I like the idea of the Forgotten Realms – that is, Ed Greenwood’s homebrew world, which he developed first as a setting for his fiction then later as a venue for his ongoing D&D campaigns run at the public library. In terms of the public, this Forgotten Realms was seen in tantalizing glimpses in Greenwood’s many articles for Dragon Magazine. This is the world that TSR bought (for a modest sum and a computer) in the mid-80s. The Forgotten Realms that TSR developed, I am less enamored of that.

Though there are FR books that came before it, the campaign setting formally launched with the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set in 1987, at which point it became the de facto AD&D setting, replacing Gygax’s languishing Greyhawk.

I suppose the major takeaway of the Realms is its size. The map is so big it is split between two posters. Large portions of the world are left for the DM to fill in with their own material, while the rest was filled in by Greenwood and company with an eye toward giving players and DMs a little bit of everything. The result, to me, is not enough of anything. I feel like that characterizes the Realms throughout its history, even as the world becomes ever more detailed. Through all the earthshaking events that would transpire there, Forgotten Realms seems weirdly generic, and because it was the central setting of D&D, that generic quality became a sort of baseline across FRPGs.

I am in the minority here. Forgotten Realms has been a money making juggernaut for decades now, which generally implies that large numbers of people like it. For proof, I only have to look at my own FR box sets, all bought second hand. Most are so well-used the cardboard has been worn soft and the sides are held together with thick patches of tape.