Why is it so widely bashed and hated? It doesn't really seem like it deserves all this vitriol

Why is it so widely bashed and hated? It doesn't really seem like it deserves all this vitriol.

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A combination of high-level characters everywhere, every single bit of land and cities and plots already mapped and decided, and boring ren-faire high-magic all over the place.

There's really nothing there for your first level party to do without a whole lot of fucking around with the canon.

It is very Ironic that Ed Greenwood talked about how Dragonlance setting had too much `power` in it, with heroes taking the major roles, leaving players to do scrap work, he intended Forgotten Realms to be the exact opposite, but at the end it become even a shitty hero playground than dragonlance.
Forgotten Reams was THE generic campaign setting in the 90s, It enjoyed the TSR policy of pumping novels and sourcebooks in early 90s and baldurs gate game popularity of later 90s early 00s. Wizards policy of supporting it also bolstered its popularity.

But this popularity made the setting saturated, It is nice to imho to have detailed histories and characters etc for almost all places, some disagree with this and argue for a more vague setting that leaves GM's leeway to improvise (like pathfinders Golarion) but I prefer having a rich background and lore, again this is debatable.
What is not debatable imho is the Heroes, almost every place has major players, heroes etc and due to the novels popularity, it kinda pushes the players towards `why should I do this, when elminster can come` bullshittery. This became so bad that ed greenwood talked about it in the 3rd campaign setting, pic very much related.

cont.

I read all the books and played it exclusively the first 3 years I played D&D. Overtime I just got burnt out on the setting. I still like it for what it is though. I just don't like playing in it anymore.

Other faults include
-Some places not carved out good (Like Chult)
-Some places basically `world history but in fantasy setting` like pirates of the fallen stars, it is basically Caribbean, (Ill forgive Mulhorand a little bit due to some creativity) I wish they had more original places/cultures like Thay or played with tropes a little bit. For example their generic knightly kingdom, Cormryr is not totally generic but could have been improved.
-Some shitty novels
-Too much change, gods come and go, your favorite place can be destroyed or your goddess can be killed by a novelist who never wrote about fr before, entire 4th edition raped Forgotten Realms so hard that they had to revert back to nearly the same 3rd edition campaign setting with the 5th. I do believe damage was done in 4th and many players left for good
-Shitty decisions after mid 2000s by Wizards, really hurt the game, 4th edition mechanics fucked up the dnd popularity, moving players away to pathfinder etc. 4th edition fr as I said above, fucked up FR, moving players away to other settings.
This is very sad, because I remember back in the good olde days of late 90s early 2000s almost everyone know about the FR lore, Bane-Azuth-Halruaa-MarrySuezt Do'urden were common knowledge. Baldurs Gate had little exposition because it assumed you knew a lot if not everything about the world beforehand. But sadly post mid 2000s decisions caused a general decine of FR, only nowadays there is an resurging interest due to being official 5th edition setting, but even now it is not supported as if it was supported back in 90s
-In similar way games also couldnt keep up, nwn2 was dissapointing in multiplayer, the only good FR vidya product post 2005 was the mask of the betrayer and thats it, I wish nwn2 could have kept the nwn1 multiplayer aspect, or more rpgs like baldurs gate came forth, But many devs began to create their own worlds back then, in order to own their IP

It's basically babbys first fantasy setting filled with Mary Sue author inserts.

Because the chans hate things in proportion to how often we see other people liking things we don't like, not in proportion to actual quality. Forgotten Realms is popular so people see it everywhere, which if a channer doesn't love it (and it's a pretty meh setting, so nobody *loves* it) they will quickly start to hate it.

It was pretty great back in the first edition, though. Back in the day with less shit detailed, less heroes around, and less magic bullshit. The Time of Troubles is what started the gradual downhill from which it couldn't recover.

Nevertheless I do believe FR is a world that should be cherished, It became the generic setting and in many aspect it still is the generic setting, a lot of the tropes have their origins in FR.
A second reason to love it is due to the amount of sources, this can be both a blessing and a curse (depending on the quality) but you will rarely find a setting that is as detailed and have material numbers that rival Forgotten Reams. If its not in a vidya game then its in a sourcebook, if its not there then its in some old 2004 article which you can get from wizards's archive site, if its not there then Ed Greenwodo or some other writer proably talked about it in candlekeep forums.

Sadly I dont play or read about it as much as I want to but I have been following realms for about 20 years, It never ceases to amaze me that when I pick an obscure location in the map, that I never heard of, I can findd at least few paragraphs about that location, or bits of history I have never heard of but was written back in 96.

First edition was indeed different, Ed talked about this also iirc, he wanted to make the place more connected to earth and to have a more renaissance rather than middle ages feeling. But his ideas were pushed away by TSR with 2nd edition.

I still like 2nd edition FR though, though less due to the butcher and more due to the amount of new material they put forward. And whatever they fucked up they certainly did not fucked up as much as they did in 4th edition.

I do agree with the hero/magic/marrysue saturation though my ideal campaign setting would be more detailed and less vague than pathfinders golarion, but It would have less heroes and powerfull magic/items than in Forgotten realms, But I couldn't manage to find such a setting. Glorantha comes close but I couldnt warm myself to myth (not gods imho, but mythology) based bronze age setting.

Agreed on most counts. I like 1e FR most but the 2e one still has plenty of ideas to mine on - although the ridiculously powerful specialist priests, with their special powers and just about all spheres, always need to be toned back a notch.

It's popular.

This-
alltimelines.com/forgotten-realms/
This, is why.

Exalted setting has had "the 1000 dooms" problem for a long-ass time: too much active, high-powered villains, enemies and generally big cheese guys to deal with.
FR is bigger, has even more power, and has it much worse.

I never looked into the game mechanics deeply, what bothered me the lack of roleplay/other information about priests. The rituals the festivals their duties poltiics etc were mentioned but they were very brief.

My inner nerd cried when I played Pillars of Eternity & Read its lorebook. The amount of detail in religion, how their priest worked, how they interacted with the populace, How a chosen of a `good god` caused a lot of trouble caused the religion tobe deemed evil by the populace he attacked, priest massacred and religion suppressed, it was also a nice touch that your companion although followed the same god did not agreed with his extremist followers If only FR had that same amount of roleplay lore, rather than stats and more stats about items and spells (maybe another personal complaint)

the thing I like most about the setting is that he baddies aside from being competent. will at times learn and find new ways to get to their goals if summon undead army failed for the 5th time.
I allows you to play an evil campain with sane people and being forced to go down the insane CE path.
Capable evil factions also gives the players aposing them more satisfaction and investment.

There is a youtube series, Realms Remembered that reads the FR books in the setting chronological order. It started around 2011, and with occasonal periods of breaks and even skipping a book or two, it is still not finished. The guy is at 1470s iirc, so hopefully will end soon.
I'm curious about what he thinks about the realm books in general, which books were the best, which are the hidden gems etc. Can't wait to ask.

I don't know... when I look at the Zhentarim, "capable" is not the first word that comes to mind.

Because Greyhawk for life nigga.

I love it. It's comfy with a lot of lore to help you get a headstart as a DM, but also vague enough (at least in the 5e SCAG) that you can switch some things here and there to spice it up a little bit.

>Put your friends/sons characters as overpowered npcs in your game
>Players so unoriginal ones character is named Male Elf
>M.elf becomes famous due to Gygaxian nepotism
>Melf's Acid Arrow becomes a well knon d&d spell

4-or three of their number are dead now, and the future of the plane ends up with like two gods there left.

Also, there are 3 Types of Death Knight, Oerth's Demogorgon ones, General, and Dragonlance.

Why is Death Knighthood NOT a class feature for a Blackguard yet?

>Manshoon got all the bitches in da house!

Which Manshoon?

OG, obviously. Orbakh a bitch.

It's fine if you avoid the North.

Try running a game in the Old Empires. Nothing happens there.

Because it is THE cliche DnD setting. But I never had a huge issue with it. Just ignore the shit you dislike and modify it at your leisure. This is why ttrpg lore never bothered me. When nothing stops me from going "yeah, nah fuck that" or lets me make my own setting for my own needs, who gives a fuck?

If you try to stick to the setting a lot you run into issues others have said before. In which case FR is a well travelled path so you're a real small fish in a big sea. But why would you do that if it bothered you? Save that for the novels or games and lore stuff. Why feel the need to include all these people in a FR setting when you don't have to and can literally just start off fresh?

Did everyone forget that this is a game of pretend where you can retcon or add in whatever the hell you want?

>There's really nothing there for your first level party to do without a whole lot of fucking around with the canon.

Ftfy

There's a cave...it has goblins inside. Enough goblins for a lv 1 or even a lv 2 party.

Did that change canon?

Idiot.

Yes, because you're supposed to die.

One, the setting's oversaturated, as another anons have elaborated. Everything tends to feel either "done" or "not worth doing - like in Dragonlance, it feels like you can't shine because there's already all these Big Name Heroes who should be handling things or who make you feel like a chump handling the stuff they can't be bothered with.

Two, and perhaps more importantly, the setting is a breeding ground for that particular horror, the novel fanatic fanboy, who absolutely rages if you don't make everything *exactly* word-perfectly accurate to the setting.

Dragonlance had the same problem. Planescape fans were similarly obnoxious, but for different reasons. Few other settings had that kind of rabid fandom.

...is that loss.book?

Yeah I think so. Fucking loss, pops up everywhere.

Good taste.

Gotta give them points in hiring colourful characters.

This. All my FR knowledge comes from the SCAG, a few wikis, the 2e guide to Unapproachable East, a few hours of Baldur's Gate, and the Dark Elf trilogy (which I didn't finish, but should, but haven't really been inspired to).

I mainly set my campaign in Rashemen/Thay, with a journey to the Feywild, a little bit of the Sword Coast and Warlock's Crypt, and a ride on a Nautiloid back to Thay for a raid on the Doomvault. The only FR character in my campaign is Szass Tam, who I plan on being the final boss.

And the players are working for Nerull, the husk of the murdered god of death from the Greyhawk setting, who has come to Toril to seek a means to resurrection, and has found it in the players.

Once they finish the current campaign, their characters will take off in the party nautiloid journeying the multiverse seeking new minions and artifacts of power. Those new minions will be the PCs in my future campaigns.

Does it make much coherent sense? No. Do I properly portray the world of Faerun? Hell no. Are my players and I having fun? Fuck yes.

I understand the urge to make one's campaign conform perfectly to "canon", but it's important to remember that a script does not make a play. We don't have Shakespeare's plays (the live performances, forever lost to time), we have the skeletons of his plays (the scripts), which different actors and directors alter, rearrange, cut, and embellish to their own tastes and needs. Settings are the same: they're a structure upon which you can build your campaign, but they are not the campaign itself.

Because the Realms in question are all Magical.

But I love the north. Icewind Dale is the best bit.

>tfw campaign opener was in 1374
>Year of Rogue Dragons
>bay of Chessenta, we're all in a tavern
>suddenly a giant quasi-god red dragon appears and starts fucking everything up midway through the opening monologue

Nice opening, basically tore us adrift right from the start. Only person annoyed was the FRfag That Guy who'd written a three page detailed summary of his character's life in Chessenta, only to have it torn away.

In fairness, we were warned that we likely wouldn't be in Chessenta for more than one or two sessions.

As everyone else has said, FR gets a lot of flak for being generic and bland. Even back in the TSR days it was pretty much the Go-To generic fantasy setting, which was both it's strength and it's curse.

Icewind Dale is best before Drizzt arrives. The stories of the fall of the White Dragon matriarchs and patriarchs, for example.

The video game, too. I plugged Kuldahar out of it. A lovely place.

The thing I hate about FR is its metaplot. I got into FR with Baldur's Gate, which I first played in 2006. Then I read some lore on it and I felt like I knew the setting well enough. Then metaplot happens on the old Wizards site and suddenly there are all these "Shou towns" popping up and my players are all like, whoa, where did all this kung fu come from?

Why being Generic is bad? I would understand your complain 20 years ago, but nowadays I feel the market is saturated with `unique` settings. Not to mention even in 90s there were plenty of settings that moved away from generic fantasy, Darksun, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Planescape, Birthright etc.


It is nice to have one big old grand setting imho, I'm glad wizards is using FR officially in the 5th edition (Worried they would use, eberron or some unknown newly crated setting)

Nothing wrong about generic in my mind. I like generic. It's just that FR's brand of generic also includes far too many epic-level characters to get anything done, and far too restrictive metaplot to fit your characters anywhere.

I've never understood why that's a problem.

You're the dm, it's your game and your setting now.
The big heroes can't come beaus they're doing their own shit, or they don't care, or they're dead because you say so.

Sure you can have some of the metaplot but if you don't want to you don't have to.

That said yeah you sometimes get the autists who will get mad if it's not exactly as in the books. But why are you playing with that guy?

>But why are you playing with that guy?

Because I AM that guy.

I feel that once something was written in the books, it happened. I've got these crazy hang-ups about going against what's once been established as canon in the setting, and I find myself much rather just trying to work around it instead.

My problem with Forgotten Realms:
That the setting is too much of a kitchen sink.
That the setting veers between being too historically detailed in some places and not detailed enough in others.
That the setting is dominated by pet NPCs and ex-PCs.
The setting is too cluttered.
That the in game history reflects changes in editions.
Parts of it feel like a modern interpretation of a pre-industrial setting.

Curiously I found an easy fix by taking the setting and inflicting an ice age on it.

Whats your favorite setting?

Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

It's basically the exact opposite of Forgotten Realms, i.e. an excellent Points of Light where the player characters can do just about what they want without some high-level ponce or a secret society getting in the way, where all those detailed kingdoms are replaced with broad-strokes city-states and gonzo aliens and shit.

It's great, look it up.

Birthright was awesome in its way. But it needed a rules update. It kept straining against 2nd edition rules.

...

Because it is so overdone. It got the most setting content for three editions. Even when Greyhawk was sort of the default 3E setting, FR got so much more content. If Eberron hadn't come around, it would have been the only setting to get any significant amount of 3E content.

>Why being Generic is bad?
You can probably list off five campaigns that you loved and five that you hated but have you truly sat down to consider the campaigns that are just so basic that they don't do anything one way or the other?

That's because in the world of entertainment, it's better to be loved or hated than forgotten.

I don't know, not saying this to prove you wrong or anything, but I do have a `meh` setting

I really really really tried to like Golarion, back in the days of 4th edition. Forgotten realms was fucked. Golarion at first seemed interesting, but most sourcebooks were very vague and it felt `instanced` there was game of thrones land, conan and robots land, vikings land, ravenloft land etc but they were not connected. Compare it with Forgotten Realms, Thay is connected to Mulhorand, Halruaa is connected with Netheril, Waterdeep influences the dalelands etc etc even Isolated places like Chult have some relation (Their god making a deal with other gods to leave chult aone)

Did I forget Golarion? No not at all, this proves your point probably.

That's Sememmon, not Manshoon. Though admittedly those glorious shoulder ruffles might have tricked you.

Sememnon was odd, having a neutral chaacter in an evil organization

Another weird fact, he is one of the rare human `heroes` in FR that is not +6'2 like elminster and manshoon. Literally the only manlet in the 3rd edition sourcebook

The Harpers single-handedly turn the entire setting into shit.

They basically don't allow any huge change to it, so what's the party to do?

because it's popular

Harpers are not all powerfull, nor they have a druidic sense of balance and status quo. They try to change the world, they win some and they lose some as with almost all other factions.
I might agree on the boring equilibrium achieved due to no faction becoming dominant and every faction being stale and waging wars that will no way make or break another faction. Then again people will be pissed off If you told them Red wizards destroyed harpers or vice versa

Hipster

I have no problem with FR.