The Forgotten Realms

I remember when I first got the boxed set of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons®.

I had never heard of Ed Greendwood (an Ontarian, surprisingly) or the Forgotten Realms. This was the 'new direction' the game appeared to be taking as the Old Gaurd at TSR drifted away - names like Gygax, Mentzer, Otus, Mohan, etc. fading away. With them was fading the Greyhawk setting. It was time for something new to open out some new frontiers and to generate some new income for TSR by allowing them to sell a new line of campaign-related products. Greyhawk was getting pretty long in the tooth by this point.

The Forgotten Realms was a place where you didn't just have hack and slash adventures and where the heroes weren't all knights and noblemen - common folk ended up becoming some of the greatest heroes. And wherever you looked, their was legacy of past civilizations, past races, past communities, and past disasters. There was a sense of age to the world and mystery. There was a sense that there would be lots to uncover and lots to discover in the games played in this world.

We are many years beyond this point now. Advanced Dungeones & Dragons® gave way to 2^nd Edition, then Skills and Powers, then eventually 3^rd Edition, D20, the revised 3.5 Edition and now very lately 4th Edition. Greyhawk is now a dead world as far as product goes. The Forgotten Realms has endured through the years, expanding to include a vast expanse of world space and diverse settings like the Horde (Mongol), Kara-Tur (Orienal), and Maztica (South American). It and the later Eberron campaign world are the current focus. Planescape and Spelljammer seem to have come and went in the intervening period.

But now, the Forgotten Realms has had so many parts of its geography and history filled in, it lacks some of what it had when the first grey boxed set came out: Possibility. The original set gave you a big chunk of the world, but it clued you in that there was a lot more of it. Even of what it did present, it presented chunks with tantalizing references never to be further developed, leaving the aspiring GM plenty of plot hooks he could exploit and create adventures for and the aspiring player many things to wish his GM would develop for his game.

Eventually, I migrated my gaming out of the Forgotten Realms. A few characters I had there were at retirement points, others were dead. Some crazy things had been introduced in the penchant of the publisher to fill every space with a campaign supplement (Ravensgate, it is at thee I am staring with contempt!) - Arch Magi giving rides to children at a fair, Spellfire, Gods rampaging around and impacting the game world directly and without subtlety. These things all seemed to eat away at the air of mystery and sensibility that the original boxed set seemed to present. Eberron was also coming on the scene and it had some pretty slick products and some very interesting and ground-breaking character options.

But now, these many years later, I find myself drawn back into a 3.5 Edition Forgotten Realms game: Olostin's Hold. My friend Doug had a lot invested in this world and has parleyed that into an ongoing game that gives me an excuse to see (or at least talk to) some of my oldest friends on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Sometimes there is more chatting and side conversation than actual D&D gaming. But even so, the game itself is interesting.

Despite all the silly things they've thrown into corners of the world, despite all the stuff they've published, there are still a lot of opportunities unplumbed. The game world is huge and lots of the supplements have laid out adventure possibilities as rumours of no more than one or two lines of text. So there is still a lot for a GM to develop for his own game.

And of course, this has inpsired me to want to run an adventure or two in the Forgotten Realms. I have my own game world of 20 years which I'm very happy with. Many of the players would have characters for it too, but not all. But Doug's game has some momentum right now and I don't want to disrupt that and I don't want to try to distract by running my game interspersed. Instead, I think I could have my fun presenting adventures within Doug's game and allow it to keep up its momentum. Momentum is not a trivial matter in the sustainability of gaming over time and over distance.

So once again, the mysteries of the Forgotten Realms have sucked me in. My urge to get out the pen and start penning adventures from those short summary lines or even from collections of varied short references to places is high.

Until Swords Part....