The Forgotten Realms is easily one of the most successful fictional worlds ever created. It’s by far the most popular Dungeons & Dragons setting, comprising almost three hundred novels and an uncountable swarm of tabletop supplements and adventures. New Forgotten Realms material has been continually published every year since 1987, and it’s still going strong as the default setting for new editions of D&D. It’s appeared in all sorts of other media as well, from video games and board games to a major motion picture. This is doomed to be only a cursory overview of its history, given the size of the subject, but it might be useful for contextualizing some of the material I’m reviewing.

Themes and motifs

The Forgotten Realms has thrived largely by being all things to all people. It’s a huge world packed with scores of different nations and cultures, so there’s practically endless room for every novel or sourcebook author to carve out a little chunk of the world and tell a story there without stepping on each others’ toes. As a DM, you can just use it as the standard elves-and-dwarves Western European fantasy setting if you like, or you can set it further afield in more unfamiliar environments, or you can customize an underdeveloped area of the setting to your heart’s content.

But if there are any themes that consistently run throughout Forgotten Realms material, they’d be:

High magic. The Realms are a setting where magic is nearly ubiquitous and the top tier of magical practitioners are city-destroyingly powerful. This works both for it and against it. On the one hand, there’s a lot you can do with a high-magic world to make it feel unique and very distinct from the real world. On the other hand, the Realms has gotten somewhat of a reputation as “the setting filled with high-level NPCs who can solve all the problems, so why should anyone else bother?”

Long history. Pantheons of gods have come and gone. Ancient empires long since fallen have left ruins all over, usually filled with monsters and magic. Pretty much everything that’s wilderness or wasteland now was once the heartland of some long-forgotten nation.

Smaller-scale conflicts. With only a few exceptions, like the Time of Troubles, the Forgotten Realms is not about giant world-spanning threats. Realms stories tend to be threats to a particular person or city or maybe even region, but it’s very rare that the stakes are “the world will end.” It’s a huge world, large enough to dwarf most conflicts.

All of these turned out to be great characteristics for both a D&D campaign setting and a novel series. From a D&D perspective, you have lots of hooks and lots of room to play around without stepping on the toes of the canon. From the novels’ perspectives, they had plenty of room to tell hundreds of disconnected stories instead of having to fit their stories into one big overarching plot.

How it started

In the mid-1960s a Canadian kid named Ed Greenwood, inspired by fantasy writers such as Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber, started putting together notes and stories for a home-grown fantasy world in which to set his swords-and-sorcery stories. The world and the stories evolved over the years, filling cardboard box after cardboard box with typewritten paper and hand-drawn maps. In 1975, when Dungeons & Dragons first started diffusing through geek culture, the teenage Greenwood adapted his made-up world into a setting for his D&D games and ran regular campaigns there for many years.

Fast-forward to the mid-1980s! TSR had seen strong sales of its first two D&D setting products, World of Greyhawk and Dragonlance Adventures, and was looking for a new setting to publish. Greenwood had been a regular contributor to Dragon, the monthly Dungeons & Dragons magazine, submitting articles full of tidbits from his homebrew campaign. TSR game designer Jeff Grubb contacted Greenwood to ask whether there was a setting behind those articles, and if so, would he be willing to sell it? Long story short, he did, in one of the worst deals since Little Richard’s record contract. Grubb then spent months trawling through twenty years’ worth of Greenwood’s ideas and assembled them into a polished product: the original Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (the “Grey Box”).

After the success of Dragonlance, it was unthinkable that a new setting could be launched without tie-in novels. The production timeline was too short to get any authors to write books set in the Realms, though, so they took an unfinished pseudo-Welsh setting that TSR UK had been working on, taped it onto the map of the Realms, and published an in-progress novel that was set there (Darkwalker on Moonshae by Douglas Niles) as the first Forgotten Realms book. Same with the second Realms book, R.A. Salvatore’s The Crystal Shard — the Grey Box wasn’t even out yet, and thus Icewind Dale was hastily taped onto the map of the Realms so that Salvatore could set his first novel in a place that didn’t require any background knowledge of the setting. It wasn’t until the fourth Realms novel, Greenwood’s own Spellfire, that TSR finally published a novel set in the territory invented by Greenwood.

How it went

The Realms rapidly became TSR’s most successful setting for both D&D materials and novels alike. I’m not even going to try to make an accurate count of all of the D&D sourcebooks, adventures, and boxed sets published for the Realms over the next several years; it would be an extremely tedious task, because there were so many scores of them. TSR usually published around 6 to 9 Forgotten Realms novels per year, barring a particularly prolific period in 1995 and 1996 where they averaged 13 per year. The pace increased after TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997, with most years seeing between 10 and 20 novels. Young people who are just getting into roleplaying games will stare at you incredulously if you tell them that bookstores used to have entire shelves of D&D novels, but it’s hard to overstate just how ubiquitous and numerous they were.

The Forgotten Realms were also a popular setting for D&D-related video games. Computer wargames company SSI published the “Gold Box” series of games, an adaptation of AD&D to the realm of single-player computer RPGs, starting in 1988. That opened the floodgates to a wide array of games over the next couple of decades, some of which were classics and some of which were godawful. But of the ninety-odd Dungeons & Dragons computer games and game-adjacent products released to date, at least fifty-nine of them were set in the Forgotten Realms — and that includes all of the most successful ones, such as the Gold Box Pool of Radiance series, the Baldur’s Gate series, and the Neverwinter Nights series. There was a great deal of cross-pollination between Dungeons & Dragons, the novels, and the video games — people who enjoyed one would be more likely to try out the others and get hooked.

The transition from TSR to Wizards of the Coast and the transition from 2nd Edition D&D to 3rd Edition were good for the Realms. The profusion of settings for 2nd Edition (ten or so, depending on how you count) were ruinous to TSR’s bottom line, fragmenting their market and cannibalizing sales from each other, so Wizards decided to focus on supporting only one — the Forgotten Realms — and licensed out the rights to the less successful settings to third parties. Tabletop game material wasn’t released at quite the breakneck pace that it was under TSR, but there was still a steady flow of content, much of which was Realms-related. The fiction department became an extraordinarily efficient book-extruding machine, often producing more than one Realms book per month.

And then, when the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons rolled around in 2008, everything changed. The higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast perceived that they had two problems with the Realms. First, the decades of lore were seen as a barrier to entry for new players, something that only hardened RPG grognards would appreciate. Second, the 4th edition rules emphasized a particular setting aesthetic that they called “points of light”: the world is a big, dangerous place, mostly wilderness, with only the occasional bastion of civilization. The Realms were seen as too civilized and cosmopolitan to fit the aesthetic, so something needed to be done.

They decided to solve the lore problem by skipping the timeline forwards by a century, so that most of the lore would be out of date and they could start somewhat fresh. They solved the “points of light” problem by introducing a massive upheaval that destroyed or transformed large parts of the world. The people on the creative side (Greenwood and Salvatore among them) urged management to reconsider, but it was to no avail.

To say that the fans did not appreciate these changes would be a vast understatement. In fact, it aggravated people so badly that Wizards walked back as many of those changes as they could in the 5th Edition version of the campaign setting — the timeskip remained, but many of the other changes were either reversed or retconned. Despite that, most long-time fans are still salty about the whole affair.

How it ended

Wizards of the Coast shuttered their in-house fiction department in 2016, which effectively spelled the end for the Forgotten Realms novel series. The only exception is the Legend of Drizzt series by R.A. Salvatore, which will presumably keep running until the sun becomes a red giant and engulfs our planet. Hasbro, the corporate overlords of Wizards of the Coast, aren’t particularly interested in anything as low-margin as fiction publishing unless it involves the one remaining author who can reliably guarantee best-sellers. Still, there have been nearly three hundred Realms novels published, and that’s one hell of a run.

It’s unlikely that Forgotten Realms novels (or any D&D novels, for that matter) will ever be as much of a cultural phenomenon as they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Without publishing works by new authors, we’ll never discover the next generation of Salvatores, Cunninghams, or Greenwoods who might catch people’s imaginations, so the fiction of the Realms is likely to end when those authors do. But then, the size of the physical book market isn’t nearly what it used to be. Today the cross-pollination with D&D is happening in podcasts, actual play series, and video games; paperbacks just aren’t going to reach a sufficiently large audience of new readers any more. It’s possible that something profitable could be done by aggressively marketing ebooks, with their lower production costs, to a targeted audience of existing D&D players, but it looks very unlikely that Wizards would even bother at this point.

As a D&D setting, however, it’s still going strong. It’s the default setting for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, and Wizards still regularly publishes content for it. They’ve taken a restrained approach to first-party content in the 5th Edition era, putting out comparatively few supplements and sourcebooks to avoid flooding the market like they did in earlier eras, so the Forgotten Realms don’t see quite the firehose of new content that they used to. In the long run, that’s probably a more sustainable policy. And with the recent video game Baldur’s Gate 3 (an RPG set in the Realms’ Sword Coast) selling somewhere north of 15 million copies, it’s clear that there’s still an audience that’s interested in the stories being told in this world. I think we’ll be seeing new Forgotten Realms material on a regular basis for a long, long time to come.

But for now, let’s jump way back in time to 1987 and dig into the inauspicious first novel in the series…