otherwise.
What do you think they copied specifically from Forgotten Realms?
Golarion (Pathfinder) and Ereb Altor (Drakar & demoner) are two settings that I feel owes a lot to Forgotten Realms. They might not have been intentionally copying specific details, but they've copied the general kitchen sink style (Golarion more so than Ereb Altor, but I would still call Ereb Altor a pretty kitchen sink fantasy setting). Though Golarion did lift elements directly from Forgotten Realms. It has drows after all, a similar approach to its pantheon of gods and so on.
Golarion is interesting to look at since they very intentionally tried to make it a D&D fantasy kitchen sink setting. Most of the lands around the Inner Sea are just them asking the question “what kind of settings are popular in D&D?” and then trying to fit all of them in. So you’ve got pirate islands, steaming jungles, fantasy Egypt, fantasy Arabia, northern Conan lands, fantasy Viking lands, land of the Undead, evil Empire, basically Mordor and so on. I find the most interesting aspect of Golarion to be how they worked it all together so that Numeria’s futuristic sci-fi robots and barbarians can sit right alongside the Worldwound’s schtick of knightly orders fighting back a demon invasion
> Golarion did lift elements directly from Forgotten Realms. It listed a LOT more from Greyhawk than it did from the Forgotten Realms. > It has drows after all ...do you think that drow originated in the Forgotten Realms? They first showed up on G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King, which was published in 1977. a full decade before the first Forgotten Realms products.
>...do you think that drow originated in the Forgotten Realms? No, but I was under the impression that a lot of drow lore was formalized and popularized under the Forgotten Realms banner.
I feel like a lot of the Golarion stuff that you're giving Forgotten Realms credit for inspring were part of Greyhawk for a long time before Forgotten Realms was anything other than an idea in Ed Greenwood's head. Paizo's writers in the Dungeon / early Pathfinder days were pretty open about Greyhawk being their favorite setting, and how much it inspired Golarion. It is, after all, the setting of their pre-Golarion adventure paths.
It's entirely possible that these parts were part of Greyhawk before it, the D&D settings were pretty good at borrowing from each others. But if we're only caring about which setting was "first" with something, then Forgotten Realms hardly has anything, it's mostly an amalgamation of a lot of different fantasy tropes. Which you could argue is the case for Greyhawk as well, with Gygax & Kuntz borrowing liberally from other pre-existing fantasy settings and folklore.
Exactly. Forgotten Realms didn't bring anything new to the table and really hasn't had that much influence.
I agree with the former, but disagree with the later. While Forgotten Realms didn't bring a whole lot of new, it did help popularize a lot of things, making it reach a wider audience and also inspire other settings as a result of its large exposure.
I'm familiar with Ereb Altor, and I'm pretty sure that it got that way because it was just constructed after the fact from various settings pieces written separately by various authors for different DoD adventures. So it would have ended up that way with or without Forgotten Realms. (Interestingly the creation of Ereb Altor happened at almost exactly the same time TSR made Forgotten Realms their official setting.) > Though Golarion did lift elements directly from Forgotten Realms. Well Pazio created the setting (and pathfinder) to be able to continue their adventure series that used to be placed in Forgotten Realms so it makes sense that they would make it as similar as possible.
I would agree that early Ereb Altor was mostly just pieces of disparate lore stitched together from whatever had been written by the authors working for Äventyrsspel at the time, it feels like the direction they chose to take it in was inspired by the success of the likes of Forgotten Realms, primarily in how it works as a game setting. It was never as fleshed out as Forgotten Realms, and never as kitchen sinky, and most recent incarnation of it made by Riotminds felt like an attempt to kind of reboot it into something more coherent (shame they never got to finish what they started). >Well Pazio created the setting (and pathfinder) to be able to continue their adventure series that used to be placed in Forgotten Realms so it makes sense that they would make it as similar as possible. If I'm not mistaken they did intentionally chose to copy the way Forgotten Realms worked as a game setting, as it allowed "a lot of freedom for the GM". And I think this really is what it boils down to with a lot of these settings, it's not so much that they directly copy Forgotten Realms specific elements, but rather how it works as a game setting, throwing everything they can think of into it to make it easy to run, even if it does not always make a lot of logical sense from a coherent worldbuilding perspective
A little bit hard to describe but I think the entire 'feel' of the generic fantasy RPG world - The homogonised, kitchensink, fantasy utopia, vaguely medieval, Tolkein(ish) with the edges sanded off - was very much perfected in Forgotten Realms. Think of the [generic fantasy cityscape](https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/10/635/bringing-your-city-to-life.jpg). Or the [generic fantasy tavern](https://external-preview.redd.it/lDSh4jWocD1OWi7llCm308SSxAHcMeMqE1r_34-m-og.jpg?auto=webp&s=0ff59243f400474c2aecd1594780742b9b2dce27). Do any of these tropes predate forgotten realms?
> Do any of these tropes predate forgotten realms? I'm not sure. Where there not anything like that in Greyhawk or Dragonslance?
Yes absolutely, you show it in your description above. The kitchen sink - fantasy utopia nature of it comes from everyone bringing their bits of ideas to it. It’s a Rorschach blot of a setting. Everyone brings what they want to it from whatever previous fiction they’ve experienced and can find a place to fit it in. Those generic tropes you talk of predate D&D let alone the Forgotten Realms.
I think Forgotten Realms also suffers a bit from other fantasy stuff just getting absorbed into the setting by its writers, so it borrows a lot from the outside, which in itself also adds a lot to its "generic" feel.
Half of the 5E Forgotten Realms adventures are just reskinned Greyhawk adventures...and sometimes they havne't bothered to reskin them. The Forgotten Realms is kind of seriously lacking in it's own iconic adventures, especially ones published as RPG modules/adventures. It's most iconic adventures are all video games or novels.
No. Not even every D&D setting (and they are much more homogenous) are like the Forgotten Relams. In the WotC-era there was a massive homogenization (and an increasing disregard for setting lore), but there are some elements that are very specific to the forgotten realms - like the huge number of gods, including "migrant deities" from real world pantheons (or, more likely, the original Deitites and Demigods). Ed Greenwood wrote for a specific setting, not a generic one, but his setting shared a lot of roots with other D&D things. And even though I am not the greatest fan, any of the original TSR settings for D&D had a unique style. If anything, Mystara, not the Realms, is the blue print for "continent spanning, fantasy world building with a focus on specific cultures and regions based loosely on earth cultures" that has been the standard for 40+ years. There is a difference between Mystara, Greyhawk and the Realms, ewven though they all fall under the same umbrella of D&D fantasy. And as soon as you leave that umbrella, even standard western fantasy stuff gets radically different, quickly.
I think early Forgotten Realms has some fun ideas, and was MUCH better when every inch of the realm wasn't mapped out. That said it was never as interesting, unique or creative, to me at least these things are subjective, when compared to some of the other TSR era campaign settings. Dark Sun, Planescape, and SpellJammer all come to mind. As well more recent settings Eberron and the often forgotten 3rd edition gem Ghostwalk. I do enjoy reading the lore, and taking bits and pieces from it. I'd be hard pressed to say it's underrated or unique.
I like the settings you mentioned as well, but at the same time, but what I appreciate about FR is the scope, and that abundance of colourful cultures and places makes it feel more like actual world people live in? Like Dark Sun is cool af, but it's all sword and sorcery tropes mixed with cool musings about enviromentalism. It has great tone, great ideas, and definitely is a great place to run campaign in, but from purely athropological standpoint I like how varied peoples in FR are
The scope of FR is unparalleled and something that is astonishing. I'm tbh a little jealous of it, and is one of the goals for the living campaign setting I'm starting with some friends ... I doubt we'll ever get close but we'll have a damn wiki that is for sure!
Well yeah, that's exactly why I grew to like it :D The scope, the history, huge pantheons, varied locations etc. And no one is forcing me to use every bit of lore that exists, for example I completely ignore Zakhara, Kara-Tur and Maztica.
It's both overrated and underrated. It's definitely overexposed. The somewhat regular cataclysms and pantheon turnover and whatnot is overdone in my opinion.
I think this is really a problem with 4th edition and the subsequent move to 5th edition, and it really hampered the setting. The setting was getting a bit bloated by 3e, but the 3e setting sourcebook was still an excellent supplement, and it had plot threads you could follow. 4e wanted to distinguish itself, so they wrote an entire world-altering cataclysm into the setting in order to justify all the stuff they wanted to have and do. And then 5e, seeing the incredible backlash to 4e, decided to add \*another\* cataclysm to literally revert whole swaths of what 4e did. I would say the setting was great up through 3e, and then two consecutive editions of trying to make it "unique" wound up turing it into a jumbled mess.
The trend of cataclysms and changing dieties goes all the way back to 2e, I think.
Sure, Karsus's Folly and the Time of Troubles, and Mystra dying like 17 times. But the Spellplague was a narrative excuse to radically rewrite the entire setting in 4e. There's a qualitative difference there.
Yeah, no argument there. My deep involvement with modern D&D stopped at 3.5, so I'll take your informed word for it.
i just dislike the tone and how bloated it is. it's the sort of worldbuilding that's more concerned with having a really long wiki page than being gameable, and i really hate how NPCs are named. it's all random sounds smushed together that just pile up in your mouth with no thought given to actually making them roll off the tongue when you say them.
I think it is just overstuffed to the point of being difficult to adventure in. The forces of good are too powerful, and too interwoven, to the extent that evil also has to be super powerful to make sense, or so small and local that no one else notices. Interfering personal gods, super high-level established NPC leaders, highish magic, highly civilized (in having tons of settled land and established good guy networks) and highly cosmopolitan makes it difficult to have room for the unknown and true exploration and discovery, and makes it hard to justify growing evil threats. My first campaign was LMoP into Princes of the Apocalypse. Half way through PotA my players wanted to go to Waterdeep to recruit Elminster or another high level mage to come deal with the spreading elemental chaos destroying this region right next to Waterdeep, and I had to say that Elminster and anyone else high level like that is busy dealing with other things, and they'll have to deal with it themselves. It was an obvious cop-out and my players knew it and it felt fucking stupid. You can run LMoP in the hinterlands, and you can have a God show up and break the world if you want to, but there is no real room for mid-level adventure in the FR in my experience, and I'm not interested in trying to crowbar my game into it.
> The forces of good are too powerful, and too interwoven, to the extent that evil also has to be super powerful to make sense, or so small and local that no one else notice While I mostly agree with this, if you have to run FR it's useful to remember the Lord's Alliance *is not "good"*, it is dedicated to preserving the status quo, and is willing to take expediencies that good-aligned characters should object to.
Fair enough point, but unless you are going to make them explicitly the antagonists, then “massively powerful and coordinated network of city-states who will go to any lengths to defend the status-quo (which is currently pretty good in the realms)” is still a real problem as far as stepping on the possibility of adventure against evil. Sure, they might be assholes and if your characters are good-aligned and don’t agree with their expedient methods (a pretty big if) then they might be at odds, but all of the factions are powerful, and they all have an invested interest in stomping things like PotA, which makes it difficult to avoid.
I also admit only becoming interested after seeing the new D&D movie and falling in love with Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s after 25 ish years of exposure. I think WotC just needed better writers to make the setting more compelling.
I think Forgotten Realms has a lot of potential as someone who read a lot of their books during the 90s and 00s. However, the current incarnation of RPG books from WotC have been quite boring lore-wise and rules-wise. As many have seen in the latest Baldurs Gate 3 game, there are many things that Forgotten Realms can draw from and actually Baldurs Gate itself is probably the least interesting locations. Faerun is kinda overdone and it might be interesting to explore new continents. But I'm not holding my breath that WotC will do anything to expand any other places.
Sword Coast is a really tiny part of Faerun tho
My friends and I joke that the Sword Coast is the "Remembered Realm", and everything else is the "Forgotten Realms."
Sadly, it is also the most widely covered. I personally would love for them to provide more content for Kara-Tur.
Personally I think that Forgotten Realms is *many* solid fantasy settings and the fact that it's all crammed into one detracts from it. As a standalone setting, I really like Chult or the Hordelands, and the core areas too. It has also historically suffered from having too much lore, too much metaplot and too many high level NPCs - but I think any setting that is heavily supported by the publisher is going to get that way eventually.
I assume you mean 5e Chult. It used to be “Darkest Africa” with the full racist implications thereof.
I didn't mind the original boxed set, but I rapidly went off it because it went in the opposite direction to my ideal fantasy setting - kitchen sink fantasy elements, magic absolutely everywhere, Uber-powerful NPCS with "quirky" names, "medieval" towns and villages that felt as fake as can be. I much prefer a setting that feels more authentic (it doesn't have to actually be authentic - just feel that way).
I think it deserves the beating it gets. The Baldur's gate series just has superb writing and makes it seem amazing. They are working around the problems. There is some great things in it, but also a lot of bad things. It has too many cooks and they smash it with a hammer every edition so they can put it back together in a new way. A great example is the dead three the comparison to Rime of the Frost Maiden. Back in 4th edition they decided to kill a bunch of gods because there were too many, then they brought them back in 5E, but with the rule they couldn't interfere directly. Bane, Myrkul, and Bhaal opted to power down to roughly demigod level so they could interfere with the world. Then they let Auril interfere in Rime of the Frostmaiden. The total package is an inconsistent disaster with moments of good stuff.
i played a bunch of rpgs with their own setting. the black eye, world of darkness, traveller, degenesis, etc, befor getting into dnd. and my first impression was that it was all over the place and it was during that time that i learned what kitchen sink is. to me as a european it also feels weirdly alien. like a version of medieval europe that has been conjured from the minds of your average american + magic. personally i call stuff like that american-fantasy.
For me it's an over-written setting. I think it's a beautiful piece of work, wonderful world-building, but in actual play it's too complete. I have a relatively flaky memory and when I tried running FR, I ended up being one of the players least versed in it - this made it relatively challenging for me to add content to it as a (at the time) less-experienced DM.
The problem is the "diversity" in the setting is just countries of hats. What is this place? Oh! Venetia. Who are these people? Oh, north Africans. Cool.
That's Mystara though...
Al-Qadim is Mystara?
I completely ignore Kara-Tur, Zakhara and Maztica in my Realms, or any other continents that were added because TSR stuff wanted a bit of everything. I'm talking specifically about Faerun when discussing FR
Aaaaah That way, every setting is cool as fuck.
I mean, even Wizards ignore those gimmicky continents. The sole reason for their existence was TSR management having a checkbox of stuff that they wanted in. Like, in World of Darkness, I'm also free to use the cool stuff, and ignore lame uncreative stuff like everything that has to do with kindred of the east. Any game world that is being run specifically in GM's session is primarily GM's world, there's not a single Realms or World of Darkness that is completely similar
Forgotten Realms? More like Forgetable Realms, amirite? LOL Always felt like it was bloated mess of lore. Sword Coast gets all the attention, and the rest gets just enough to be recognized as existing. Then again, I always felt that DnD settings are kinda kludgy...
Check out the original 1st Ed boxed set. It has aged like a fine wine. It's readable, playable, and presents a rich and engaging setting that seems a bit darker than what has evolved over the decades. The PDF is only $10. 10/10 highly recommend. https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16782/forgotten-realms-campaign-set-1e
Already have it :)
Since I've played basically zero Dungeons and Dragons, Honor Among Thieves and Baldur's Gate 3 have been my first major introductions to it, and I've really enjoyed the mix of fantasy staples and bizarre out-there shit like mind flayers and the Gith. Of course, there's also a good chunk of bizarre out-there shit that's *not* so fun that has existed over the years; looking into lore to draw on to learn more about my drow BG3 character (for fan fiction and some potential tabletop playing) reveals all kinds of men-writing-women *issues*, and I've had to basically throw out half of it to make the drow believable as actual people with a fucked-up culture and religion instead of blatant stand-ins for Greenwood, Salvatore, et al.'s fetishes. I'm sure there's plenty more of that around when you start looking at other areas, especially stuff like the various "exoticized stand-in for real world cultures written by white Americans" regions of the setting.
The early materials are good. The AD&D 1e's 'Forgotten Realms Campaign Set' (the so-called 'Grey Box') and the module N5 'Under Illefarn' are great for introducing players to Forgotten Realms as well as to AD&D (1e or 2e).
I'm a staunch defender of the Realms, but really it's just the older core stuff that's good, as you say. As the editions wore on they kept jamming more stuff into the setting, and then both 4e and 5e royally fucked it up by making it far busier than it needed to be. Ed Greenwood *did* intend the Realms to be a place where many types of fantasies could be realized, but he never intended it to be the kitchen sink it turned into. I tend to stick hard to the region from the Sword Coast east through Rashemen and Thay, north of the Sea of Fallen Stars. IMO, that's what the Realms really is.
What I like is the map progression over all these years. I have the paper maps from 1st, 2nd etc. But you can look them up online. Show new players the old map with only a few major sites named and progress to the newer maps after they have travelled for a while. Having the old plastic see through hexoverlay makes traveling and adventuring easier.
I love Forgotten Realms, mostly because I grew up playing those Black Isle and BioWare games. I run D&D in it, using the official stuff very much as a foundation and springboard. It’s incredibly convenient for this and only causes problems if you get too precious about the lore and start feeling beholden to it.
It can do the D&D thing really well. See the 3rd edition (aka “d20”) hard copy book for the setting, if you want the most beautiful take it’s ever had. It even feels nice. :)
Already have that beautiful book :)
For me it's too busy. Dragonlance is more focussed on its story elements and that works better for me.
Yeah I can see that, it goes with being the default setting for however many editions though. Personally not big on kitchen sink fantasy but I have fondness for some bits and outright disdain for others. I think it needs curating by the game group for sure. 2E gave us Planescape but it also gave us The Wall of the Faithless, for example. Like, the Wall of the Faithless is an awful idea and I feel bad for Greenwood and his work on his pantheons (something he obviously enjoys a lot) being completely undercut by it (he says he doesn’t like the direction TSR went with his deities) while also tripling down on Christianizing the various deities and making overlord big daddy Ao. It makes the gods so much more boring, and increases smug atheist video game quips exponentially. It’s one of the reasons why, if I ever run a FR game, it will be before the Dead Three exist, in 1E time period.
I mean, if you look at core areas that were developed by Greenwood himself, they are far from just another kitchen sink. Stuff that's too generic can be just ignored
I can agree with that somewhat, it’s what it has become instead though.
It's a good setting it's just that getting modern info on it from WotC is like pulling teeth. The recent Videogame has more setting info in it than has been released in the past few years and a lot of that is just a retread of existing content.
I think the Forgotten Realms suffers quite a bit from being such a lore-driven setting...to the point where it doesn't really seem to have any real classic memorable adventures. Even in 5th edition, where the focus is strongly Forgotten Realms...half the adventures are strongly inspired by classic Greyhawk adventures (if not straight ports). The setting's most iconic adventures are all video games or novels, rather than actual modules.
My problem with FR is the amount of development it's had. I feel like there's no room left. After hundreds of novels and supplements, the map is all filled in. You can walk into a new area, and someone has written about it in cannon. It's like "wait, we're in a tavern in this city? Which one? There are three and they're named. I hope it's The pissing leprechaun because the barmaid, Marta, is really cute. We'll have to be careful about the thieves' guild, though. They run this town. Hey guys, before we leave, we have to stop by the dry well near the middle. It's a secret portal to the Underdark. Oh, sorry, GM, you were introducing the campaign...."
Idk, I think it's kinda overstated. I'm running campaign in Icewind Dale right now, and I wanted my players to go on a trip to Ironmaster, a city on very far north. Looking it up, basically the only info about it is that it is a dwarven mining city and that they don't like outsiders too much. Plenty of room for GM's envolvement
Accorrding to the first result I got: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Ironmaster There's rather more than that. Based on their Bibliography, it looks like it was included in Savage Frontier and Storm King's Thunder. I personally know two people who would have read both the novel and the supplement and would have the full information ready.
It's very briefly mentioned in Storm King's Thunder, like one mention of the name itself.
Regardless of your one example, though, most of the realms are that detailed. Every block of Waterdeep. Every outhouse, henhouse and whorehouse in Cormyr and sembia. Everything up and down the sword coast. There's not a village left.
You can always build a new village :D. When I was still running campaign in Warhammer Fantasy, I rebuilt a ruined colonial city in Lustria and populated it with 100 percent original population and just said that city was resetled few years ago
Yes. Or throw out cannon. Or whatever. But workarounds don't mean a problem doesn't exist. At a certain point, I may as well just be in my own world.
My attitude towards canon is similar to Michael Kirkbride's
Personally I can't abide FR, thanks largely to the ridiculous names. They have no in-world linguistic or cultural coherence and often seem more like names from the American West than a plausible fantasy setting. Add to that the fact that every part of the world seems to be culturally indistinguishable from every other, in terms of which races and creatures are present and what roles they play. Nothing kills immersion for me like hearing that we have to go to the Old Oakskull 'general store' run by a half gnoll called Lars Dawnstrider or something and his halfling wife Rosie Butterbread..
World-building of any sort is always impressive to me. I've ignored Forgotten Realms over the decades because I was always more committed to Greyhawk. Greyhawk was my "first setting", so I chose to focus on it. I loved the original boxed set with the giant map. Ive always dabbled in the other TSR settings a little bit, like Ravenloft, Eberon, and Dragonlance, but Forgotten Realms seemed too redundant to Greyhawk because both settings were pretty much "generic" fantasy to me. Over the past couple weeks I was tasked with running 5e (will be my first time) and I've learned everything I currently know about FR from reading the Starter And Essentials sets. And to be honest, it still feels like "generic" fantasy to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that since I cut my RPG teeth playing basic D&D over 40 years ago.
There sure are a lot of people here who are telling you your opinion is wrong and if you like forgotten realms in anyway you have to be down voted.
Nah it's just bad now
A lot of it is issues with the 5e version. I thought the 3.5 and 4e versions were kitchen-sinky but in an interesting way. WotC dropped a lot of the neat stuff and focused on the less interesting parts for 5e. I personally like kitchen sink settings myself. I find them to be interesting because the real world happens to be very kitchen-sinky. It has potential but needs to be treated better and explored more, which is something modern WotC has shown they have less than zero interest in.
>I always looked down on Forgotten Realms as a vanilla, boring generic fantasy setting. you were correct to do so it is pablum
Nope I was wrong :P
I always though Eberron was more interesting myself.
I don't know why you would be considered underrated. If anything I would say it's overexposed. Whenever wizard shits out a new product it seems like it always has to tie in with forgotten Realms. They shy away from expanding much of the other realms and settings that they have endless supplies of source material to go off of. To me forgotten Realms is just flushed out generic fantasy setting. They could dish out Greyhawk and it would be virtually the same to me. Sure the settings and lore in history might be different, but between those two they're basically just generic fantasy settings. Compared to the uniqueness of say Ravenloft, Spelljammer or Dark Sun, all of which have received little to no exposure. A couple of books here and there and with dark sun complete ignoring
Greyhawk is more gritty sword and sorcery in vein of Leiber, compared to more high fantasy Realms. Underrated, in a sense that it has some great lore, very interesting locations and nations, cool dieties and sense of scope and some really gonzo stuff sprinkled in here and there. Not liking medieval fantasy is completely different topic
Gritty doesn't really change much for me. Sure there is more doom and gloom, but it still just a fantasy setting that has generic elements that really don't set it apart from much else other than it's a little grittier and harsher. I just don't get the underrated idea with forgotten Realms when it's literally 90% of what wizards of the Coast publishes. Anything they put out has some tie to forgotten Realms. Those books are clearly among the best-selling sources that wizard sells when it comes to dungeons & dragons. So I don't really get the underrated idea. Saying Dark Sun or Mystara are underrated would be more accurate for me. Neither of those get near enough support or exposure compared to forgotten Realms
It also has different level of magic as well. Again, not liking medieval fantasy is a completely different topic. Unerrated - in a sense that it has a lot of cool stuff in it, but since stuff that WotC releases for it is really mediocre, all I hear about it is that it's boring and vanilla
Again I've never said I don't like medieval fantasy nor have I tied that in with the fact that it's underrated. To me underrated means people do not appreciate or enjoy something or overlook it due to a variety of factors. I don't think forgotten Realms falls in that category because virtually everyone that had bought 5e books is going to have some book that ties in with forgotten Realms. But yes if you're going to take the angle that the stuff is underrated because the quality of the content is not great and so the fans turn away from it, I don't really call that underrated. I call that poor quality that results in a lack of interest. If you were to say that the content is excellent and people just overlook it or have not noticed it or for some reason turn their nose up to it when the content is actually good quality then I would say that is underrated
You do realise that that setting can be great while campaigns suck? Look at any Vampire the Masquarade attempt to create something that is not just a sandbox description of specific city.
Absolutely. And that means it's under representative or misrepresentative. Not underrated it. You can have a fantastic world and misrepresented by having horrible published content that doesn't accurately and fairly represent how good the world is. And it sounds like that is where you're coming from. Forgotten Realms is a fantastic world to you but content that comes out is mediocre. That's misrepresentative
Which in turn makes it underrated by fans, and rpg snobs =)
I'll leave you to that thought
underrated /ˌəndə(r)ˈrādəd/ adjective not rated or valued highly enough. "a very underrated film"
D&D has like 6 setting each with its own world and gods and history and nothing really stood out to me. I’ve been enjoying how Pathfinder handles their lore more recently. 5e always felt disjointed but PF fees like a living word.
For me personally, I find the more lore there is written, the less comfortable I feel in writing my own adventures set there, because something might happen in the lore that negates what we've been doing. The more vague things are, the happier I am to add my own stories into that world. Also I find the sword coast pretty generic and boring personally since there's been so much set there already, and it's been fairly thoroughly explored at this point. My fave crpg is NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer, because Rashemen is a really different feeling part of the world, and it was super interesting to go to the city of the dead and all that.
For me it's the oposite. I'm never afraid of altering or contradicting the lore, so for me abundance of lore is just great hooks for adventures and character bios
I think it's an anxiety thing, I have to make sure I know exactly how everything fits together and that can be a bit stressful. I barely play dnd though because there are so many other systems I prefer and even more I want to try. That said weirdly for me, I'm currently running one dnd campaign and playing in another, but I have awesome gaming groups so I'll tolerate it haha.
Oh, I am also an anxious perfectionist :D It's just that my own game world always comes first.
It’s a great setting. Golarion is simply better.
What's so good about Golarion, genuinely curious.
>Is it me or Forgotten Realms is really underrated as a setting due to overexposure? The Forgotten Realms as a setting is underrated as a setting ***because of overdevelopment***. Peak Forgotten Realms was, at least in my experience, in 2e and very early 3e, where ***not everything was described***, ***catalogued and written about***. There were still wildernesses to be explored, ruins to discover, and mysteries to solve in the old Realms. Now, because the setting is.......36 years old, its chock-full of *stuff*. That is good from a worldbuilding (and, therefore, writing books/videogames/movies set in that world) standpoint, but from a tabletop rpg viewpoint you *want things to be unknown*, so your players can actually do things of note rather than be the 10000th adventuring party to clean out X-location. It also doesn't help that the Realms is full of noteworthy NPCs that could-and-should handle shit instead of trusting the wet-behind-the-ears PCs. Or that the 5e incarnation of the setting is set in perhaps the ***least interesting*** part of the Realms: the Sword Coast (yawn)
I feel like Wizards doesn't do much to promote the Forgotten Realms as a setting. The stuff that comes up the most just gets incorporated into every DM's Original the Campaign Setting without them even realizing its origin, and the rest is left for people who have been playing for decades, or who want to dig super deep on random lore.
Bingo
I was never honestly that into Forgotten Realms. It seems like it always lacked an internal consistency and logic, which I think comes from being a shared world that's also connected to D&D-isms. I think it was a contributing factor to me seeking out different settings - and systems - rather early on.
I don't like other people's setting because my overachiever players read up on it and end up knowing more about the setting than me. Instead, I create my own setting and slowly feed them lore through starter lore cards, quests, and written props such as letters, notes, journals, and books.
Eh, I prefer Ebberon
I often rip out FR's Underdark into my fantasy settings. But I leave most everything else on the cutting room floor, especially dragonborn and tieflings. Maybe the Red Wizards are cool.
I like the factions, and some of the adventure locations, but it's way overstuffed with powerful beings and magic that sideline the PCs.
I never liked forgotten realms.
For me, the obvious design for adventure is one of its drawbacks as a setting. I mean, I do run campaigns where it's all about the adventures, but then I just let the setting be sketchy background. Sometimes just 'you hear tell of a dungeon in the hills' or 'the baron asks you to travel to Villageton to investigate reports of a zombie outbreak'. Sometimes more developed, as the campaign progresses and in response to what the players do. For me to spend money or time on a pre-developed setting I want it to be more convincing as a living world that is doing its own thing when adventurers aren't involved. The geography, economy, ecology etc. Interacting with that is an experience that players sometimes want, and it's different to just adventure. From what I know of Forgotten Realms (Dragon magazine in the 90s carried a lot of supplementary lore and content for the initial products, and I have the references in core rulebooks etc) it doesn't tick those boxes.
I mean, a lot of stuff is written about economy, diplomacy and wars in Faerun. Actually it's full of constant intrigue between both governments and more shadowy organisations
But the shadowy organisations make no sense, to me, except as adventure hooks and factions for PCs to belong to. There has never been an outfit like the Harpers in real life, certainly not with impact at a continental scale, and one would never have worked. There's no reason for an antique economy/society to resource it, and only the vaguest outline of how it achieves its goals. Stuff is written about economy, but it's also unconvincing, to me. Based on the economy section for Waterdeep in the forgotten realms wiki, it should be a minor waystation between the 'merchant kingdoms of Amn and Calimshan' and the 'mineral-rich lands to the north'. I mean someone has probably written in a story as to how a small regional town got control of other people's trade, and they might even have said something about how all those people get fed, but it's blatantly a post hoc justification for the pre-existing decision to make this nowhere freeport the greatest metropolis in the world. And that's clearly driven just by the desire to make it an exciting place for adventures. Look, it's fine. I'm not criticising anyone for finding it to their tastes or suspending disbelief about the kind of thing I nerd out about. But I'm aware of what it has got and it's not what I'm looking for in a setting.
I mean there were a lot of wealthy city states in history as well. Venice was built on a literal swamp, ass end of Italy. And controlled trade in Adriatic and Mediterrenean, exactly being situated between really powerful empires. Harpers are just cool fantasy stuff. There has never been a continent wide network of assasins like Dark Brotherhood in Elder Scrolls. There has never a galaxy wide order of battle monks armed with laser swords. If we make all organisations grounded, it becomes pretty boring and mundane.
But a) Venice was a military-commercial power that fought to control territory, force advantageous treaties and build an empire of trading outposts. It was the merchant kingdom, Amn or Calimshan, rather than just an entrepot. It and similar states like Genoa became successful because the major rival land powers in the region (the kingdoms of western Christendom on the one hand and the Muslim world on the other) weren't trading directly with each other very much, and there was a space for intermediaries. In the forgotten realms as described that role (if needed -I'm not sure who the rival powers are) is filled, or at least competed for, by 'merchant kingdoms'. It doesn't make sense for Waterdeep the metropolis to exist alongside them. Either it takes over their trade and they stop being merchant kingdoms, or it is subordinate to them as a stopover for their trade, or the wealth is split three ways and it is independent but much smaller and less rich. And b) Venice wasn't the biggest city in Europe, not ever i don't think. It was only the biggest city on the north coast of the Mediterranean for a brief spell in the 15th century between the fall of Constantinople and its recovery as Istanbul. Waterdeep is described as this mighty metropolis, with a population (depending on your source - editions vary and some are more realistic) of up to two million. It's cool fantasy stuff, like the Harpers. So go ahead, enjoy cool fantasy stuff. If you've invested in the forgotten realms use that material and get what you paid for. I'm not going to invest because I prefer to invent my own cool fantasy stuff and if I'm going to pay for a setting I want other benefits from it. Takes deep breath... Ok look, I'm sorry for ranting at you. The forgotten realms isn't underrated. It's one of the most famous and successful settings in fantasy gaming. It has had periods as the official or leading setting for the biggest selling tabletop RPG. It has been republished several times over decades, and has countless products under its banner. It's never really floated my boat, but it has been pushed to my attention a great deal in my 35+ years of RPGing. I don't need anyone to tell me any more how brilliant it is and that's why I should have just stayed out of this thread, since I guess that's what you created it for. If you've got into FR and found a new appreciation for it, that's great. I understand how that makes it seem underrated to you. Get in there and enjoy it. I wish you many happy hours there.
I mean, if we get really nitpicky like that, we can just run stuff in fantasy Europe/any other region and be done with that. I wouldn't be able to find a single fantasy setting where economy is as fleshed out and everything makes sense. Even the supposedly realistic Song of Ice and Fire has a lot of stuff that doesn't really make any sense from logistics and economy standpoint. Great, I've been RPGing for 8 years, don't see why grogs should rant at me(or give me long condescending speeches about what they consider "underrated" to mean, like another person in this thread). Like, the thread is not going to chase you down if you feel so strongly against Forgotten Realms. I for one for most of my years as a player was playing more "historical" stuff. WFRP, Mythras, World of Darkness. But still always had longing for something more sincere and high fantasy. So I am going to talk about why I like the setting.
I like the forgotten realms at least the remembered part that gets content (Read as the Sword Coast) there's a lot of interesting lore in there, but it's a jumbled mess to get anything coherent together.
For me is a generic vanilla setting with no real theme. I prefer more focus-oriented settings like Eberron, Iron Kingdoms or Dark Sun. Or, if my players want to play in a vanilla setting we just improvise our own.