Oh, man. These Forgotten Realms books are putting me through the wringer. I don't know what it is. Normally, I'm a glutton for lore. It's a big reason why I try and collect full sets. But there's something about this setting's lore that is aimed straight at the apathy center of my brain. It's actually kind of a mystery, because the Realms have plenty of interesting things going on. For example, this very book, Races of Faerun (Eric L Boyd, Matt Forbeck, James Jacobs), introduces the idea that the Gold Dwarves of the Great Rift ride on hippogriffs and then jump off their steeds mid-air to divebomb their enemies with specialized wingsuits. There's a whole prestige class that revolves around this activity. And somehow, it took me so by surprise that I actually pulled the Campaign Setting off the shelf to see if it was previously mentioned. Nope. Then I thought maybe it had appeared earlier in this book and I just glossed over it. This is the entirety of what the Gold Dwarf section had to say about the matter, "The hippogriff-mounted skyriders of the Great Rift are known to employ drogue wings (see appendix) and exotic military saddles." The Great Rift Skyguard wasn't even mentioned among the suggested prestige classes! You've got some dope-ass Red Bull-style shit going on and you don't even see it until the appendix. But it's vitally important that you mention five different human societies they've traded with over the last ten thousand years.
I think this might be the key to understanding my ambivalence. The way these entries are written, it's like Every Single Detail is of The Exact Same Importance. They've got this bucket-full of proper nouns and a meticulously assembled timeline and damnit, they're going to use them. . . and mumble, mumble, oh yeah, the gnomes are walking around strapped up in this medieval fantasy setting.
And by the time you're like, "hey, what was that last part," it usually moves on to the next Equally Important Fact About the World, like a page and a half detailing three thousand years of Damaran history. Who are the Damarans? Where do they live? No one can say.
Okay, that's not fair. The book says quite explicitly - the Great Dale (unrelated to the Dalelands), the Moonsea, the Vast, and a half dozen other locations that are. . . undoubtedly canonical, but I refuse to believe I was expected to come into this knowing where "the Easting Reach" was supposed to be (partial vindication: it was not in the Campaign Setting's index, and probably wasn't in the text, but it was a label on the removable map poster).
And for some reason, most other rpg settings, even the most staunchly conservative vanilla fantasy ones, don't really do this. Like, yes, you start your history at the beginning of time. And yes, your various locations have their share of baggage from The Great Capitalized War. And with enough space to play around in, it all starts to become terribly impenetrable to outsiders. But even amid the most insular, creatively moribund, world-building for the sake of world-building rpg settings, there's still a sense that things have . . . relevance(?). Like, maybe there's too much stuff on the page, but it's all being put down for a reason. Every digression or laser-focus on a picayune detail can nonetheless be traced back to something we have reason to care about.
Perhaps it's me problem. Maybe the reason I'm so aggressively uninterested in these bread-crumb trails is because I have no attachment to any of the stuff at either end. There are things in this setting that I do care about - the Dwarvish colonialism of the Vast that displaced the native orcs (unexplored in this volume) or the hypothetical good version of the Moonshae Isles that understood they are a fundamentally a different genre than regular D&D (admittedly, it would have been a real reach to expect it here) - and it's perfectly imaginable that there's someone out there who feels the same way about Mulhorand (it's Not Egypt in a way that gets a disproportionate amount of wordcount, but it also is coy about its intended genre).
Let's call it a wash. The Forgotten Realms as a whole could do more to sell itself to newcomers, but I, personally, can be a needlessly tough sell.
Now that this harmless anti-fandom griping is out of the way we can move on to more important matters - the book's frequent use of deeply problematic racist tropes. Both the elves and the dwarves have "wild" offshoots who are formerly "civilized" peoples who "descended into barbarism," losing their literacy and most sophisticated technological abilities when they went to live in the jungle. No points for guessing their skin color.
Oh no, the poor Tieflings face suspicion and discrimination everywhere they go . . . but they really are naturally inclined to criminality and wickedness.
And you better believe we get creepy, borderline-eugenics discussions of blood quanta. Half elves still explicitly operate on one-drop logic. You need to have "at least one-eighth elven blood" to qualify for the Spellsinger prestige class.
All told, it's a relatively small portion of the book, and I don't think there was any conscious malice at work. But it would just keep happening, and a lot less deniably than what you'd see in a modern product.
It's hard to put into words, because it's not as crude a matter as "fantasy race X = fantasy race Y" (except when it comes to the Roma . . . there's always a Roma analogue and in Faerun they're called the Gur). Instead, it's like the relationships between the races and the setting are governed by racist modes of thought. Human-on-human racism is wrong, but you can draw a box around a group of creatures (the demihumans) make them "white" and then create a humanoid species for each white "anxiety" about minorities. Who are the cultureless barbarians who lurk beyond the borders of civilization and seek to destroy it (orcs)? Who are the sinister followers of an ancient religion who exploit the fact that they look just like regular people to infiltrate society and weaken it from within (Yuan-ti)? Who are the inferior garbage people who are no match for a decent citizen one-on-one, but who breed so fast that they threaten to overwhelm their betters with superior numbers (goblins)?
There's kind of a double bind. You try to directly critique them by drawing a one-to-one connection between the fantasy race and its most likely real-world inspiration and you will be quite understandably (if perhaps unfairly) accused of being gross. But try to indirectly change or remove them and you run the risk of losing the vibrant culture of re-appropriations, re-imaginings, and deconstructions that grew up around them. Queer gamers have largely embraced tieflings, and so they have to stay, but at least as recently as 2003 their presence in Faerun meant it was sometimes useful for a Player Character to think like a racist.
The trick seems to be trying to thread the needle of woobifying the creatures enough that the racists are visibly disgusted (they don't like orcs, but they like the game with orcs), but not smoothing them down so much that they lose the edge that made them appealing in the first place. Goblins become the fun kind of chaotic garbage-lover. Tieflings still look like they could plausibly do crimes (sexily). And of course we cannot lose the incoherent orc screaming, but maybe it could be FOR JUSTICE!!!
Overall, I can't really recommend this book. It doesn't elevate the material, like at all, and at its best it's just more Forgotten Realms. But I reckon it would take the average gamer multiple decades just to use all the Forgotten Realms we got from the campaign setting. Maybe if you're really into historical minutiae, or you want to bully your DM into letting your gnome character carry a gun. There are some cool feats, prestige classes, and bits of equipment. The heavy aspergillum is straight-up WH40K nonsense (it's a hollow rod with a round, hole-filled head meant for sprinkling holy water, but this one is tough enough to act as a mace and can hold 3 flasks of holy water, for all your vampire-hunting needs). I'm not sure the good parts are worth wading through the dusty old tropes, though.
Ukss Contribution: The coolest thing in the book also neatly demonstrates the mind prison that is D&D-style racial essentialism. The Urdunnir are a dwarvish "subrace" (and it's absolutely unclear what this means from a biological perspective, though in terms of rules they basically have a totally new set of racial abilities). And "Thanks to the blessings of Dumathoin, the urdunnirs can walk through earth and stone as if it were air and shape metal or stone with their hands."
And, obviously, this should be a prestige class, right? I can't be the only one to see this. Call them "Deepearth Mystics" or something and they're a spiritual community that is so in tune with the earth that it gives them special earth themed abilities. That's basically what they are already, but for some reason they need to be physically different than "regular" dwarves. Their relationship with the god is something they're born into, rather than something people can cultivate. Just a tragic waste of potential which probably came about because urdunnirs first appeared in some obscure Monstrous Compendium Appendix. I have a theory that many of the high ECL "monster character" options came about because of AD&D's asymmetric monster statting, so that certain creatures that should just be regular demihumans with class levels (hags, ogre magi, drow, centaurs) are given extra hit dice and/or innate magic abilities when they become PC legal because whoever did the conversion acted on the assumption that the Monster Manual stats represented a 0-level commoner.
Luckily, I don't have to work under that constraint with Ukss and so these mystical earth-lovers can be the disciples of an obscure goblin religious tradition (as a reminder, my personal attempt to avoid falling into the same trap as Races of Faerun is to make all the vanilla fantasy small creatures - dwarves, gnomes, halflings, goblins, etc - into members of the same species, with different cultures and/or personalities).
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