Hello again! After my Disney World diversion last time, I’m returning to D&D’s 50^th anniversary and my own contributions to that story.

In other news, I find myself pleased but baffled by the Phillies’ red-hot start to the 2024 season. The Phils have built a reputation over the last few years as a slow-starting team—I used to joke that the team’s strategy seemed to be to get to 10 games under .500 as fast as they could, so they could start catching up. They’re currently sitting at 38-18 as we are one-third of the way through the season. We did just lose our first series since the beginning of April yesterday, only taking one of three from the Rockies. But this is looking like the best Phillies season since 2011. (Knock on wood!)

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (3^rd Edition)

In a previous post I described how I was part of the D&D 3E design team, contributing to class designs and a lot of overall system work. After 8 months on the team, a reorganization of our brand team and R&D department opened up a position as the lead for the Alternity R&D team. So, I stepped away from D&D 3E to take point on the Alternity products.

I steered the Alternity team through the Star*Drive and Dark Matter setting books in late 1998 and 1999, mixing in some design work with team-lead work. After a year or so, Wizards was ready to wind down the Alternity line, and Bill Slavicsek asked me to take charge of the Forgotten Realms R&D team. With most of the 3^rd Edition rules set well on its way at that point, we were ready to relaunch our premier world setting for the new edition.

At that time, I hadn’t had a lot of close contact with Forgotten Realms game products. I’d written a couple of Realms novels and a 2E sourcebook (The Dalelands), but Bill and our brand leadership wanted to bring in new perspectives for the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. We assembled a team including Skip Williams, Sean Reynolds, Rob Heinsoo, Michele Carter, Julia Martin, and art director Robert Raper. My counterpart over in the Brand team was Jim Butler. And of course we wanted Ed Greenwood, creator of the setting, involved every step of the way.

So, in December of 1999, me, Skip, Sean, Jim, Julia, and Michele went to Toronto to meet with Ed.

We spent four days in a Toronto hotel talking about the Realms, the new edition of D&D, and how we were going to update the setting. We discussed how new assumptions in the game ought to be reflected in the existing world, and then went area-by-area to examine what was going on there in the 2E era and what *could* be going on in the 3E era. For example, we knew that D&D 3E would support buying and selling magic items, so we asked ourselves where and how that should happen in 3E Realms. The idea of Thayan concessions (like ‘em or hate ‘em) arose from that discussion.

Most important, we decided that we would *not* impose a new Avatar Crisis to justify game rules changes. (For those of you who don’t know, that was how the Realms handled the change from 1E to 2E D&D; there was an event in the world justifying how the rules changed.) Instead, we decided to go with the “retcon” approach, and simply present the setting as if the rules had always been that way. A few years later, we made a different decision with 4E Realms. In retrospect, neither answer works terribly well!

After our Toronto conference, we returned to Seattle and got to work. As the team lead, my big job was creative direction, review, and filling in here and there. Of all the items I plan to revisit in these 50^th anniversary blogs, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3e is the product where I did the least amount of actual writing. However, there wasn’t a page of the book I didn’t touch in some way or another.

(I did go on to write extensive parts of later sourcebooks and adventures in the Forgotten Realms product line. For example, I wrote big parts of Silver Marches, Underdark, and Unapproachable East.)

Rather controversially, I’m the guy behind the 3E Forgotten Realms poster map, which involved some deliberate reworking of the existing Realms maps. We needed to compress some north-south distance in order to make the most efficient use of our 20” by 30” poster—otherwise, to show all of Faerun we would have had to leave about a third of the map as empty ocean. Some fans take issue with that call, but I think it was the right one. We were able to mark hundreds of locations by using all the space we had, which made the map a lot more useful for the average DM.

In terms of impact, the 3^rd Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting was pretty big at the time. I believe we sold over 200,000 copies, and in terms of size and quality it raised the bar for setting books for years afterwards. Heck, we won an Origins award for Best Role-Playing Game Supplement in 2001. For many fans, the 3E Realms remains their favorite iteration of the setting, although the current 5E Realms has more or less moved on. (The 5E version really traces most of its DNA to the 1987 “Gray Box” of 1E, or so I think.)

Ultimately, we made a quality product that a lot of people enjoyed. The success of 3E Realms meant that we had the opportunity to publish Realms in 4E (which admittedly did not go well) and relaunch it again in 5E. None of that was guaranteed in the late ‘90s, when there was a real possibility Forgotten Realms would end with 2^nd Edition. I think 5e would have been a very different game without the Realms included!