Honestly I'd love to make a simple yet surprisingly deep joke about existential philosophy regarding the title of my post, but simply put I can't quite pull it off in text... Also, that's not where I want to take this post.

If anyone had asked me 5 years ago, I would have told them that picking Faerun to be the new Core Setting for D&D, the focus of the core books, was a bad idea. Its a notion that has only grown since the release of 5e, but I haven't taken the time to really dig into why that should be.  So yes, this may involve a bit of brainstorming, since my PHD in D&Dology is not at risk for publishing an ill conceived thesis, I can get away with it.

To begin with let us turn to WHY Hasbro turned to Faerun and the Forgotten Realms to begin with. For some reason it has been massively popular for thirty damn years as a setting for books.  This, by the way, is no small part of why its a BAD idea to use Faerun, but lets explore the positive value: Built in fanbase.  Much like buying an existing IP you can literally print money from fans who might not be interested in your product, but will buy it out of brand loyalty.  That's the theory. But, as a given, all Forgotten Realms books are by default part of the D&D over-brand, and thus that 'fan-boy money machine' is actually already baked into the cake. If you really feel that FR's appeal is bigger than D&D, you don't have to warp D&D to tap that, and warping will occur as I will explain.

There are other positives to using the Forgotten Realms, I should add.  Forgotten Realms is rich, even positively lousy, with Lore. Ed Greenwood has a flair for naming things that puts Oerth to shame. The Elves feel elvish, at least in their cities and lost empires and mythals and what not that seems positively Ringian in the best possible way.  Old D&D Tropes like the Underdark, Menzoberanzan and so forth either got their start in Faerun, or became so synonymous with it that they became inextricable.  

So lets talk about some negatives, and in no particular order.

First, the setting is a mess. Part of the reason it is a mess is because so very much as been written, and by so many people, over the last thirty fucking years, many of whom had a weak ass idea of D&D in the first place, and its all 'canon'. The very richness of Faerun is a problem because its an incoherent richness. Take, for example the 'Solid Liquid Culture'... yes, I just made that up, but let me explain before I forget my own brilliance.

See: Cultures are liquid in nature. Imagine pouring two pools of liquid on a table. IF they are close together they will mix, or if not mix (oil and water)... interact heavily. If they are far apart the level of mixing will be minimal, as the pools slowly spread out to fill the available space.  Books are often written about only the cultures they are about. Bottle Cultures, the liquid within contained, not spreading or mixing, because it falls outside the confines of the story within the book.  In the setting of Faerun, these bottle cultures are set down and, by necessity of being a setting, the bottle is removed. The Culture, however, fails to spread and interact with the surrounding cultures meaningfully, as if still bottled up.  At least until someone writes another story involving two or more interacting cultures... but even then you wind up with only bigger bottles of mixed cultures, instead of spreading across the landscape.  This is how you wind up with a bronze age egyptian style culture smack dab in the middle of a continent full of high mideval european cultures virtually unchanged.  

This manifests in other ways too. The world of Faerun manages to be rather horrifically dynamic while also being agonizingly static. No matter how earth shattering (Toril shattering, if you prefer) an event, in two or three years everyone is right back to business as usual. You might not realize this from reading the D&D books, but only five years ago in the setting an entire continent was shifted to another plane of existance (Abeil) and a continent full of Dragonborn was shifted from there onto Toril/Faerun. Nobody blinked at this, because in the last fifety or so years the goddess of magic was murdered... TWICE... wreckign the entire setting for everyone.  In fact a whole BUNCH Of gods died horribly (after, you know, being stripped of their divinity for a while), but they got better. Because of course they did. That is also why the heroes of the RA Salvatore Novels got their own private heaven for a few decades before they were all totally reincarnated just so they could keep adventuring with good old Drizz't.  

That's right, bubie: Five years ago there were no Dragonborn on Faerun, but remember what I said about 'warping'? D&D has to warp to conform to Faerun, and Faerun has to warp to conform to D&D. New D&D demands core Dragonborn, so Faerun gets 'em, not matter how fucked up the process is. An older 'static' setting (due to general death/fan apathy) is much more tolerant of this sort of change, by the way. As is one written for the implied setting you WANT to give people (eg One with Dragonborn in it...).  Faerun's age becomes a problem, simply because its old enough to have gone through plenty of edition changes as it, but is also still 'living' unlike (and I'm sorry for all the Oerth fans I may offend), Greyhawk.  Or a setting DESIGNED for the Edition, as Eberron was (only... moreso?).

The other problem with the 'living setting' of Faerun, is there is a whole bunch of shit that is absolutely core to Faerun that isn't in D&D at all (sort of like Eberron, which works as an alternate setting, but not so much as The Core.). Things like Spell-fire, Silver Fire, Chosen of Various Gods (which, aside from the absolute SHIT that is Forgotten Realms MANY Mary Sue Uber-NPCs, is something that reasonable players would be calling for their higher level characters to become... good job, D&D designers. Now you have to come up with 5e Rules for all of Greenwood's Mary Sueness that Player Characters should totally have access to.  Or, you know, piss off all those fans you were catering to...).

See, that is the core of the problem right there: The 'default setting' and the 'core rules' should absolutely reflect one another.  Faerun, for all it seems to exemplify D&D (Underdark, yadda yadda) actually doesn't because it both adds a whole bunch of very specific things that don't reflect 'Core D&D' at all, and because Core D&D as envisioned by the Designers adds a whole host of things that now have to be forced into Faerun like a bad case of canon-rape.  

And we won't even talk about our new Corporate Overlords and their Family Friendly Ways, and how that conflicts very deeply with the fact that Ed Greenwood (and thus Forgotten Realms) is a Happy Pervert.  *


In essence we have the crux of the issue. We have the concept of a proper 'default setting', so lets explore that idea a little.

To repeat: A Default Setting must reflect the Core Rules, and the Core Rules should reflect/build the Default Setting.

At its heart, as explained above, Forgotten Realms simply does not meet this criteria.

It can be made to work, but the 5e crew didn't want to put in the work.

An older, mostly static, forgotten setting (Oerth) would have been a much easier 'fit' to update, but Our Corporate Overlords apparently thought it would make them Less Money, so 5e was too Greedy.

Making a new setting out of whole cloth would have been slightly more work than properly updating Faerun (which, note, they haven't actually published a gazateer for, just for the Sword Coast region), and would have opened up the possibility of entirely new books that won't be left on the shelf for being redunant, warmed over rehashes of older books. Of course, it may simply be that the 5e Crew lacks the ability (or the faith in their ability) to craft an evocative, interesting setting from whole cloth... and we can almost garauntee that our Kindly Corporate Overlords simply didn't want to pay for the work.

In essence the Forgotten Realms as Core is sort of the Emperor's New Clothes of Core D&D. If you like it you are blind to greed, laziness and incompetence in the making of the new edition. If you don't like it, well....  **








*Yes, I put that right after Canon-Rape deliberately. Aren't you clever for noticing and reading my footnote? Yes you are... clever little reader.. who's a good reader? Yes, you... you are!

** A disclaimer of sorts. I actually do like 5e, with plenty of caveats. I find it inferior to 3e in the main, but with some good ideas. By 'In the Main' I find 5e to be the dumbed down 'little kids' version, stripped of anything that might make it 'unfun', and thus slightly boring.  A lot of interesting new features seem half baked rather than fully realized, but the addition of backgrounds (to pick one) is marvelous.  I, at least, can clearly see how the designers are at least a little petulant that their precious 4e experiment went so badly, and how (in my bitterly cynical worldview) they're trying to sneak many of the same ill-concieved ideas into D&D despite us, by dressing it up in the skin of the older, superior edition.  But that's me...

Obviously Mystaria should have been the 5e setting.  No reasoning or rationale beyond that it's a perfect case of just dropping things into space on the map with little reason or thought.

Absolutely, and for many of the same reasons I suggested Greyhawk/Oerth. Its an older, deader setting that is far more amenable to a proper re-write to fit it to the setting as of 5e.  I favored Oerth simply because my admittedly foggy memories of the old Greyhawk box set I once had made it seem like a more coherent setting (the Bottle Culture phenomenon critique), and honestly I never paid much attention to Mystaria so I couldn't say much.

Honestly, if not for the prepackage adventures and the Sword Coast book, or teh Baldur's Gate Gazateer in Descent into Avernus, the use of Faerun could be safely ignored, since its impact on the Core Books is so minimal (lazy design work, what have you...), and I'm guessing D&D will never give players/DMs the tools to make 'chosen of Gods' or 'Silver Fire' or any of the other weirdnesses of Forgotten Realms...

You know, like how Azure Bonds/Finders Stone Trilogy, seems to utterly ignore how magical cloning is actually a thing, with rules and known outcomes, in D&D, and how the presence of a draconic lizard race in that trilogy has never once impacted the idea of Dragonborn in D&D, or for that matter the Faerun Setting at all (outside the books they actually appear in...).

Somewhere I have a four page write up of how Samurai can be a thing in a D&D setting, specifically Forgotten Realms, (Er, without needing Kara Tur to be a thing), because Xanthar's makes it necessary to understand how Samurai are a thing in an ostensibly western culture (and all those pictures of Dwarven Samurai in particular...).  WHich again begs the question: Why aren't the designers making sure their  random thoughts that make it into rules don't fit/reflect the setting in any meaningful way?

Faerun is WotC's creation and thus they have complete ownership over it.  If they start messing with the older settings older fans will bitch about it and have a leg to stand on.  Sure that is really nothing, but to avoid headaches I guess.

I would assume they bought all of the TSR settings when they bought TSR back in the day.  The bit about older settings is that there are fewer active engaged fans to bitch, vis a vis Forgotten Realms which is chock a block full of fans who are actively engaging with the setting due to the on-going adventures of Mary Sue And Her Many Clones...

Any setting that isn't completely new would have to change, simply because D&D has changed. THey INSIST on putting in Dragonborn and Tieflings, because those races have fans, many, many fans.  Gotta keep things fresh adn interesting (and I'm not disagreeing here with this policy, by the way), which NO setting was written to account for.  Changing from blandly generic classes to highly detailed career classes (Fighter to: Arcane Archer or Samurai or Purple Dragon Knight...) is another way the setting has to 'flex' as D&D changes from the older editions. Before you could just write up a prestige class adn give ideas how that particular prestige class MIGHT fit into setting x or y (which they totally did...), now its just assumed that dwarves have samurai wandering around Citadel Adbar, because Xanthar's Guide to Everything makes them Canon, and thats an easy one. What do we do with the Bard Colleges? Or the presence of Ancestor Spirit Barbarians?

Minor issues, certainly, but the bulk of them add up. I'll be honest, I would not actually be surprised if Mike Mearls showed up and admitted they threw a dart at a board to pick which setting would be Core. I mean: I laid out why I think they picked Faerun, but given the apparent 'planning and forethought' that went into actually adapting setting and rules to one another (Literally none...), the dart board theory holds water.

I was sceptical at first, but in practice I find FR works very well as the core setting for 5e. Sensible people ignore Canon, except what they want. Of course FR is a mess, that is part of the attraction - take what you want and ignore the rest.

The main good thing about FR is that it's mostly an adventure-ready wilderness full of ruins, where you can plop down whatever stuff you like. And it hits the standard D&D tropes very nicely. It lacks the powerful nation states that make many D&D worlds not very good for D&D.

I think for better or for worse, FR is the most popular setting. It has 100s of products, 100s of novels. Dozens of video games.

Greyhawk has what, maybe two dozen novels? Maybe 50 products? 1 video game? It was deprecated in the 2e era, which saw the most official releases.

Mystara had a lot of products, probably more than Greyhawk, but not that many novels and probably only 4-5 video games. It also was really made for B/X D&D and so has a lot of quirks due to that rule system, like different classes, no half-races, no gods, etc.

I think the other thing about FR is that it's mostly a generic setting.  Outside the very early products, Mystara basically just took real world countries/cultures and renamed them

3rd edition "sort of" used Greyhawk as default, and I think it was a good decision for Faerûn, as they could concentrate on what makes that world special in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book. (Which, by the way, I think is pretty damn good for what it is. Certainly better written and more interesting than [m]any of the novels I've managed to read.)

But I think the decision to use Greyhawk was because WotC's then-CEO was a fan of the setting or somesuch. If not for that, they'd probably used the FR as default for the same reason they did it now. Which, I agree, is money.

As much as I've grown to dislike FR I've always thought of it as the 'default' D&D setting decades before it officially became the actual default setting--going back to the 90s, soon after I was introduced into the hobby, once I had played D&D long enough to know WTF FR was. FR has always seemed like the most expansive, hodgepodge setting so characteristic of what D&D is to fantasy gaming (a huge, ultra generic hodgepodge desperately trying to be everything to everyone), with the greatest amount of novels and supporting material, as well as video game franchises that helped it transcend D&D and attract its own audience that didn't necessarily play D&D, but had played Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights, etc.

I never really cared much for FR, except for the novels and side franchises (Baldur's Gate, et al) which was how I learned about the setting the most. Going by the actual game material I never actually cared much for it, as it lacked a distinctive feel or focus (like Dragonlance) and as a player & DM I didn't know where the F to start with it. The setting's constant haphazard development also didn't help it much, with drastic world shattering changes made between editions that only ever served as a transparent excuse to shoehorn the latest changes made to the game--which, as the OP points out never seem to have an impact on the overall world, beyond some superficial changes, cuz the setting itself is an odd mix of bottled cultures that never seem to change no matter how drastic the events surrounding them happen to be. It's a world without history, despite being the D&D setting with most recorded events, because no matter what happens its bland, hodgepodge essence never truly changes--it merely molds itself to whatever arbitrary new thing makes it into the D&D core rules--like freaking Dragonborn (spits at the name).

And as far as I know, FR has always been the only D&D setting that consistently does that--puke out some lame, world shattering crisis that only superficially alters the world to mold it to whatever half-baked new addition the D&D core rules have in store. Which is what makes it the ideal candidate to be game's lead setting, despite its many failings and the fact that almost every other setting is better than it--at least as a game setting and world-building exercise--with more distinctiveness and focus than FR ever had.

Why Faerun? Because D&D irregardless of edition targets a genre while since the late 1980s Faerun is altered to fit whatever in the kitchen sink for the current edition. This especially apparent starting with 4th edition.

The setting itself aids this by being depicted as mostly wilderness with scattered realms, city states, and isolated villages in a kitchen sink fashion.

I think that RPGs work best when they reflect the reality of a setting. Sometimes it specific but other times it is more vague and targets a genre so it can be used for different types of campaign. D&D does the latter. Because of this it is the setting that the company sells that is altered to fit the current rules.

Quote from: Spike;1116637To begin with let us turn to WHY Hasbro turned to Faerun and the Forgotten Realms to begin with.

In my opinion WotC Hasbro went with the Forgotten Realms because, after all these years, it is still the best DnD world.

Why?  Top three reasons:

Because it has competed with every other setting and is still the most popular.  

It has bits and pieces from everywhere which lets you play any style of game somewhere in the Realms

The accumulated history lets you go as shallow or as deep in the Lore as you want to.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1116654Faerun is WotC's creation and thus they have complete ownership over it.  If they start messing with the older settings older fans will bitch about it and have a leg to stand on.  Sure that is really nothing, but to avoid headaches I guess.

Wrong. Forgotten Realms was a TSR setting.

One of the reasons they keep going back to FR is the novels. These have been wildly popular and are essentially free advertising for the RPG. Greyhawk bas had very few novels other than a set a friend of mine wrote and a few others by authors. Not including Gary's Gord series.

The other one is they still have Ed on hand, whereas Gary is gone.

Another reason is that FR is a high to very high magic setting which WOTC believes, possibly correctly, appeals to more players. And there is enough space for low fantasy adventuring as well. That and FR is very adventurer friendly where other settings are less ammendable to the adventuring lifestyle.

I've hated the FR, both muchly and bigly, ever since they started fleshing out the bare bones of the awesome first box set (and I mean "fleshing out" like some sort of Cronenberg movie, with slime and eyeballs and undifferentiated tissue all up the walls and over the floor). Nearly every decision they've made has been fuckshit dumbcunt in its ballitude and the FR has become my yardstick for measuring the awfulness of a setting, including a few homebrews I've written myself.

That said, I don't much mind it as the core setting for 5e. I could be funny and say THAT'S COS I DON'T PLAY FIFTH EDITION! But I played and ran it for three years+ and during that time came to like (is a strong word, "appreciate" might be more appropriate) this de-lored, generic-but-gonzo, yeah-fuck-it-just-whatevs version of Faerun. Like S'mon says, it's very gameable and these days that's what I look for in a setting.

Make Ravenloft the core setting of D&D. All retcons are the works of the higher powers!

Its also already a "Pick & Mix" setting.