Our Realms

We got the original Forgotten Realms set the year it came out, in 1987, before AD&D 2nd Edition ever came out. So, this was always an AD&D setting for us. By this time, we have had years of Grayhawk power gaming, and that entire setting felt plagued by "level 100 characters" and their "armies of djinn riding red dragons." It got so bad Grayhawk City was this lazy, entitled, high-level character hangout where there was a minimum level required to enter the city.

Was it realistic? No. Was it fun? Oh, hell yeah. We loved our high-level Grayhawk sandbox of unchecked power, like a world filled with superheroes gone out of control.

For us, the Forgotten Realms was a reset. A section in this book discusses "what the gods will allow" in the world, such as balancing characters that enter, removing illegal class levels, and preventing modern technology from working.

To us, the Realms was a very gated community.

It is along the lines of Dragonlance - where when you hit a certain level, the gods ask you to leave. This was mentioned in the above book, and it blew our minds. TSR could have just put a level cap on Dragonlance, but they didn't. In our version of the Realms, the gods feared the world becoming the out-of-control Grayhawk, so they kept a tight reign on play power and magic availability.

So Greyhawk and its level 100 power level served as an anti-example of a campaign world and justified the gods of the Realms to keep tighter control on magic and player power. I know, this is all alien talk to 5E players. Don't you dare limit my magic and power! I won't play! I need my magic items and spells!

Our Realms were a low magic setting, more akin to a Runequest or an early Warhammer feeling, with very few spellcasters, magical anomalies, and crazy things going on. The gods did not like open gates in or out of the world; you had to travel through astral space to get here. The gods also did not interfere much in the world, and there wasn't a lot of crazy stuff going on.

There was also no planar travel.

The gnolls, orcs, dragons, demons, golems, giants, drow, mind flayers, evil cults, serpentmen, slavers, raiders, and other monsters always provided the opponents, per AD&D standards and norms. Anything in the AD&D Monster Manual was fair game.

The world was this very "down" and low-fantasy and low-magic place where most people lived in a world with variable levels of danger, so you could have a fortress under siege in one place and relatively unwalled, pastoral villages in another. If a kingdom was isolated and kept monsters under control, people could live in cities without walls.

Rangers kept patrol of the roads, and scattered garrisons provided men to take care of trouble. There could be peaceful areas. Out beyond the frontier, things got dangerous and wild quick. Armed caravans were needed in lawless and wild areas. There were places on the map relegated to "failed kingdoms" and "the wilds" where very few dared to go.

Two years later, the setting died.

I hate you, AD&D 2nd Edition. TSR's overreacting to the Satanic Panic forced the company to sanitize AD&D and give the Forgotten Realms a lobotomy. Entire gods, such as Loviatar, the goddess of pain and torture, were retconned and removed from the setting. Their clerics had their powers taken away. Demons and devils were pulled from the game. All the brothels in this setting (there were hundreds) were closed quietly. Every assassin disappeared. And they had this "time of troubles" module series that went through and showed the aftermath like this was a "real thing that was happening."

One random encounter that burned into my mind was a cleric of Loviatar with her whip sitting in her leather outfit on the side of a street, crying that her goddess and powers had been taken away. Just to show players, "Hey! This has changed!"

Thanks, TSR.

Throwing sex workers and fetish goddesses under the bus since 1989.

And people think today's Wizards team sucks. This was at least a few orders of magnitude higher. This was 1,000 times worse than what Paizo did to the remaster. This was a combination of a lobotomy, censorship, and brainwashing of an entire campaign setting and game where you could not find anything remotely offensive.

How times change. It could never happen today. Right?

And we were kids; we didn't know you could "just say no" to a company that owned a game. So out went the demons, devils, slightly suggestive deities, suggestive content, slaves, brothels, assassins, topless succubus, and anything else remotely offensive vanished overnight.

And nothing changed about the people who hated the game and wanted it destroyed; D&D was Satanic, and getting some blood only proved them right. This only emboldened them further, and most edgy and mature role-players left for Vampire: the Masquerade. The rest left for Magic: the Gathering.

Ten years later, TSR was bankrupt.

The setting left a bad taste in our mouths, and guess what? It became the same: high-level GM NPC, high magic, high fantasy place every other campaign world was. We skipped the novels and modules and were no longer fans of the setting since it had lost its charm. We never played in any of the "signature" FR adventures - they didn't exist, and all of ours were homebrew.

We never had Waterdeep be so important - it was just another port city. Neverwinter was the same; no videogame happened there, and it never looked like a CGI abomination of a castle-shaped city on a 3d terrain. Baldur's Gate and Candlekeep? Places on a map we used as fantasy locations. The video games never happened.

Those first two years were the setting's golden age for us.

If I were to turn back time, I would have dropped D&D like a dead rat and switched to GURPS Fantasy (Dungeon Fantasy these days). The original Goddess of Magic (who never died) took a copy of the 1987 world and fled, refusing to change the precious gem she had created.

This also fits with what everyone was doing in the late '80s and early '90s timeframe. GURPS was the dominant game. Everyone was dumping D&D and quitting polyhedral gaming, primarily because of feeling betrayed by AD&D 2nd Edition. And GURPS did everything, plus so much more. You only needed to learn one set of rules for any game, movie, or TV show you wanted to play. And there were no silly classes or levels.

And my world would be mine again. The original Realms has a new history, one made by dreamers, and nothing that may have happened later ever did. The world was allowed to "be."

I bet somewhere out in the stars, she is sitting out there smiling at me with my dream of a low-magic and low-fantasy Realms, where life is hard, magic is exceptional, and heroes are forged in the deadly trials of battle. And she has that world I saw in my dreams, as it was, but maybe a few more years down the road, and just as much as a gated little world where the stories of the gods were told through the people that lived on this blue ball of wonder and life.

The assassins are still there, Loviatar punishes the unworthy, the brothels are doing good business, and the succubus' are free to dress however they want. Demons and devils plot to overthrow what's good. Nobody remembers a 'time of trouble' or things almost changing because they never did.

The only strangeness going on would be dungeons being hex-based. I will blame the six-sided Modrons that helped Mystra break free. They always liked GURPS better, too.

And D&D, and the seven versions down the road it went through elsewhere, were not even memories because they never happened. In my gaming career, this is one of the moments I wish I could go back and change.

Because someone realized we don't have to wreck the things we love just to please others.