Trivia & Anecdotes: Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3E

(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on, in chronological order of when they were published. If you see a number in brackets like this [1], it’s referring to a footnote at the bottom of this post.)

cover of the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting

This is the first of several T&A articles about the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting–a big book with a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff I want to talk about, and I’m more likely to finish writing about it if I break this into several small articles instead of one big one. :)

Set the Wayback Machine to early 2000. The D&D team has just about wrapped up the design for the three core 3E D&D books (Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, and Monster Manual), and it’s time for the FR team to take those rules and make the big 3E setting book for Forgotten Realms. Considering that the transition from 1E to 2E was chaotic and destructive to the setting[1], we wanted to take a more nuanced approach to this book that didnt “blow up the world” and mess with everyones home game.

In the previous couple of years, the FR team had come up with the idea that we should treat the Realms as a real place, and our D&D rules were essentially a “magical television” that gave us a way to view and interpret things happening in the Realms. And that meant that changing the rules didnt mean the setting was changing, it was our understanding of the rules that changed our understanding of the setting. For example, with 3E adding the sorcerer class, that didnt mean that the Realms all of a sudden had sorcerers–the realms has always had sorcerers, but our old “television” (the 1E/2E rules) didnt allow us to see that (like how a black & white TV doesnt let you accurately perceive the colors of a color transmission), we saw them as wizards. That meant (from a design-the-new-book perspective) we didnt have to blow up the Realms to justify all of these new rules in the game, we just needed to adjust our magical television’s “antenna” and take a look at the newly-clear pictures we were seeing.

This is not to say that the new setting book wouldnt have significant setting changes–as always, the novels department was pushing for big changes that their novelists could write about, and assumed that GMs would accept these changes in their own campaigns. A perfect example of this is the Death of the Dragon novel, and the Into The Dragons Lair adventure (which I talked about here) that we wrote to account for that novel.[2] So we had some changes like turmoil in Cormyr (including a dead king and an infant heir), the reappearance of the flying cities of the Shades from Netheril in the Anauroch desert, and so on, but nothing like “several main gods have died or changed identities” or “this country no longer exists” or “hello a new continent has joined the chat.”

Likewise, we kept the timeline on track. Usually, a new FR book might advance the official timeline by just a month or two, with “Current Clack” plot seeds you could drop into your campaign. We did a bit of this for the FRCS, but it wasnt a bigger jump than what a typical new FR book would do.[3] We wanted (and made) some fresh plot-related ideas for every country and region in the book, but none of them had much of an impact outside of that area, because, again, we didnt want a ton of sweeping changes that the GM would have to account for[4].

I think the team working on the FRCS was a really great team, with a great, balanced mix of skills and design backgrounds.[5] We were, in no particular order:

• Ed Greenwood (designer): I mean, it’s Ed Greenwood, it’s literally his campaign setting, his home campaign that TSR bought from him back in the day. He represented the core ideas of FR, and we wanted to make sure he was involved in the new setting and could let us know if any of our ideas veered too far from what he wanted for FR.

• Skip Williams (designer): Skip is a veteran game designer, having worked on every edition of D&D, and most recently having been part of the 3E design team. He was there to make sure our 3E stuff didnt break any of the core ideas of 3E D&D.
• Sean K Reynolds (designer): It’s me! I was the “young upstart,” having been a professional designer for just a couple of years, with a lot of Greyhawk experience and a couple of 2E FR books under my belt. I was there to bring some new blood and new ideas to the FR design process.
• Rob Heinsoo: Rob[6] was the wildcard, having recently been hired by Wizards. Like me, he was here to bring some new, fresh ideas to the Realms. (FYI, in his post-Wizards years, Rob went on to design the 13th Age game, which is a different sort of take on traditional D&D-style gaming.)
• Rich Baker (creative director): Rich is an experienced designer and novelist, and had been managing the FR line for a while now, so he was used to books department shenanigans[7] and was a good intermediary between their wild ideas and our cool ideas. ;)
• Jim Butler (brand manager): Jim was an FR designer and editor for many years, and having moved over to the brand team, he was there to make sure what we did with FR was good for the FR trademark and product line as a whole.
• Julia Martin (editor): Julia was the main FR editor for most of 2E D&D, and not only did she have vast FR knowledge, she had a great working relationship with Ed Greenwood and the rest of the FR team. She was an excellent resource for testing out design ideas.
• Michele Carter (editor): Michele was one of the main editors for the D&D core line (as well as the line editor for Planescape and a lot of other rad stuff). Sharp as a tack, she and Julia would make sure that everything the four designers wrote would be stitched together into a cohesive story and presentation.

(The FRCS credits page also lists John D. Rateliff as an editor, and James Wyatt for additional design, but I don’t think either of them were at the Toronto summit for this book. EDIT: James confirms that he wasn’t at the summit; his work was mostly limited to the monsters appearing in the book, as he was working on Monsters of Faerûn at the time.)

When it was time to start planning this book, we realized we needed to get everyone in the same room so we could talk story ideas, the consequences of rules changes, and how to address various inconsistencies and problems that had cropped up in the last ten or so years of FR design.[8] But of course, most of us were in Washington state, and Ed was in Canada … so we had a week-long brainstorming summit in Canada! Toronto! In Winter! Literally the coldest I had ever been up to that point in my life.

Each day at this summit we met up in a conference room at our hotel, with a list of topics, and talked and talked about those things. Honestly, it was AMAZING, and prolly one of the most design-rich events Ive been involved in. So many things that ended up in that book were first thought up in those meetings, with most of them being “eureka” moments, like “Well OF COURSE the Red Wizards of Thay are Intelligence-based wizards, and OF COURSE the witches of Rashemen are Charisma-based sorcerers, and OF COURSE part of their opposition to each other is their philosophical differences about the nature and use of magic!”

I’ll talk about these more when I talk about specific design choices for the book. Anyway, we took a TON of notes and had a TON of great ideas, and we returned to Washington brimming with excitement about all the stuff we were gonna write for this book.

This article is already long, so I’m gonna stop here and plan for the next one(s). Topics for the next “trivia & anecdotes” article(s) about the FRCS include:

• Updates to PC species (including the resurgence of dwarves, an entirely new type of halfling, and what to do about drow PCs)
• Prestige classes
• Wizards vs sorcerers
• Festhalls
• Red Wizard enclaves
• The pantheons
• Revising the FR map
• Revising the FR cosmology
• The playtest process
• Wild magic
• Spellfire
• Portals (aka “why does the Realms have so many portals that it’s basically swiss cheese?”)
• Trade routes and resources
• FR magic items
• FR monsters (and the Monsters of Faerûn book and its unique challenges)
• The cover inscription
• In-store signing events
• Signing 1000 promo copies of the book
• Reactions from the FR fans
• Reactions from the Greyhawk fans
• Awards and such
• Using this book on the Interplay FR videogame

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[1] In-setting, this catastrophic edition-changing event was called the Time of Troubles, prompted by a series of FR novels (aka “the Avatar crisis,” predating Avatar: The Last Airbender and James Cameron’s Avatar by decades) where the deities were cast out of the planes and sent to Faerûn in mortal bodies. Several key deities died, their portfolios were acquired/inherited by various mortals, and the end result is a big shake-up in the pantheon. Plus wild magic was doing crazy stuff to the land and all spellcasters, and a lot of things in the setting were broken, remade, and patched. The TOT was a very successful novel series, but many many many fans hated the destructive changes it caused to the setting.

[2] And yes, the 100-year timeline jump between 3E FR and 4E FR was something pushed by the novels department onto the games department, because apparently telling new stories in the current timeline was getting harder and harder for the novelists.

[3] At least, not that I can remember. I was always being a little annoyed by the “Current Clack” sections of new FR books, which suggested that the GM was always scrambling to catch up with the official timeline, even if it was a small scramble.

[4] Sorry, novels department, I am totally throwing you under the bus here. But to be fair, you did make a habit of balancing on the curb and leaning really far into the street as a bus approaches.

[5] Obviously, we could have used some POC representation, but this was 2000 and most of the people in the department were white.

[6] By the way, his last name is pronounced “HAIN-soh,” not “HEIN-soo” or anything else.

[7] HONK HONK watch out for that bus!!!! *tires screeching*

[8] More on this topic later, but one example is how we never really had consistent population numbers for “big” cities. One designer might decide “this is a huge city,” and give it a population of 50k, and another designer might decide that a different “huge” city had a population of ONE MILLION. With the 3E DMG having population ranges for settlements of all sizes, one of our tasks was to standardize the FR city populations so that one “big” city wouldnt be a joke compared to one in a different area … or at least that our terminology for minor city, major city, metropolis, and so on were consistent across the setting.