Forgotten Realms

• 1. Introduction

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  Forgotten Realms hides a message inside its own emblem. Until the year 2000, the setting's official logo contained tiny runic letters. Translated, they read "Herein lie the lost lands." That was a nod to the world's core premise. Earth and this fantasy realm were once close enough to cross between. Then the people of Earth forgot that connection had ever existed.

  That single premise eventually grew into a defining setting for the Dungeons & Dragons game. It now spans novels, role-playing video games, comic books, a play-by-mail game, and the 2023 film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

  So how does an entire fictional universe start? Why did a major game company gamble its future on this particular world instead of an already-published rival setting? Who are the gods that rule over it, and what happens when they get cast down among mortals? And why would one drow ranger become so beloved that his creator turned into a bestselling novelist? The answers begin decades before any of that, in the imagination of a single child.

• 2. Creative Origins

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  Ed Greenwood was only eight years old when he first started inventing stories set in the Forgotten Realms. He built the setting's name around an idea of parallel worlds, a multiverse where Earth was one world among many. The Realms, in his conception, was simply another. In his original telling, Earth's own myths and legends actually came from that unreachable fantasy world.

  Greenwood discovered Dungeons & Dragons itself in 1975. By 1978, when the first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books appeared, he had become a serious role-playing enthusiast. A university student named September invited him to play AD&D with her. That invitation pulled his private fantasy world into the new medium of tabletop gaming. He ran his first Realms campaign in the city of Waterdeep, later forming a group called the Knights of Myth Drannor in the Shadowdale region.

  Greenwood later explained what shaped the setting. His players, he said, want the world to feel real. In his words, they "work on 'honest jobs' and personal activities, until the whole thing grows into far more than a casual campaign." He has also said that his own home campaign is darker than anything published under the Forgotten Realms name.

  Starting in 1979, Greenwood published a series of articles in The Dragon magazine detailing the setting. The very first one covered a monster called the curst. In August of 1982, he published the setting's first true adventure, The Assassin's Run, inside Dragon issue 64.

  Everything changed in 1985. Gary Gygax, as one account puts it, "lost control of TSR" that year. That pushed the company to look past its existing Greyhawk setting for something new. By 1986, TSR assigned designer Jeff Grubb to investigate the campaign world Greenwood had spent years describing in Dragon magazine.

  Grubb reportedly asked him directly, "Do you just make this stuff up as you go, or do you really have a huge campaign world?" Greenwood answered yes to both. TSR judged the Realms more open ended than its existing epic fantasy line, Dragonlance. It chose the Realms as the default setting for the coming AD&D 2nd edition.

  To close the deal, Greenwood mailed TSR a few dozen cardboard boxes stuffed with pencil notes and maps. He sold every right to the setting for what he called a token fee. He later noted that TSR dropped his original idea of Earth being directly reachable through a gate. TSR did so, he said, over "concerns over possible lawsuits" from kids trying to find one.

  Jon Peterson wrote the book Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History. He later called Greenwood a rare, obsessive DM. In his words, Greenwood "just seemed to have more ideas and energy to pour into his world than even the folks at TSR did." Peterson credited that same raw material with giving one future novelist, R. A. Salvatore, his start. That career would later help keep TSR afloat as a major book publisher.

• 3. Print Empire

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  The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set reached store shelves in 1987. It was a boxed set built from two sourcebooks, the Cyclopedia of the Realms and the DM's Sourcebook of the Realms, plus four large color maps. Greenwood designed it together with Jeff Grubb, and in its first two years the box sold roughly one hundred fifty thousand copies.

  TSR folded in outside contributions almost immediately. Douglas Niles supplied the Moonshae Isles, Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman contributed the Desert of Desolation, and Zeb Cook built Kara-Tur. The Bloodstone Wars, published in 1987, and The Throne of Bloodstone, published in 1988, folded an older adventure sequence squarely into the setting.

  R. A. Salvatore's first Forgotten Realms novel, The Crystal Shard, appeared in 1988. It had originally been set in the Moonshae Islands before Salvatore relocated it and introduced a new character: a drow ranger named Drizzt Do'Urden. Drizzt would go on to appear in more than seventeen further novels, many of which reached the New York Times Best Seller list.

  That same year, Strategic Simulations, Inc. released Pool of Radiance, the first Forgotten Realms role-playing video game. It won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1988. TSR expanded the print line quickly, adding supplements such as Waterdeep and the North, Moonshae, and Empires of the Sands through 1987 and 1988.

  In 1989, DC Comics began publishing its own Forgotten Realms comic series, written by Grubb and illustrated mainly by Rags Morales and Dave Simons. Twenty-five issues appeared in total before the series ended in 1991; a fifty-six page annual had already appeared in 1990.

  By the first quarter of 1996, TSR had published sixty-four Forgotten Realms novels. That was out of two hundred and forty-two total novels set across every AD&D world. Those novels, in turn, drew new gamers to the tabletop, curious about the deities who ruled quietly over every corner of the Realms.

• 4. Gods, Mortals, and the Time of Troubles

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  Every deity in the Forgotten Realms depends on worshippers simply to survive. Every mortal, in turn, is expected to keep a patron god to secure a good afterlife. Greenwood built his original pantheon for his own home game. He introduced it publicly in an article called "Down-to-earth divinity," printed in Dragon issue 54 in October of 1981.

  When the setting was formally published in 1987, the pantheon gained a new goddess of trade, money, and wealth: Waukeen. She was invented by one of Jeff Grubb's own players and folded into the Realms by Grubb himself. Grubb also swapped Tyche out for Tymora, and replaced the elemental lords borrowed from Melniboné with four new deities: Akadi, Grumbar, Istishia, and Kossuth.

  Above every other god sits Ao, the Overlord, a deity so remote that he refuses to accept worshippers of his own. Ao alone caused the upheaval that the setting calls the Time of Troubles, or the Godswar, an event chronicled in The Avatar Trilogy.

  Mortal representatives of the gods, called the Chosen, carry a portion of their deity's power. Elminster, Fzoul Chembryl, Midnight, and the Seven Sisters are named among them. Midnight herself later became the new embodiment of the goddess of magic, Mystra. One of those Chosen, Elminster, would go on to anchor an entire circle of characters at the center of the setting's fiction.

• 5. Companions of the Hall

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  The Companions of the Hall first appeared together in The Crystal Shard, R. A. Salvatore's 1988 novel. Each one was built to fit a distinct role-playing archetype.

  Drizzt Do'Urden, a dark elf ranger, is the central figure across thirty-four novels. He is prized for a commitment to friendship that runs against every stereotype of his own drow people. His fiction is often read as commentary on racial prejudice, especially across The Dark Elf Trilogy. He also carries an ongoing strain with his human partner, Catti-brie, over their mismatched lifespans.

  Wulfgar, a massive human barbarian, once helped Drizzt and his magical panther Guenhwyvar defeat twenty-five giants together in The Crystal Shard. Critics have compared Wulfgar's hot-headed warrior archetype to Robert E. Howard's Conan.

  Bruenor Battlehammer, a dwarven fighter, reclaims Mithral Hall with the Companions' help and becomes its king; both Catti-brie and Wulfgar are his adopted children. Writer Rob Bricken, for io9, called him a dwarf who fits "pretty much every fantasy stereotype." That included a drive to reclaim an ancestral home lost after his people dug too far and woke a monster.

  Catti-brie starts as a human archer and later develops spellcasting abilities; Drizzt calls her his soulmate in The Crystal Shard. She is favored by Mielikki, goddess of forests and nature spirits, and bears the goddess's mark.

  Regis, a halfling Companion, behaves like a classic J.R.R. Tolkien hobbit. Bricken noted he carries a crystal pendant that lets him charm people. Regis often ends up "saving the day, Bilbo-style," including in the climactic battle of The Crystal Shard.

  Elminster, the Sage of Shadowdale, is a founding member of the Harpers and one of Mystra's oldest and most powerful Chosen. Bricken described him as "the most powerful, important, and smartest wizard in the Forgotten Realms... more Merlin than Gandalf."

  Jarlaxle, another Salvatore character, was introduced in the 1990 novel Exile and leads the mercenary band Bregan D'aerthe. Christian Hoffer, of Comicbook.com, called him an amoral villain full of "contingencies and secret plots."

  Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunsun, created by Greenwood and designer Steven Schend, serves as Archmage of Waterdeep and a leading Harper. Before his death he passes his staff to his apprentice, Tsarra.

  A handful of other names recur across the fiction. Artemis Entreri is Drizzt's cold-blooded human rival. Gromph Baenre is Archmage of Menzoberranzan and a rival to Elminster. His daughter, Liriel Baenre, created by Elaine Cunningham, eventually leaves the Underdark to live permanently on the surface.

  These characters carried the Realms through its most dramatic upheavals, including a redesign that would tear apart the very world they lived in.

• 6. Reshaping the Realms

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  TSR advanced the Forgotten Realms' internal calendar by one year, to 1358 DR, in a storyline it called the Time of Troubles. It started with the 1989 book Hall of Heroes. The story continued through a three-part Avatar adventure series, a three-novel Avatar series, and stories inside the comic book.

  The 1990 hardcover Forgotten Realms Adventures, written by Grubb and Greenwood, introduced the reshaped setting to AD&D 2nd edition. It also explained exactly how the Time of Troubles had changed the setting.

  A second, far larger overhaul arrived with Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition in 2008. It centered on a cataclysm called the Spellplague, triggered when the goddess of magic, Mystra, was killed. The event pushed the fictional timeline ninety-four years forward, from 1358 DR to 1479 DR. It fused parts of the world of Toril with its long-lost twin, Abeir. Elves, sensing a renewed connection to the Feywild, returned to Faerûn in force.

  Author Shannon Appelcline, writing in Designers & Dragons, called the resulting Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide possibly "the most controversial D&D book ever produced by Wizards." He said that was driven entirely by the large-scale destruction of the Realms.

  R. A. Salvatore himself was unhappy with the change. He later said authors were "handed a document and told how things were going to be." Their opinions were asked for, he said, but mattered "very little."

  Wizards of the Coast reversed much of that damage in 2013 with a year-long multimedia storyline called the Sundering. It included a free-to-play mobile game and a social networking app. A six-novel series carried the story, written by authors including Salvatore, Paul S. Kemp, and Greenwood himself.

  That Second Sundering carried the Realms from 4th edition rules into 5th edition, published in 2014. This time, as Salvatore later put it, authors were "told what was happening to the game" rather than simply handed the outcome.

  By then the Forgotten Realms had already outgrown the tabletop entirely. It had shown up on computer screens years before Wizards of the Coast even existed as a company.

• 7. Beyond the Tabletop

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  Strategic Simulations released Eye of the Beholder for MS-DOS in 1990. Two sequels followed, one in 1991 and one in 1992. All three were repackaged onto a single disk in 1995.

  That same year, 1991, saw Neverwinter Nights launch on America Online, the first graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game ever released. Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1997 and trimmed its six campaign settings down to just Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance.

  BioWare released Baldur's Gate in 1998, a game later called by pundits "the hands-down best PC roleplaying game ever." A sequel, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, followed in 2000. Icewind Dale, built on the same engine, arrived alongside it.

  BioWare returned in 2002 with a new Neverwinter Nights set in northern Faerûn. A 2006 sequel from Obsidian Entertainment followed, along with expansions including Mask of the Betrayer.

  The Neverwinter Campaign Setting arrived in 2011. It spun off four Salvatore novels, a comic book, and a board game called The Legend of Drizzt. Two separate video games followed: the Facebook game Heroes of Neverwinter and the MMORPG Neverwinter, released in 2013. Laura Tommervik, of the Wizards of the Coast marketing team, explained the strategy directly: "We use Neverwinter as the connective tissue across multiple product categories."

  In 2023, Larian Studios released Baldur's Gate 3. It became the first game ever to win Game of the Year, or its equivalent, at all five major award ceremonies. Those were the Golden Joystick Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards, the DICE Awards, the BAFTAs, and The Game Awards. That same year brought the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, set in the Realms with Neverwinter as a major location.

  The story even reached the stage. Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern opened off-Broadway at Stage 42 in New York City on the 5th of May 2024. It closed there on the 11th of May 2025. The production later opened at the Sydney Opera House's Studio venue in December of 2024, closing on the 6th of April 2025. A U.S. national tour began in July of 2025.

  None of that spread would have mattered much, though. The Realms first had to win over critics and scholars deciding whether it deserved the attention.

• 8. Critical Reception

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  Sean Patrick Fannon, in his book The Fantasy Roleplaying Gamer's Bible, called the Forgotten Realms "the most ambitious fantasy game setting published since Tekumel." He suggested it may be "the most widely played-in game setting in RPG history."

  Marc Oxoby, in his book The 1990s, credited the Realms novels with an "extraordinary shelf life," noting they stayed in print for years after release. Joyce Saricks, in The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, listed the Forgotten Realms novels among the books most requested by fantasy readers at public libraries.

  D&D chroniclers Michael Witwer and colleagues, in the book Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana, praised the "Tolkienesque history and detail" Greenwood built into his creation. They called the result "quite simply, Dungeons & Dragons at its very core."

  Aubrey Sitterson, writing for PC Magazine in 2015, ranked the Forgotten Realms among the eleven best Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings. He noted it was still the only setting actively supported by Wizards of the Coast at the time.

  Brian Silliman, for SYFY Wire in 2017, called it "a classic fantasy backdrop... inspiring limitless possibilities for any smirking dungeon master." Academic Philip J. Clements, writing in 2019, described the setting as "more-or-less the flagship setting for D&D" and noted it had received more supplements than any other.

  Not every assessment was warm. Academic Daniel Heath Justice argued the setting was "explicitly based on the civilized-versus-savage binary." He pointed specifically to its portrayal of the drow as "sadistic" and "black-skinned," led by "vicious matriarchs."

  Francesco Cacciatore, of Polygon, welcomed one especially specific piece of that future. The 2025 sourcebook Adventures in Faerûn promised a proper look at the Dales, Calimshan, and the Moonshae Isles. Cacciatore said those regions had gone unexplored in detail for more than two decades.