Forgotten Realms
Forgotten Realms is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Commonly referred to by players and game designers as "The Realms", it was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as a setting for his childhood stories. Several years later, it was published for the D&D game as a series of magazine articles, and the first Realms game products were released in 1987. Role-playing game products have been produced for the setting ever since, in addition to novels, role-playing video game adaptations, comic books, the Forgotten Realms play-by-mail game, and the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
Forgotten Realms is a fantasy world setting, described as a world of strange lands, dangerous creatures, and mighty deities, where magic and supernatural phenomena are very real. The premise is that, long ago, planet Earth and the world of the Forgotten Realms were more closely connected. As time passed, the inhabitants of Earth had mostly forgotten about the existence of that other world – hence the name Forgotten Realms. The original Forgotten Realms logo, which was used until 2000, had small runic letters that read "Herein lie the lost lands" as an allusion to the connection between the two worlds.
Forgotten Realms is one of the most popular D&D settings, largely due to the success of novels by authors such as R. A. Salvatore and numerous role-playing video games, including Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder, Icewind Dale, the Neverwinter Nights and the Baldur's Gate series.
Creative origins
began writing stories about the Forgotten Realms as a child, starting at the age of eight. He came up with the name from the notion of a multiverse of parallel worlds; Earth is one such world, and the Realms another. In Greenwood's original conception, the fantastic legends of Earth derive from a fantasy world that can no longer be accessed. Greenwood discovered the Dungeons & Dragons game in 1975, and became a serious role-playing enthusiast with the first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game releases in 1978. Greenwood brought his fantasy world into the new medium of role-playing games when a university student named September invited him to play AD&D with her. Greenwood then starting using the setting for his personal role-playing campaign. Greenwood began a Realms campaign in the city of Waterdeep before creating a group known as the Knights of Myth Drannor in the Shadowdale region. Greenwood felt that his players' thirst for detail made the Realms what it is: "They want it to seem real, and work on 'honest jobs' and personal activities, until the whole thing grows into far more than a casual campaign. Roleplaying always governs over rules, and the adventures seem to develop themselves." Greenwood has stated that his own version of the Forgotten Realms, as run in his personal campaign, is much darker than published versions.Starting in 1979, Greenwood published a series of articles that detailed the setting in The Dragon magazine, the first of which was about a monster known as the curst. Greenwood continued to write extensive articles for Dragon, in which he used the Forgotten Realms as the setting to detail magic items, monsters, and spells. When Gary Gygax "lost control of TSR in 1985, the company saw an opportunity to move beyond Greyhawk and introduce a new default setting". In 1986, TSR began looking for a new campaign setting for AD&D, and assigned Jeff Grubb to find out more about the setting used by Greenwood as portrayed in his articles in Dragon.
Greenwood states that Grubb asked him "Do you just make this stuff up as you go, or do you really have a huge campaign world?", and Greenwood answered "yes" to both questions. TSR felt that the Forgotten Realms would be a more open-ended setting than its epic fantasy counterpart Dragonlance, and chose the Realms as a ready-made campaign setting upon deciding to publish AD&D 2nd edition. Greenwood agreed to work on the project and began working to get Forgotten Realms officially published. He sent TSR a few dozen cardboard boxes stuffed with pencil notes and maps, and sold all rights to the setting for a token fee. He noted that TSR altered his original conception of the Realms being a place that could be accessed from Earth, as "oncerns over possible lawsuits led TSR to de-emphasize this meaning".
Jon Peterson, author of Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History, said that Greenwood "was that rare obsessive DM who just seemed to have more ideas and energy to pour into his world than even the folks at TSR did. Naturally when TSR was shopping for new campaign worlds as part of their cross-media strategy, they had to get the Forgotten Realms. R. A. Salvatore took Greenwood's world and created characters and stories for it that made him a bestselling author and sustained TSR as a major fantasy book publisher".
Publication history
1985–1990
In 1985, the AD&D module Bloodstone Pass was released by TSR and is retroactively considered to be a part of the Forgotten Realms, although it was not until the module The Bloodstone Wars was released that it became the official setting for the module series. Douglas Niles had worked on a novel trilogy with a Celtic theme, which were then altered to become the first novels set in the Forgotten Realms, starting with Darkwalker on Moonshae. It is the first book in The Moonshae Trilogy, which predates the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set by one month.The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set was later released in 1987 as a boxed set of two source books and four large color maps, designed by Greenwood in collaboration with Grubb. It sold ca. one hundred fifty thousand times in its first two years. The set introduced the campaign setting and explained how to use it, and reserved space on the map for SSI's Gold Box computer role-playing games set in the Forgotten Realms.
TSR began incorporating elements by other designers into the Forgotten Realms, including the Moonshae Isles by Douglas Niles, the "Desert of Desolation" by Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman, and Kara-Tur by Zeb Cook. The setting also provided a new way for TSR to market its Battlesystem rules, which it had supported with the Bloodstone adventure sequence which started with Bloodstone Pass; the last two adventures in the series, The Bloodstone Wars and The Throne of Bloodstone, were unambiguously set in the Forgotten Realms. Some characters from Egg of the Phoenix by Frank Mentzer were incorporated into The Savage Frontier.
The compilation module Desert of Desolation reworked the previous adventures to fit as part of the Forgotten Realms. The module Under Illefarn published in 1987 is set in the Forgotten Realms, as is the module released in 1988, Swords of the Iron Legion.
R. A. Salvatore wrote his first novel for the Forgotten Realms, The Crystal Shard, which was originally set in the Moonshae Islands before being moved to a new location and introduced the drow character Drizzt Do'Urden. Drizzt has since appeared in more than seventeen subsequent novels, many of which have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list. In 1988, the first in a line of Forgotten Realms role-playing video games, Pool of Radiance, was released by Strategic Simulations, Inc. The game was popular and won the Origins Award for "Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1988".
Several supplements to the original boxed set were released under the first edition rules, beginning with Waterdeep and the North, which was followed by Moonshae in 1987, and Empires of the Sands, The Magister, The Savage Frontier, Dreams of the Red Wizards, and Lords of Darkness in 1988. The City System boxed set was released in 1988, and it contained several maps of the city of Waterdeep. Ruins of Adventure, a module based on the computer game Pool of Radiance, was also released in 1988.
The boxed set Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms was released in 1988. It gives details of the lands of Kara-Tur, and was designed to be used with the 1986 book Oriental Adventures, which officially placed the book in the Forgotten Realms world.
In 1989, DC Comics began publishing a series of Forgotten Realms comics written by Grubb. Each issue contains twenty-six pages, illustrated primarily by Rags Morales and Dave Simons. Twenty-five issues were published in total, with the last being released in 1991. A fifty-six page annual Forgotten Realms Comic Annual #1: Waterdhavian Nights, illustrated by various artists, was released in 1990.
Curse of the Azure Bonds, a module based on the role-playing video game of the same name, was released in 1989.
1990–2000
To transition the Forgotten Realms from first edition AD&D to the ruleset's second edition, a story involving the gods being cast down was planned by TSR management from the top-down and started with Hall of Heroes and continued with a three-adventure Avatar series and a three-novel Avatar series, and some stories in the comic book. TSR adjusted the timeline of the Forgotten Realms by advancing the calendar one year forward to 1358 DR, referring to the gap as the Time of Troubles.In early 1990, the hardcover Forgotten Realms Adventures by Grubb and Greenwood was released, which introduced the setting to AD&D 2nd edition; the book also detailed how the Time of Troubles had changed the setting. The Ruins of Undermountain was one of the first published mega-dungeons. The Al-Qadim setting by Jeff Grubb was released in 1992, and the setting was added to the southern part of the Forgotten Realms. In July 1990, the RPGA Network's Polyhedron Newszine began publishing a monthly column by Greenwood entitled "The Everwinking Eye" detailing various locations and personalities in the Realms. The Network used the Forgotten Realms city of Ravens Bluff as the setting for their first living campaign. Official RPGA support for this product line included the Living City module series. A number of sub-settings of the Forgotten Realms were briefly supported in the early 1990s. Three more modules were produced for the Kara-Tur setting. The Horde boxed set, released in 1990, detailed the Hordelands, which featured a series of three modules. The Maztica Campaign Set, released in 1991, detailed the continent of Maztica.
The original gray boxed set was revised in 1993 to update it to AD&D 2nd edition, with the release of a new Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting boxed set containing three books and various "monster supplements". Additional material for the setting was released steadily throughout the 1990s. Forgotten Realms novels, such as the Legacy of the Drow series, the first three books of The Elminster Series, and numerous anthologies were also released throughout the 1990s, which led to the setting being hailed as one of the most successful shared fantasy universes of the 1990s. By the first quarter of 1996, TSR had published sixty-four novels set in the Forgotten Realms out of the 242 novels set in AD&D worlds. These novels in turn sparked interest in role-playing by new gamers.
Numerous Forgotten Realms video games were released between 1990 and 2000. Eye of the Beholder for MS-DOS was released in 1990, which was followed by two sequels: the first in 1991, and the second in 1992. All three games were re-released for MS-DOS compatible operating systems on a single disk in 1995. Another 1991 release was Neverwinter Nights on America Online, the first graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In 1998, Baldur's Gate, the first in a line of popular role-playing video games developed by BioWare and "considered by most pundits as the hands-down best PC roleplaying game ever", was released. The game was followed by a sequel, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, in 2000 and Icewind Dale, a separate game that utilized the same game engine as Baldur's Gate. Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor was released in 2001. Several popular Forgotten Realms characters such as Drizzt Do'Urden and Elminster made minor appearances in these games.