Chris Sims talks about some of his work for the Forgotten Realms in this blog post. Here's the bit I find interesting:
I like that we'll be seeing a lot of maps and a focus on providing material that'll be used in play. The toolbox approach they're taking with 4e seems quite sensible to me. As someone who has always been somewhat overwhelmed by the vast anount of realmslore, this makes me much more likely to run a FR game.
Some of these 'threats' and how they're presented in the campaign guide would make for a great preview article .
“Lands of Faerûn” is the largest chapter in the Campaign Guide. It follows a nice, easy-to-navigate spread format, and almost every area includes an imbedded map of the region. Each entry focuses on places PCs can come from, pass through, and stay in, as well as cool experiences, sites, and plots to fuel DM imagination. It’s really the DM’s guide to Faerûn, and it acknowledges itself as just that.
Its second largest section is dedicated to threats, retaining some old foes, putting a new spin on some recognizable adversaries, and adding a few new ones. Szass Tam still stands as Abeir-Toril’s mightiest necromancer; the Zhents still plot in the shadows, hoping to reclaim lost glory; gibberlings still pour from the Underdark, but the Spellplague changed some of them. Along with these, surviving Halruaans ply a mercenary trade from a floating fortress and their few remaining skyships, and warlocks tied to a mysterious primordial entity rule Vaasa. And these aren’t the half of my work. They don’t even touch on the work Ed Greenwood did in describing the threats in his parts of the world.
The cool thing to me is that the Campaign Guide will be helpful on another level. In designing the threats, I took the approach that my design should supplement Paragon and Epic tiers, since the MM already has a great deal of support for Heroic-tier play. MM monsters are as much FR as they are D&D, and vice versa, so the FR threats can add to any DM’s toolbox. I’d happily use Manshoon’s statistics in my homebrew campaign, along with a lot of ideas for magic and such detailed in the Campaign Guide (and Player’s Guide for that matter).
I like that we'll be seeing a lot of maps and a focus on providing material that'll be used in play. The toolbox approach they're taking with 4e seems quite sensible to me. As someone who has always been somewhat overwhelmed by the vast anount of realmslore, this makes me much more likely to run a FR game.
Some of these 'threats' and how they're presented in the campaign guide would make for a great preview article .