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.

Thoughts: The Forgotten Realms, Part 3

If I were to revisit the classic Forgotten Realms as the players who first adventured in this world, I could play this in a few games. D&D 5E is not one of them, nor are the original AD&D 1st or 2nd Edition PoD reprints. D&D 5E doesn't do the setting any favors, at least not in our interpretation of it —a gritty, dark, realistic, low-magic, massive setting where the majority of the world was monster-infested wildlands. The original (TSR) map scale was much larger, making the setting the size of half of the world instead of a Europe-sized mini-setting (D&D 3E and Wizards).

Why not the PoD reprints? Honestly, we have better books these days, with easier and more accessible content for new players, faster reference, easier table reference, and better organization.

Since most of this setting took off in Second Edition, and if you are focused on playing the Second Edition adventures, the obvious choice would be For Gold and Glory, an excellent retro-clone of this edition. Some down on this game due to its use of classical public domain art, but I think the selection here is fantastic, and the game has some of the best fantasy art ever created in history by the original masters. The art here is evocative and gets me in the proper mindset to play a gritty, dark, realistic, and low-magic game.

Sorry, public domain detractors, the art is fantastic. This is precisely as I would picture the Forgotten Realms with a grim, deadly, and realistic tone. What other type of art would I want than something actually painted in a world close to what the world actually is?

The downsides? It does not include the entire monster and magic list from AD&D 2E. If you care about it, consider buying the PoD PDFs for 2E and using them as a reference. This book is far better organized and easier to use at the table than the official 2E books, which drone on and on with pages of pontificating, have terrible layout, and some horrendous art choices. I can be "in and out" of FG&G for a rule or table in a few seconds, whereas in the 2E books, I could flip through hundreds of pages and search endlessly.

I can't imagine new players and those 2nd Edition softcovers.

Some of the conceptual and fantastical pieces make me see the evil and darkness in the realms entirely differently. The above is horrific, and the art raises the stakes in the fight between good and evil.

Oh, and the FG&G PDF is free. This is zero-cost for new players. For the official books, the prices are as follows: three PDFs for $10, three softcovers for about $30 each; while FG&G's hardcover is for $65, and a softcover book is for $30.

Another benefit to FG&G is that the rules feel more focused on the classic races and classes. This is particularly notable since Faerun was based on AD&D, which didn't have the cartoonish options we have today. The only real oddity to the Faerun setting is the 101 different types of elves, but they all can just be "elf," and the subtype is a flavor choice, just like humans.

The setting feels more realistic and grounded without the D&D 4E races, with humans as the predominant species, which is how we first encountered it. Tolkien was a significant influence on this setting, and returning it to the classic game's races feels right. Oh, and the above is from the FG&G rulebook; just because the book uses classic art, it doesn't mean it isn't diverse. Seriously, the use of classic art elevates this game, and it would do the same to the Faerun setting.

FG&G is a game where death happens at zero hit points, but you could houserule in the "death's door" rules that allow you to go as low as -10 hp. I like the hardcore rules, and this is also what a few other old-school games do. Again, the art in this book rules. If I had a Forgotten Realms like this, I would still be playing in it.

Another missing piece in FG&G is statistics for demons and devils, just like in AD&D 2E, these were removed from the game due to pressure from the Satanic Panic, and later "snuck in the back door" via an Outer Planes Appendix to the Monsterous Compendium. The above book works fine with the game, so you are covered. FG&G does not include these, either. It is an extra purchase, but it is worth noting. For me, not having them means the gods got extra careful in allowing them access to the world, and it forced us to focus on other bad guys.

FG&G is a solid choice and allows you to play the classic 2nd Edition adventures without issues. I could say the same honestly about a First Edition game, but if we are focusing on the heyday period of the Realms and the novels, then FG&G would be my go-to game.

Thoughts: The Forgotten Realms, Part 2

 Today?

The Forgotten Realms feels like "tourist Europe" with little danger, settled bucolic hamlets everywhere, and a sense of Ren Faire peace and happiness across the land. Everyone and everything has magic. Fantasy races of every shape live together in harmony, and even the orcs, goblins, and gnolls have settled into civilized lands, misunderstood "good folk." The spawn of dragons, the Dragonborn, are seen as noble helpers of civilization. I remember when dragons were feared. Even the misunderstood spawn of the Devil, the Tieflings, wander around with puzzling Russian accents, and have no taint of Hell in their blood, and are this generation's Drizzt emo-PC character choice.

The "D&D reality" is essentially a corporate "Disney reality," which is messy and dated. It is a strange "Disney Princesses" version of fantasy, its own genre, honestly, and it infects every game it touches. Even D&D clones like Tales of the Valiant, Level Up, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Nimble 5E can't escape that D&D zeitgeist. If you enjoy it, great! But, don't let it become your only idea of what fantasy can be, nor that other genres or ideas are "lesser" in any way.

Too many fantasy races lead to terrible world design and storytelling. It isn't fantasy anymore; it is a meaningless spectacle with no apparent meaning or direction. More and more are seeing this as a problem, and this isn't some metaphor for the current-day anything; it is just muddled confusion and the sloppy buffet-like world design where "more of everything is better."

I call out kitchen sink fantasy for this reason.

Your ideas should come first.

You shouldn't be forced to accept every class, race, option, power, monster, spell, and idea from "that other game" into "your game." Clear, focused, limited world designs are superior. Even if the world just has Dragonborn and Tieflings, and no other races, that is a superior world design than these modern ones, where the designers are afraid to remove choices.

Shadowdark does a lot with just the basic six races. That is an excellent example of a focused game. Books that keep adding races to Shadowdark don't do much for me, as they confuse the game with too much choice. I see them as net negatives to the core system.

While it is nice to "have options" and "all the work done for you," that should never come before your ideas. John Carter of Mars is a fun, imaginative, unique, and compelling setting that has nothing to do with kitchen sink fantasy. This is another IP that Disney ruined, and the best we have today of something similar is Goodman Games' Purple Planet series. Good fantasies and compelling stories can be found outside the kitchen sink fantasy genre.

I love the Dungeon Crawl Classics rule, "only one monster of each kind exists." This is the way. The ogre is one monster; come up with another brute if your campaign needs another. Commoditized, fantasy factory, stamped out clones of monsters, leading to stagnation and boredom.

The classics that inspired D&D are precious, special, and the products of vivid imaginations. We will never have new ideas if we only recycle old ones and continually regurgitate 6th-generation clones of original ideas in our games. The classics were, in fact, recycling of biblical stories, but we have not had a level of pop-culture recycling so hard, so systematic that the genre develops a culture of its own.

I call it out to put your imagination first, and avoid the corporate colonization of the idea of "what fantasy is" from being co-opted by these ideas. Once you accept the D&D reality, it's akin to a religion, and you might as well give up playing every other game and log into D&D Beyond to consume digital goods that align with that worldview. You will be happier there, rather than trying to "fight the system" aimlessly in clone games.

Strong, compelling, good-versus-evil, character-driven fantasy is not dead.

Sadly, for me, having been there from the start, the Forgotten Realms is to me. Greyhawk is, despite the efforts of historians and those who write for the game these days. I love both settings, but I can't unsee what we had, and the repackaging of these settings as something that D&D 5.5E speaks to.

If I ever revisit this setting, it will be in GURPS as a deadly, gritty, low-magic setting, like the one we first played. The ones on the first two covers of the boxed set.

The "serious D&D" setting.

The one that was supposed to showcase the original AD&D game, and was a reset from the Monty Haul and power-gaming Greyhawk games we had grown tired of, and one that 5E has turned back into. A world where characters mattered, kinship and family were who you were, and life was short and violent.

Easy raise dead or resurrection? You had to roll resurrection survival each time, as there was a hard limit on the number of times, and finding a cleric high enough to cast it was nearly impossible (a 9th-level cleric and a 17+ WIS required). You had to make death saving throws to survive being polymorphed and returning to your original form. Oh, and there were only two named clerics described in the gray books that were high enough level to cast this spell: one was the leader of an evil cult, and the other one was dead.

If you wanted it, you had to be able to DIY your own resurrects, and then retire that character as a pocket cleric and hope they weren't assassinated. Evil factions would target clerics who possess such power, so you never advertised you had it. What? My character is targeted by evil because they have a spell? Yes, you helped the good guy side. That level of power made you a target of cults, demons, and evil gods. That never happens in 5E, since power is a guarantee and so widespread that everyone feels like they have it.

There should never be a "resurrection in every temple" in the world. The idea is stupid, lame, and comes from trash video games, not fantasy.

Even the NPCs in my world were careful, and they didn't "ride in to save the day" like they did in many campaigns that I have heard about. Elminster was not immortal, and probably had only a handful of resurrections remaining. He was thoughtful, careful, and conservative in his use of power. If there was another way, he would take it or send someone else if he could. He knew he was a target, too.

Characters used to be part of the world instead of feeling like they logged into an MMO.

Stories used to matter here.

Factions were deadly serious.

Evil existed.

The world used to matter.

Your character used to matter.

No NPC was immortal or more important than the characters.

Magic used to be special.

Thoughts: The Forgotten Realms, Part 1

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.

Our Realms, Part 2

One of the worst parts of the Realms setting (given the information we used to play) is that it suffers from a D&D mentality. If we go by the monster manual and the encounter tables, this is a dangerous world filled with monsters, raiding tribes, dragons, wild beasts, dark elves, demons (in AD&D, not 2nd Edition), and undead. You are likely to encounter a monster a mile out of town.

Then, we will see maps of towns with no defenses, moats, or walls around them, like they were pastoral villages in ancient France. And we will have massive cities with no history of warfare, no enemies nearby, surrounded by multiple layers of walls. Massive navies and armies with no enemies.

The concentric walls and towers make excellent fantasy maps!

Or they don't? Did we need them? Are there monsters here or not? Do we have enemies?

D&D sometimes brings out all the tropes of fantasy worlds and leans hard on pageantry and flash, often not backed up by reality. We put walls around towns that never needed them because of needing walls on the map! Towers too! Giant high towers overlooking farms! Well, they look fantastic in the art? No, we never used them. But we need towers.

Nobody in the town knows why the towers or walls are there.

Small towns, 50 miles away from major cities, look like small New England towns strung out along roads. No defenses. No fort to run to should the city be attacked. Just houses and farms as usual. We don't see anything from the monster manual around here; why do you ask?

The danger level of the setting can't make up its mind. Sometimes, it contradicts the history (if you can find it). The boxed set above sheds a little light on the historical record, and the entries for cities rarely mention wars or military campaigns. Mind you, this was the only information we were playing with. No novels, no 3.5 guides, no modules - just the boxed set above.

Again, hindsight today gives us a lot more. But we never had it.

Not every village in ancient England had defenses, but we are in a swords & sorcery world. Dragons are real here. Armies of orcs that worship demons and raid civilization exist. The dead can walk the land. To be honest, this was a problem with our first B/X game back in 1978. We saw a few maps and went, hey, that's cool! A small town with a few farms around them!

The original boxed set never emphasized that the kingdoms in the world ever fought any wars or had natural enemies or alliances. Everything was just 'there,' which is how we took things. Mystara is a little like this, too, very sandboxed and peaceful (at least until the last modules with the war came out). I recall one of the authors of the FR setting saying Canada was what the world was modeled after, sort of a loose collection of places and peoples that mostly got along and lived in relative peace (until the next world-shaking event).

Truth be told, FR was more about the books than the world design. It is a good setting, just not compelling for us on a low level of danger and survival. And remember, all we had was the first boxed set. It would have been very different if this was our first world today.

Greyhawk wasn't like this and is arguably the better AD&D setting overall. This place had kingdoms with alignments, which was cool since you knew who hated who. A lawful good domain next to a lawful evil one was not getting along; the border was likely fortified, and the towns along the border were defended well. A chaotic evil kingdom had plenty of monsters wandering the countryside. Places in good kingdoms far away from evil areas would be lightly defended, but still, this is an AD&D world, and there would always be defenses.

Kingdom alignments are a must for world-building. I know; someone finally says this after every major game is eliminating alignment as a concept.

Without alignment, it is not D&D.

Greyhawk is still the gold standard of AD&D settings. In D&D 3.0, seeing it featured as the default setting was terrific. And 3.5 crept back into pulling in the Realms and other places. By 4E, everything was abandoned for a planar-focused nebulous setting (that we initially loved), and weak "kewl rad" sourcebooks came out to destroy every world (except Greyhawk, which was a blessing in disguise).

The shift towards novels and storytelling changed the entire course of D&D, and you see that shift towards "story gaming" to this day, even to the point where player protections are so extreme in 5E that no one can die.

The only thing FR had going for it were those novels and characters. They became pop culture icons and the hated GMNPCs of the world. The company went bankrupt, and that entire legacy was squandered when we could have had movies and films with that lore and those characters. Greyhawk was made for AD&D, and the Realms was created for novels.

Then again, without a Dragon magazine subscription, knowing Greyhawk's history was inaccessible before the boxed set's release at the end of the 1980s. By then, we had moved on. We did not have the Internet back then! What we could find in the Waldenbooks at the mall was what we had.

The 3.5 Forgotten Realms hardcover is better, but it only has six pages of history. Still, I need more than this. When this came out in the 2000s, we were far from anything D&D.

Ed Greenwood runs a Patreon for Realms fans - join that; I need to shout him out since he does amazing YouTube videos, too. He is a treasure, and we should enjoy him today and not regret this later.

Without history and conflict, the Realms as a campaign setting died for us. It was too peaceful and happy kumbaya, and the world lacked ancient mysteries and fallen empires. There weren't threats from monster hordes and dragons. If they were there, we never knew about them. Later, video games would change all this because who wants to play in a dull world?

Other worlds were more compelling. Warhammer FRP was fantastic; it was full of armies, chaos, hardened defenses of civilization, and conflicts.

The Realms ended for us as a destroyed 4E setting nobody ever visited. A bunch of GMNPCs lived there and stared at the massive hole in the ground that was the Underdark. The Dragonborn and Eladrin showed up inexplicably. Still, the default 4E assumption was that you started your planar adventures at level 10, so all 4E settings felt like glorified MMO "starting zones" where the tutorials happen.

The 'rule of cool' flashy, often nonsensical fantasy art that defined the 2010s destroyed the old school and most old school settings because they needed to adopt the fresh, hip, new style. Today, the whole 'rule of cool' art is problematic, so we are left with overly safe 'Scholastic fantasy art' that is bland, with most people looking bored or high as they stand alone on a page in a white void.

The Harry Potter books killed 1970s fantasy. Everything we see today comes from that sterile, sexless, cosmopolitan, overly magic, anti-religious, and war-free place.

Part of me wants to revisit the Realms using one of the new Open 5E systems or even GURPS, and then another part just doesn't care anymore because I know there isn't much there. I would have to drastically change the world to a more violent and conflict-ridden one, with the ruins of lost civilizations and empires. These worlds aren't even made for major wars or monster invasions, and the last time they did one, it wrecked the setting more (Greyhawk Wars, 1990s).

But if I am going to do that much work, I will just make my own world.

I go back to the reason I play GURPS. If I have to fight a setting or game to fix it, I will find one that lets me do what I want and build from there. And the changes that modern creators do to these worlds are more done out of spite than love. They see themselves as "fixing it" like some sort of repair expert, but they will never be a world creator. They will never be allowed to build worlds by their masters. So that hate gets transferred to the things they are told to work on, and they have to prove they are better than what a true creative mind built.

I keep asking myself, where are the worlds from this generation of creators? The answers are in the indies and never with the big IP holders. But I can't hold people at these big companies at fault for ruining these worlds; they are in a crappy situation - they fantasized about working for a 'dream creator' company, and when they are in, they find out it is the 'dream killer.'

I have been there. You resent every day. And you end up hating your dreams since they cause you pain.

It is easier and more satisfying to just create my own world myself.

Why would I play in a wrecked setting? Nostalgia isn't enough.

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.

Old Modules, Conversions, and Feel

You have old modules, you want to replay them with newer systems, and inevitably you run into the "bulk encounter" trope that was so overused in these older modules. You even see this mentioned in conversion notes for Savage Pathfinder, where the game's designers cut down dungeons and larger encounters to get the best "flavor" of the adventure rather than a 1-for-1 exact replication.

The old modules were content to throw 10 goblins with short bows at a party as an encounter and let you throw a sleep or other AoE spell at them to resolve the situation. You try and simulate this in other games, and you are either "grouping them up as one foe" (Savage Worlds), cutting them down to fewer combatants (GURPS), or leaving them as-is for games that still have that bulk-encounter resolution mechanic (C&C and B/X).

But these encounters feel overly "wargame" to me, and one of the best examples is Keep on the Borderlands. You will have rooms in this adventure with 20-30 enemies frequently, and I tried playing this with Pathfinder 1e, and it was a complete game-slowing slog and slaughter simulator.

Warning, spoilers ahead for N5: Under Illefarn.

One exciting project I am doing is replaying the old Forgotten Realms setting with GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy to see if I can get that original "feeling" the world had when we first played it. I wanted less of a focus on monsters and more on roleplaying, skill use, and deadly and gritty combat. This is a low fantasy world (to us), and I was looking for modules set in the Forgotten Realms to try to convert.

Enter N5: Under Illefarn.

The scale of the Sword Coast is vast, and right off, the scale of this adventure is way too large. The map has this scale where the secondary adventure areas are two to three hundred miles from the town. Interstate 80 in Nebraska is 300 miles long, and you are supposed to chase someone 300 miles at one point in the adventure. By horse. Without roads. The beginning swamp is 200 miles away and uses tribes of lizardmen who never are used again. The final part of the adventure requires that 300-mile trip. I would have been happy with the 30-mile area around the town. The adventure feels like TSR gave the designer a map and said, "please fill this out."

Are there dinosaurs here too? Yes, there are, and it feels wrong for the Realms.

There is a point where a fantastic "honor duel" is short-circuited by 10 goblins firing bows into the situation, and I was sitting there with that old familiar "TSR pulls the rug out from under you" feeling again. What would have been an excellent roleplaying encounter was thrown away because AD&D's rules only do swordplay and honor duels in a generic "AC and to-hit sense" with no options or style.

I sit here with my GURPS books and say, "Daminit, I can do that honor duel easily in this system!"

I would have liked the adventure to focus on the town and the surrounding area rather than being so travel-heavy. The first encounters with the lizardmen feel like throw-away compared to the end of the adventure, where you are split between three factions in a dungeon trying to repair a water source contaminating 300 miles of river (that the dwarf faction should know how to do). Seriously, the town's farm and sewage runoff will contaminate the river more than a few green slimes 300 miles away.

The adventure does not need a "trigger warning" for sensitivity issues; it needs a trigger warning because it lacks environmental impact knowledge.

Fixing N5

I would cut the swamp and lizardmen out of the adventure. The "bad guys" attacking the village should be one of the factions in the final dungeon, either the orcs or the necromancers. Thus, you solve the dungeon and destroy the bad guys, and help the town. Simple. No more goblin drop-in encounters for cheap combats; this isn't Starfinder. I kid, but even Starfinder's early adventures suffer from too many random goblin encounters.

Keep the kidnap plot and honor duel. Maybe flesh out the bad guy in this arc's hometown and craft a rescue scenario at a "forced wedding" party the idiot put together. That would be a lot of fun, and add a few options for sneaking in, even disguising yourself as the party catering. You need to have silly and fun parts to the adventure, and this is a great moment to do that.

Strengthen the factions in the end dungeon, and involve them in the town. The dwarves should be in town, asking for help early and warning people about the evil factions. The town should ignore them, setting up the "I told you so" part later. Make the evil factions more active in town, either orc raids or necromancers digging up graves, and have these as "set piece" battles or investigation parts of the adventure.

After a while, everyone realizes, "All roads of trouble lead to the dungeon."

The end of the adventure should be the faction dungeon (placed closer to town) and involve helping the dwarves complete a series of tasks to repair the water source. Help the dwarves raid an orc stronghold in the dungeon. Seal off a passage the zombies sent by the necromancers are using. Destroy the orc's supplies outside the dungeon and weaken the force there. Destroy a power source used by the necromancers. Have the dwarves develop exciting missions involving the party with adventures from war movies.

And then one big final battle.

N5, as written, feels unfocused and railroads players into situations.

This design feels like a story and novel and is a much better experience overall.

Forgotten Realms: Our History

We played the Forgotten Realms in the early AD&D 1e days, way before the 2e novels caused havoc with author NPCs and ever-expanding "don't touch this author's area" world design, which honestly caused a strange fractal repetition in cultures and places, so every writer could baseline a "fantasy setting place" as their own. We never had invincible GMNPCs running around or organizations in every area that could step in and save the day.

It was just a world, and it was ours.

The 4e disaster destroyed the world, and for us, the world's history ends around the above-depicted 3e book. We hated the 4e shoehorn of eladrin and dragonkin in the FR lore, and this foretold today's homogeneity where "every world needs every race and background," even if it does not make any sense at all. What makes a world unique is who lives there and accepts the limitations of the culture and setting; otherwise, we will need Klingons and Vulcans in Star Wars. Along with anthropomorphic animal races, space goblins, dragons, and...

The tendency to put everything in every world becomes obsessive-compulsive after a while. It takes away anything unique and exciting about the setting and makes it just like every other place. This is the equivalent of chain restaurants and applying that logic to fantasy settings. You go to a place looking for some great local barbeque, and your friend from there takes you to Applebees.

Diversity of background and culture can exist in settings with a world with just humans; just look at Earth.

5E, as far as I know, still needs a Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide (if we ever get one). Wizards stopped making setting guides except for books linked to Magic: The Gathering and a few other oddities that have been underwhelming and feel like filler. The great campaign settings these days are written by 3rd parties (see also: The OGL Disaster of 2023), and if I want a fully fleshed-out "official" setting, I am buying older setting guides and adapting. In some ways, it is a good thing since they won't screw them up.

We Played Low Fantasy

When we played in the Forgotten Realms, it was a low-fantasy game. It was terrific; we were so used to the chests filled with a million gold pieces, PCs with gloating castles and armies of djinn and gold dragons, and characters with stacks of +5 magic items so deep they walked around with a chestful of gold bling Greyhawk 100th level characters - having an AD&D world that was down-to-earth and realistic felt so good.

There was even the concept in here (enforced by the gods of Dragonlance in their world Krynn) that if characters got too powerful, they were asked to leave the world and banished. And there were strict "transfer rules" in place for any visitors to the world; you could not be disallowed race and class combos, unrealistic ability scores would be trimmed down, powerful magic items disallowed, technology banned, and wealth for incoming "residents" severely restricted.

Yes, the Forgotten Realms was this strange European country with all sorts of limits on citizenship. And we were sure if a character ever got too powerful, they would not be allowed to stay; most likely, they would get sent to Greyhawk with the rest of the power gamers and 100th-level characters.

Monsters? What Monsters?

Many town maps had no walls and natural defenses, so we assumed these areas were already settled, and the land tamed. This was not your typical B/X world where you step ten feet into the woods out of town and start rolling random encounters with giant beetles and goblin war bands. There were militia and patrols in settled areas, and towns existed peacefully in the settled areas of the world. We did a lot of roleplaying, and this was one of our first "fantasy RP" worlds where the conflicts were story-driven and not "the monster of the week."

Evil wizards, bandits, and other humans were often the bad guys in these stories. You get towards the borderlands of each kingdom, and you start seeing orcs, gnolls, and other humanoids. The silly monsters of Greyhawk (gelatinous cubes, mimics, ropers, piercers, etc.) were not present since we saw those as a little childish and "dungeon-y" for a mature and realistic world.

It did feel a lot like Lord of the Rings, in fact. Elves stuck to their forest and were rarely seen outside of it. The dangerous lands on the borders were where the King's forces battled the armies of chaos. If you found "adventure" in a settled area, it was something special and mysterious, like a lost ruin nobody knew about for hundreds or thousands of years. Elves and dwarves stuck to their lands, and seeing visitors in town was a memorable and fun moment worthy of roleplaying the meeting.

Please Stock my Dungeon!

These days I get the feeling that campaign settings exist only for a reason to provide a map to throw fully-stocked dungeons on. We ran ours as a realistic world, devoid of powerful GMNPCs and some of the silly "dungeon ecology" stuff Greyhawk enshrined in the hobby. Whenever we talked about "the Realms was a cool place" with other players, we got moans about the omnipresent GMNPCs, and we were left scratching our heads - having skipped the novels and most of the adventures to do our own thing.

We didn't have the cartoon beholders and drow who ran thieves' guilds in Waterdeep or most of the godling and powerful monster stuff in the Baldur's Gate games. We skipped the first "time of trials" and felt it was stupid to cause an in-world event to happen to explain the 2e rules changes. TSR ended up destroying the world for us in the 2e transition, and we moved on to superhero games and sci-fi.

There is this tendency in D&D the game to over-magic the world into this silly high-fantasy superhero mode, the same one established in D&D 4e. The 5E game has that feeling in spades; everyone is a superhero starting out and gets more superheroes by the campaign's end. It is fun, but it is also very tiring and lacks challenge.

GURPS or Dungeon Fantasy

If I ever revisited the Realms, I would do it with GURPS or Dungeon Fantasy. I would want a low-fantasy, gritty, realistic game to match our original experience with the setting. I do not care about having "every monster in the book" and "every magic item on the list" at all. Our Realms never had them, and most of the conflicts were between humans and humanoids, and actual monsters were rare and unique. Magic was not too commonplace either, and wizards were special. Most battles were fought without magic, and magic was a relatively unique and rare power. Most classes did not have magic powers either, and you could get by in the world being a great ranger with excellent wilderness skills.

One evil mage with his network of assassins, spies, mercenaries, and an allied humanoid tribe? A great campaign villain. Monsters? They could be summoned in and were very rare and unique, or one powerful owlbear would be the "boss monster" of a dungeon. Dragons? Maybe you see one flying far overhead and wonder.

I thought Pathfinder 1e would be a good fit, but after I thought more on the subject, the entire 3E ecosystem and Pathfinder have way too much "stuff" to ever be of use in the Realms we played in. I would not use 95% of the classes, monsters, backgrounds, and items in the game - and it would be more of a chore cutting things out than recreating a world I knew.

Castles & Crusades could do it well, but it would still have higher magic than our game, and again, I would only use a small portion of the game. The GURPS combat system is a lot more gritty and realistic, and that would give a good "feel" to the game and enforce the deadly and brutal nature that would feel right for the experience I want. C&C is still a great game, the best AD&D feeling game out there.

Much of what ended up mattering in D&D and even Pathfinder was absent in our version of the Realms. The world was fantastic, like Lord of the Rings, and in its own reality bubble.

And it was a fantastic place while it lasted.

World Replacements: Forgotten Realms, Aihrde

If you are playing Castles & Crusades, this is an easy one. The modules Troll Lord Games put out are very character-based, with travel, exciting locations, light to moderate dungeons, roleplay, mysteries, and lots of problem-solving.

They feel exactly like how we played the Forgotten Realms in the 1990s and give me that feeling of playing through one of the novels of that time (which we skipped). We always did this mixed travel and story gaming here, which felt more pulp-action, very character based, and with fantastic set-piece dungeons that were more movie sets than the typical OSR mapping hazards.

And Toll Lord has a ton of these presented in a sort of "adventure path format" with five paths you can get to play through, plus one Celtic-themed and many standalone adventures.

I don't have many fond memories of Forgotten Realms modules in the 1990s since most were book tie-ins, many were railroads, and we had fun with whatever the basic set included. I could easily take the characters we loved from the Realms and drop them in here, use the ones from the modules, and have my own world free from the messy history of the Forgotten Realms, plus publisher-supported adventures out on a regular schedule - for this world.

I feel that is my reason for wanting to make the jump away from a "classic gaming" world and move on to a new one. I could keep living in the past with the old Forgotten Realms boxed set or use my time, money, and attention to support a new project with a ton of great art, work, and design put into the adventures and move on. They are writing adventures for this today, and people are making a living off of these, like fresh produce - and the classic stuff will always be there, like canned goods.

I would rather play and share in a space that is a living, actively producing community.

I loved the boxed set collections of the A-Series, they come with maps and all sorts of cool stuff, and they are premium collections and sets to have. There are quite a few of these in print, and they are not that expensive to get them in print with PDF.

The only thing I would add to this world is a classic mega-dungeon to anchor the world. There is a blog that chronicles the classic Barrowmaze dungeon played with C&C, and they are up to 118 sessions now, over 400 hours of play, and 3 years of gaming. Wow. One of these massive constructions is enough for a world and years of gaming, and they are still not through everything in this chronicling. I love Barrowmaze, and it is 95% compatible with C&C; I may just put it in this world when I start playing as a tribute to the other blog recording this adventure.

What Do I Lose?

Well, there are a few characters I would like to keep, and most are pretty relocatable with a few tweaks. I lose the Waterdeep setting; which is not a big loss since we never really based games out of there. Neverwinter, again, is not really a significant loss since we were only up there a few times, and I have the videogames in case I ever want to revisit the world.

We based most of our games around Immersea and Arabel, and finding a nicely mapped and NPC'ed small town would fit the feeling of my game, and I am sure there are plenty of those in the Troll Lord Games modules.

One thing I always felt about the Realms was there was never a strong enough place in the world for other races, such as dwarves, elves, and others. The Realms always felt way too "human" for us, which gave it that classic fantasy feeling, but given the world, I felt a solid elven and dwarven presence was sorely needed. Plenty of drow were there, though. The world felt off-balance.

And if I wanted a reason for the classic Realms characters to be there, I could just say the original AD&D Mystra Goddess of Magic did not die during the Time of Troubles and took a copy of her heroes and left the world in disgust. Ugh. Do not make me talk about the AD&D to AD&D 2e jump and how they messed up and wrecked the world with an official module series. There were clerics of "the assassin god" crying in the street because TSR took their god away, and it just shattered immersion and made it seem like we were playing through a module called "The Satanic Panic 1990: TSR Censors the World."

This is why a lot of the big games these days still suck. They go mainstream, and the mainstream pressures kill the game. The game, because of Wall Street, Twitter, and Hollywood, has to be as noncontroversial and censored as possible to avoid "bad press," and we get these watered down and censored. White-bread games are designed to cause as little controversy as possible from the current crop of complainers.

Anytime a game "goes mainstream," the game is guaranteed to suck later. It happens repeatedly, and the suits will get their hands on it and slowly ruin everything people love about the game. It has never, ever stopped - and this is not new. D&D 6E, meet AD&D 2e, your spiritual partner. 6E will probably be a good edition (we loved 2e), but we knew the game was heavily censored because of pop-culture influences such as Stranger Things and the D&D movie.

And I hope Wizards can break the even-number edition curse this time.

And then the final nail in the coffin for the Realms came during D&D 4, and they nuked the world, advanced the timeline, collapsed the Underdark, and shoehorned in all of the official D&D 4 cosmology races (which have become the game's identity in 5E; any world, these races). A lot of the changes just felt mean and spiteful. The Forgotten Realms was dead, at least to us.

We never adventured in 4E Realms. That place was like Twilight: 2000 to us. A destroyed world that never made the jump into the new regime, and nothing important ever happened there. D&D 4E's default "planar adventures past level 10" did not help either, and the base worlds felt like MMO starting zones.

What Do I Gain?

Well, five incredible adventure paths from Toll Lord Games. A world to drop OSR adventures in, but more of the story and location-themed ones. For the old-school dungeon crawls, I may want to save them for a world built on that type of adventuring, such as a Greyhawk-style world.

Why do two worlds? Why not put everything in one? Just have one world to rule them all?

We always felt a thematic difference between Greyhawk-style worlds and Realms-style worlds. Realms-style worlds are story-based, with sweeping movie plots, fewer mazelike dungeons, and plenty of interesting characters. They have a pulp feel, like classic swords & sorcery adventure movies.

Greyhawk worlds are lost deep in mazelike dungeons. We don't need plots, characters, or pulp action. All we need to know is great treasure is sitting in that hole, and we are taking it for ourselves. Certain OSR adventures are more Greyhawk, and others feel more Realms. If I found those story-style adventures, I would add them to this world in a heartbeat.

Barrowmaze is the exception, but since that dungeon's layout is more distributed across a large area, it feels like a better fit for a pulp game since the dungeons you can find in that massive space are episodic and can have stories woven into them as "the reason to go in" such as a kidnapped priest, lost artifact, or other story reason an important NPC can come up with. I would "pulp it up" to make the mega-dungeon less a grind and clear and use each location as a story setting that ties into events in the greater world.

And since I am playing C&C, I can pull in adventures and dungeons from other OSR games easy.

No Clerics? No Problem?

What do the above two games have in common?

No divine magical power sources or cleric classes. They keep to a holy-less trinity of fighter-rogue-mage where the only source of otherworldly power is the mage. No clerics, no gods, no paladins, no praying for power, and no second column of magical power exists in these worlds - it is just the mage.

The duality of mage vs. cleric seems like a staple in fantasy, right? Well, Tolkien's well-known world of Middle Earth just had wizards as the "magic users" as well, and the beings that could be considered "gods" weren't your typical D&D high-fantasy style gods who gave everyone who prayed to them cure light wounds. The holy-less trinity defines these stories as well, as magic was practiced by mages.

And speaking of no-clerics, then there is Game of Thrones as well...

D&D has always had this injection of spiritualism, even in the original 1974 edition of the game had fighter, mage, and cleric as the trinity classes (thieves/rogues being added later in the first Greyhawk supplement). MMOs are rife with divine power sources, like World of Warcraft and other games. There is always this "occult versus the divine" conflict going on in the more D&D style of fantasy, feeling like Westernized religious values being placed on top of Tolkien-style fantasy to create a conflict of power sources.

And D&D's history with divine beings has been notoriously messy, at least in our experience. The old Deities and Demigods book made gods monsters out of the Monster Manual. They were superheroes and super-characters in D&D 3.5, and finally MMO horrendously under-powered end-game raid bosses in D&D 4. Thankfully Pathfinder and D&D 5 (and games like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord) leave the monster stat blocks for gods at home and makes the gods stat-less beings, making them something like "Q" in the old Star Trek: The Next Generation lore - there to affect outcomes and make snarky remarks, but as monsters or characters on the tabletop? No way, and no thank you.

Seriously, the injection of "gods as monsters" thing has messed up so many of our campaigns that it leaves a bad taste in our mouths when we play these versions of the game. Whenever the "gods got involved" in our past games the players rolled their eyes, wondered when it was going to end, and wished for the times of searching a dresser drawer full of silver pieces and a giant spider guarding the horde. When a game goes "big divine" it becomes "all about the gods" and the focus shifts away from the heroes and onto a divine soap opera worthy of Greek tragedy. For us, at least, and we prefer the heroes to be the focus of the game, and leave the divine super-characters to the background.

If the Forgotten Realms had that supposed problem of high-level NPCs "messing up" adventures, in our experience and our games it was "super-character gods." Give us a high-level NPC any day, because at least those can be ignored, walked away from, or made enemies of and smacked upside the head every once and a while to keep them in line. Making Elminster a recurring enemy to insult and mess with is fun, while having various gods show up again to stop the party in the real world is not.

But removing the cleric and divine power source entirely? It feels like heresy in high fantasy RPGs nowadays, but there is a simplicity and elegance in the world structure once you remove the "power for worship" access to magic. Power is not gained through faith, but in the three historical forces of humankind: might, deception, or knowledge. Removing faith from that mix creates a darker world, where access to magic is controlled by the mage, and there is no "faith versus knowledge" conflict.

"Faith versus knowledge" can also be summarized as "religion versus science" and you can see why this conflict feels natural to us, but in high fantasy this conflict is typically hand-waved off because we need the magic user to be able to adventure with the cleric and the band of merry men. In many high fantasy game worlds and MMOs you will see the "holy church of X" sitting right beside the "mage college of Y" and no problems whatsoever between them. Does it bother the church that those faithless mages have power equal to their followers? Does the mage college feel threatened by the mass of worshipers who only need to pray for power and not need knowledge?

You take that conflict out and the world feels a little strange, but then again we can't have the cleric and the mage fighting in the dungeon because it would slow up play and start real-world fights when the mage doesn't get a heal, right? Ah, dungeon crawling and the sacrifices we make for party-based play.

Take out clerics and divine power sources, and the problem is removed. Hand-wave the divine-arcane conflict off and it is gone as well, but something feels interesting when mages are the only ones who hold the keys to power. It does feel more Tolkien, and magic feels more arcane and special.

What is the lesson here? I guess it is "know your game" and understand the basic assumptions a game makes changes the world. Don't always be so beholden to the typical tropes of high-fantasy and MMO gaming, and games where divine magic is removed create interesting world models of power and how people acquire the same. What you play is your preference, but be open to games which may take you out of your comfort zone and experience "the power of magic" in a new light.