The Encrapification of the Forgotten Realms

https://www.enworld.org/threads/forgotten-realms-geographic-changes.702914/page-2#post-9279257

This thread came up on Facebook, and a thread linked to this EN World post, where the designers of D&D around the jump to 3.5E, sliced the Forgotten Realms up with scissors and shrunk the map.

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, 3E, Page 29

The new map feels more inspired by video games, and shrinking the map to make it more accessible and closely connected. The old world was massive, with plenty of room to "fill in the blanks" where I could drop in my own kingdoms, cities, characters, history, dungeons, bad guys, and stories.

This was a world where most of the chaos and evil flowed from the lands of the dead, the wastes, and the dragons and demons, or this hellish scar cutting through the center of the civilized world. Everyone needed to be on guard, or else the fragile lattice of civilization could be crushed by the forces of darkness. Nothing was close by, so the heroes needed to answer the call.

But the best part of the old world was that room to fill in the blanks. I had room to make my own Underdark, drop it into an area, and create surface kingdoms to deal with the threat in a sandboxed story area that was Realms-like, wholly inspired by it, yet my own creation.

The NPCs and books never interfered with my games, since I had the room to create my own setting anywhere within the existing one. The new world? Forget making my own cities and stories, I was forced to use the published ones. I could not put a dungeon on the map without checking what was already there, so as not to accidentally connect them.

Grand History of the Realms, 3.5E, Page 44

The most notable loss was the massive wasteland (The Anauroch Desert), where most of the chaos and monsters originated, which divided east from west and was lost forever. I knew there was a change here, but I never realized it was this dramatic. Frankly, the new map is crap, and it is not even the same world I remembered from AD&D 2E. Everything is so close, covered in a book or video game, and adjacent that help is just a short trip away.

No wonder my memories of campaigning in this world feel so different than the games and books of today. The world became a shrunken-down World of Warcraft map, smaller than a US state map, where a massive capital city is just a 10-minute walk from the furthest borderlands. Orc invasion at the border fort? Somebody, please, walk over to the capital and tell the king.

Our world was a fully realized AD&D 2E game, immense and everywhere was explorable and full of mysteries and my own history. The world was as massive as the stories we told inside it. A demon king could have an empire in that desert, and it could sow chaos everywhere it touched.

I have no room in the new world. No wonder the GMNPC problem got worse as time went on; the vast area of chaos was cut out of the world, and every Harper and good guy lives in the neighborhood. Need help? Someone from the next town over will be by shortly; you can all sit in the inn while Elminster and the Harpers ride in to save the day again.

They are just down the road.

Did players complain that the map was too big, and thus "not adventurable?" Did DMs lose their imagination and complain about all the "blank space" on the map with "nothing in it?" Did we all collectively lose our minds and ability to create new stuff? Were we only meant to "recreate the events of the video games" with the D&D rules?

This new 3.5E version of Faerun is some mutant demiplane created by the video games, and it is not the real Forgotten Realms at all. This is the moment the Forgotten Realms died and became a corporate tool, meant to push book and adventure sales. The world told us, "We have no room for your ideas anymore." By the time we reached 4E, the massive changes continued, and the Underdark collapsed, leaving enormous holes in the world, figuratively, mentally, and physically. It is a fantasy setting wearing a skinsuit, calling itself something it is not.

The old world was a literate place, huge and filled with my own ideas. It feels more like The Lord of the Rings than it does an "8-bit console RPG."

The old world was a real fantasy world.

The new world isn't.