Ex Carta

Greenwood has remarked that when TSR approached him for the rights to publish the setting, he ‘happily sold them all rights to the Realms for peanuts just to get nice coloured maps for the world that didn’t have visible strokes of my pencil crayons in all the seas and deserts’.

The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set includes numerous maps in its sourcebook and ‘Cyclopedia’, ranging from regional surveys to highly detailed city plans, such as that of Suzail, the key of which comprises seventy-eight sites of interest. The boxed set also includes four large, full-colour poster maps depicting different regions, including Faerûn itself. The overall impression is of a fully realised game world: a planet-spanning gaming territory overwhelming in its narrative possibilities.

This influential TSR boxed set introduced Ed Greenwood’s 

 players, presenting the sprawling continent of Faerûn as a richly detailed setting for adventure. Accompanied by numerous maps – including large full-colour poster maps and detailed city plans – the set helped establish the Realms as one of the most fully realised fantasy worlds in role-playing games.

Ed Greenwood (b.1959) began creating what became known as the Forgotten Realms at an astonishingly precocious age, inspired by his access to his father’s collection of pulp magazines and paperbacks, including the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories of Fritz Leiber (1910–1992).217 Greenwood claims that by the age of six he had conceived of a character named ‘Mirt’, who was ‘making his way south along something called the Sword Coast – and had reached Waterdeep, where he was going to stay for ten or so stories’.

Other influences on this emerging imaginary realm included Jack Vance (1916–2013) and Lord Dunsany (1878–1957). The continent in which Mirt’s adventures were set – Faerûn – lay on the planet Toril, part of a wider cosmology that Greenwood termed the ‘Forgotten Realms’, since ‘we on Earth had “forgotten” where the gates were’ that once allowed magical travel to this plane of existence.218

Greenwood became involved in the emergent role-playing game community in the late 1970s and – as a contributor to TSR’s house magazine Dragon – opened up the Realms to fellow D&D players. Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk setting shows its tabletop wargaming DNA: it is a harsh, martial land of perpetual conflict, with pockets of civilisation continually assailed by the forces of chaos and evil. Forgotten Realms, by contrast, reveals its roots in narrative and storytelling.

It is a vast, messy, late-medieval world in motion, replete with rowdy taverns, boisterous city-ports, and bustling urban centres. This vibrant, picaresque environment embraces humour and romance as well as violence and peril, allowing players to explore, interact, and enact character-based drama alongside tactical combat. This inviting, intrigue-filled world has proved enduringly popular. By the 1990s, it was regarded as possibly ‘the most widely played-in game setting in RPG history’.219 Its success has resulted not only in numerous game supplements, but also in bestselling novels, hugely popular computer games such as

A section of the four-part Forgotten Realms poster map of Faerûn designed to fit together with the other maps in the campaign set

A section of the four-part Forgotten Realms poster map of Faerûn, covering the Sword Coast, Fields of the Dead and the High Moor designed to fit together with the other maps in the campaign set

A section of the four-part Forgotten Realms poster map of Faerûn, covering the Sword Coast and the territories of Amn, Tethyr and Calminshan. Designed to fit together with the other maps in the campaign set

A section of the four-part Forgotten Realms poster map of Faerûn, covering Anauroch and the lands between to the Sea of Fallen Stars. Designed to fit together with the other maps in the campaign set

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms Campaign Set packaging

Forgotten Realms Dungeon Master Sourcebook

Forgotten Realms Encyclopedia

Forgotten Realms hex map and scales for tabletop tracking

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms Campaign Set - back of packaging

Greenwood has remarked that when TSR approached him for the rights to publish the setting, he ‘happily sold them all rights to the Realms for peanuts just to get nice coloured maps for the world that didn’t have visible strokes of my pencil crayons in all the seas and deserts’.

 Campaign Set includes numerous maps in its sourcebook and ‘Cyclopedia’, ranging from regional surveys to highly detailed city plans, such as that of Suzail, the key of which comprises seventy-eight sites of interest. The boxed set also includes four large, full-colour poster maps depicting different regions, including Faerûn itself. The overall impression is of a fully realised game world: a planet-spanning gaming territory overwhelming in its narrative possibilities.