The Forgotten Realms has had a long and messy life, and it did not deserve most of what happened to it over various revisions and editions of its parent game. We started off as an AD&D (first edition) setting, and instead of maintaining its artistic and literary integrity, it became a "vehicle to sell D&D" and "a platform to showcase changes in the rules" as improvements and upgrades.
To be honest, the entire Forgotten Realms should have been sold to another company and managed appropriately as an IP, and not as a "D&D hamburger wrapper."
We got the first "Time of Trials" from AD&D First to Second Edition, where they tried to explain the panic of "losing the assassin class" as the "god of assassins dying" and "thousands losing their character class" with NPCs literally weeping in the street like they were some player in an MMO who had their class nerfed.
D&D 3.0 was based on Greyhawk, and FR returned in 3.5E with numerous changes. By D&D 4E, they destroyed the world and "collapsed the entire Underdark." They also added Tieflings and Dragonborn to the Realms, as if they had always been there. The Forgotten Realms died in D&D 4E, and it has never really come back for people who knew the original. D&D 5E never did the setting justice, and they were hoping a video game and an entire edition would smooth over the mistakes they made in this setting.
There are people today who think the Forgotten Realms is limited to Baldur's Gate 3 and Spelljammer, and they know nothing else. It is an unfortunate thing to see. I'm not even a fan of Baldur's Gate 3 characters on the new book's cover; it feels like the next generation of unkillable GM NPCs has been born to torture players, and this setting has long been a haven for them. And they had no follow-up to that game, so it feels dead to me. I wish they had at least made an expansion.
As a literary setting for fiction, the Forgotten Realms has a lot to offer. This is why playing it in GURPS works so well. With GURPS, I can run this "low magic" setting like we did when we started playing it back in AD&D. This was supposed to be the "serious and realistic" version of AD&D, while Greyhawk was more for power gamers.
These days, I wouldn't play something like that with others, as nobody would understand what I was talking about or what I was trying to accomplish. The Forgotten Realms has always been science-fiction high-fantasy, right?
It was a great setting back in the day, as I remember it.
I loved the whole vibe here, of character-driven stories, low magic, cults of the gods scheming, the humanoids of the unsettled lands constantly raiding, armies being raised to settle lands and conduct crusades against the wildlands and bastions of evil far away from civilization, and that whole fight between good and evil gods that makes for great fiction.\
These days, the setting has been rebooted, the map scale has been changed (and dramatically shrunken in size), and it's been recycled so many times that it feels like the worst tropes of fantasy instead of aspiring to be the best. The setting no longer serves the grand sweeps of epic fantasy; instead, it is engineered to cater to the "me and my fantasy" crowd, glazing your fantasy identity as the best thing ever. It is also far too tied in with video games, constantly shrinking in size to be more of a tiny MMO map than the world it was.
I miss the old, continent-sized, massive world setting.
The setting offers more than enough room to DIY the rest of the world, and I could create an entire campaign setting of my own, 200 miles away from Waterdeep.
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