Trying to Understand the Forgotten Realms

Since the end of 1st edition AD&D I have been at a loss to understand the basic concepts behind the Forgotten Realms and what makes that setting so popular. Unlike the campaign settings of Blackmoor and Greyhawk that came before it, the Realms seemed to be nothing more than a mishmash of discarded or "forgotten" religions, cultures, and concepts from Earth's history - the Egyptian, Celtic, and Norse influences on the Realms are undeniable. The later inclusions of anything that TSR could dream up were obviously not of Ed Greenwood's design, so I won't fault him for that. However, the very things that made his campaign setting so inviting to others seem to be completely unrelated to the campaign that he ran for his original players and were, instead, the creation of other authors using his world setting as their play thing.

My disdain for the "one good dark elf ranger" aside, it seems to me that the Realms have no true identity. They are simply a conglomeration of various ideas that seemed interesting to their creator at the time. It may astonish some to know that some of the "original" deities of the Forgotten Realms had names of Earth deities like Tyche (later changed to Tymora) or Tyr (which was curiously left alone). The various locations of The North seem to be vignettes in a sea of wilderness without any real connecting threads. Now, I've read some of the novels written by others in the Realms (Douglas Niles, R. A. Salvatore, Elaine Cunningham, Jeff Grubb, James Lowder, etc.), but it seems that each takes a portion of the Realms to make their own personal playground and never step on the toes of the other authors. This makes the Realms feel even more disjointed, since there is little to tie all the novels together other than a brand name. In fact, it feels like the branding of the Forgotten Realms as the default campaign setting for 2nd edition AD&D was more of a corporate decision instead of any sort of actual, thought-out plan on the part of TSR, Inc. It seems that Ed Greenwood lost control of his creation from the start, and definitely after the popularity of the various new characters took off.

Now, I've read Ed Greenwood's material in Dragon Magazine for years before the Realms were ever produced. Even then, it seemed that the world he developed was more of a crazy quilt of cultures randomly woven together into some bizarre fantasy setting. Elminster was more of a "narrator" telling the story of the Realms (and I see him as Greenwood's alter ego in the Realms). When that character became more prominent in later books, his mysterious narrator role (where you weren't quite sure he wasn't a god in disguise) fell away and he became as trite and mismatched as the rest of his world. The inclusion of Kara-Tur, Chult, Maztica, and the Hordelands cemented my belief that TSR was going to take every form of fantasy campaign and set them all in one world. I was surprised that they didn't include Ravenloft and Dark Sun in the mix as well!

It wasn't all bad. I actually liked Ed Greenwood's novels about Cormyr, and the ones about the Knights of Myth Drannor weren't terrible. But these were rehashes of places he had developed fully. The Cormyr novels were about the fall of King Azoun and the politics of the kingdom. The Knights series was a retelling of the adventures of his first group in Cormyr, exploring the Haunted Halls and running afoul of the Zhentarim. The concepts in these stories are connected and make sense - if only the rest of the Realms were as cohesive...

So, in my attempt to understand the Realms better, I went back to the source material. I started re-reading the original boxed set developed under 1st edition rules. It was more cohesive than later campaign sets, but covered much less area. The original modules written in the Realms by Ed Greenwood were also enlightening to a degree, but I also saw a side of the Realms that turned me off completely. I am referring to three adventures written by Ed Greenwood in particular - Into the Forgotten Realms which was the first ever published tournament module set in the Realms (Dragon Magazine #95), the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar (his original campaign dungeon published much later at the height of 2nd edition AD&D), and Irongard published in Dungeon Magazine #18.

The first was written for mid-level characters in the Dalelands, and featured a nasty surprise waiting for the characters in the middle of the dungeon they were sent to explore. Lots of background information on the Dalelands was supplied as adventure background, but nothing could prepare the adventurers for the deadly foe that waited within. Now, I'm not going to spoil the surprise here, but let's just say that the characters really have no chance of survival. On the other hand, it was a tournament module from Gen Con 1984, and elimination is really the name of the game for tourney modules. This adventure shows the cruel side of the author in making his characters face a deadly threat that they really have no chance of overcoming without using tact and guile, and relying on good dice rolls. Exciting? Perhaps to some.

The second was the original campaign dungeon for his first players in the Realms. Set in the Kingdom of Cormyr, the adventurers set their home base in Eveningstar, a lovely little town on the northern borders of the kingdom in the Stonelands. The module is not very well executed and seems to be "padded" to increase the page count (and thus the profit). Half the module is fluff about the town and the NPCs therein. This is all very interesting material as backstory, but few adventurers would learn most of the material unless they lived in the town for a long period of time. And that won't happen if they enter the nearby dungeon... of course they have to FIND it first! And, like all old-school dungeons, everything is well hidden and requires a very competent group to locate the entrance to the place.  Once inside, the lack of monsters and preponderance of deadly traps which test the adventurers' courage as well as their knowledge of the rules led my D&D group to abandon the place out of sheer boredom and lack of treasure. It's hard to rationalize a dungeon that kills everyone that dares face its challenges as 1st-level characters in the first encounter. You have to ease players into the game, not kill them all off before they even get a chance to do anything.

The final straw was while reading Irongard. The whole premise of the module is infuriating. As the DM, you have to select one character (a wizard) to be the recipient of a horrible curse that basically makes that character useless for the entire adventure. It's bad enough when playing a wizard to survive past 1st level, but taking away their only ability (casting spells) at the START of the adventure is just plain cruel. "Here, your character is a mage and knows how to cast one spell for the day. Are you ready to play? Great. I curse you and now you can't cast your spell anymore. That was your only useful spell? Gee, that's too bad." The rest of the module then pits the party against a number of magical phenomena in a small dungeon that can only be overcome by trial and error, or BY CASTING SPELLS. Yeah, dick move there Greenwood....

Now, I've heard rumors about the deadliness of Castle Greyhawk or the deaths incurred in other campaigns, but it seems that Ed Greenwood just didn't want any new characters to survive his world or accomplish anything. All the original modules seemed to do was discourage play or piss off players. Not a very good introduction to the Realms, if you ask me. It didn't help that all the NPCs in the world were also of godlike power and seemed to roam every byroad and highway in the Realms! I've played in the Realms myself - under a very good DM who loved the Realms - but we made the place our own and avoided the major NPCs if possible (even though we were based in Shadowdale). I remember playing through N5 Under Illefarn (or at least part of that module) and being very impressed with the adventures we had. Of course, that might have been due to the DM and not the setting itself. It also helped that we were still using 1st edition rules at the time. When we switched over to 2nd edition, the campaign lagged a bit before finally ending with our party being captured and imprisoned in some gods-forsaken castle inhabited by humanoids and devils (Hellgate Keep or Dragonspear?).

Despite playing in the Realms, and exploring some of its secrets, I still don't understand why people love this campaign setting so much. It lacks cohesion and verisimilitude to me. It's cohesive only within the context of a module or novel, not across them. The events in the Realms change so fast, and so many stories were published about them, that I don't believe it's humanly possible to maintain all that information in one brain, no less write a cohesive adventure about the place. The more information there is on a place, the less mysterious and interesting it becomes. The Gazetteer series for Basic/Expert D&D suffered from this. Once those locations were all detailed, you couldn't really see a place to set a dungeon adventure or a bandit kingdom. All the hexes were pretty much detailed and "explored."

The original Forgotten Realms setting left one land completely undesigned for use by the DM to make it his or her own (Sembia?). One small nation on the map of a world would never be developed by TSR and was smack in the middle of the maps. I'm not sure if this was such a good idea for them to do. It would render that one nation trivial, since most adventurers would likely come from that place and then adventure elsewhere to explore the other, cooler regions of the world that the players read about in all the novels. Is that a good design idea? Did it ever really work for anyone's campaign?

In 5th edition, the Forgotten Realms is once more the "default" D&D campaign world. All these years later, and I'm still trying to understand why people love this setting so much. Guess it's just a mystery for the ages. I just don't get it...