Why I Don't Like the Forgotten Realms (as the Default 5E Campaign Setting) 

My biggest issue is the fact that Wizards pretty much ignored the rest of Realms.

A couple of notes: 1. The Forgotten Realms used to not center on the Sword Coast. The 2nd Edition box set fleshes out the Dalelands as the starting region for new players. Of course, using the Sword Coast in that role kind of works as an homage to the setting's roots, since Ed Greenwood's first Realms stories were set in that region. 2. Before 3e, there were literally blank spaces on the Forgotten Realms map where DMs could put their own towns, cities, and nations. The 3e Realms team apparently decided that they wanted the map to be less sprawling, so they took those areas out. 3. The Forgotten Realms was originally supposed to be a setting without a reliable canon. The idea was supposed to be that everything you read about the realms came from either Volo (who's kind of an unreliable person) or Elminster (who was forwarding information from sources who may or may not be reliable). If the DM decided to change something, they could just tell a player who had read the material that the book's sources were wrong. Of course, the setting evolved into a canon lawyer's dream in the 2e era and beyond.

I know an absurd amount about Toril, including that Toril is the name of the planet. I feel confident in saying that even with the benefits that weapons-grade nostalgia provides, the Forgotten Realms setting is the box-art on a LEGO set. It's a polished and reliable option that comes with complete instructions, and for some people it's exactly what they're looking for, no shade. But for me, the real value of LEGO came when I stopped just making the thing on the box and started exploring my own creativity, using what I learned from following the directions to make something uniquely my own. Forgotten Realms is a complete setting, but that means it's pretty well contained by its own well-defined boundaries. You can break it apart, though, and use any of the individual pieces that excite or inspire you while making something that's exclusively your own.

The Forgotten Realms being so well known that players know it better than DM's... That's me. I'm the DM that knew nothing, and had a player with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Sword Coast. It was extremely daunting. I almost stopped DMing because I felt inadequate since I knew literally *nothing* about this place and my player was basically telling everyone else about the city they were visiting. Thankfully got past that and now I'm in a group that really doesn't give a damn if I go by the "true" history or just make up my own.

You got the point: Forgotten Realms' lore is overwhelming and is difficult to find a blank spot where GM's personal imagination can find its space freely. As fanatic fan of the old classic isometric games like Baldur's Gate, I got so affectionate to that world that I lost entire nights of sleep confronting sources from 3e, the Sundering, 5e, Salvatore's and Greenwood's publications, just to get prepared enough for a campaign in the Forgotten Realms. It was a comparable efford I could put in a deep historical research for my job. But the group exploded in excitement when Jarlaxle, Elminster, Rautholim appeared in their full magnificence... It was a moment of personal joy for me, indeed.

This is the reason I prefer working on homebrew campaings, there isn't that much lore I need to understand for me to enjoy it. The prep work I need to do on my own for worldbuilding is harder, but I can take it on my own pace because I can work on that whenever I feel will be important.

What I liked about Forgotten Realms is becoming lost. You started off in surroundings that, while fantasy themed, were largely familiar, like an unassuming town in the Dales, and as your character explored and grew in power you discovered with him a world that was far vaster, stranger, and more and more dangerous than he ever imagined. But, alas those days are long gone. At some point around in the reign of 3ed, D&D lost this concept of a character arc that went from familiar to fantastic, and in the process the setting when from familiar to generic, and I do think there is a subtle difference. When everything is fantastical nothing is.

Your point about the daunting lore, and the possibility of your players knowing more than you about the world, was exactly the train of thought that led to me using a home-brew setting for my first DMing experience. My brother-in-law (who has been a forgotten realms fan for quite a while) knew so much about it, that I knew I couldn't give him a good experience in it that lived up to his prior knowledge. So I started in my own, and we all discovered it together. It was great!

I am currently running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, as someone who knew very little about the Forgotten Realms aside from passing familiarity with the main cities, and I am completely of two minds about it. On the one hand, it writes the city of Waterdeep so. well. It has a whole section (supposedly written by Volo, of Volo's Guide to Monsters) that reads as a traveler's guide so evocative I wanted so badly to be able to actually visit. The book as a whole gave enough depth and character to Waterdeep that it didn't feel like just "generic city," but still left enough room for me to improvise whatever I need to. I love it as a source material, and the adventure is well written, as well. And on the other hand, I am dreading the second the players decide to leave the city for one reason or another. Everything outside of Waterdeep feels exactly the kind of 'too much, I know I'm going to get it wrong' intimidating you were talking about. And one of my players HAS read the Drizz't novels, and IS playing a Drow because of it, so there are parts that I worry about getting wrong and ruining his fantasy. So far, it hasn't been a problem (my players have been great, they're flexible, I honestly don't anticipate push back even if I just fully change elements of the lore.) But at the same time, I definitely did some fan wiki deep dives into recent Forgotten Realms history when the book referenced events I didn't know much about, or when one of my players chose a god to follow that had a complicated history. It wasn't terrible, but it was a lot of work, and I know if we leave Waterdeep, I'm going to start feeling overwhelmed.

Literally every reason why you say it doesn't work as a default setting is why it's a default setting. The Lore is all filled out, so new DMs or someone who doesn't enjoy the macros of worlsbuild this is a perfect setting. The theme is just default general fantasy for this fantasy table top game. There plenty to draw character inspiration from, you can be a theif from the Xanathar's Guild, a Scholar from Candlekeep, a Bard Street rat from Balder's Gate who learn how to survive on the streets using his charm and talent. While there are much more out their setting, Eberon with its weird magic punk nior setting, Dragonlance for its brutal war setting, and Exandria which is trying to examine the classic troops and make us think, but Forgotten Realm is just the generic default fantasy setting.

I am so glad you made this video. I am still new to D&D, and I started a homebrew campaign based in Neverwinter because we started with the Essential Kit, and my biggest problem has been trying to understand the Sword Coast without all the previous lore knowledge as a base and it has been daunting. Glad to know that it isn't just me.

As a DM, the huge wealth of lore and information available in FR makes my game building much easier. I can look anywhere on the map and find tons of ideas for adventures. I don’t have time to make up a world and have an answer for every question or location that comes up. I love that it is possibly the most developed fantasy world of all time. Whatever happens in the future is up to me and my players.

I think the appeal of the Realms isn't that you can make a character that's specific to the Realms, but rather that any character you want to make can fit into the Realms somewhere.

I take the perspective of "my" Forgotten Realms. The last game I ran (9 months bi-weekly with us finishing the game with lvl 6 PCs) was "homebrew in the Forgotten Realms". I wanted to run a game in a desert and found the Anourach Desert in Faerun and decided that'd be my biome for the game. I used the Forgotten Realms Wiki for inspiration and ideas, but wasn't afraid to ignore/change/throw out anything that i didn't like or didn't fit. EDIT: Another way of saying this is that I enjoyed using the Forgotten Realms as a premade setting to create my homebrew adventures within.

In defense of Forgotten Realms, while I also like "DM's sandbox" -style settings with a lot of mysteries left unanswered and giving the DM freedom to do anything they want, it has a really interesting good side to it! If you want to run a prep-light game with lots of interesting characters at your disposal with a quick search from the wiki, Forgotten Realms has so many hooks, twists, turns, characters, items, and history to build your story around. You can take any location, any faction in the setting and there are interesting tidbits around its history and the characters within to build entire campaigns out of. My current campaign is set in the Sword Coast, with a civil war within the Lord's Alliance (ie. the three main cities) as the backdrop for it, and it's been such a fun journey to see how I can mix and match the campaign I wanted to run within the existing lore and history. Any prep I need to make, I can search the wiki about the locales to be featured and the characters around there, and build from there how they might be connected to the main plot or any subplots. If anything unexpected happens, I can again use the wiki to help with the coming up with stuff on the fly. It's a very unorthodox way of playing, I guess, but it's amazing how many possibilities for depth and cool stories and beats there are when you're willing to read a few wiki pages before a session. And yes, it takes some mixing and matching with the information available, and sometimes the articles on the wiki might be long and there might be lots of them in prep, but then again, as a DM, who doesn't like learning about lore? Who doesn't need to adapt existing stuff for their exact needs in their campaign? tl;dr: Use Forgotten Realms wiki for building adventures mixing and matching info from locales, factions, and characters kind of like writing a fanfic, or doing an improv with setting info provided. Worried about your worldbuilding skills, or if you have enough points and characters of interest? Use Forgotten Realms wiki and you'll never run out of stuff to use for your campaign.

The Dawn War pantheon is certainly the best pantheon. I still use the 4e lore for the Raven Queen.

My first campaign was set in the Sword Coast because I ran the Lost Mines of Phandevler adventure. I honestly enjoyed running the setting for a time since there was so much established lore, I could find details about any corner of the world and use that for inspiration, changing details as I saw fit. Once Explorers Guide to Wildemount came out, I immediately switched to Exandria because A) myself and a few of my friends are critters, and B) EGtW does the “leaving blank spots” / “leaving unanswered questions” things so well! All my 5e campaigns will take place in Exandria as far as I’m concerned

As a new DM playing with new players, there is so much to learn just with game mechanics and figuring out how to run a starter set that I didn’t have the brain-space to devote to learning any of the lore before playing. When my players had some lore-related questions in the first session, I just decided to use a combination of Greek and Celtic mythology to explain things, figuring I’d look it up between session. But when I looked, I was so overwhelmed with all the info and no easy, quick overview I just bagged it and went with my own made-up stuff.

Ok I think I realized why I do like the Forgotten Realms, and that's because you and I look for the opposite things in settings to run. I feel much more at home running a campaign, not just in a dnd setting with a lot of established lore already in it, but in the world of fictional works that I and my players are already familiar with, like Hyrule, or Middle Earth. I want to point to familiar places and people so that my players already know the history that it probably makes sense their characters would know too (and it's less work for me muahahaha)

I enjoyed the forgotten realms stories when I was 12. I tried to reread the Drizzt books last year, and it probably took me 6mos to get back through one, and I quit halfway through the second. They did not age well for me.

I would love for you to cover Greyhawk CY576 as covered in the 1983 boxset as a starting campaign World.

Your description of the Forgotten Realms as a land forgotten by our world was the first time I’ve ever been interested in the setting. The idea of our half-remembered real cultures and gods being present in this world as fossils to be dug up by adventurers is brilliant. I’m imagining the awakening of Ra, will he snatch back the sun from Amaunator?

My first experience with Forgotten Realms was as a player. One of the other players just kept fanboying the entire session and I felt left out. There was no sense of discovery or awe, it was just listening to another player gushing about things I'd never heard of.

The major issue that I feel you have is that how Forgotten Realms has been handled in its current iteration. Most of these concerns are addressed in previous editions especially third edition. Wizards has ripped out all of the information and exciting parts of the setting to be more Vanilla. The Sword Coast (which is all they talk about) is such a Tiny part of the realms and is the most boring section. Please, I beg you, at least find a pdf copy of the Forgotten Realms: Campaign Setting for third edition. I feel like this will shed so much more light on it.

This is a good channel. I like Mike.

Yeah, you need to read the FR 3.x material and see how that addresses most, but not all, of your concerns. Even the FR 1e/2e add-on books would help out. Maybe that's why WotC didn't (re)publish all that content - it's just sitting there waiting to be picked up (and the 3.x content is, IMO, some of the best ever out out by WotC) IMO, the FR isn't just one setting... it's a whole bunch of settings kind of crammed together with the idea that you can pick and choose to work in a specific locale (so my current campaign is set in the Celtic-themed Moonshea Isles off of the Sword Coast) yet have the scope available to travel to other places in the world.

I suspect that them picking the Forgotten Realms as a default setting and bringing Ed Greenwood and R. A. Salvatore to help was a way to make emends about 4e. They wanted to show that they were making big changes to the game and picked Forgotten Realms because of how criticized the 4e version of the setting was. It's also interesting how the Sword Coast is the most popular area of the Realms. I suspect this actually happened because of the popularity of the Baldur's Gate games and it was not true during AD&D days. Ed Greenwood's original campaigns were set in Cormyr.

You have many valid points, especially true about high level npcs. In starting adventures, for example, essentials kit (and its continuation)- the bad guys threaten the whole sea-trade route, there is no reason why Neverwinter won’t react to it, it’s a port city that thrives on trade. And mind it as it’s written in the setting it’s about one and a half days on foot, or like half a day on a ship

The early versions of the setting, before the novels and video games, focused much more on the Dalelands and Cormyr, and there were explicit blank spaces on the map for DMs to use. That version had a very different vibe, and honestly it was a bit too empty for me. The Sword Coast in that era was one of the faraway, exotic locales. That all changed as the more popular adaptations focused on the Sword Coast and filled in the blank spaces. A lot of the Realms novels also focused on explaining the various rule changes between each new edition of the game. Rather than just handling rules changes in an abstract way, TSR & WotC published a LOT of novels to provide in-universe explanations of the various changes to the magic system, classes, races, and so on. That's where stuff like the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague came from. There was also a whole thing about introducing Dragonborn to Toril.

I am a huge fan of the realms. I have collected realms books for years and have almost all the novels. Honestly it's a lot and I definitely understand where you are coming from. The best thing Wizards could do is make a real setting book for this edition and not just the tiny sword coast book. There are so many cool locations in the realms. As for places to get started for fun and interesting lore goes try the first box set for the realms on drive-thru rpg and the 3.0 campaign setting books those are my favorite books.

6:10 “It was a perfect pantheon” TOTALLY AGREE! The first time I made a character, I wanted to pick a god… but all I had available was the 5e handbook… and all of those felt either bland or cumbersome. I was so entranced by the Raven Queen on Critical Role, and I was happy to see that they were using (and reclaiming) 4e’s pantheon… WITH ONE EXCEPTION: Sarenrae. That’s a carry-over from Pathfinder :) Ashley/Pike didn’t want to switch.

I think my problem with the forgotten realms is that I found it really hard to find any information on basically anything besides the sword coast book. Like, I don't want to read adventures because one day I might play them and I don't want to be spoiled, and I also don't want to go out of my way and download pdfs from older editions. Anytime I had any interest in one aspect of the lore, I had to search on a wiki that didn't explain much.

I grew up with the Realms, reading the books in highschool. The appeal for me, would be the same for anyone reading Tolkien, and wanting to play in Middle Earth. There's so much lore, any character could fit into the world, and you could drop a setting anywhere in it. Sadly I haven't played much in Faerun.

I think something you're missing in this conversation is the fact that for the longest time, the Forgotten Realms books and videogames were much, much popular than D&D itself, and only recently has that paradigm shifted. It was never about expecting new DMs to have to go through all the lore, but rather, that you'd expect only hardcore fans of the lore would want to pick up the game. I for one have been running games in Mercer's Tal'dorei for years now, because I find it new and exciting, as well as easier to make mine, but the second a seasoned player jumps in, I am asked whether the classic factions of the forgotten realms or the red mages and rose knights of the dragonlance settings, with an expectation that they or at least a parallel will be found in this game. There are some aspects that are just too iconic, and it doesn't matter what setting we're playing on, if my players go underground chasing after dark elves, I owe it to them to face them with the twisted splendor of Menzoberranzan, because they deserve to have that shared experience with the players who've loved the game for decades before them.

A good setting is a multi-course meal, or at least a buffet. There are many options, and they maintain their distinct flavors. Forgotten Realms is like taking a seven-course meal, running it through a blender, and making NutraLoaf from the remains. Greenwood probably didn’t intend his setting to become so genericized.

I love the FR because of the amount of detail. Sure it doesn't always line up with what I am trying to accomplish at the time of the campaign I'm running, but as a DM I'm free to change what I want. Having so many years of lore baked into the setting allows me to find great plot hooks for my own campaign. The issue I have with a lot of bare bones settings is its just that and puts the majority of the world building up to me. That takes up precious prep time having to fill in the gaps the world leaves, while in a place as detailed as the sword coast all I need is a quick google search to find out whats going on in the area and what my players can expect or be surprised by.

I'd say you're not wrong. There's a lot of preexisting material for the Forgotten Realms and when the modules reference it they do a poor job of putting it into context and that can be a pain in the ass for someone not up to date on the complete history of the Realms trying to put it into context for your players. An example of this is in Lost Mines of Phandelver. If your players go to Thundertree, part of the lore about the location is wrapped up in the eruption of Mt. Hotenow and the Spellplauge. This stuff is all just referenced in a STARTER BOX for the game with no context as to what any of that bullshit even means and they expect someone who is very likely a new DM to just say that stuff out loud with enough conviction to make their players who are also very likely new to the game buy into it.

5E has been more light Lore written in their hardcover products instead lore inspiring. Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep was more inspiring than the three Spelljammer books. As DM from way back in 1E the few points of light trope is more inspiring than having 3 sentences of let us not tick people off to describe a whole region of the realms. And the number of published races 73 with 106 subclass is too many options. As the speeder kid say, “When everyone special no one is.” In fact, the Realms has going way into cartoon/anime land of anything is possible but no one cares.

So I will say I didn’t realize for a long time that Forgotten Realms wasn’t exactly what you think a D&D campaign to be. I thought it was just some generic coast where mainline adventures tend to take place and a whole world for the DM to make stuff up. However the more I learned about it I just decided to make my own homebrew world anyway with a similar vibe. I wanted a kingdom rather than a like of citystates for a more medieval vibe.

I think Mike's base premise wrong. The FR is a fine setting for the base setting. The problem is the lack of support coupled with people thinking they have to stick to canon. There should be a Campaign Guide instead of lore scattered across adventures or in products on the DMs Guild. That's a "WotC doesn't know what they are doing" problem, not a FR problem. Aa far as novels, I would recommend: Waterdeep: City of Splendors The Haunted Lands trilogy The Sembia series The Erevis Cale series House of Serpents trilogy

I think the milage you get out of FR as a default setting largely depends on how fast and loose you like to play things, which goes largely with how confident are you as a DM. I've been running games for a long long time, and so I've come to the point where I don't get intimidated by someone "well actually-"ing me at the table. I just respond with "yeah, that played out differently in my world" or "yeah, see, that probably how the myth goes, right? But you're bout to find out that's not EXACTLY how that articular god works." If you make it clear some things might be shifting around, the FR then does become very easy to run in, just because if I want to run a campaign or module set in, say, Waterdeep, I can likely five 15 high quality Lore and Setting Info video to send to players with one search. Beats having to write and dispense all that background info myself. But also, I agree that the PHB and DMG don't actually do a great job of leveraging the FR as a good "default," and being comfortable with it either requires digesting a LOT of lore or being ok with shutting down players trying to hammer you for "doing the setting wrong." Neither of those are things most new DMs want to deal with.

18:32 Completely agree. The "Points of Light" in 4e was great for this exact reason.

I'll always care for the Forgotten Realms because of Drizzt Do'Urden. RA Salvatore's novels were my first exposure to D&D

I started DMing my first campaign with Dragon of Icespire Peak. My players (all newbies) and I wanted to continue the story and had backstory ideas - so after finishing that adventure I started homebrewing the world with my players to be able to create a more character-focused campaign. So now the only parts I took are Phandalin, Neverwinter (though there I homebrewed everything but the name) and a few gods that my players had already expressed interest in. I am really happy with that approach, but I was incredibly lucky with my players and their interests, especially because they're all first-timers.

Never been a fan of FR, and you hit the nail on the head with the barrier for entry all the lore represents. If I want to play a game set in a world where generic fantasy tropes are generally true, it’s a lot less work just to mad-libs quick-brew it. “Great, you’re from the town of [town name] in the kingdom of [kingdom name]. The town is built around [feature]. While life is generally pretty okay there, the presence of [complication] threatens it.” Roughly the same value-add to my game as FR and a ton less work on my end. Sure it won’t be as deep as Faerun, but I don’t need deep when the setting isn’t going to do anything with that depth besides “uhh, there’s an angsty elf”; I need a complication I can set my adventurers to interacting with. If you’re going to lore bomb me, you’d better be giving me something I couldn’t pull out on the fly in exchange for that work. Take Ravenloft or Ebberon for example. Those worlds have a distinct feel to them that FR lacks. Greyhawk as presented in 3.X was super boring, but it also filled a couple of pages in the PH, so no real investment required.

You are 100% right about the bar to entry being too high in the forgotten realms. The dritz books are fun I've read a few I'd say they're on the good side of average. They're definitely more thoughtful than I expected and I mean that in a good way, they talk about ethics in interesting ways that a lot of other similar novels don't.

Love that you picked up on this topic, as it's one that I'm very interested in. I love sword coast, but it's daunting as a GM to find a "new" campaign premise for adventurers in the forgotten realms, and I'm bullocks at building from scratch. So far Eberron is my favorite published setting, but I'll have to take another look at the 4th edition setting!

This is definitely a subject that I think about often, myself. I definitely agree with most of your points, especially how convoluted and intimating the lore has gotten. Now, I don't hate The Forgotten Realms, I read several of R.A. Salvatore's Drizz't novels in my teens alongside those from my actual favorite D&D setting (Dragonlance), and I mostly enjoyed what I read. I also grew up playing the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights games, which hugely influenced my love of RPGs today. That being said... I cannot say that I have ever really identified with the setting itself, usually just specific scenarios and characters. I never really felt the drive to run my games in The Forgotten Realms, even before it became the overcomplicated hodge podge it is now. It just never stood out to me like Krynn from Dragonlance. I would also honestly say there is a non-0% amount of salt on my part stemming from the seeming preferential treatment the setting has received over the years. Meanwhile Dragonlance got sabotaged by TSR and then abandoned in the 90's, brought back briefly in 3.5 edition by WotC (just to be ignored as a setting again until 8 years after 5th edition came out), and then only kept alive by the occasional side novels and free content from talented 3rd party creators (with the blessing of the original authors) until the most recent release. Considering how influential the setting was, and how important it was for D&D as a whole (Dragons Of Autumn Twilight was literally the first D&D novel ever published, and Tracy & Laura Hickman used the setting to add more roleplay and story into the game when it was mostly just a dungeon crawling, kill-and-loot game at the time) the way the setting was treated by both companies, and the fact that it has faded so much into the background since those times... just really makes me sad, and admittedly a little resentful. Oh and don't even get me started on the legal drama around the current Dragonlance book trilogy and WotC torpedoing their brand (OGL drama) right after finally bringing Dragonlance back and opening it up for use on DMs Guild... Anyways, I would definitely have been ok if Nentir Vale was just created as the default setting in the Player's Handbook, and The Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance were both still campaign settings. I just wish most of D&D's important settings would have received more equal attention over the years, instead of being largely ignored in favor of the 132nd Forgotten Realms sourcebook or adventure. Sorry, I needed to vent. Anyways, great video as always. lol

I'd say the amount of lore is also the Forgotten Realms' biggest advantage, new DMs planning an adventure there can fairly easily find information about a lot of stuff without having to make it up themselves. Of course, that also means there's danger of more experienced players knowing more about it than the DM...

TLDR - Love the FR, liked the video, disagreed, but still liked it. Personally I love the FR, and I actually disagree with you here - however your points were really well stated and I still enjoyed the video. Credit there! I can kinda see where your coming from and understand why you'd feel that way. Even though I love the realms, I would not dislike if the 'default' for DnD was something else. It would give new DMs the feeling that they can choose what they want to do. Per your request: I highly recommend the MrRhexx lore series. It's a good audiobook/podcast audio experience but if you do watch the artwork is incredible and inspiring. My knowledge of FR is almost exclusively from that series and I only found it about 3 months ago (June 2023). To me this series is what makes FR the inspiration and reason I actually moved my campaigns into it. Context: I've been DMing since before 5th edition (I skipped 4th came from 3.5) and (until next Friday) have never run any official DnD modules/content. Literally everything I did was homebrew/homemade. Next Friday I'll run Curse of Strahd for the first time - my first module and FR content. Again I love the realms and there's plenty there for old DMs and plenty of room for new DMS but!!! It all depends on how it's presented.

My online game is all homebrew, including the setting, so this hasn't been an issue. But in the in person game I am in, I seem to be the only one not to know anything about forgotten realms. I just never got into the books or lore much. I do feel a little left out & even behind the learning curve, but I deal and don't worry about it too much. I kind of play my character in Dragon Heist as one who isn't too aware of his surroundings and rather bad with names. The best 'default' fantasy campaign setting I have ever played in is RuneQuest's Glorantha. Very immersive & evocative. Full of backstory & powerful NPCs & histories but the emphasis is still on the the fact that the player characters have the potential to do great things. Not very helpful for the 5e discussion but definitely a great example of how to do a setting properly if you are looking for inspiration. Kato

Problem with FR is it's Over Developed, it was one of the Big Two Canon (and eventual Three with Dragonlance) worlds for AD&D 1E, Garry wrote OA for 1e and before he could decide where he wanted to put it, it was dumped in to FR. Come 2E it became the default setting, after they forced Garry out they soon turned on Ed and they had a major "Event" to brake Ed's Realms from the "New" realms and the new writers.

As someone who is not familiar with the setting, I find myself not wanting to run a game there as there is just so much lore to learn. From learning all the gods, to the various histories and important characters, locations and creatures... I feel like learning all of that is almost as hard as creating my own world from scratch, but with the added negative of having a bunch of content that I don't like attached. So I have 3 options: 1. Learn everything, and spend months or years on the process 2. Learn enough and change what I need, potentially breaking the immersion of players familiar with the lore 3. Create my own setting/use a different setting. I think the issue is that there is so much lore that I do not know where to start. I'm not super interested in running a module, I would just like a book that gives me a map with towns and settlements laid out and some important NPCs, locations, and cultures. Also, I am reluctant to buy books for things that might get retconned. I bought Volo's Guide to Monsters and now DnDBeyond lists all or most of the monsters in that book as depreciated, with a note saying I should buy another book for the newer, less interesting stat blocks and creature details.

One of the players in my campaign did something dishonest enough I felt a god of lies needed to get involved. I chose Cyric and had him show up for one scene to do what I needed. When the session was over, my player informed me of Cyric's extensive backstory and how different my Cyric was from the real character. My player was cool about it, but I agree with Mike that my player knowing more about The Forgotten Realms than I do puts me at a disadvantage.

My first encounter with the Forgotten Realms was back in 1987 with the 1st box set. Loved it back than, stopped playing during the end days of 2E and came back in 2020. I was excited to get back to DMing in the Forgotten Realms, as I had many fond years of adventuring within it, but before long I began to feel locked into the existing lore, more than 20 years worth, that the realm no longer had that wild feel, everything felt packed to the gills, it was no longer the point of light setting it once was. I think its great that there is love for FR, but for me as a DM, I want to have a world of exploration and mystery that I cannot go read about in tons of places, I wanted something wild once more, something grittier, which is what led me to stop running campaigns in it. Now, I do still love FR and love to read about it, but as for a setting for me to run games in, it is way too charted and I would rather not ret-con, destroy, or ignore that which has already been created out of respect and a love of the setting.

As someone who was only familiar with FG in passing but a deeply invested D&D player when 5e came around, I think everything you've gone over can also be the strengths of the setting. It's generic fantasy (save for a few things like the weave) and the general public will have proper expectations of what should and shouldn't exist in the world. Most of the published adventures do a decent job of name dropping famous things (Yawning Portal, Baldur's Gate, Durnan, Masked Lords, the five guilds, etc.) without getting too attached or lost in the weeds, especially in the starter kit adventures. And there's a ton of material out there if people want to dive in and get more invested in specifics if they so choose; no extra work required! While I can understand that it's sometimes daunting for new DMs to jump into such an established setting, I think this is more an issue with fear of the knowledge gap. Rules are the perfect example of this where players overconcern themselves with making sure their rulings are 100% according to the book, even through 5e was supposed to get away from "the one true rule" mentality that players have inevitably dragged the game back into because of this very fear. I have this same fear when I play Star Wars games because I enjoyed the original trilogy and while I'm familiar with the other six movies I'm not super invested in them, and care very little about the EU, KOTOR, and the like. I just make sure expectations are set with players that I'm not Wookiepedia and see Star Wars as pulp space fantasy so we're not getting lost in the minutia of hyper drive specifications or if my depiction of Ewok culture goes against the Lucas deep-cut never aired pilot of a scraped miniseries that was fan leaked for private screenings 12 years ago. The setting is only as daunting as you make the expectations be. I think the most obvious downside to FG is the lack of space for D&D's roots: dungeon crawling. There are locations like the Underdark and the Undermountain, but for the most part I have trouble imagining adventurers having a lot to do in a world like Faerun because I don't imagine it to be a world where random dungeons are littered across it, unlike somewhere like the Nentir Vale. Faerun feels discovered, young, and safe as opposed to mysterious, dangerous, and built upon civilizations long past whos ruins are worth exploring. And even then, for better or worse, the not so squeaky clean parts of FG are being scrubbed clean of problematic content which, while being more welcoming to people of the not white male persuasion, does get rid of many points of conflict in the setting. In effect, Faerun is a PG13 setting with enough history to evoke either deep nostalgia or wide-eyed wonder and curiosity, which is _exactly_ the sort of setting a large corporation wants to amke its primary reference point when saying "this is the Dragon Dungeons from the 80s kids show!"

I 100% agree with something you’ve said in a previous video, the gist being “Forgotten Realms feels like a world created specifically for adventurers.” That’s why I’m not a fan of it; the world itself seems to know you are an adventurer and wants to give you magic items. The mostly low-magic way it’s presented in Baldur’s Gate 1 is a lot better in my opinion, though I have to concede that the overall generic feel and abundance of magic stuff does lend itself to a default setting feel: You can’t avoid doing D&D stuff while you’re playing in FG. The high-magic vibe is what I think really bothers me about it. Every major NPC has tons of treasure and magic items and, whether true or not, it feels like there is a magic shop on every corner of every town. The funny thing about this is that I’ve always felt they could make it work, make it make sense, if they just leaned more heavily into the Time of Troubles. Explicitly tell me that the world was low-magic BEFORE the ToT and I probably wouldn’t complain. And yeah… names like “Lord Nasher Alagondar” are awful. Great video!

I almost feel like there doesn't even need to be a default campaign setting. Writing an adventure like LMoP wouldn't be hard to do in a setting-agnostic way (at least, widely applicable to many different settings). I feel like presenting it as part of FR kind of impresses on DMs that they should really know more about this setting to be able to answer player questions about the world from a position of authority. Furthermore, I always see tons of weird comments online where people are asking if X or Y are permissible to do in their games when those are FR-specific bits of lore rather than actual game mechanics; many newer D&D players don't really fully understand that the game mechanics and lore can be completely separated from one another. Setting-agnostic starter adventures allow you to drop them in to any other setting without much or any work really needed, and also make it much more explicit to new DMs that they are encouraged to build their own worlds in which to run their games.

Hey Mike, I agree that there is so much to know about the forgotten realms(sword coast). I got into D&D in 5e. Funny enough forgotten realms novels were in my family’s home sense the first book was written. I just never read them until I had moved away and found out that was D&D. What I like about forgotten realms is that I can go online and get background info on almost every town. I can pick and choose what info I will use and what I will change. As long as I keep in mind and the mind of my players that it’s my own homebrew forgotten realms.

The Star Trek Dilemma ("You're the only ship in the sector" "But, we're only three days from Earth!") element is strong in the 5e Realms adventures that's for sure - I hate both the pacing and the inaction of high level residents.

"Tripped down the stairs carrying a basket of typewriters" 😆 love it. Though I'm sure there are plenty of daft names in FR, I would be cautious saying that sounds "would not occur in human language". Coming partially from a non-proto-indo-european background, and having consulted an actual linguist (I'm lucky, he's my brother) in designing my own fantasy world - I can say definitively that just about any sounds can exist in human language! What *is* important and the vast majority of fantasy worlds do wrong is to not be _consistent_ in naming within one country even. And I'm sure Forgotten Realms has this, though the region I'm most familiar with - Icewind Dale - is actually OK there. The place I've recognised it most recently is in a world called "Golarion" used for a campaign I've recently started playing in. The naming is seriously unhinged! It's one of my big criticisms with Exandria also, though. "Emon" "Byroden" and "Westrun" can just about hang together, but in the nation of "Tal'Dorei"? And then "Rexxentrum" and "Zadash" and "Nogvurat"? Hrm. And I have to mention Exandrian norm for naming shops/inns/organisations that looks like a someone ran a dictionary through a shredder and just stuck the resulting strips together at random. Ultimately, though, bad naming doesn't make a bad world. I love Matt Mercer's detail in storytelling, and he can describe things so evocatively you can look past the sometimes threadbare stitching of the world. Regarding Forgotten Realms, I'm largely on board with most of the criticism here. The sheer scale of the lore, especially - often written very inconsistently - is awfully intimidating and yes, the sheer prevalence of powerful characters everywhere _not saving the world_ has made for a real disbelief suspension problem when running games in that setting.

While I'm not sure if you'd like it, I really love Pathfinder's Golarion as a default setting. The lore in the books is all built around it and it's a fantasy kitchen sink setting with a lot of unusual stuff in it.

Most of the AD&D books detailing the Sea of Falling Stars area - Cormyr, City of Ravensbluff, etc - are full of great detail. Ed wrote much of this and he references the regions fairly often when he talks about the Realms. Definitely changed my perspective towards the Realms to more positive.

I don't love the realms, but that's because it's WAY more high magic than I prefer. I'm a strong proponent of "This is MY world, so don't rely on what you think you know about it, and I reserve the right to decide things are different from what you know."

As someone that has played in the Realms, read novels, obsessed over characters, and created my own lore for them for almost thirty years, my heart is in the nostalgia. With every new iteration of DnD I look forward to seeing how they move forward with the classic characters, and have lamented many that have no stat blocks even to this day.

I like forgotten realms and I liked it since 3 ed. I love the setting and I played my very first campaign in it. I collect merch of it and novels and it's my setting of choice. Still, I left dnd for a while and when i returned I discovered 5e and started to look into it again. And I found a spellplague, PLACES THAT DISAPPEARED and stories that potentially don't exist anymore. It's not like other things like the silence of lolth. This seemed to me like a child that builds the most perfect sand castle and then is compelled to destroy it only to understand it's not playable anymore. Now I found out that the creator of Toril has nothing to do with the spellplague.. I still like it, but I'm finding it hard to understand some choices of the setting and of the company in general. It's just as if they need to make a mess out of everything.

Disagree with many things said here. There are many places left to explore, plenty of distintion between baldurs gate, neverwinter, or amn. The two big things about the forgotten realms that you may not like are : A) Overwhelming about of documentation B) Very Magic heavy (if you're not into that)

Campaign settings are fun but need player buy in. Going overboard is a huge problem - don't overdo infodumps! For DMs with any setting , I recommend worrying only about essential facts of immediate areas. Encourage collaboration. Never assume or punish - be quick and gentle with setting reminders, and be honest about your setting knowledge. Reward players with good story and direct gratitude when they use the setting information. Reign in experts they expect too much.

Great video, thank you. When you were saying that the cities don't have a lot that separates them I was reminded of a 1st edition game I played. My character was part of a team out of Waterdeep that pooled all our money together to buy 2 draft horses and a cart and then we went up the road to Red Larch to buy horses. Red Larch is not the suburbs of waterdeep, more like the sticks, meaning we weren't far from civilization (there was a road after all) but we were far enough to feel like we'd set out and were on our own. We come into red larch hot and tired and was treated at the inn to some roast phoenix (a jealous favorite of inn keepers apparently, as the bird comes back to life again no matter how many times they cook it) and the next morning had to negotiate with stable masters and farmers to buy up all the available horses in town (at a discount from PHB prices). At last, we set off northward with our wagon and a team of like 15 horses. After weeks on the road we arrived in Mirabar, up in the north (our GM didn't want to research anything about the town if all we were going to do was buy and sell and stay at the inn before moving on, we agreed, and so admittedly, Morabar was boring) but without taking time to see the sites we sold most all of our horses (at a premium) and bought up all the iron we could with our profits (at a discount). We had random encounters on the road coming and going from Mirabar but for the sake of brevity we made our way back south again but this time we came around and arrived in Luskan. The sign outside read, all Humanoids will be executed on sight, all Humans will be mistrusted. Luskan is a pirate city with castles shaped like skulls, and an island clouded in a wild magical storm from some experiment gone wrong, then there was the Host tower (a freaking massive, dead, tree that housed evil wizards). Pirates were at our backs around every corner. Someone was always trying to figure out where we parked the wagon, what goods we carried, how much money we had, why the one guy in our party always wore his hood up despite the heat of it being summer, (he was an elf of course and he had to hide his face and especially his ears). Pirates were everywhere - and these pirates hated those pirates - anyway, long story shortened, we get out of Luskan with our party still alive and our goods still in our possession and head down the road south again. When we arrived in Neverwinter, the last big city before getting home to waterdeep, we were contracted by the temple (Torm I think or Helm) to do some policing jobs around the city. We healed and fed the poor people contained inside the Beggars nest who hadn't enough money to live or pay taxes and we patrolled the streets full of townhouses and greenhouses stacked next to and even over each other. We had such a great time stopping in Neverwinter that no one wanted to go back to waterdeep. We sold our iron (at a premium, cha-ching), split the prize, and my character bought himself some land inside the city and retired - Those were in the days of 1e tho.... when adventure had much less to do with saving the world and more to do with just making a living and staying alive.

I got into the Forgotten Realms as a new DM a few years ago, running Lost Mine of Phandelver for family. I didn't feel overwhelmed by the setting information needed to run it, and had such a great time that I started reading more about the Forgotten Realms in the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, the online wiki, and the Drizzt novels. It felt to me a world like Tokkien's, only with more magic, that I could be a part of shaping and get to play in! Before we even finished that adventure, I knew I wanted to run another, and dove into reading Dragon Heist and learning everything I could about Waterdeep. Now I'm running Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which I've set on the Sword Coast. Each new adventure enriches the world for me and for my players, and I love that connectivity.

I am one of the DMs that homebrew a whole world because I was spooked off by Faerun lore. I came to know it reasonably enough to be confortable DMing and playing in it, and liking it. I think the adventure who made me like the forgotten realms was Princes of the Apoclypse. I don't think it's a great book for guiding a DM to run the adventure in itself, but in the effort of trying to DM it, I ended up caught up in the lore. The book does have a lot of content and art, which helps with that. And it avoids a little bit the major cities and focus on a more rural area. Red larch is a very detailed town in it, and the lore behind the adventure is also great for that. And there's also Tomb of Annihilation, which showed me a different part of the realms that I thought was very intersting. But that's kinda cheating I guess.

I like the forgotten realms because their stories are pretty modular and contain, and easy to adapt to any HB campaign that wants to use it. So if you have a HB world, anything you don't want to create can be from the Forgotten Realms.

I think it was chosen because of its popularity and established lore. It does have a deep history, but it hooks older gamers that might be wary of an edition jump. Oerth/Greyhawk just was terrible, and a main reason we still run 2nd. It was a bad choice for 3rd and why we never made the jump. The 4th ed setting is just vanilla no name fantasy, perfect for a homebrew if you like. This is really the 1st time they have chosen the Realms and it has its merits and flaws, but I think its a reason it has done so well.

What you're describing for Forgotten Realms is a big part of the problem with D&D today for someone who wanted to run the game for the first time: There's a _lot_ you're expected to know from years of play or novels or whatever else … and then there's a lot more you're supposed to know because the game's got a fair amount of complexity that falls on the GM side of the screen. There's just a lot there. Unfortunately I don't see WotC changing that because they want to lean into that "lifestyle brand" thing. You don't do that by giving people an open-ended world to create themselves. You do it by giving them a bunch of canned worlds and adventures, ready to learn and run. That's me being a bit of a cynic, I realize, but … I think we have had reason to be cynical in recent months.

My biggest issue with the Forgotten Realms is the fact that it feels like the entire world has been developed. There is nothing to explore or discover. No matter what the player's do, they will always ben overshadowed by canon characters and events. There are some great ideas that I have no issues with stealing and filing the serial numbers from, but as a setting it's great for novels, but not so great to play in. I also agree about the names. Rumblebelly? Ugh.

I completely understand why a setting should ideally have a lot of unexplored potential (thinking about the Tales of the Loop ttrpg specifically) but I personally love being able to drop into an established setting with a ton of lore and work with that, it feels, oddly, a lot less daunting than being given a blank canvas to make choices on. Maybe that'll change as I get more comfortable as a DM. HOWEVER, as much as Baldur's Gate III has made me fall in love with the Forgotten Realms, gods is it messy. There is no sense of stability for me to latch onto there because some things, like drow lore and culture in Menzobarranzan, is so wildly detailed compared to lore on, say, that one planet that has a ton of illithids and tarrasques on it. It both encourages me to make stuff up on the spot and to have an exhaustive knowledge on its lore, and I wish it would pick a side. Also a thing that bothers me a ton is that somehow the setting in the "present day" takes place only a few years after what amounts to an apocalypse scenario in the world with gods dying and being reborn and nobody seems to like... care about it? Final bit I wanted to add is that yeah, first time I tried to get into DnD I looked at the sheer amount of lore of the default setting and decided it was far too much work to try and get into it. As much as I like the Forgotten Realms (and oftentimes really only the idea of it) I agree, it should not have been made the default setting for DnD.

What I like about the forgotten realms is that is has some cool aspects of other settings merged into it. It gets all the excitement and variety plus you can technically travel from ravenloft to spelljammer in the same campaign. In addition to those two, it also has the underdark from greyhawk, dragonborn and plot-driven adventures like dragonlance, and it’s moving away from races having typical alignment like exandria. And I’m sure some of that’s inaccurate, but 5e is my first edition, and forgotten realms was my gateway into fantasy.

Your video matches exactly what I felt when I was introduced to the scene and tried to get to know it. Your last point in the video is what bothered me the most: lots and lots of stories that overwhelm the GM. It's definitely not fun. There are those who boast that an entire life is not capable of narrating forgotten realms. It's ridiculous. Thank you for having the courage to express your opinion. I make her mine. And long live the creators of their own scenery.

Thank you so much for doing this. The proper names thing you so eloquently spelled out at 10:51 and your biggest complaint 17:15 is exactly what made me look up this topic of video in the first place, and your video is so well paced and on point. I am finally after all this time doing my first proper campaign as a DM and as I began prepping I started to really get this feeling and I couldn't put my finger on the exact word of what was bothering me about running in this as the default setting, and you nailed it right on the head. Daunting. Im planning to just simplify the names of NPCs and keeping things generic (i.e. in the mountains of 'these lands' , nomadic tribes of these mountains) and have PCs discover things about the world organically through playing instead of in lore dumps, to eventually work toward this vision for a dnd setting I have. Was having the same problem with some of the celtic settings, and the ancient myths from 2e, 5e and real life. The proper nouns are so foreign to our non-Gaelic speaking ears, keeping track of stuff was becoming burdensome to me and my playtesters, so scrapped doing it with the names from those settings at a minimum, and put prepping those adventures on the way far backburner. Ps. If anyone's interested and got this far theres a nifty campaign setting done by this Celtic Archaeologist really well researched and does 5e well , adventure path for it still being written though.

There should be no default setting, there should be more guidance in the DMG about creating one slowly over time. Mike Shea has it right; prepare as much as you need for the next sessions with an eye toward the overall campaign, but don’t waste a bunch of time and effort on lore that your players aren’t going to understand or care about until it’s relevant to their play experience. If you’re building an emergent story with emergent character development, the setting can emerge way too. They should teach DMs and players alike to do emergent development, and when they do present a setting, they can just call out the key features that make it unique while leaving plenty of unknowns for the players to discover along the way.

The thing that got me interested in the Forgotten Realms was pulling out the vast maps of the continent of Faerun and finding some random location. Then diving into that specific location to find out more about it. Like throwing a dart at the map, hitting a place like Cormyr and just diving into the lore of it. Finding a place called The Dungeon of Death or Hellgate Keep and finding out why these places have such names. These days there’s a great wiki page for the Forgotten Realms so you can just Google most things found in the Realms to find articles and sources for the content, whether novels or video games and setting books.

This video was really helpful. I'm currently running a campaign that's a successor to some old games of my group - which started with Lost Mines of Phandelver - which has thus far taken place in the Outer Planes but will soon have everyone returning to Sword Coast. As I anticipate the upcoming setting shift, I can't help but feel locked down by all the issues you've raised here. Some major conflicts will be taking place in the cities and I find my challenge is less learning about these cities as much as trying to make them distinctly interesting. I have a few good plans in mind, but seeing this takes me back to my very first time DMing, which was a one-shot. The idea for it sprang up from me just inventing lore in a notepad, line by line, based only on some basic fantasy knowledge. To this day, that one-shot has no clearly defined setting that's beholden to anywhere and it was still the most liberating experience I've had as a DM. In future, while I'm happy for now to work with the current setting I have and apply some creativity to the issues with it, I would like to just do more world-inventing to ensure any future campaigns I run aren't too limited. And I'm not gonna lie, but I will keep it vague in case any of my players read this, I think reflecting on all of this has given me a new inspiration for how the campaign will end. There's an aspect of it that my players may have you to thank for, whenever we get to it!

Never played D&D until 5e, but I got into the Realms (and Dragonlance) as a teen in the 90s, through the Drizzt and War of the Lance series respectively. I love the Forgotten Relams, but I also understand where you're coming from with this. Honestly, even though I know the lore of the world, I've never used it as a campaign setting.

I love the Realms, it is my favorite published setting. By far. That said, it is the wrong "default" setting. The default setting of DnD exists to showcase the latest edition of the rules. They should consider a new one every couple of editions or keep using Greyhawk. Then release a version of the edition customized to the Realms. Otherwise what happens is that the Realms gets customized to the rules, and that is a mistake because the Realms has its own unique flavor and feel. Changing the flavor and feel of a setting never works, it will only annoy established fans. It is best that a new flavor/feel/tone be created by creating a new setting rather than adapting an old one.

Becoming the default setting also hurt the Forgotten Realms on a narrative level, as the ever evolving history of the world was more or less frozen in time. That way, the world always stays close to the lore that's presented in the core rulebooks. At the beginning of 5E it was stated that there won't be mayor "Realms shaking events" anymore. But I suppose it would now be difficult to just shift the borders of a single kingdom. Furthermore, 5E's changes to revert many geographical, political and religious features to a mix of various 1-5E states often felt very forced, are hard to believe in-game (even for a high fantasy setting) and devalued some long-standing story arcs. As to character inspiration: In older editions, regional sourcebooks as well as the "Grand History of the Realms" gave plenty of that for me. But yes, it was daunting for any DM, especially if you also wanted to keep up with the many changes the novels brought to the setting. Speaking of novels: Instead of the very long Drizzt series I would recommend Paul S. Kemp's eight Erevis Cale novels as an entry point. They take place from 3-5E and have well written and unique FR-characters. If you like drow, the multi-author "War of the Spider Queen" hexalogy and Lisa Smedman's "Lady Penitent" trilogy are also worth reading.

so the problem isn't really the FR; it's the book(s). if the PHB/modules had a map and a short blurb on what the major races/locations/conflicts/factions were in each region, DMs would have enough details and enough blank space to make their campaigns, and the players would have enough inspiration to make their characters. problem solved.

Honestly FR seems designed to be the kitchen sink. It’s fantasy is so tightly crammed together that nothing really feels fantastical anymore. You’ve got cities ruled by archmages who can animate the various statue-of-liberty-size sculptures that are just spread around, and yet people build houses on those sculptures apparently knowing this could happen? Another city has a second sun that never sets, but there’s no real discussion about what challenges that causes for people who live without night? Everything seems to be kind of an elevator pitch idea without much consideration for how those things interact and how they should actually impact the world. What I like about Eberron is that it’s the opposite of that - the ideas are developed and they DO impact the world both culturally and economically.

I find this to also be mostly a 5e sourcebook problem, lots of flavor not a lot of usable content

My experience with the Forgotten Realms is somewhat limited, and also partly homebrew: One of my DMs does an extremely great job of adapting existing campaign settings to fit a specific story he wants to tell, and those campaigns are...super, super fun. But aside from his extreme expansion of Curse of Strahd, and the way we handled it causing enormous ripples he made two and a half additional campaigns out of, I don't know that anything he did strictly needed to be the Forgotten Realms campaigns. Realizing this is what made me really appreciate your point that the FR does not need to be the default setting. I really like how you address the things about the setting you think are good when you state your opinion. It's something I see and appreciate in most of your videos. I suppose at the end of the day the thing I can most confidently say is a strength of the Forgotten Realms (specifically the Sword Coast, as the rest of the world is not nearly so well-defined), is that it has a really solid map to look at, and as long as you don't have someone too obsessed with the lore of the Sword Coast at your table, you can use that already-completed, detailed map for inspiration to tell your own story. Oh, also Luskan is cool, and pirate kings controlling the city is rad as heck. Although...now that I just looked it up real briefly, it seems that city in particular was heavily modified by my DM, specifically it seems like he made a pre-spellplague version of Luskan in a post-spellplague world.

I have never been a fan of Forgotten Realms. My fave setting by far... and there is no competition in my heart... is Eberron. It's unique, doesn't have the problem over insanely powerful NPC's, so much political intrigue possibilities. I also like how it doesn't have the generic medieval feel.

What I have found is irritating is the size of places and the distance between them varies in the different material. So when I bought old maps of the forgotten realms to show the players the distance between cities varied so much from the campaign I was running that I got very frustrated.

I have mixed feelings about settings where the players have more lore knowledge than I do. On the one hand, it makes my job harder as a referee and a storyteller. On the other hand, I firmly believe that players *should* have a lot more storytelling agency than they typically do, and having a big investment in setting lore is one way to accomplish that. Thus, it does make me uncomfortable, but I think maybe it's not a bad thing.

For me the Forgotten Realms The Sword Coast. The Sword Coast is just one small slice of FR. I've seen it joked that the Sword Coast is "the Remembered Realms" because it gets so much attention in 5e while the rest is largely ignored. For the record, I do not play my tabletop games in Forgotten Realms anymore, as I like the Golarion setting of Pathfinder more, and I run Pathfinder1e, but I like it for all the same reasons I like the Forgotten Realms. It's FULL, and I'm a lore junkie. I could make my own setting(s) but I prefer to play in the most detailed published settings I can find, as long as I like the pantheon for the setting. To me, what makes or breaks a setting is its pantheon. I love learning the new published lore of a setting. Points-of-Light settings are not my jam at all. (While I don't run FR anymore, I do still play on a Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition persistent-world server that is still set in 3.x FR, so I still keep up on my 3.x FR lore, anyway.) I highly recommend watching the new video from Ed Greenwood as he talks about Cormyr, which is a country in the region of the Forgotten Realms known as the Heartlands. (The Heartlands are usually considered to include Cormyr, Sembia, and The Dalelands. I think later lore might have had something happen to Sembia though, but I haven't kept up with 4e/5e.) The Western Heartlands, which appear labeled as such on maps because they're not a unified country, are west of the Heartlands, and include the areas generally around the Sword Coast. Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep are in the Western Heartlands. Cormyr is in the Heartlands, to the east, on the northern shore of the Dragonmere. Anyway, check out Ed Greenwood talking about Cormyr: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eBKgct8M-Bk.html I started playing D&D with 3.5e Edition, and I never understood why 3.x focused on Greyhawk with the core books, then didn't support it with its own campaign books. It was weird, and mostly annoying as new classes in splat books would reference Greyhawk deities but the Greyhawk setting was not covered in-depth. Having the campaign setting that is published in supplements match the campaign setting published in the core rules of the game makes a lot more sense to me. To this day, I can name a few Greyhawk deities, but I mostly just tried to figure out their analogs for FR so I could use the core material content appropriately in FR. Luckily, the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting had a table with recommended analogs for the major ones. (I came to D&D from Forgotten Realms, as my first two D&D books were actually the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3e and FR Faiths and Pantheons 3e. After that I got the 3.5e Core Rulebooks. Why did I buy FR books first? To support my online RP in Neverwinter Nights back in 2002.) Anyway, check out Ed Greenwood talking about Cormyr. He actually talks about "Why is Cormyr?" to some degree.

I discovered the Realms in high school, and being the lore junkie that I am, I devoured the content. The map had all these evocative place-names, and I wanted to know more about a lot of the regions. The constant focus on one part of the world annoys me, since there are many incredible areas to adventure in, some far better suited for new adventurers than the Sword Coast. Imagine adventuring in Halruua, a benevolent magocracy where everyone knows a little magic, and which produces many marvels, including airships. Or Lantan, a nation consisting primarily of Humans and Gnomes, where the worship of Gond, the artificer God is almost a state religion, and the natives have made many advances in alchemy and technology. Ravens Bluff, an island city on the Sea of Fallen Stars, offers many adventures dealing with the criminal underworld, political intrigue, and, as one might expect, piracy on the high sea! There is the mysterious desert of the Anauroch, with ruins that date back to the greatest empires the world has ever known. Or the war-torn lands of Vaasa and Damara, far to the east. Phlan, once a great city, was largely abandoned long ago, and to this day, reclaiming it's lost sections from monsters is a never-ending task. The Moonshaes, remote islands steeped in Celtic lore, where legends and myths and the fair folk are just as real as anything else. But no, WotC has barely covered any of this in 5e, leaving new players wandering about some of the best-known areas, with little of the wonder or majesty one can find elsewhere. Is all this lore daunting? Of course, but I don't think any campaign was ever meant to cover vast chunks of the world; each DM could find a region that interests them, and then go on to make their own adventures there.

My own introduction freely mixed locations and monsters from Toril, Krynn, Oerth, Mystara, unnamed fantasy worlds from other sources, and the imaginations of not just the DM but the entire table. I was allowed to play a two foot tall anthropomorphic fox with bat wings, a Paladin who had been an apprentice wizard. Every single dungeon used a map suspiciously similar to the HeroQuest board with the doors (we had to search for) being on different segments of wall. We loved it and played multiple campaigns. Being 13 and younger, we had a pretty loose grasp on the rules anyway. A full caster could always cast 3rd level spells at level 3, 2nd level spells at level 2, and 1st level spells at level 1. We still found martial types and healers to perform the best in spite of what's objectively a huge buff to arguably the most powerful class (from the perspective of those with deep mastery of the rules, of course).

Points of Light was definetly a highlight of 4e, I hope 1dnd follows suit and makes a similar or just adapt the setting to 1dnd.

I had a problem with it in 2nd ed! Mine was the absolute staggering lack of history to work with! Other than the official d&d fiction books & the Neth(something) there is virtually nothing between "The Flight of Dragons" & the Neth(something). So you've got about 3-15,000 years completely empty. Sure it's nice to have that empty spot of DM's, but when you've dropped money on the setting you require ALOT more mainly because you're expecting it to be a "Drop the PCs in and campaign!". If anything Forgotten Realms is a setting that needs to be retired as it's just becoming bloated and worn out.

I am about a month into my first ever dm experience, and I found the established lore of the forgotten realms very comforting because I had lore that I could fall back on if I needed it. That being said, my next campaign will either be set in a homebrew setting or in Exandria. All depends on how much work I get done on my homebrew.

Wholeheartedly agree. I personally don't care for Forgotten Realms, though that may be mostly due to unfamiliarity on my part. On a related note, I'm super curious about your thoughts on Eberron!

The problem I have with the Forgotten Realms as a player, is that it's 'too detailed'. Past, present and future events have already been determined. There is no mystery left, there is nothing over that hill to explore, because you already know what is over that hill. It kind of feels like your just going through the motions when playing through this setting, that your bit player in someone elses story, a story whos ending has already been determined. The deities and factions are really the only thing I think the setting has going for it.