There's a reason I prefer to use the term "Vanilla Fantasy" over the perhaps more commonly accepted "Generic Fantasy." And that reason is The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (Greenwood, Reynolds, Williams, and Heinsoo). This is corebook-implied-setting D&D in its purest form, but also the single most specific fantasy book I've ever read. It is gleefully specific. Maybe even sadistically specific. It's got a 4-page long timeline, full of canon events, locations, and characters. Want to know when Castle Waterdeep was built and how long that is after the location of the future city of Waterdeep was first settled? This book has you covered.
There's an unapproachable grandeur here. In many ways, it's a perfect rpg supplement. And I don't use that word lightly. It's hard to imagine a book with more D&D per page. It may not be physically possible. There's a sidebar which lists 23 "Lost Empires." Later, over a stretch of several pages, we get more than 40 example dungeons. And neither of those things is even in the setting chapter. The "Geography" chapter takes up half the book and has literally hundreds of specific locations, each with their own potential rpg plot. You buy this book because you want to play a game of D&D, and it gives you a lifetime of D&D games to choose from.
It's a shame, then, that so many of these choices are basically interchangeable. That's the dark side of specificity - you can have a thousand snowflakes, each of them unique, but you need to put them under a microscope to appreciate it. Did we really need 11 fucking 'Dales? Eleven?!
I mean, yeah, probably. My nose would be growing pretty long if I tried to claim I was against that sort of thing in the abstract. The whole reason my rpg collection is this big and unwieldy is because I am exactly the sort of person to care about the nuanced differences between all 11 'Dales. However, in the context of this specific book, I'm not sure having such a thorough list was worth butchering your presentation of Moonshae.
As the DM chapter would have it, "The Moonshae Isles offer a locale with a Celtic or Viking flavor. Chult in the far south could be home to a campaign featuring primitive technology (not to mention marauding dinosaurs). Calimshan and the Vilhon Reach offer settings similar to that of The Arabian Nights. The eastern end of the Sea of Fallen Stars has a Mediterranean or North African flavor."
Or, to put it in the words of the Geography chapter, lolwut?
I mean, it's there. D&D's long history of racial coding is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but if you know that's what they were going for, you can see how they were going for it. Take Calisham. "Its people are heirs to an old empire founded by genies . . . renowned for its chauvinism, exotic markets, thieves' guilds, decadent harems, desert landscapes, and wealthy ruling class, as well its enormous population and many slaves."
First of all, yikes. Second of all, doing a ctrl+F for the word "wizard" and replacing it with the word "genie" does not an Arabian Nights-inspired setting make. We're still getting the same kind of information, presented in the same list-based format. We've still got orcs and dragons. One of the antagonist plots involves "powerful undead spellcasters (including a blue dracolich)." Almost the entire section could be transported unchanged to the vicinity of Waterdeep . . . and that's the most distinctive one. If you can find a hair's worth of difference between Moonshae and Shadowdale, based only on this book's text, you are a much more perceptive reader than I am.
It's a problem that's most apparent when the book "tries" to expand beyond its vanilla fantasy wheelhouse, but it's persistent throughout the whole thing. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting does not give you the tools to engage the setting from a genre level. It eschews spectacle in favor of a flood of proper nouns. In glorying in the specific, it foreswears the power of the abstract. Like, maybe a list of 40+ dungeons wouldn't be necessary if it just took a couple extra pages to explain what a dungeon was supposed to be.
But would addressing those issues leave us with a better book, overall? That's a question that's tough to answer. On the one hand, yes, obviously. But on the other hand, we would be losing the beauty of a pure thing. I called it "perfect" before and I meant it. This book is the epitome of "loredump as worldbuilding." And that's something that certain playstyles can get a lot of use out of. Much like an old-school module will have a series of connected rooms, all described down to the last piece of furniture, in order to facilitate a very direct and literalist style of engagement, the Faerun Gazetteer is like an old-school worldmap, connecting those old-school dungeons. It creates space for "player skill" in the form of knowing the lore, even if it sometimes comes at the price of making its locations feel like geography-scale furniture.
Although, I would be remiss if I didn't address the fact that some percentage of this worldbuilding is less old-school "the world is established even if the PCs aren't there to see it" and more "we've got hundreds of books worth of material and if we leave out someone's favorite location, we'll probably hear about it." There are definitely areas that have been transparently Touched by Metaplot, and you can usually tell which ones they are by the fact that they are long on incident and short on atmosphere. Why does Citadel of the Raven get a longer entry than Balder's Gate? Presumably because Fzoul Chembryl was featured in more than a half-dozen novels and short stories (actually, about a dozen by now, but half of them were published post-2001).
As far as metaplots go, Forgotten Realms actually seems to use a fairly light touch. It's not quite as heavy-handed as FASA or White Wolf, and it definitely doesn't drive the whole setting, like with Dragonlance. It just sort of peeks in every now and again, as if to say, "wow, that happened." I think it might be a function of its over-abundance of detail. Oh, the Tuigan horde is invading and Cormyr has to ally with the Dalelands and Sembia to fight them off? Well, Amn and Neverwinter barely noticed. Likewise, you can have an entire Avatar Crisis, where the gods are forced to take mortal form and battle it out until they learn the true meaning of personal responsibility, and it's kind of a shrug. A few of them died, and some powerful mortals stepped in to take their place. There's a sense that none of this shit is load-bearing.
That's the main strength of Forgotten Realms as a setting - it's a world where a lot of D&D is happening, everywhere, all the time. Its weakness is that it's mostly just D&D. Wherever you go, there's a good chance that you and 3-5 of your friends are going to travel through monster-infested wilderness to find monster-infested ruins and plunder them for gold and magic items. You could also do political intrigue, slice of life, philosophical transhumanism, or even punk, but you'd be building almost everything from scratch.
As an entry point to the series, I think the AD&D boxed set works better, despite being an objectively inferior book. The 3e book has smoothed out many of the setting's rough edges and is much more dialed-in to the Forgotten Realms' voice, but I think its greater sophistication wound up making me feel more like an outsider to the fandom. Plus, the gray box had elves riding giant butterflies, which is a baffling omission from the new edition.
Overall, this is another one of those books that I admired a lot more than I enjoyed. It's something that gets the fundamental construction of a setting book exactly right while being primarily about a setting I don't particularly like. Strangely, though, I think I might be okay with reading specialized Forgotten Realms supplements about individual areas of the setting. I think a tighter focus would inspire the authors to try and justify their choices, whereas, like I said about the previous version of the setting, Forgotten Realms as a whole often acts like it doesn't need to justify shit.
Ukss Contribution: One day a year, the air god Shaundakul turns his priests into mist and lets the wind blow them to some random location, where they will reform and have to figure out what to do on their own. I like it because it's both an incredibly rude thing for the god to do and something that's probably a primary motivation for people becoming priests in the first place.
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