So, first a question: What is the Forgotten Realms?
The simple answer is that the Forgotten Realms is the most popular setting for Wizards of the Coast classic fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.
Back in 1973, an insurance adjuster named Gary Gygax came up with an interesting gaming concept based on insurance actuarial tables*: you can simulate the sum total of a set of actions in combat using probability tables in the same way that you can use insurance actuarial tables to simulate the life outcomes of a given group of people if you have enough information about them to model the probabilities of the outcomes of their lives. Which is to say that if I have a weapon, and I use it to attack something, then I have a specific probability of hitting my target and doing damage. And I can measure and model that probability if I can come up with a way to take into account a reasonable number of the factors involved in my attack and in the target’s defense. If I then simulate the separate combat actions of a given fight in a reasonable sequence—using dice to generate random outcomes—I can effectively model an entire fight. And if I have a way to model fighting and other kinds of combat interactions under a wide variety of potential circumstances, I can use it to build a very broad-based tactical simulation and/or role-playing game. Gygax did both.
Gygax’s company, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) published a small variety of tactical simulations and combat-based role-playing games, the most famous of which is D&D (based around the iconic Lord of the Rings novels by J.R.R. Tolkien) but which also included various miniatures-based simulations of World War II and modern-era combat as well as (eventually) games based around James Bond-esque spying (Top Secret), intergalactic science fiction (Star Frontiers), dystopian science fiction (Gamma World), the Marvel Universe (Marvel Superheroes), and probably a zillion others that I can’t think of right now. I distinctly remember playing one of TSR’s hex-based aircraft dog fighting games as a kid with my folks, for example, but I’ve no idea what that was called. Regardless, Gygax’s theory was groundbreaking and easily applicable to an enormous variety of different situations and settings. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military’s war gaming owes its current functionality to Gygax’s work, and that the video gaming industry could not exist were it not for the fact that we can today apply our understanding of probability and statistics to games of skill and strategy.
Still… if there were (and are) many potential applications of insurance theory for gaming, what on earth made Dungeons and Dragons the one that stuck?
Well, one could easily argue that D&D made the biggest impact because a) it was first, and b) it was based on the most iconic source material, but personally, I kind of doubt that explanation. After all, D&D is only good when its setting is well-articulated by your Dungeon Master, and we’re not all Tolkien. Building an engaging setting is hard work. And more to the point, it’s as easy to build an engaging setting using intergalactic or dystopian science fiction as it is using a fantasy base, and we’re talking about the 70s here. The age of Star Wars and Star Trek. Not to mention Bradbury and Heinlein at the peaks of their powers. In that age, one would not automatically give the nod to the hobbits.
Personally, I think D&D won out primarily because the game is probability-based. TSR didn’t briefly take over the world because nerds like swords. It took over the world because nerds like MATH. And math-lovers like swords. And maybe, in the backs of their minds, they think that the math of D&D works a little better for the swords and the magic than it does for bullets or laser beams or even super-powers. I know that was always my feeling, at any rate. Seriously, look at my game. We have TWO professional physicists AND an electrical engineer. Clearly, there’s a certain comfort there with the mathematics underlying the system. I don’t think that the smart folks in my game would hang around if they thought that the game system itself defied all logic and reason.
And then, too, maybe it’s true that Gygax himself loved hobbits better. One of the smarter things he did with his company was to publish adventures for use with his inherently story-based games. Which is to say that you could make up and play any game you wanted, but if you couldn’t come up with anything, TSR was more than happy to help you out and give you some useful ideas. And while there were adventure modules published for several of the games, it’s no stretch to say that the ones published for D&D were the best. To that end, in 1979 TSR published an article by Ed Greenwood in the 30th issue of its magazine The Dragon*. Greenwood would eventually go on to write about a zillion more articles for The Dragon and D&D in general, and these, taken together, soon formed the basis for the Forgotten Realms (FR) campaign setting.
The good thing about the FR is that it’s so big and versatile that it can be literally all things to all people. Unlike some of the other published D&D settings. For example, in Dragonlance you’re eternally stuck in a world-spanning war between good and evil dragons (ugh). In Dark Sun, you’re stuck in an endless the desert Hellworld. In Eberron, it’s all prophesy-based fantasy-tech noir, all the time. Heck, even in the Fourth Edition’s new basic “points of light” campaign setting, you’re basically stuck in an eternally fallen world, endlessly searching through the ruins of some long-forgotten lost empire. Thankfully, in the FR, there’s more. Cities. Ruins. Villages. Castles in the sky. Temples under the ground. Noble politics. Village scuttlebutt. Really, whatever you want, it’s all there. Well, what do you expect when the Realms’ creator has been steadily working at it since the late 60s and allowing its use as the basis of a line of shared fiction novels since at least the late 1980s? At this point, it’d be weird if there weren’t a whole lot of very usable source material out there covering every conceivable situation and setting. In my game, we’re just using the northern half of one coast (the Sword Coast), and believe me, it’s work just to try and see all of that. We haven’t even been to the biggest city in the region yet!
So. Shared world fiction can be a tricky thing. When it’s good, it’s very good. There’s a sense of history and mission and familiarity that’s both comforting and deeply engaging. The setting becomes one of the characters. And it’s for this reason, I think, that the FR is my favorite literary vice. It’s awesome fun to see how new writers are gonna play in my favorite sandbox. But then, too, shared world fiction can go soooo far off the rails. If you get an author who doesn’t get it or doesn’t want to get it or just plain can’t write, well… That ain’t good. With that in mind, I try to be a little skeptical of new FR novels—and new authors. Books are expensive, and there are a lot of them out there, so I try not to waste my money one inferior products. Plus, with so many FR books out there, there’s no reason to pick up a bad one. You just have to do the research to make sure that the one you’re considering is worth your time and money.
Thus, without further ado, here’s a brief list of my favorite FR novels. If you’ve got one (or more) to add, you’ll be dong me a disservice not to let me know about it.
Swordmage, by Richard Baker
Cormyr: A Novel, by Ed Greenwood and Jeff Grubb
The City of Splendors: A Waterdeep Novel, by Ed Greenwood and Elaine Cunningham
Books by Elaine Cunningham
· The Magehound (Counselors & Kings #1)
· The Floodgate (Counselors & Kings #2)
· The Wizardwar (Counselors & Kings #3)
· Elfshadow (Song and Swords #1)
· Elfsong (Song and Swords #2)
· Silver Shadows (Song and Swords #3)
· Daughter of the Drow (Starlight & Shadows #1)
· Tangled Webs (Starlight & Shadows #2)
· Windwalker (Starlight & Shadows #3)
Book by R. A. Salvatore
· The Crystal Shard (Icewind Dale #1)
· Streams of Silver (Icewind Dale #2)
· Homeland (Dark Elf #1)
· The Legacy (Legacy of the Drow #1)
· Starless Night (Legacy of the Drow #2)
· The Silent Blade (Paths of Darkness #1)
· The Spine of the World (Paths of Darkness #2)
· Servant of the Shard (Sellswords #1)
· Promise of the Witch-King (Sellswords #2)
· Road of the Patriarch (Sellswords #3)
· The Orc King
· The Pirate King
Books by Paul S. Kemp
· Shadowbred
· Shadowstorm
· Shadowrealm
The God Catcher, by Erin M. Evans
Let me close this up by adding a few notes. First, my favorite series on this list is the “Counselors and Kings” series by Elaine Cunningham, and Ms. Cunningham is without a doubt my favorite Realms author. She’s easily the most consistent of the bunch, and she does strong characterization. Of course, “Counselors and Kings” is now out of print—and indeed, the entire nation of Halruaa in which the series was set was destroyed in the Spellplague that started off the Fourth Edition—but there’s some hope in that the new FR Campaign Guide covered Jordaini Enforcers in its section on the ruins of Halruaa.
Eh… that’s not much in the way of hope. But still…
Cunningham’s “Starlight and Shadows” series is probably her most popular series—because it features the drow—but I think my second recommendation of hers would be The City of Splendors. That’s a great book, and it does a very good job of exploring what is perhaps the most important location in the entire Realms.
With that said, my favorite FR book (not series) is either Starless Night or Servant of the Shard, both by R.A. Salvatore. Salvatore frustrates me as an author because he’s so inconsistent, but like the FR, when he’s good, he’s very good. And both Starless Night and Servant are examples of Salvatore at his best.
For readers new to the Realms, I recommend The God Catcher. It’s a good book, it’s quest-based without any re-hashed humanoid invasions, and its new, so you’ll find it everywhere. That’s a good thing.
Finally, my game The Sellswords of Luskan is largely based on the Salvatore novel The Pirate King and on Paul S. Kemp’s “Shadowstorm” trilogy. Not so much because I loved those books—although I liked both enough to put them on this list—but because I liked specific story elements that I felt I could effectively re-use. With that in mind, if somebody would write a really good book incorporating the church of Bane, the Black Lord of Conquest, I’d really appreciate it. We use Bane a lot in my game, but there’s not much in the way of source material for what we’re doing with him. And worse: there are a lot of mid-Heroic Tier Bannite villains and a fair collection of Epic Tier Bannite villains, but not much in between. And yeah, it’s easy enough to wing it, but without much in the way of source material, I always feel a little like I’m flying blind.
*The info on Gary Gygax in the opening was taken from his obituary in Newsweek. I got the stuff on Greenwood’s background off the Forgotten Realms Wikipedia page.
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