Why I Don't Like the Forgotten Realms (as the Default 5E Campaign Setting)

Ойындар

Today I pour a nice, tall glass of Haterade and lay out my issues with the Forgotten Realms as presented in 5th Edition game products.
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Chapters:
00:00 - Intro: Forgotten Realms Bad?
01:52 - What’s the Deal With the Forgotten Realms?
04:11 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have a Clear Premise?
05:16 - What Do I Mean By Default Setting?
07:33 - A Word From Our Sponsor
08:39 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have a Distinct Tone
11:42 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have Iconic Imagery?
12:34 - Does the Forgotten Realms Provide Character Creation Inspiration?
15:59 - Does the Forgotten Realms Offer Plot Hooks?
17:16 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have Daunting Lore?
19:04 - Does the Forgotten Realms Have Blank Spaces on the Map?
21:17 - Final Thoughts: Forgotten Realms Good?
22:15 - Outro
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Пікірлер: 807

  • @nukabat5386
    @nukabat5386 Жыл бұрын

    My biggest issue is the fact that Wizards pretty much ignored the rest of Realms.

  • @omnishangout747

    @omnishangout747

    Жыл бұрын

    You could say… they forgot it….

  • @firelordeliteast6750

    @firelordeliteast6750

    6 ай бұрын

    There were other realms?

  • @nukabat5386

    @nukabat5386

    6 ай бұрын

    @@firelordeliteast6750 the Dalelands, Alaquim, the nation's that were across the ocean. I should have said the rest of Faerune.

  • @voidsabre_

    @voidsabre_

    26 күн бұрын

    Ignored even the rest of Faerun other than the sword coast

  • @kevinrsmith2947
    @kevinrsmith2947 Жыл бұрын

    A couple of notes: 1. The Forgotten Realms used to not center on the Sword Coast. The 2nd Edition box set fleshes out the Dalelands as the starting region for new players. Of course, using the Sword Coast in that role kind of works as an homage to the setting's roots, since Ed Greenwood's first Realms stories were set in that region. 2. Before 3e, there were literally blank spaces on the Forgotten Realms map where DMs could put their own towns, cities, and nations. The 3e Realms team apparently decided that they wanted the map to be less sprawling, so they took those areas out. 3. The Forgotten Realms was originally supposed to be a setting without a reliable canon. The idea was supposed to be that everything you read about the realms came from either Volo (who's kind of an unreliable person) or Elminster (who was forwarding information from sources who may or may not be reliable). If the DM decided to change something, they could just tell a player who had read the material that the book's sources were wrong. Of course, the setting evolved into a canon lawyer's dream in the 2e era and beyond.

  • @grzegorzlewandowski3859

    @grzegorzlewandowski3859

    Жыл бұрын

    3. That is exactly how I run it now. Read a lot of basic wiki info and still dig down from time to time for inspiration, but generally rulebooks lore is just stories circulating in the world. Stories that often turn out partially false in the end.

  • @trondbirkeland8094

    @trondbirkeland8094

    Жыл бұрын

    Yes, I seem to remember the Dalelands or thereabouts (?) being intentionally largely left undescribed, for the DMs to flesh it out as needed. I have always imagined that this was supposed to be the real meaning of Forgotten Realms. It seems now, these are really forgotten, even by me...

  • @dylanryall

    @dylanryall

    Жыл бұрын

    @@trondbirkeland8094 most of the dalelands were described. It was Sembia, which was just south of the Dalelands that was deliberately left for GMs to flesh out.

  • @originaluddite

    @originaluddite

    Жыл бұрын

    Yes, Sembia was left vague but Cormyr, the Dalelands, Myth Drannor and Zhentil Keep were all more defined, and that area north-west of the Sea Of Fallen Stars was kind of the home territory of initial play. I liked it, partly because the inner sea is geographically more interesting-looking than the rather straight north-south line of the Sword Coast. It's also more central, so you could head west to those ocean trading ports or east to more forbidding lands like Thay.

  • @81Earthangel

    @81Earthangel

    Жыл бұрын

    True. Honestly I don’t get this video at all. Most points mentioned I don’t get and even contradict themselves. Some points are even setting independent and more about the products are structured, with basic rules, adventures, source books, etc.

  • @danielbeshers1689
    @danielbeshers1689 Жыл бұрын

    I know an absurd amount about Toril, including that Toril is the name of the planet. I feel confident in saying that even with the benefits that weapons-grade nostalgia provides, the Forgotten Realms setting is the box-art on a LEGO set. It's a polished and reliable option that comes with complete instructions, and for some people it's exactly what they're looking for, no shade. But for me, the real value of LEGO came when I stopped just making the thing on the box and started exploring my own creativity, using what I learned from following the directions to make something uniquely my own. Forgotten Realms is a complete setting, but that means it's pretty well contained by its own well-defined boundaries. You can break it apart, though, and use any of the individual pieces that excite or inspire you while making something that's exclusively your own.

  • @danielbeshers1689

    @danielbeshers1689

    Жыл бұрын

    @@BreadDestroyer Yeah, that's exactly what I was driving at. My point may have drowned in my well of text; I can be guilty of over-explaining.

  • @LarsBlitzer

    @LarsBlitzer

    Жыл бұрын

    I think part of the issue isn't just that "There are no blank spaces on the map" but also its corollary "All the important NPC VIPs are written." If you're in Waterdeep you HAVE to take into account the likes of Elmisnter and Khelben Blackstaff. If you're up north you're going to eventually run into the likes of Wulfgar, Catti-Brie, and Drizzt. This runs the risk of going into R.A. Salvatore-levels of narrative wankery where these exemplars are the most important people in the room at any point. I mean, I certainly felt that way. My party certainly did when we ran afoul of a tribe of Gnolls and the DM had our asses saved by Drizzt. Ten minutes of "Drizzt's scimitars flashed and another five Gnolls were cleaved in twain!" and we knew what the score was, especially when he had Drizzt escort us to the end. That's boring. It kind of feels a little suffocating, knowing no matter what happens your character will never measure up to the named characters.

  • @snieves4

    @snieves4

    Жыл бұрын

    This

  • @MorinehtarTheBlue

    @MorinehtarTheBlue

    Жыл бұрын

    Well Toril was short hand for Abeir-Toril. And the shenanigans with 4E basically allowed Abeir to be removed from the mix so silver linings I suppose.

  • @caitlynv1167
    @caitlynv1167 Жыл бұрын

    The Forgotten Realms being so well known that players know it better than DM's... That's me. I'm the DM that knew nothing, and had a player with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Sword Coast. It was extremely daunting. I almost stopped DMing because I felt inadequate since I knew literally *nothing* about this place and my player was basically telling everyone else about the city they were visiting. Thankfully got past that and now I'm in a group that really doesn't give a damn if I go by the "true" history or just make up my own.

  • @wingedhussar2909

    @wingedhussar2909

    Жыл бұрын

    I have the opposite problem. My players don't know anything about Forgotten Realms and they don't really care because it's not very interesting. The setting feels very generic, it has everything... and that's a problem because nothing feels special.

  • @andreaantonel2722
    @andreaantonel2722 Жыл бұрын

    You got the point: Forgotten Realms' lore is overwhelming and is difficult to find a blank spot where GM's personal imagination can find its space freely. As fanatic fan of the old classic isometric games like Baldur's Gate, I got so affectionate to that world that I lost entire nights of sleep confronting sources from 3e, the Sundering, 5e, Salvatore's and Greenwood's publications, just to get prepared enough for a campaign in the Forgotten Realms. It was a comparable efford I could put in a deep historical research for my job. But the group exploded in excitement when Jarlaxle, Elminster, Rautholim appeared in their full magnificence... It was a moment of personal joy for me, indeed.

  • @MollymaukT

    @MollymaukT

    Жыл бұрын

    Ed Greenwood has a literal basement full of unpublished notes - one author remarked in a novel that when she asked him for a brief set of notes on the War Wizards of Cormyr, he obliged by cutting down the stuff he had on them... to FORTY-NINE A4 PAGES.

  • @blas_de_lezo7375

    @blas_de_lezo7375

    Жыл бұрын

    There are PLENTY Of less explored areas. And even many explored areas that not too much is known and danger and opportunity can be found...

  • @natbarmore

    @natbarmore

    Жыл бұрын

    I’m curious: did your players know those characters from playing D&D? Or from reading novels or playing videogames or some other non-RPG source?

  • @RoninCatholic

    @RoninCatholic

    11 ай бұрын

    I care about exactly two Realms NPCs: Minsc and Boo.

  • @manueltorresart2345
    @manueltorresart2345 Жыл бұрын

    This is the reason I prefer working on homebrew campaings, there isn't that much lore I need to understand for me to enjoy it. The prep work I need to do on my own for worldbuilding is harder, but I can take it on my own pace because I can work on that whenever I feel will be important.

  • @danielhughes3758

    @danielhughes3758

    Жыл бұрын

    I've never homebrewed a world before, but now that I've started using chat GPT I feel much more empowered to come up with lots of ideas and flesh things out fairly quickly. I'm kinda tempted to start a homebrew campaign, or at least I could do a world based on the Forgotten Realms that also can stray from the original at my discretion

  • @json_bourne3812

    @json_bourne3812

    Жыл бұрын

    @@danielhughes3758 Do it! I'm kicking off my first homebrew campaign tonight after many months of work. Pulling some deity and faction stuff of FR but otherwise all my own stuff. One of my players has a LOT of knowledge of the realms so I tried to keep the usage light but you can always pull from or being inspired by anything (and not just FR!)

  • @Mokiefraggle

    @Mokiefraggle

    Жыл бұрын

    This. So much this. Homebrew settings are great, because you can take it at your pace, develop what you need of the world for any given moment, and let the rest come as you need. Even better, IMO, is getting your players involved. My fiance created a homebrew a few years back with one of our game groups simply dubbed "The Hunters' Guild," which was basically a mash-up borrowing from The Witcher, Bloodborne, and a few other pieces of media we enjoy, centering on a bunch of highly trained monster hunters in a world which the gods seem to have abandoned, and in which true magic has been lost, leaving only those who make warlock pacts able to truly use anything resembling magic. He has plot and a few overarching concepts, and typically pre-generates the PCs (handing them out to the players he feels will create the best concepts around what he gives them), and then plays a sort of round-robin world generating session zero, where he'll pick a player and ask them to describe a part of the world centered on a broad guideline, such as "there's an impassible region to the south where no one ventures. What is this, and why does nobody venture into this place?", and lets the player spin the idea from there. We've done this with two groups thus far (three if you count one that a player from the first Hunter's Guild campaign started), and have gotten incredibly different worlds that have great detail, and it really helps get the players invested in this world that they have helped to create.

  • @mholt76

    @mholt76

    Жыл бұрын

    Most of all my DM’ing for the past 30+ years has been centered in FR. Homebrewing an entire world is a long term and daunting task even for experienced DMs. For 5E WoTC gave new DM’s absolutely nothing for materials in helping in world building. As WoTC goals were to maximize profits with sales of player based materials. Beyond that WoTC NEVER encouraged DM’s to refer back to older materials for FR lore which there are 1000’s of pages of materials spread across previous editions.

  • @Stephen-Fox

    @Stephen-Fox

    Жыл бұрын

    Yeah. Even when something is as open ended as something like Yrth is, with some mysteries that the GM is clearly meant to fill in with whatever they want I get this nagging 'but what if I get it wrong' sense in my head, and I suspect I'd feel the same way if I ever decided to read Hârn, the publishers of which have explicitly stated they're never going to go past a specific year so you're canonically safe starting in that year with the established plothooks. I don't mind there being an established setting, I'd just rather one that feels like a rough sketch of one - A few details to riff on, but nothing so concrete as to feel intimidating. Honestly, though? I'd rather just make something up as I go along - Ideally with my player's involvement. "You want to play a dwarf? Sure. How do you envision dwarves working in this setting? What do you want their culture to be - Are we going with industrious miners? Snow white... things? Master artisans working in metallurgy? Gorons with the serial numbers filed off?" - Either implicitly or explicitly. And as a player? I know I feel more engaged with a setting when the GM leaves an entire chunk of it open for me to stamp my mark on, or we as a table create it during session 0, even if where I'm stamping my mark on is way off camera for the purpose of the campaign. (Same reason I always gave canonical characters a wide birth when I was doing fandom roleplay and writing fanfic in the early 00s, honestly)

  • @karensprague8857
    @karensprague8857 Жыл бұрын

    I am currently running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, as someone who knew very little about the Forgotten Realms aside from passing familiarity with the main cities, and I am completely of two minds about it. On the one hand, it writes the city of Waterdeep so. well. It has a whole section (supposedly written by Volo, of Volo's Guide to Monsters) that reads as a traveler's guide so evocative I wanted so badly to be able to actually visit. The book as a whole gave enough depth and character to Waterdeep that it didn't feel like just "generic city," but still left enough room for me to improvise whatever I need to. I love it as a source material, and the adventure is well written, as well. And on the other hand, I am dreading the second the players decide to leave the city for one reason or another. Everything outside of Waterdeep feels exactly the kind of 'too much, I know I'm going to get it wrong' intimidating you were talking about. And one of my players HAS read the Drizz't novels, and IS playing a Drow because of it, so there are parts that I worry about getting wrong and ruining his fantasy. So far, it hasn't been a problem (my players have been great, they're flexible, I honestly don't anticipate push back even if I just fully change elements of the lore.) But at the same time, I definitely did some fan wiki deep dives into recent Forgotten Realms history when the book referenced events I didn't know much about, or when one of my players chose a god to follow that had a complicated history. It wasn't terrible, but it was a lot of work, and I know if we leave Waterdeep, I'm going to start feeling overwhelmed.

  • @tacoman10

    @tacoman10

    Жыл бұрын

    You could retire the characters at the end of the book and move on to something else. In theory the next place to take the characters is Dungeon of the Mad Mage, but in my experience it's not a very compelling adventure. Or they could be kidnapped and enslaved by the Gith'yanki, overthrow the slavers and take control of the astral ship only to crash it into a completely different Prime Material Plane (read: your new homebrew setting) with the goal of getting back home. Or something completely different happens. You're the DM. You control literally everything about the game that's not the PCs. Screw the rules, you are the rules. Either way you should discuss how you feel with your group and see what they want to do after you finish Dragon Heist.

  • @Spartacus547

    @Spartacus547

    Жыл бұрын

    what you do is you let your Players know it takes time to make a days session and that if we go there it well be there nowhere else for that day that's it. ask if there is somewhere they like the campaign to go? if so where let them know that it will be at the next session you now have a week are more to learn all you need about one spot on the map, not the hole thing. Look up KZread videos on that place or area, look up wikis on the things and people there and who or what has been there, find your hook there.

  • @idontwanttopickone

    @idontwanttopickone

    Жыл бұрын

    Honestly, just make it your own place outside the city. Who cares what the official stuff says. Use what you have read in the book as a starting point and build off of that. When your players step outside the city, describe a world that you imagine the city resides in and let them draw a map based on that description - you could give them the opportunity to look over the landscape, maybe from a tower or a wall/window at the edge of the city and describe some key points of interest they could see (a distant mountain peak, a forest, a small village a day or twos ride away, maybe the surrounding farm land) and let them draw a rough map from that. Make them sound as dull or as interesting as you like. You'll soon work out what your players are interested in doing and where they'll be going. Your FR is your own, offer your players as little or as much of it as you want to. Don't worry about what the official stuff says, it's yours, not WotCs. If you're players want to leave the city, they'll likely have an objective in mind and you can make that as close or as far away as possible. You can offer up little distractions and sidequests along the journey. If they say, "I want to leave the city to find this artifact or this person". Tell them they can ask around for information about it. In the sessions they are asking you can do your prep for where that thing is. You can get an NPC to tell them "oh I heard it's over this mountain range" or "beyond this forest" and the players can go to a high point and look for that location to add to their rough map. Or the NPC could say "oh, I heard that they have just returned and are on the other side of the city in this location" and then you keep your players from leaving the city and make them look around an area they haven't been to yet or is difficult for them to go to. And you can always do what Critical Role did and just allow them to discover a fast travel system - a portal or a air ship. Then you can skip straight to the location that the player wants to go to. You could even have the fast travel system break on arrival so that the players have to figure out a way to fix it or maybe they only have the money for one directions travel and they have to figure out a different way back. If you want, you can make this new place a good reason to grab another book and add in the reason for going there into that books map and lore. But it might be easier to just build as much of the world as you need for your players to explore and build it out as you go. Just, don't allow yourself to be constrained by the official books. They are a starting point for your own world and story. The trick is to get comfortable with building off of them. Every session you should try to add in extra details or locations to the campaign setting you are using. Details that are inspired by your players interests. Locations that tie into things your players are looking for or have mentioned in their backstory. Things that will make your players want to go there and give you a good reason to try out expanding the world.

  • @jsnrvst

    @jsnrvst

    Жыл бұрын

    Yeah, after Dragon Heist, retire that party and start another module. You got a Drizzt fan, so you should look into Rime of the Frostmaiden, which takes place in Ten-Towns and Icewind Dale.

  • @nuntiusmortis8976

    @nuntiusmortis8976

    Жыл бұрын

    I'm a new GM also running Dragon Heist with minimal knowledge about the setting, and I completely feel you. I've communicated to my players that this campaign is scoped to Waterdeep so they probably won't go out of range without giving me a major heads up, but (even with the slow tempo of my game) I can't help panicking about what to do next. However, I try to remind myself that that won't be my decision but will have a discussion with the players about what they want after the Dragon Heist story comes to a close and adjust accordingly. I don't have anyone familiar with the lore at my table, but in your case think it's best to talk with that player to get a feeling which stories and aspects are important to them. This will help you put bits of that into your own campaign for them to enjoy that fantasy, while also communicating "listen, I can't read everything you have and tailor the experience accordingly, so expect inconsistencies and changes in the world we're playing". A Drow player like that can also help you steer the adventure to something you can prepare if others are onboard - either to somewhere like Luskan via Jarlaxle, or towards the Underdark exploring the environment in which Drow society lives amongst various other dark and scary creatures. That's just an idea, maybe your players want something completely else.

  • @gandolf7777
    @gandolf7777 Жыл бұрын

    I am so glad you made this video. I am still new to D&D, and I started a homebrew campaign based in Neverwinter because we started with the Essential Kit, and my biggest problem has been trying to understand the Sword Coast without all the previous lore knowledge as a base and it has been daunting. Glad to know that it isn't just me.

  • @annak1042

    @annak1042

    Жыл бұрын

    I had a similar experience when I started DMing. What helped me was learning to say "this is my Forgotten Realms, it may differ from the published Forgotten Realms". Reaching for the existing lore as inspiration when I wanted to, but feeling free to ignore it and/or add my own stuff as well.

  • @ericlayton24
    @ericlayton24 Жыл бұрын

    As a DM, the huge wealth of lore and information available in FR makes my game building much easier. I can look anywhere on the map and find tons of ideas for adventures. I don’t have time to make up a world and have an answer for every question or location that comes up. I love that it is possibly the most developed fantasy world of all time. Whatever happens in the future is up to me and my players.

  • @Treebohr
    @Treebohr Жыл бұрын

    The Dawn War pantheon is certainly the best pantheon. I still use the 4e lore for the Raven Queen.

  • @SupergeekMike

    @SupergeekMike

    Жыл бұрын

    She’s the best 😁

  • @krim7

    @krim7

    Жыл бұрын

    4E Raven queen was the best version of that goddess.

  • @fortunatus1

    @fortunatus1

    Жыл бұрын

    100%. My favorite goddess was the 4E Raven Queen.

  • @marcusaurelius5149

    @marcusaurelius5149

    Жыл бұрын

    Raven Queen is one of the best deities created for D&D and I use that in all of my games, whether it's Greyhawk or Eberron. The lore is strong enough to fit any D&D cosmology.

  • @marcusaurelius5149

    @marcusaurelius5149

    Жыл бұрын

    @@Guts-the-Berserker I joke that turned into a real thing was the Raven Queen communicated with her followers through Tweets.

  • @coolman4202
    @coolman4202 Жыл бұрын

    I take the perspective of "my" Forgotten Realms. The last game I ran (9 months bi-weekly with us finishing the game with lvl 6 PCs) was "homebrew in the Forgotten Realms". I wanted to run a game in a desert and found the Anourach Desert in Faerun and decided that'd be my biome for the game. I used the Forgotten Realms Wiki for inspiration and ideas, but wasn't afraid to ignore/change/throw out anything that i didn't like or didn't fit. EDIT: Another way of saying this is that I enjoyed using the Forgotten Realms as a premade setting to create my homebrew adventures within.

  • @briansmaller7443

    @briansmaller7443

    Жыл бұрын

    Right on. I did not even use D&D rules. I used Fantasy Hero.

  • @ShadowPa1adin

    @ShadowPa1adin

    Жыл бұрын

    I see DnD lore and settings as "narrative lego": Enclosed are the parts and instructions for making what is in the picture on the box, but you are free to just tweak that spaceship to your liking, or make something completely different altogether.

  • @haganlife

    @haganlife

    Жыл бұрын

    Spot on! Make it yours! If you want crazy historical ideas check out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_History_of_the_Realms

  • @ryanlytle8521

    @ryanlytle8521

    Жыл бұрын

    I’ve been doing this in Elturgard. “My” Elturgard bares some resemblance but lore-wise I’m sure it’s a mess.

  • @jemleye
    @jemleye Жыл бұрын

    In defense of Forgotten Realms, while I also like "DM's sandbox" -style settings with a lot of mysteries left unanswered and giving the DM freedom to do anything they want, it has a really interesting good side to it! If you want to run a prep-light game with lots of interesting characters at your disposal with a quick search from the wiki, Forgotten Realms has so many hooks, twists, turns, characters, items, and history to build your story around. You can take any location, any faction in the setting and there are interesting tidbits around its history and the characters within to build entire campaigns out of. My current campaign is set in the Sword Coast, with a civil war within the Lord's Alliance (ie. the three main cities) as the backdrop for it, and it's been such a fun journey to see how I can mix and match the campaign I wanted to run within the existing lore and history. Any prep I need to make, I can search the wiki about the locales to be featured and the characters around there, and build from there how they might be connected to the main plot or any subplots. If anything unexpected happens, I can again use the wiki to help with the coming up with stuff on the fly. It's a very unorthodox way of playing, I guess, but it's amazing how many possibilities for depth and cool stories and beats there are when you're willing to read a few wiki pages before a session. And yes, it takes some mixing and matching with the information available, and sometimes the articles on the wiki might be long and there might be lots of them in prep, but then again, as a DM, who doesn't like learning about lore? Who doesn't need to adapt existing stuff for their exact needs in their campaign? tl;dr: Use Forgotten Realms wiki for building adventures mixing and matching info from locales, factions, and characters kind of like writing a fanfic, or doing an improv with setting info provided. Worried about your worldbuilding skills, or if you have enough points and characters of interest? Use Forgotten Realms wiki and you'll never run out of stuff to use for your campaign.

  • @captaindudeman3613

    @captaindudeman3613

    Жыл бұрын

    This is how I use it too. Honestly id be even more intimidated trying to use Middle Earth than the Realms.

  • @pedrogarcia8706
    @pedrogarcia8706 Жыл бұрын

    Ok I think I realized why I do like the Forgotten Realms, and that's because you and I look for the opposite things in settings to run. I feel much more at home running a campaign, not just in a dnd setting with a lot of established lore already in it, but in the world of fictional works that I and my players are already familiar with, like Hyrule, or Middle Earth. I want to point to familiar places and people so that my players already know the history that it probably makes sense their characters would know too (and it's less work for me muahahaha)

  • @JoniWan77

    @JoniWan77

    Жыл бұрын

    ​@@arklainquirk But that player is just so dumb. Honestly. A DM should not be required to run a world after its lore. They should be able to adapt and alter it to their tastes. I might be the third kind of DM. I prefer settings with a lot of information, so I can choose what to take, what to drop and how to alter everything according to my players. I really don't like worlds and adventures who leave blank spaces. Feels cheap to me. After all it's easy to drop and alter if you want to but hard to make things up on your own.

  • @azzaelulbrinter

    @azzaelulbrinter

    Жыл бұрын

    I really like playing on he realms as it creates a shared experience across many tables. I can comment you how my fiancee’s character successfully did a saving throw against Mordenkainen and you know why it is a big deal (Tho that wizard is from greyhawk but you catch my idea)

  • @JoniWan77

    @JoniWan77

    Жыл бұрын

    @@arklainquirk Ugh. Hang in there, mate, and good luck with your players in the future. 5e really seems to have a weird kind of spoiled TTRPG players, who don't have a clue about the important parts of the social contract. No wonder, there is such a DM shortage if enough players behave like that.

  • @rich63113

    @rich63113

    Жыл бұрын

    ​@@JoniWan77 " A DM should not be required to run a world after its lore." Sure, but some of our brains just don't work that way. I *know* that when my players leave Phandalin and decide to check out Neverwinter while they run down some supplies, that I could just make stuff up about Neverwinter - but my brain won't let me do that. I keep worrying about messing stuff up, or getting things wrong and the players not knowing what's going on because a faction isn't acting in a characteristic way - and it puts a lot of strain on me mentally because I don't understand *why* things are as they are in the setting. Whereas, if it's a "fake" city, and I've just got basic motivations for factions written down - I can not only improvise - but I can let the players unknowingly develop things. "Is there a mage's college where we can go talk to some one?" - "Um.... yeah, there is, north side. Wizardface, you've heard the headmaster is a jerk". The existence of lore makes me feel like I need to know all that lore, and I just end up spending sessions with lots of long pauses where I'm looking things up. " After all it's easy to drop and alter if you want to but hard to make things up on your own." For me, it's the exact opposite.

  • @JoniWan77

    @JoniWan77

    Жыл бұрын

    @@rich63113 Fair point. I always had trouble understanding this sentiment, so I might have misappropriated my own feelings on this upon everybody.

  • @BegravelseinBrussels
    @BegravelseinBrussels Жыл бұрын

    I enjoyed the forgotten realms stories when I was 12. I tried to reread the Drizzt books last year, and it probably took me 6mos to get back through one, and I quit halfway through the second. They did not age well for me.

  • @diegomountin585
    @diegomountin585 Жыл бұрын

    My first campaign was set in the Sword Coast because I ran the Lost Mines of Phandevler adventure. I honestly enjoyed running the setting for a time since there was so much established lore, I could find details about any corner of the world and use that for inspiration, changing details as I saw fit. Once Explorers Guide to Wildemount came out, I immediately switched to Exandria because A) myself and a few of my friends are critters, and B) EGtW does the “leaving blank spots” / “leaving unanswered questions” things so well! All my 5e campaigns will take place in Exandria as far as I’m concerned

  • @annie4424
    @annie4424 Жыл бұрын

    As a new DM playing with new players, there is so much to learn just with game mechanics and figuring out how to run a starter set that I didn’t have the brain-space to devote to learning any of the lore before playing. When my players had some lore-related questions in the first session, I just decided to use a combination of Greek and Celtic mythology to explain things, figuring I’d look it up between session. But when I looked, I was so overwhelmed with all the info and no easy, quick overview I just bagged it and went with my own made-up stuff.

  • @haganlife

    @haganlife

    Жыл бұрын

    Check out ShadowDark RPG kickstarter. It will be my new goto for RPG in Forgotten Realms.

  • @Venomm12
    @Venomm12 Жыл бұрын

    The major issue that I feel you have is that how Forgotten Realms has been handled in its current iteration. Most of these concerns are addressed in previous editions especially third edition. Wizards has ripped out all of the information and exciting parts of the setting to be more Vanilla. The Sword Coast (which is all they talk about) is such a Tiny part of the realms and is the most boring section. Please, I beg you, at least find a pdf copy of the Forgotten Realms: Campaign Setting for third edition. I feel like this will shed so much more light on it.

  • @TheGlock30owner

    @TheGlock30owner

    11 ай бұрын

    I suggest the campaign supplements from 1e/2e. Each one came with poster sizes maps of each region covered.

  • @qarsiseer
    @qarsiseer Жыл бұрын

    Your description of the Forgotten Realms as a land forgotten by our world was the first time I’ve ever been interested in the setting. The idea of our half-remembered real cultures and gods being present in this world as fossils to be dug up by adventurers is brilliant. I’m imagining the awakening of Ra, will he snatch back the sun from Amaunator?

  • @UmbraKrameri

    @UmbraKrameri

    Жыл бұрын

    The egyptian gods actually exist in the setting. My favorite PC is a paladin whose whole shtick is that she's a mortal vessel for Ra trying to enact his will on the world. Actually, for most of my PCs the inspiration was digging in some obscure native cultures and constructing the fantasy version of that in the setting. ^^;

  • @user-jq1mg2mz7o

    @user-jq1mg2mz7o

    Жыл бұрын

    yeah the original FR concept was very heavily tied into the idea of being remnants of our real world cultures. this is why there's like a few irl pantheons that exist canonically in FR and not only that, explicitly arrived from "another world" (ours)

  • @joshuamoore2836
    @joshuamoore2836 Жыл бұрын

    Your point about the daunting lore, and the possibility of your players knowing more than you about the world, was exactly the train of thought that led to me using a home-brew setting for my first DMing experience. My brother-in-law (who has been a forgotten realms fan for quite a while) knew so much about it, that I knew I couldn't give him a good experience in it that lived up to his prior knowledge. So I started in my own, and we all discovered it together. It was great!

  • @bristowski
    @bristowski Жыл бұрын

    This is a good channel. I like Mike.

  • @Dalenthas
    @Dalenthas Жыл бұрын

    I think the appeal of the Realms isn't that you can make a character that's specific to the Realms, but rather that any character you want to make can fit into the Realms somewhere.

  • @SupergeekMike

    @SupergeekMike

    Жыл бұрын

    I could see that logic, for sure (especially in the 5e version)

  • @simonfernandes6809

    @simonfernandes6809

    Жыл бұрын

    ​@@SupergeekMike It's true for 3e as well.

  • @MrMark069
    @MrMark069 Жыл бұрын

    My first experience with Forgotten Realms was as a player. One of the other players just kept fanboying the entire session and I felt left out. There was no sense of discovery or awe, it was just listening to another player gushing about things I'd never heard of.

  • @jeremycraft2445

    @jeremycraft2445

    Жыл бұрын

    The problem there is the other player Metagaming, not the setting. Tell that guy "Your character is 1st level!, he doesn't know jack about X!" :)

  • @user-jq1mg2mz7o

    @user-jq1mg2mz7o

    Жыл бұрын

    i really dislike it when my players do this to other players. an extension of this is them constantly talking about older campaigns i ran for them while playing in another game with new players. "yeah that's cool, i like the inside joke, but can we not make it super awkward for the other players"

  • @benjaminking9675

    @benjaminking9675

    11 ай бұрын

    Yeah, I've been there. I prefer Homebrew worlds for the 'act of discovery' you mention.

  • @JimFaindel
    @JimFaindel Жыл бұрын

    I think something you're missing in this conversation is the fact that for the longest time, the Forgotten Realms books and videogames were much, much popular than D&D itself, and only recently has that paradigm shifted. It was never about expecting new DMs to have to go through all the lore, but rather, that you'd expect only hardcore fans of the lore would want to pick up the game. I for one have been running games in Mercer's Tal'dorei for years now, because I find it new and exciting, as well as easier to make mine, but the second a seasoned player jumps in, I am asked whether the classic factions of the forgotten realms or the red mages and rose knights of the dragonlance settings, with an expectation that they or at least a parallel will be found in this game. There are some aspects that are just too iconic, and it doesn't matter what setting we're playing on, if my players go underground chasing after dark elves, I owe it to them to face them with the twisted splendor of Menzoberranzan, because they deserve to have that shared experience with the players who've loved the game for decades before them.

  • @natbarmore

    @natbarmore

    Жыл бұрын

    Hmmm…interesting. Was that hyperbole, or have all (or nearly all) the “seasoned” players you’ve played with been deeply familiar with the Realms? I’ve been playing D&D since before the FR was published, but even when I’ve played with people who were younger (but still experienced D&D players), I’ve almost never encountered people who were particularly familiar with or fans of the Realms. It used to be (in the ‘80s and early ‘90s) that if there were any expectations like that, it was that elements of Greyhawk would show up in every game. And other than Phandelver (which I only in this video found out is set in the Realms), I’ve never run or played in the Realms-and AFAIK, nobody I know has ever run FR or played in it in a home game. Though, interestingly, most of the gamers I know who are the right age have played the FR-based computer games. So I know that FR must be popular-if for no other reason than WotC wouldn’t keep publishing so much content for it if it weren’t-but I’ve never encountered anybody actually gaming in it, outside of adventurers’ league games at conventions. Point being: it _is_ possible for people to be seasoned D&D players and not be Realms aficionados, or even particularly familiar with the Realms. I don’t doubt your experiences, I’m just wondering to what degree they are representative of the D&D playerbase as a whole?

  • @vitaliilukin2505
    @vitaliilukin2505 Жыл бұрын

    You have many valid points, especially true about high level npcs. In starting adventures, for example, essentials kit (and its continuation)- the bad guys threaten the whole sea-trade route, there is no reason why Neverwinter won’t react to it, it’s a port city that thrives on trade. And mind it as it’s written in the setting it’s about one and a half days on foot, or like half a day on a ship

  • @SoaringQuails

    @SoaringQuails

    Жыл бұрын

    @@BreadDestroyer this is a huge pet peeve of mine. While I think there's merit to showing low level PCs the kinds of problems that they might face at higher levels, to give a sense of progression and potential, so many settings completely blow past that and make things that should feel fantastical and dangerous feel routine. Unless you separate these epic events from the present by centuries or millennia, they're going to outshine the current adventure

  • @gabrielwander370
    @gabrielwander370 Жыл бұрын

    I think my problem with the forgotten realms is that I found it really hard to find any information on basically anything besides the sword coast book. Like, I don't want to read adventures because one day I might play them and I don't want to be spoiled, and I also don't want to go out of my way and download pdfs from older editions. Anytime I had any interest in one aspect of the lore, I had to search on a wiki that didn't explain much.

  • @Malvisk

    @Malvisk

    Жыл бұрын

    you mean "current" information? There are 35 years of lore about the Forgotten Realms. There are few areas that are devoid of additional information.

  • @Gasaso

    @Gasaso

    Жыл бұрын

    I use the wiki a lot, and it really helps

  • @johnfielder2064

    @johnfielder2064

    Жыл бұрын

    i know what you mean, we ran a game set there recently for pathfinder and had a hell of a time trying to find information about places etc

  • @SnowWolf9999

    @SnowWolf9999

    Жыл бұрын

    yeah unfortunately 5e seems to be obsessed with only the sword coast areas From Icewind Dale to Candlekeep (which in my opinion are kind of overdone at this point), if you look back to older editions they flesh out areas like The MoonShae Iles, the Northern icy mountains of Bloodstone, Vasa and Damara, to the Silver Marches, and Anauroch, onto the Dalelands, Moonsea and Sea of Fallen Stars, The Dragon Coast and Thay, all the way South to Calimshan, Haluraa and Jungles of Chult, out over the great grass sea to East and the mysterious lands of Kara Tur.

  • @vincentd.2284

    @vincentd.2284

    Жыл бұрын

    3.5 pdfs are easy to find, you know.

  • @chazhoosier2478
    @chazhoosier2478 Жыл бұрын

    What I liked about Forgotten Realms is becoming lost. You started off in surroundings that, while fantasy themed, were largely familiar, like an unassuming town in the Dales, and as your character explored and grew in power you discovered with him a world that was far vaster, stranger, and more and more dangerous than he ever imagined. But, alas those days are long gone. At some point around in the reign of 3ed, D&D lost this concept of a character arc that went from familiar to fantastic, and in the process the setting when from familiar to generic, and I do think there is a subtle difference. When everything is fantastical nothing is.

  • @ChaoticTabris
    @ChaoticTabris Жыл бұрын

    I suspect that them picking the Forgotten Realms as a default setting and bringing Ed Greenwood and R. A. Salvatore to help was a way to make emends about 4e. They wanted to show that they were making big changes to the game and picked Forgotten Realms because of how criticized the 4e version of the setting was. It's also interesting how the Sword Coast is the most popular area of the Realms. I suspect this actually happened because of the popularity of the Baldur's Gate games and it was not true during AD&D days. Ed Greenwood's original campaigns were set in Cormyr.

  • @ddis29

    @ddis29

    Жыл бұрын

    i have the 2nd es. forgotten realms box. the focus was around the north-west moonsea area. Cormyr, the dalelands and zhentil keep.

  • @SnowWolf9999

    @SnowWolf9999

    Жыл бұрын

    people miss many of the best areas of the FR focusing too much on the Sword Coast

  • @adamwhitehead7289

    @adamwhitehead7289

    9 ай бұрын

    Ed Greenwood's first stories were set on the Sword Coast, specifically about Mirt the Moneylender wandering the coast road from Luskan down to Baldur's Gate and getting into hijinks, and eventually settling in Waterdeep. His first home AD&D campaigns a decade later were also set around Waterdeep. It was a second campaign he started in his public library job that introduced Cormyr, and then his OG roleplaying party started a second campaign in the Dalelands. His various adventuring parties visited other parts of the Realms, but they tended to based in those regions (to the point where he himself has said he's never actually run in-depth campaigns in many parts of the Realms, despite inventing and writing about them, which is how they ended up being fleshed out by other writers, sometimes not very well, after TSR bought the setting). It is the case the BG made the Sword Coast more popular. In fact, the Sword Coast was originally just a small part of the coast between Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, and as the term became more popular it expended to incorporate most of the west coast of Faerun from Icewind Dale to Tethyr, and in 5E also inland to the Great Desert. So this very specific term now applies to about 1/6 of the entire continent and incorporates two massive regions (the North/Savage Frontier and the Western Heartlands). However, it is also the case that 1E and 2E specifically refer to the Realms in two stages: the "Heartlands" or "the bit Ed Greenwood fleshed out in massive detail" and "Beyond the Heartlands" ("the bits he created in not as much detail, so can be outsourced to other writers of wildly varying ability level"). The Heartlands were Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, the Sword Coast, the Western Heartlands, Cormyr, the Dalelands, the Moonsea, the Dragon Coast and the Vast (the North got later absorbed into this area). So it was always the centre of events, the difference is that those "beyond" regions got some development in 1-3E and absolutely none at all in 5E.

  • @andrewswanson9461
    @andrewswanson9461 Жыл бұрын

    I am a huge fan of the realms. I have collected realms books for years and have almost all the novels. Honestly it's a lot and I definitely understand where you are coming from. The best thing Wizards could do is make a real setting book for this edition and not just the tiny sword coast book. There are so many cool locations in the realms. As for places to get started for fun and interesting lore goes try the first box set for the realms on drive-thru rpg and the 3.0 campaign setting books those are my favorite books.

  • @Harryeaster

    @Harryeaster

    Жыл бұрын

    Yeah, it's mostly the DM Guild fleshing out the setting now. Good books, but still. I think a proper campaign setting book would be enough. Or they go the other round, just publish one book about one part of the continent and let the rest for the imagination for the groups. Worked with Wildemount and other settings.

  • @beezany
    @beezany Жыл бұрын

    The early versions of the setting, before the novels and video games, focused much more on the Dalelands and Cormyr, and there were explicit blank spaces on the map for DMs to use. That version had a very different vibe, and honestly it was a bit too empty for me. The Sword Coast in that era was one of the faraway, exotic locales. That all changed as the more popular adaptations focused on the Sword Coast and filled in the blank spaces. A lot of the Realms novels also focused on explaining the various rule changes between each new edition of the game. Rather than just handling rules changes in an abstract way, TSR & WotC published a LOT of novels to provide in-universe explanations of the various changes to the magic system, classes, races, and so on. That's where stuff like the Time of Troubles and the Spellplague came from. There was also a whole thing about introducing Dragonborn to Toril.

  • @medleyrose
    @medleyrose Жыл бұрын

    I grew up with the Realms, reading the books in highschool. The appeal for me, would be the same for anyone reading Tolkien, and wanting to play in Middle Earth. There's so much lore, any character could fit into the world, and you could drop a setting anywhere in it. Sadly I haven't played much in Faerun.

  • @Teschmacher
    @Teschmacher Жыл бұрын

    Love that you picked up on this topic, as it's one that I'm very interested in. I love sword coast, but it's daunting as a GM to find a "new" campaign premise for adventurers in the forgotten realms, and I'm bullocks at building from scratch. So far Eberron is my favorite published setting, but I'll have to take another look at the 4th edition setting!

  • @kevinbaird6705
    @kevinbaird6705 Жыл бұрын

    18:32 Completely agree. The "Points of Light" in 4e was great for this exact reason.

  • @The-Scoot
    @The-Scoot Жыл бұрын

    My first encounter with the Forgotten Realms was back in 1987 with the 1st box set. Loved it back than, stopped playing during the end days of 2E and came back in 2020. I was excited to get back to DMing in the Forgotten Realms, as I had many fond years of adventuring within it, but before long I began to feel locked into the existing lore, more than 20 years worth, that the realm no longer had that wild feel, everything felt packed to the gills, it was no longer the point of light setting it once was. I think its great that there is love for FR, but for me as a DM, I want to have a world of exploration and mystery that I cannot go read about in tons of places, I wanted something wild once more, something grittier, which is what led me to stop running campaigns in it. Now, I do still love FR and love to read about it, but as for a setting for me to run games in, it is way too charted and I would rather not ret-con, destroy, or ignore that which has already been created out of respect and a love of the setting.

  • @ricksturgis4451
    @ricksturgis4451 Жыл бұрын

    I'll always care for the Forgotten Realms because of Drizzt Do'Urden. RA Salvatore's novels were my first exposure to D&D

  • @emjtucson
    @emjtucson Жыл бұрын

    I would love for you to cover Greyhawk CY576 as covered in the 1983 boxset as a starting campaign World.

  • @SylviusTheMad

    @SylviusTheMad

    Жыл бұрын

    Greyhawk will probably always be my favourite D&D setting. As the home of Mordenkainen, Tenser, and Bigby, it really should be the default setting.

  • @darthpunk3510

    @darthpunk3510

    Жыл бұрын

    It's definitely underated and underutilized, lots of great 2e modules in that setting, it should of gotten reboot for 5e

  • @FrostSpike
    @FrostSpike Жыл бұрын

    Yeah, you need to read the FR 3.x material and see how that addresses most, but not all, of your concerns. Even the FR 1e/2e add-on books would help out. Maybe that's why WotC didn't (re)publish all that content - it's just sitting there waiting to be picked up (and the 3.x content is, IMO, some of the best ever out out by WotC) IMO, the FR isn't just one setting... it's a whole bunch of settings kind of crammed together with the idea that you can pick and choose to work in a specific locale (so my current campaign is set in the Celtic-themed Moonshea Isles off of the Sword Coast) yet have the scope available to travel to other places in the world.

  • @user-fc7sv5ln6m
    @user-fc7sv5ln6m5 ай бұрын

    The Star Trek Dilemma ("You're the only ship in the sector" "But, we're only three days from Earth!") element is strong in the 5e Realms adventures that's for sure - I hate both the pacing and the inaction of high level residents.

  • @twil004
    @twil004 Жыл бұрын

    I love the FR because of the amount of detail. Sure it doesn't always line up with what I am trying to accomplish at the time of the campaign I'm running, but as a DM I'm free to change what I want. Having so many years of lore baked into the setting allows me to find great plot hooks for my own campaign. The issue I have with a lot of bare bones settings is its just that and puts the majority of the world building up to me. That takes up precious prep time having to fill in the gaps the world leaves, while in a place as detailed as the sword coast all I need is a quick google search to find out whats going on in the area and what my players can expect or be surprised by.

  • @christenh359
    @christenh359 Жыл бұрын

    6:10 “It was a perfect pantheon” TOTALLY AGREE! The first time I made a character, I wanted to pick a god… but all I had available was the 5e handbook… and all of those felt either bland or cumbersome. I was so entranced by the Raven Queen on Critical Role, and I was happy to see that they were using (and reclaiming) 4e’s pantheon… WITH ONE EXCEPTION: Sarenrae. That’s a carry-over from Pathfinder :) Ashley/Pike didn’t want to switch.

  • @kevinrsmith2947

    @kevinrsmith2947

    Жыл бұрын

    I think the CR crew's earliest sessions were D&D 4e. Then they switched to Pathfinder 1e, and then switched to D&D 5e for streaming. So I wouldn't be surprisded if the whole Exandrian pantheon is kind of a mismash of 4e and PF1 gods, with names now changed so they can independently publish setting material without violating anyone's intellectual property.

  • @frankwojtczak855

    @frankwojtczak855

    Жыл бұрын

    If none of the gods that were available worked for you, your DM should have worked with you to create a god that you liked. That's a failure of your DM, not Forgotten Realms. I'm assuming that the god you would have preferred would have been no more active with his followers as much as any other god isn't very active with their users.

  • @beesbooksbabies8378
    @beesbooksbabies8378 Жыл бұрын

    I started DMing my first campaign with Dragon of Icespire Peak. My players (all newbies) and I wanted to continue the story and had backstory ideas - so after finishing that adventure I started homebrewing the world with my players to be able to create a more character-focused campaign. So now the only parts I took are Phandalin, Neverwinter (though there I homebrewed everything but the name) and a few gods that my players had already expressed interest in. I am really happy with that approach, but I was incredibly lucky with my players and their interests, especially because they're all first-timers.

  • @TangledLion
    @TangledLion Жыл бұрын

    While I'm not sure if you'd like it, I really love Pathfinder's Golarion as a default setting. The lore in the books is all built around it and it's a fantasy kitchen sink setting with a lot of unusual stuff in it.

  • @aaroninfante-levy3612
    @aaroninfante-levy3612 Жыл бұрын

    Most of the AD&D books detailing the Sea of Falling Stars area - Cormyr, City of Ravensbluff, etc - are full of great detail. Ed wrote much of this and he references the regions fairly often when he talks about the Realms. Definitely changed my perspective towards the Realms to more positive.

  • @JoesphEKerr
    @JoesphEKerr Жыл бұрын

    Great video, thank you. When you were saying that the cities don't have a lot that separates them I was reminded of a 1st edition game I played. My character was part of a team out of Waterdeep that pooled all our money together to buy 2 draft horses and a cart and then we went up the road to Red Larch to buy horses. Red Larch is not the suburbs of waterdeep, more like the sticks, meaning we weren't far from civilization (there was a road after all) but we were far enough to feel like we'd set out and were on our own. We come into red larch hot and tired and was treated at the inn to some roast phoenix (a jealous favorite of inn keepers apparently, as the bird comes back to life again no matter how many times they cook it) and the next morning had to negotiate with stable masters and farmers to buy up all the available horses in town (at a discount from PHB prices). At last, we set off northward with our wagon and a team of like 15 horses. After weeks on the road we arrived in Mirabar, up in the north (our GM didn't want to research anything about the town if all we were going to do was buy and sell and stay at the inn before moving on, we agreed, and so admittedly, Morabar was boring) but without taking time to see the sites we sold most all of our horses (at a premium) and bought up all the iron we could with our profits (at a discount). We had random encounters on the road coming and going from Mirabar but for the sake of brevity we made our way back south again but this time we came around and arrived in Luskan. The sign outside read, all Humanoids will be executed on sight, all Humans will be mistrusted. Luskan is a pirate city with castles shaped like skulls, and an island clouded in a wild magical storm from some experiment gone wrong, then there was the Host tower (a freaking massive, dead, tree that housed evil wizards). Pirates were at our backs around every corner. Someone was always trying to figure out where we parked the wagon, what goods we carried, how much money we had, why the one guy in our party always wore his hood up despite the heat of it being summer, (he was an elf of course and he had to hide his face and especially his ears). Pirates were everywhere - and these pirates hated those pirates - anyway, long story shortened, we get out of Luskan with our party still alive and our goods still in our possession and head down the road south again. When we arrived in Neverwinter, the last big city before getting home to waterdeep, we were contracted by the temple (Torm I think or Helm) to do some policing jobs around the city. We healed and fed the poor people contained inside the Beggars nest who hadn't enough money to live or pay taxes and we patrolled the streets full of townhouses and greenhouses stacked next to and even over each other. We had such a great time stopping in Neverwinter that no one wanted to go back to waterdeep. We sold our iron (at a premium, cha-ching), split the prize, and my character bought himself some land inside the city and retired - Those were in the days of 1e tho.... when adventure had much less to do with saving the world and more to do with just making a living and staying alive.

  • @Keovar
    @Keovar Жыл бұрын

    A good setting is a multi-course meal, or at least a buffet. There are many options, and they maintain their distinct flavors. Forgotten Realms is like taking a seven-course meal, running it through a blender, and making NutraLoaf from the remains. Greenwood probably didn’t intend his setting to become so genericized.

  • @jamesonsan8539
    @jamesonsan8539 Жыл бұрын

    Thank you so much for doing this. The proper names thing you so eloquently spelled out at 10:51 and your biggest complaint 17:15 is exactly what made me look up this topic of video in the first place, and your video is so well paced and on point. I am finally after all this time doing my first proper campaign as a DM and as I began prepping I started to really get this feeling and I couldn't put my finger on the exact word of what was bothering me about running in this as the default setting, and you nailed it right on the head. Daunting. Im planning to just simplify the names of NPCs and keeping things generic (i.e. in the mountains of 'these lands' , nomadic tribes of these mountains) and have PCs discover things about the world organically through playing instead of in lore dumps, to eventually work toward this vision for a dnd setting I have. Was having the same problem with some of the celtic settings, and the ancient myths from 2e, 5e and real life. The proper nouns are so foreign to our non-Gaelic speaking ears, keeping track of stuff was becoming burdensome to me and my playtesters, so scrapped doing it with the names from those settings at a minimum, and put prepping those adventures on the way far backburner. Ps. If anyone's interested and got this far theres a nifty campaign setting done by this Celtic Archaeologist really well researched and does 5e well , adventure path for it still being written though.

  • @bobbiesheetz1863
    @bobbiesheetz1863 Жыл бұрын

    I think Mike's base premise wrong. The FR is a fine setting for the base setting. The problem is the lack of support coupled with people thinking they have to stick to canon. There should be a Campaign Guide instead of lore scattered across adventures or in products on the DMs Guild. That's a "WotC doesn't know what they are doing" problem, not a FR problem. Aa far as novels, I would recommend: Waterdeep: City of Splendors The Haunted Lands trilogy The Sembia series The Erevis Cale series House of Serpents trilogy

  • @SoulisStar
    @SoulisStar Жыл бұрын

    Hey Mike, I agree that there is so much to know about the forgotten realms(sword coast). I got into D&D in 5e. Funny enough forgotten realms novels were in my family’s home sense the first book was written. I just never read them until I had moved away and found out that was D&D. What I like about forgotten realms is that I can go online and get background info on almost every town. I can pick and choose what info I will use and what I will change. As long as I keep in mind and the mind of my players that it’s my own homebrew forgotten realms.

  • @matthewburton6360
    @matthewburton6360 Жыл бұрын

    So I will say I didn’t realize for a long time that Forgotten Realms wasn’t exactly what you think a D&D campaign to be. I thought it was just some generic coast where mainline adventures tend to take place and a whole world for the DM to make stuff up. However the more I learned about it I just decided to make my own homebrew world anyway with a similar vibe. I wanted a kingdom rather than a like of citystates for a more medieval vibe.

  • @maecenus778
    @maecenus778 Жыл бұрын

    The thing that got me interested in the Forgotten Realms was pulling out the vast maps of the continent of Faerun and finding some random location. Then diving into that specific location to find out more about it. Like throwing a dart at the map, hitting a place like Cormyr and just diving into the lore of it. Finding a place called The Dungeon of Death or Hellgate Keep and finding out why these places have such names. These days there’s a great wiki page for the Forgotten Realms so you can just Google most things found in the Realms to find articles and sources for the content, whether novels or video games and setting books.

  • @Xackadee
    @Xackadee Жыл бұрын

    This video was really helpful. I'm currently running a campaign that's a successor to some old games of my group - which started with Lost Mines of Phandelver - which has thus far taken place in the Outer Planes but will soon have everyone returning to Sword Coast. As I anticipate the upcoming setting shift, I can't help but feel locked down by all the issues you've raised here. Some major conflicts will be taking place in the cities and I find my challenge is less learning about these cities as much as trying to make them distinctly interesting. I have a few good plans in mind, but seeing this takes me back to my very first time DMing, which was a one-shot. The idea for it sprang up from me just inventing lore in a notepad, line by line, based only on some basic fantasy knowledge. To this day, that one-shot has no clearly defined setting that's beholden to anywhere and it was still the most liberating experience I've had as a DM. In future, while I'm happy for now to work with the current setting I have and apply some creativity to the issues with it, I would like to just do more world-inventing to ensure any future campaigns I run aren't too limited. And I'm not gonna lie, but I will keep it vague in case any of my players read this, I think reflecting on all of this has given me a new inspiration for how the campaign will end. There's an aspect of it that my players may have you to thank for, whenever we get to it!

  • @L337P1R4735
    @L337P1R4735 Жыл бұрын

    You are 100% right about the bar to entry being too high in the forgotten realms. The dritz books are fun I've read a few I'd say they're on the good side of average. They're definitely more thoughtful than I expected and I mean that in a good way, they talk about ethics in interesting ways that a lot of other similar novels don't.

  • @misomiso8228
    @misomiso8228 Жыл бұрын

    What book do you reference for the Nentir Vale Pantheon? Would like to have a look at it. ty

  • @SupergeekMike

    @SupergeekMike

    Жыл бұрын

    The 4th Edition Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide, or the 5th Edition “Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount” or CR’s book “Tal’dorei Reborn” book both include the Pantheon (with the addition of “Rae,” because they were still using a Pathfinder goddess for their campaign and has to include her under a different name)

  • @PeterFendrich
    @PeterFendrich Жыл бұрын

    I think the milage you get out of FR as a default setting largely depends on how fast and loose you like to play things, which goes largely with how confident are you as a DM. I've been running games for a long long time, and so I've come to the point where I don't get intimidated by someone "well actually-"ing me at the table. I just respond with "yeah, that played out differently in my world" or "yeah, see, that probably how the myth goes, right? But you're bout to find out that's not EXACTLY how that articular god works." If you make it clear some things might be shifting around, the FR then does become very easy to run in, just because if I want to run a campaign or module set in, say, Waterdeep, I can likely five 15 high quality Lore and Setting Info video to send to players with one search. Beats having to write and dispense all that background info myself. But also, I agree that the PHB and DMG don't actually do a great job of leveraging the FR as a good "default," and being comfortable with it either requires digesting a LOT of lore or being ok with shutting down players trying to hammer you for "doing the setting wrong." Neither of those are things most new DMs want to deal with.

  • @adamwhitehead7289

    @adamwhitehead7289

    9 ай бұрын

    There's a good saying there: "Oh, you know lots about the published Forgotten Realms? That's nice. But you know jack about MY Forgotten Realms."

  • @_Bread-_-
    @_Bread-_- Жыл бұрын

    I think most of my friends and I are on the same page when it comes to running an original game. we tend to create our own worlds simply taking a lot of the theological and more metaphysical aspects from the forgotten realms. its just been easier on us to look at the PHB and know that there is an Abyss in most of our games, while still getting to learn about the world whoever is dming has crafted, for example. That being said, I still love to hear about all the crazy lore of the forgotten realms that's been thought up over the years. Great video btw :)

  • @MravacKid
    @MravacKid Жыл бұрын

    I'd say the amount of lore is also the Forgotten Realms' biggest advantage, new DMs planning an adventure there can fairly easily find information about a lot of stuff without having to make it up themselves. Of course, that also means there's danger of more experienced players knowing more about it than the DM...

  • @miguletio9175
    @miguletio9175 Жыл бұрын

    Such a great video! I feel like I'm in the middle of these three examples of GMs you gave: The ones who are intimidated, the ones who are interested in challenging themselves to get more knowledge about the world lore, and the ones who create stuff into the Forgotten Realms, making their own. I'ts also a mix o feelngs being into the middle of everything! xD

  • @VestigialLung
    @VestigialLung Жыл бұрын

    Never been a fan of FR, and you hit the nail on the head with the barrier for entry all the lore represents. If I want to play a game set in a world where generic fantasy tropes are generally true, it’s a lot less work just to mad-libs quick-brew it. “Great, you’re from the town of [town name] in the kingdom of [kingdom name]. The town is built around [feature]. While life is generally pretty okay there, the presence of [complication] threatens it.” Roughly the same value-add to my game as FR and a ton less work on my end. Sure it won’t be as deep as Faerun, but I don’t need deep when the setting isn’t going to do anything with that depth besides “uhh, there’s an angsty elf”; I need a complication I can set my adventurers to interacting with. If you’re going to lore bomb me, you’d better be giving me something I couldn’t pull out on the fly in exchange for that work. Take Ravenloft or Ebberon for example. Those worlds have a distinct feel to them that FR lacks. Greyhawk as presented in 3.X was super boring, but it also filled a couple of pages in the PH, so no real investment required.

  • @BryonAutry
    @BryonAutry Жыл бұрын

    This is definitely a subject that I think about often, myself. I definitely agree with most of your points, especially how convoluted and intimating the lore has gotten. Now, I don't hate The Forgotten Realms, I read several of R.A. Salvatore's Drizz't novels in my teens alongside those from my actual favorite D&D setting (Dragonlance), and I mostly enjoyed what I read. I also grew up playing the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights games, which hugely influenced my love of RPGs today. That being said... I cannot say that I have ever really identified with the setting itself, usually just specific scenarios and characters. I never really felt the drive to run my games in The Forgotten Realms, even before it became the overcomplicated hodge podge it is now. It just never stood out to me like Krynn from Dragonlance. I would also honestly say there is a non-0% amount of salt on my part stemming from the seeming preferential treatment the setting has received over the years. Meanwhile Dragonlance got sabotaged by TSR and then abandoned in the 90's, brought back briefly in 3.5 edition by WotC (just to be ignored as a setting again until 8 years after 5th edition came out), and then only kept alive by the occasional side novels and free content from talented 3rd party creators (with the blessing of the original authors) until the most recent release. Considering how influential the setting was, and how important it was for D&D as a whole (Dragons Of Autumn Twilight was literally the first D&D novel ever published, and Tracy & Laura Hickman used the setting to add more roleplay and story into the game when it was mostly just a dungeon crawling, kill-and-loot game at the time) the way the setting was treated by both companies, and the fact that it has faded so much into the background since those times... just really makes me sad, and admittedly a little resentful. Oh and don't even get me started on the legal drama around the current Dragonlance book trilogy and WotC torpedoing their brand (OGL drama) right after finally bringing Dragonlance back and opening it up for use on DMs Guild... Anyways, I would definitely have been ok if Nentir Vale was just created as the default setting in the Player's Handbook, and The Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance were both still campaign settings. I just wish most of D&D's important settings would have received more equal attention over the years, instead of being largely ignored in favor of the 132nd Forgotten Realms sourcebook or adventure. Sorry, I needed to vent. Anyways, great video as always. lol

  • @SnowWolf9999

    @SnowWolf9999

    Жыл бұрын

    I am in 100% agreement that the other settings should have got the love they deserved and FR should be a campaign setting and not the default. When you look back to when it was its own setting and Ed Greenwood's input actually meant something, Toril was very a very fleshed out setting just like Krynn (and the lore made sense). Making it the default setting has made it very incoherent and them having "world changing" events every time they want to introduce new rule sets and races etc.... has really turned it into quite the mess and doesn't feel like the world that all the books published in the 80s and 90s were set in anymore.

  • @anarwally
    @anarwally8 ай бұрын

    We are going to start Rime of the Frostmaiden soon. Icewind Dale definitely helped me make a PC that would specifically fit into that setting.

  • @jameswhitehead9697
    @jameswhitehead9697 Жыл бұрын

    My online game is all homebrew, including the setting, so this hasn't been an issue. But in the in person game I am in, I seem to be the only one not to know anything about forgotten realms. I just never got into the books or lore much. I do feel a little left out & even behind the learning curve, but I deal and don't worry about it too much. I kind of play my character in Dragon Heist as one who isn't too aware of his surroundings and rather bad with names. The best 'default' fantasy campaign setting I have ever played in is RuneQuest's Glorantha. Very immersive & evocative. Full of backstory & powerful NPCs & histories but the emphasis is still on the the fact that the player characters have the potential to do great things. Not very helpful for the 5e discussion but definitely a great example of how to do a setting properly if you are looking for inspiration. Kato

  • @starscream71288
    @starscream71288 Жыл бұрын

    I am about a month into my first ever dm experience, and I found the established lore of the forgotten realms very comforting because I had lore that I could fall back on if I needed it. That being said, my next campaign will either be set in a homebrew setting or in Exandria. All depends on how much work I get done on my homebrew.

  • @tinaprice4948
    @tinaprice4948 Жыл бұрын

    What I have found is irritating is the size of places and the distance between them varies in the different material. So when I bought old maps of the forgotten realms to show the players the distance between cities varied so much from the campaign I was running that I got very frustrated.

  • @ilmari1452
    @ilmari1452 Жыл бұрын

    "Tripped down the stairs carrying a basket of typewriters" 😆 love it. Though I'm sure there are plenty of daft names in FR, I would be cautious saying that sounds "would not occur in human language". Coming partially from a non-proto-indo-european background, and having consulted an actual linguist (I'm lucky, he's my brother) in designing my own fantasy world - I can say definitively that just about any sounds can exist in human language! What *is* important and the vast majority of fantasy worlds do wrong is to not be _consistent_ in naming within one country even. And I'm sure Forgotten Realms has this, though the region I'm most familiar with - Icewind Dale - is actually OK there. The place I've recognised it most recently is in a world called "Golarion" used for a campaign I've recently started playing in. The naming is seriously unhinged! It's one of my big criticisms with Exandria also, though. "Emon" "Byroden" and "Westrun" can just about hang together, but in the nation of "Tal'Dorei"? And then "Rexxentrum" and "Zadash" and "Nogvurat"? Hrm. And I have to mention Exandrian norm for naming shops/inns/organisations that looks like a someone ran a dictionary through a shredder and just stuck the resulting strips together at random. Ultimately, though, bad naming doesn't make a bad world. I love Matt Mercer's detail in storytelling, and he can describe things so evocatively you can look past the sometimes threadbare stitching of the world. Regarding Forgotten Realms, I'm largely on board with most of the criticism here. The sheer scale of the lore, especially - often written very inconsistently - is awfully intimidating and yes, the sheer prevalence of powerful characters everywhere _not saving the world_ has made for a real disbelief suspension problem when running games in that setting.

  • @DJBubbleBoy
    @DJBubbleBoy Жыл бұрын

    Never played D&D until 5e, but I got into the Realms (and Dragonlance) as a teen in the 90s, through the Drizzt and War of the Lance series respectively. I love the Forgotten Relams, but I also understand where you're coming from with this. Honestly, even though I know the lore of the world, I've never used it as a campaign setting.

  • @RottenRogerDM
    @RottenRogerDM Жыл бұрын

    5E has been more light Lore written in their hardcover products instead lore inspiring. Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep was more inspiring than the three Spelljammer books. As DM from way back in 1E the few points of light trope is more inspiring than having 3 sentences of let us not tick people off to describe a whole region of the realms. And the number of published races 73 with 106 subclass is too many options. As the speeder kid say, “When everyone special no one is.” In fact, the Realms has going way into cartoon/anime land of anything is possible but no one cares.

  • @BradK4444
    @BradK444410 ай бұрын

    One of the players in my campaign did something dishonest enough I felt a god of lies needed to get involved. I chose Cyric and had him show up for one scene to do what I needed. When the session was over, my player informed me of Cyric's extensive backstory and how different my Cyric was from the real character. My player was cool about it, but I agree with Mike that my player knowing more about The Forgotten Realms than I do puts me at a disadvantage.

  • @fried2styles
    @fried2styles Жыл бұрын

    remember that Greenwood's original play group ("the knights of Myth Drannor") were located in the Dales, specifically Shadowdale, NOT the Sword coast. I find the Dales (with small, isolated settlements and plenty of old ruins) fit with the old-school, "sandbox"-style campaign much better than Waterdeep, etc. As a drowsy, forest-shrouded back-water, you get the "intimacy" and detail you want.

  • @evilminion4989
    @evilminion4989 Жыл бұрын

    Thay is one of my favorite regions in FR. A large amount of lore, plenty of potential plot hooks for adventures, a particular vibe to it. The issue of a "default" setting cuts both ways, on the one hand you get a fully flushed out world but with the burden of learning about all of it, or on the other end of the spectrum you have an blank/mostly blank slate but with the burden of building all the details that make up that world. Finding that sweet spot between them is a herculean task. The flushed out world atleast usually has a wiki and maps ya can download, etc to help with questions about it.

  • @Vuk11Media
    @Vuk11Media Жыл бұрын

    Absolutely keen to see you talk about the Greyhawk setting!

  • @luciusrex
    @luciusrex6 ай бұрын

    i watched this video after reading a bit of Pathfinder's Lost Omens World Guide. I can see the reasoning behind your words! I was especially surprised when i skipped to the section on "Old Cheliax" and found backgrounds for characters related to lore. e.g., "Bellflower Agent" where you work to free slaves, can choose 2 ability boosts and gain feats! Then on the next page you can choose Hellknight archetypes, where ig your mission is to hunt for these slaves. And they're all specific to "Old Cheliax." It's amazing. The world of Golarion is pretty dope.

  • @drokangel
    @drokangel Жыл бұрын

    As someone that has played in the Realms, read novels, obsessed over characters, and created my own lore for them for almost thirty years, my heart is in the nostalgia. With every new iteration of DnD I look forward to seeing how they move forward with the classic characters, and have lamented many that have no stat blocks even to this day.

  • @Tekkice
    @Tekkice Жыл бұрын

    I find this to also be mostly a 5e sourcebook problem, lots of flavor not a lot of usable content

  • @Brian_Rogers
    @Brian_Rogers Жыл бұрын

    I'd say you're not wrong. There's a lot of preexisting material for the Forgotten Realms and when the modules reference it they do a poor job of putting it into context and that can be a pain in the ass for someone not up to date on the complete history of the Realms trying to put it into context for your players. An example of this is in Lost Mines of Phandelver. If your players go to Thundertree, part of the lore about the location is wrapped up in the eruption of Mt. Hotenow and the Spellplauge. This stuff is all just referenced in a STARTER BOX for the game with no context as to what any of that bullshit even means and they expect someone who is very likely a new DM to just say that stuff out loud with enough conviction to make their players who are also very likely new to the game buy into it.

  • @falionna3587
    @falionna3587 Жыл бұрын

    Points of Light was definetly a highlight of 4e, I hope 1dnd follows suit and makes a similar or just adapt the setting to 1dnd.

  • @Seraphina-Rose
    @Seraphina-Rose Жыл бұрын

    I got into the Forgotten Realms as a new DM a few years ago, running Lost Mine of Phandelver for family. I didn't feel overwhelmed by the setting information needed to run it, and had such a great time that I started reading more about the Forgotten Realms in the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, the online wiki, and the Drizzt novels. It felt to me a world like Tokkien's, only with more magic, that I could be a part of shaping and get to play in! Before we even finished that adventure, I knew I wanted to run another, and dove into reading Dragon Heist and learning everything I could about Waterdeep. Now I'm running Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which I've set on the Sword Coast. Each new adventure enriches the world for me and for my players, and I love that connectivity.

  • @SupergeekMike

    @SupergeekMike

    Жыл бұрын

    I’m glad to hear that!

  • @mortthepirate6318
    @mortthepirate6318 Жыл бұрын

    This was great! Do you plan on doing any non- D&D settings? If love to hear your take on my favorite fantasy setting: Creation, the setting for the game Exalted

  • @mrmuffins951
    @mrmuffins951 Жыл бұрын

    What I like about the forgotten realms is that is has some cool aspects of other settings merged into it. It gets all the excitement and variety plus you can technically travel from ravenloft to spelljammer in the same campaign. In addition to those two, it also has the underdark from greyhawk, dragonborn and plot-driven adventures like dragonlance, and it’s moving away from races having typical alignment like exandria. And I’m sure some of that’s inaccurate, but 5e is my first edition, and forgotten realms was my gateway into fantasy.

  • @phatcavy98
    @phatcavy98 Жыл бұрын

    I love that you mentioned that free audio book. To this day I will never forget Ice-T trying to read Menzoberranzan. It was fantastic.

  • @xdevantx5870

    @xdevantx5870

    6 ай бұрын

    Is that the book he was talking about? Ice-T's video on doing that was hilarious.

  • @ryanheffelfinger1956
    @ryanheffelfinger1956 Жыл бұрын

    I’d love to see you cover my favorite indie setting Yoon Suin. They just had a kickstarter for the second edition.

  • @SupergeekMike

    @SupergeekMike

    Жыл бұрын

    Ooh I’ll add it to my list of settings to check out!

  • @luketfer
    @luketfer Жыл бұрын

    Nerdy D&D trivia. The first printing of D&D had Blackmoor (which got rolled into Mystara later down the line and as such hasn't been an independant setting since) as the default setting, 2nd edition had two default settings, the 'Advanced' setting was Greyhawk while the 'Basic/BECMI' setting was Mystara. 3/3.5e was still Greyhawk, 4th was Nentir Vale and 5th was Forgotten realms. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is the oddity in that whilst we have a lot of setting books for 5e that got no adventure book, GoS is an adventure without a setting book, Ghosts of Saltmarsh is explicitly set in Greyhawk but there has been no Greyhawk setting book published during 5e.

  • @Felsidian
    @Felsidian Жыл бұрын

    I 100% agree with something you’ve said in a previous video, the gist being “Forgotten Realms feels like a world created specifically for adventurers.” That’s why I’m not a fan of it; the world itself seems to know you are an adventurer and wants to give you magic items. The mostly low-magic way it’s presented in Baldur’s Gate 1 is a lot better in my opinion, though I have to concede that the overall generic feel and abundance of magic stuff does lend itself to a default setting feel: You can’t avoid doing D&D stuff while you’re playing in FG. The high-magic vibe is what I think really bothers me about it. Every major NPC has tons of treasure and magic items and, whether true or not, it feels like there is a magic shop on every corner of every town. The funny thing about this is that I’ve always felt they could make it work, make it make sense, if they just leaned more heavily into the Time of Troubles. Explicitly tell me that the world was low-magic BEFORE the ToT and I probably wouldn’t complain. And yeah… names like “Lord Nasher Alagondar” are awful. Great video!

  • @alanthomasgramont
    @alanthomasgramont Жыл бұрын

    I use the 4th edition version of Faerun for my game. There are a ton of resources for the 4th edition and they are dirt cheap. So when the players go to Helm’s Hold, they find an adventure hook about the legacy of the spellplague and find classic settings like Scar Alley. And I don’t read all the sources from those books. I’m not an avid reader. Instead, I ready the intro, the first two paragraphs from each area, and then drill down into maybe my favorite 10 pages of one or two sections and call it good. That same book from 4th edition outlines what is in the Neverwinter woods, so the PCs later discover an outpost from the ancient elves who once inhabited the forest.

  • @daviddaspit4166
    @daviddaspit41665 ай бұрын

    Good points. I’m contemplating running a game and I’m looking at the old 1e “modules” that aren’t set anywhere and can be dropped into any “world”.

  • @RoninCatholic
    @RoninCatholic11 ай бұрын

    My own introduction freely mixed locations and monsters from Toril, Krynn, Oerth, Mystara, unnamed fantasy worlds from other sources, and the imaginations of not just the DM but the entire table. I was allowed to play a two foot tall anthropomorphic fox with bat wings, a Paladin who had been an apprentice wizard. Every single dungeon used a map suspiciously similar to the HeroQuest board with the doors (we had to search for) being on different segments of wall. We loved it and played multiple campaigns. Being 13 and younger, we had a pretty loose grasp on the rules anyway. A full caster could always cast 3rd level spells at level 3, 2nd level spells at level 2, and 1st level spells at level 1. We still found martial types and healers to perform the best in spite of what's objectively a huge buff to arguably the most powerful class (from the perspective of those with deep mastery of the rules, of course).

  • @adampender2482
    @adampender2482 Жыл бұрын

    Not normally my kind of content bc I only play 1e/2e AD&D but you got a thumbs up for the copy of 11/22/63 behind you. King Multiverse for the win

  • @xMEGALUCASx
    @xMEGALUCASx Жыл бұрын

    Wholeheartedly agree. I personally don't care for Forgotten Realms, though that may be mostly due to unfamiliarity on my part. On a related note, I'm super curious about your thoughts on Eberron!

  • @zippomage

    @zippomage

    Жыл бұрын

    the easiest lesson I can teach you about FR follows the most common question one might ask "Oooh, what's over there?" Oh, that's a long ago explored forest, it has a ruined castle just picked clean of any loot you might want. Nothing is unexplored, everything is already discovered.

  • @Wolfbane971
    @Wolfbane971 Жыл бұрын

    What do you think of Eberron(the best setting)

  • @sarahlanger2605
    @sarahlanger2605 Жыл бұрын

    I so agree. I came into DnD with 5e, and for some time I just wanted a short introduction to the world... And I couldn't find it. I just made up my own setting, sort of, and play there. Great video! Hope to see more 🙂

  • @schroecat1

    @schroecat1

    Жыл бұрын

    That's the best way to play D&D. Make it up as you go. XD

  • @tntori5079
    @tntori507910 ай бұрын

    TLDR - Love the FR, liked the video, disagreed, but still liked it. Personally I love the FR, and I actually disagree with you here - however your points were really well stated and I still enjoyed the video. Credit there! I can kinda see where your coming from and understand why you'd feel that way. Even though I love the realms, I would not dislike if the 'default' for DnD was something else. It would give new DMs the feeling that they can choose what they want to do. Per your request: I highly recommend the MrRhexx lore series. It's a good audiobook/podcast audio experience but if you do watch the artwork is incredible and inspiring. My knowledge of FR is almost exclusively from that series and I only found it about 3 months ago (June 2023). To me this series is what makes FR the inspiration and reason I actually moved my campaigns into it. Context: I've been DMing since before 5th edition (I skipped 4th came from 3.5) and (until next Friday) have never run any official DnD modules/content. Literally everything I did was homebrew/homemade. Next Friday I'll run Curse of Strahd for the first time - my first module and FR content. Again I love the realms and there's plenty there for old DMs and plenty of room for new DMS but!!! It all depends on how it's presented.

  • @ingridwolfe7016
    @ingridwolfe70162 ай бұрын

    The more of these I watch, the more I feel like I'm doing pretty well as a DM and the more I want to recommend your channel to a friend who could really use this advice

  • @toddbailey8474
    @toddbailey8474 Жыл бұрын

    I think it would be a really fun series looking at different dnd settings and compareing them

  • @kweh8122
    @kweh8122 Жыл бұрын

    My experience with the Forgotten Realms is somewhat limited, and also partly homebrew: One of my DMs does an extremely great job of adapting existing campaign settings to fit a specific story he wants to tell, and those campaigns are...super, super fun. But aside from his extreme expansion of Curse of Strahd, and the way we handled it causing enormous ripples he made two and a half additional campaigns out of, I don't know that anything he did strictly needed to be the Forgotten Realms campaigns. Realizing this is what made me really appreciate your point that the FR does not need to be the default setting. I really like how you address the things about the setting you think are good when you state your opinion. It's something I see and appreciate in most of your videos. I suppose at the end of the day the thing I can most confidently say is a strength of the Forgotten Realms (specifically the Sword Coast, as the rest of the world is not nearly so well-defined), is that it has a really solid map to look at, and as long as you don't have someone too obsessed with the lore of the Sword Coast at your table, you can use that already-completed, detailed map for inspiration to tell your own story. Oh, also Luskan is cool, and pirate kings controlling the city is rad as heck. Although...now that I just looked it up real briefly, it seems that city in particular was heavily modified by my DM, specifically it seems like he made a pre-spellplague version of Luskan in a post-spellplague world.

  • @r.downgrade5836
    @r.downgrade5836 Жыл бұрын

    'Motes of light'. That's the first time I've heard someone describe it like that, but I knew exactly what you meant when you said it. Thank you.

  • @MethosJK9
    @MethosJK9 Жыл бұрын

    I would love to watch a video where you have a conversation with Jorphdan about the lore of the Forgotten Realms. He has a whole video series about it and I'm curious to hear your takes on the pieces that speak to you the most.

  • @julianbecker4351

    @julianbecker4351

    Жыл бұрын

    or MrRexx the other big Forgotten Realms lore KZreadr, either way both of these know the realms so much better than what Wizzard is puplishing these days, wich in turn is the biggest strike against the realms. Wizzards may see them as their standart setting, but they sure aren't giving new DMs the tools to dive deep into this rich world

  • @Lngbrdninjamasta
    @Lngbrdninjamasta Жыл бұрын

    This is one of the reasons I have loved the Exandria setting so much. I understand the lore better than my players. While there r well defined locations, there is much they leave vague for me to create & flesh out. An example is the Pallid grove. There is maybe a paragraph or two about its history then nothing else. It's an entire even kingdom ripe for my creation.

  • @loesdevries152
    @loesdevries152 Жыл бұрын

    I'm fairly new to D&D, and what I really missed with my first group was some background info on the world. We were playing Lost Mines of Phandelver, and I wanted my character to be connected to the world. I want the details to be right, so as a cleric I want to make sure there is actually a temple for my deity in the town/city I'm from. I don't know about the available info for other settings, but I actually found it quite difficult to figure it all out with what the internet gave me. Now, the DM from my second group had the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide and that helped me somewhat for creating that character and his background, but it still didn't tell me what it was like living in the region and most of the history. Also to be fair, I didn't even know there was apparently a lot of lore, and that has gotten me curious but I wouldn't even know where to start. So, any tips for like glossary documents about the lore would be greatly appreciated! What's funny is, I started writing this comment before watching most of the video and Mike keeps highlighting the things I've struggled with. So I guess I can agree?

  • @benjackson-ellery4267

    @benjackson-ellery4267

    Жыл бұрын

    Try and get hold of the third edition campaign setting if you are looking to dive deep. It's still the gold standard when it comes to setting books.

  • @loesdevries152

    @loesdevries152

    Жыл бұрын

    @@benjackson-ellery4267 thanks, I'll check it out!

  • @_bats_
    @_bats_ Жыл бұрын

    I almost feel like there doesn't even need to be a default campaign setting. Writing an adventure like LMoP wouldn't be hard to do in a setting-agnostic way (at least, widely applicable to many different settings). I feel like presenting it as part of FR kind of impresses on DMs that they should really know more about this setting to be able to answer player questions about the world from a position of authority. Furthermore, I always see tons of weird comments online where people are asking if X or Y are permissible to do in their games when those are FR-specific bits of lore rather than actual game mechanics; many newer D&D players don't really fully understand that the game mechanics and lore can be completely separated from one another. Setting-agnostic starter adventures allow you to drop them in to any other setting without much or any work really needed, and also make it much more explicit to new DMs that they are encouraged to build their own worlds in which to run their games.

  • @adamwhitehead7289

    @adamwhitehead7289

    9 ай бұрын

    This was always the way D&D worked. The original 1974 material had zero mention of any kind of setting at all, and Arneson and Gygax were confused when people started asking them what world these things were going on in. "World? You're going into a dungeon to steal treasure from a dragon, why do you want to know about the geopolitics of the local village?" But it's a question that kept coming up and their own players started asking them, so they created their own settings at a low level of detail (Gygax infamously couldn't be bothered to create something, so traced over a map of Michigan with the Free City of Greyhawk as Chicago and turned the map 90 degrees and called it a day). Greyhawk got some vague mentions in adventures, particularly in the late 1970s, but Gygax didn't release even a brief setting guide until 1980 and a full setting guide until 1983, so D&D literally spent almost the first ten years of its existence without any kind of campaign setting, default or optional. And then the floodgates opened and TSR released Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, Mystara, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright etc. But none of them were default. 3E nominally used Greyhawk as a default setting but really didn't flesh out the setting at all in any of the basic books (it only got fleshed out in a brief Greyhawk Gazetteer and later the Living Greyhawk sourcebook and that was basically it) and the Forgotten Realms 3E range massively outsold it (and to be fair the 3E FR Campaign Setting book might be the best worldbuilding book either TSR or WotC have ever released) so mentions of Greyhawk vanished quite early on, but it still wasn't default. 5E is the first time that FR elements are mentioned in the PHB, DMG and MM. Mid-5E it did feel like they were moving away from FR as the default setting, and started fleshing out things like Saltmarsh as a generic campaign location (it is very nominally set in Greyhawk, but given there has been zero Greyhawk material released for almost twenty years, they really don't dwell on that) and bringing back other settings in one-off books like Eberron, but they do seem to have recently snapped back to FR, possibly because of the movie and Baldur's Gate III.

  • @AlexnicholasBlakely
    @AlexnicholasBlakely Жыл бұрын

    After a big gap away from dnd, I resumed the adventure in 5e in the classic setting starting with the dragon of icespire peak, which evolved into a sandbox world adventure that's been running for 2 years. Originally overwhelmed with trying to keep to the book in regards to lore I have since relaxed that stress. I agree with your points exactly, though what I do like is I can just Google something about a question a player asks or a curious thing in my prep and there's lore on it usually and Its a spring board for my own themes, cherry picking the best elements or running away with an idea the original inspired.

  • @luclin92
    @luclin92 Жыл бұрын

    Reminds me that I immediately said out loud that my version of the sword coast does not have everything that is the same as the forgotten realms, since I knew my players would go nuts creating their own characters, and have made some changes to the main city of the campaign, since we are playing rise of Tiamat. (Since I am using the tiamat books as a way to learn what I need for a campaign, at least when it comes to setpieces).

  • @roguevirus
    @roguevirus Жыл бұрын

    You're on the mark with Greyhawk's involvement with 3.0/3.5

  • @SupergeekMike

    @SupergeekMike

    Жыл бұрын

    Thanks! That’s a relief to hear ☺️

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