Childhood is idolizing Eberron. Adulthood is realizing Forgotten Realms makes more sense

Jesus 5e ruined that map and the setting as a whole. Fuck 5e FR, 2e is the only way to play.

Eberron makes more sense specifically if you assume D&D3.5e and it's wonkiness are part of the world.
Forgotten Realms made more sense in the early AD&D era, but made even more sense when Greenwood ignored the gamerules, and just wrote a setting, since he wanted sorcerers since the beginning but D&D only had wizards back then.

you posted this on the wrong board m8
or this is pic related

The original FR gray box is great. It's designed to be played in, things are left vague or for the DM to decide, there are plenty of ideas for adventures and campaigns.

Read the Dragon review from the time. The reviewer basically says it's a breath of fresh air after Dragonlance, which was more obsessed with novels and canon events than being a useful game setting. How far it's fallen...

n o u

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>childhood is liking established settings
>Adulthood is making your own

...

That's...actually not bad. FR focused on trade, culture, politics and detailed ecosystems.
Eberron was muh magic is actually steampunk, much realism!

That would in fact be the 4e map. 4e ruined the Realms. 5e has basically done its best to reset the clock to 2e/3e without pulling out actual time travel.

There hasn't been an official full map of 5e Faerûn yet, just Sword Coast down to Amn, the Savage Frontier, and Chult.

Adulthood is realizing Planescape is wasted potential

Planescape is realizing adulthood is wasted potential

Actual adulthood is realizing that your own hexcrawl points of light setting is better than these shitty old setting weighed down by snowflake NPCs.

People only pretend to like Planescape and Spelljammer out of nostalgiafaggotry, there's a reason no one runs games there anymore.

>He plays in other people's settings

Pretty much this

You see, the beauty of FR is that it's so shitty and poorly defined that people feel compelled to twist and turn it onto something better, Eberron is too good for that and GMs end up accepting it's shitty parts.

The 4e version of the realms is the only version worth running.

What, exactly, makes the 4e Realms good as a setting? I don't see the advantage of shoving giant holes everywhere. What is gained by shrinking the Sea of Fallen Stars - were there not enough nations in the Realms? What gained by sinking half of Chult?

Enlightenment is realizing that Dark Sun is the best official setting

Everything I've read about Dark Sun has me going "that makes no fucking sense". Like, "all the seas have dried up except for one body of water that's barely more than a large lake, yet I'm expected to believe that anyone is actually alive in this world".

Any catastrophe that eliminated the surface water to that extent would see fucking EVERYONE dead within a matter of a few years at most. 5, maybe 10 years max. There certainly wouldn't be entire cities of people still in existence roaming around the place.

>all these shitty snowflake NPCs and stilted generic plots/nations are awful.
>I know I'll just make my own.
This doesn't even begin to solve the problem.

Guys help! I'm new to roleplaying so I decided to play D&D but I'm too lazy to actually make a setting myself. Can you guys recomend me a setting which is kind of generic (no dark sun or planescape) but somewhat interesting? Should I actually go with forgotten realms?

>inb4 don't play d&d

too late, already bought the books and told my group to learn them they're a bunch of normies that have never touched somewhat Veeky Forums relate4d aside from lord of the rings in case you wonder

If you're just starting, you don't actually want an "interesting" setting, you want a setting you can make mistakes in. FR is perfect for that because it has enough "conventional" fantasy flavor for people to grasp on easily, but doesn't have enough unique and relevant features for you to fuck up too badly.

I mean, you could argue that technically all D&D games are run on prime material planes in those settings.

>EASY MODE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance
>MEDIUM DIFFICULTY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(campaign_setting)
>HARD MODE
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystara
>NEW GAME +
>Council of Wyrms
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Wyrms

t. man who knows absolutely nothing about Eberron except warforged memes.
As people have said in the thread Eberron is heavily based on the politicking and spy games between the remaining kingdoms, and put a lot of thought in the effects of ubiquitous magic on culture and technology.
Also
>Gygaxian naturalism
>Making sense as an ecosystem

>Mystara
This should be easy mode
>Birthright
This should be hard mode for a new player
>SPOILER
>tfw you will never have good enough roleplayers for it

I like them conceptually, just not in execution. Taking the ideas and making your own setting around them works much better.

>Le noble savage orcs
>Dragonborn
>Wayne Reynolds. Wayne Reynolds everywhere

1) Orcs were not noble, just savage.
2) Goblinoids weren't "noble" they were a collapsed society trying to get their shit together.
3) And?
4) Show me in the lore.

For maximum comfy/maximum laziness you don't even need a full setting. Start in a town with some stuff around it that make sense for an adventure, and add stuff on the borders of this whenever you need to. That's how me and my brothers did it when all we had was a 2e starter set. It helps that it started with a town that we then built off of, but then, you can always just steal a town you like from an existing setting and file off the serial numbers.

FR is pretty lame.
Mystara however has way more going for it.

There's a very high res copy of it up on the official site. The geography seems a bit more sane than 4e's over all, though the lack of ludicrously sized craters and sinkholes will do that.

Forgotten realms is probably going to be the most accessible and provide you with the closest thing to the area you were imagining having your adventures in.

FR changed between editions though. So don't be afraid to pick from one or the other - your players won't know. So, for example, Myth Drannor (sp) was one thing in 1e/2e another in 3e and yet something else in 4e - and now sorta not sure about 5e. So you get what you want if you like.

For the record I have 1e and 2e stuff back from when I started playing and that is what I use today if I use that setting.

Agreed. If I ever become independently wealthy, I'm going to spend the rest of my life developing a CRPG that's metaphysically Spelljammer with edgy Planescape aesthetics and cyberpunk/fallen earth themes

...

Hard and Medium are mixed up there, but your nigga status is muh for that spoiler.

Wrong. Forgotten Realms is D&D’s objectively worst setting.

ITT: Objectively wrong thoughts.

That sounds vaguely like Numenera.

>newbaitfish.jpgacquired.jpg

>Guys help! I'm new to roleplaying so I decided to play D&D but I'm too lazy to actually make a setting myself. Can you guys recomend me a setting which is kind of generic (no dark sun or planescape) but somewhat interesting?
personally I'm a fan of the Sundered Empire/Godwar setting; 1d4chan.org/wiki/Sundered_Empire

As long as Eberron has the loli pope Eberron will always be best

I have stolen the lolipope idea for several games. Everyone gets shocked when it is revealed.

It killed off all the Uber NPCs and metaplot that had choked the setting since the Time of Troubles.

What metaplot? The Realms has no metaplot. It had plot hooks for DMs to take advantage of. 4e didn't change that, it just changed what the plot hooks were.

>Uber NPCs

This was never a problem for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.

The whole Netheril or what the fuck ever it was empire thing.

So why is "The Netherese flying City of Shade has appeared and is up to spooky magic shit" not as good a plot hook as "The Netherese Empire has returned and has conquered Sembia and is threatening the Dalelands?"

>his favorite setting isn't Planescape
>his favorite faction isn't the Free League

Dark Sun, old Ravenloft back when it was separate, Greyhawk, and Mystara are also acceptable. Spelljammer's fine, too, I guess.

The biggest problem is that Shade was a hook, much like the Zhentarim are up to no goof, or the Thayans are fagging shit up. It's the less is more principle really. Shade was more of an actual faction. And Factions are what 1e-mid 2e FR was all about in the long run. DO I have to mention just how many were involved in new Phlan or the whole Azure Bonds fiasco.

>fun to play in.
Good sir, where do you think you are?

Yes, actually, since I have no idea what either of those two things are.

>The biggest problem is that Shade was a hook

But it's a hook either way. Spoopy magic city up to no good or returned magic empire outta nowhere conquering shit, both have advantages and disadvantages. I don't see how replacing the latter with the former improves anything, especially since it didn't "end" the metaplot, it just changed it from "the City of Shade is doing spooky stuff, let's feature that in our books" to "the Netherese Empire had fucking conquered Sembia and has designs on Myth Drannor, let's feature that in our books".

but who was phone

As someone who hasn't read any forgotten realms books but has read a few Wikipedia articles, it's possibly not a terrible skeleton for a game.

People only like FR because of Baldur's Gate

This, even if outside of D&D context.
The campaign I've been running for past... 4 years holy shit, where the time went?! was in completely winged as a setting. The party started next to a small, rural monastery that was looking for people to hire. Anything that went from there was pure improv and adding elements as the game went on.
The setting is perfectly fine and cohensive, despite the party moving over those years across more or less 1k km

>adulthood
>still playing a knock-off clusterfuck DnD setting

Pick one. FR is generic shit for people who don't really care about settings. It's for murderhobo players to sperg out in, and for lazy DMs who hate worldbuilding. All it is is the usual elf-orc-dwarf shit without any surprises, with real world mythological creatures from every corner of Earth all randomly mixed in, and a few original things on top. It has the standard DnD conceit where somehow there are still ordinary kings and queens and aristocracies despite Wizards and Clerics being able to rule everything. Wall of the Faithless is stupid. Former PCs turning into canon gods of the setting is a stupid, self-indulgent cliche. Drizzt is stupid. The extended realms are mostly boring. Honestly the whole thing feels like a shitty rennaissance fair, where the fake tavern's serving wench has a Minnesota accent and serves you barbecue wings, before hurrying off to flirt with the one guy who isn't in costume.

I might have said it's a lazy setting too, but it has so much splatbook detail that calling it lazy hardly fits. What I do think is lazy is shit like "the Egyptian gods are in this setting cuz they got kidnapped from Earth by some bad dudes and now they're here!" or "Dragonborn become a core race, so suddenly two worlds collide and a continent full of Dragonborn appears".

It's shit. OP. You can like shit, that's fine. But admit it's shit.

New Phlan, was basically an attempt to get Phlan back from monsters, canonically the Zhentarim, and Orc Horde, a fucking Red Wizard, a tribe of Lizardmen, a devil being of Bane's, New Phlan, at leasat one of the Dales, and Comyr were all involved.
The Azure Bonds Fiasco was two sets, one involving a demon, and a few other big things like the cult of Moander, and goddamn Finder Wyvernspur before he became a deity. The other being a different set with Moander overlap, was basically yet another plot of that devil thing of Bane's to bind heroes to further strife, involving the Fire Knife thieves guild, the Cult of the Dragon, the Cult of Moander, and IIRC the Zhentarim as well and a couple others.

Early-ish FR was all shades of factions instead of big names and empires.