If you would seek the original Realms, picture a huge rectangle composed of 8-and-a-half-by-11 inch pages laid together to form a map, long in width rather than height (with, as is customary, “north” at the top). This is the original Realms, consisting of the familiar continent of Faerûn and lots of sea. Its western border is Evermeet, floating alone (along with a few isolated islands, used in my Anchorome adventures) in the middle of a lot of otherwise empty ocean.
Those waters extend east to the Sword Coast, and as far south as “the Utter East” coast south of Ulgarth. Going ashore there, the map edge runs overland due east to a longitude just east of the mountain range known as the Glittering Spires (east of Winterkeep), and then runs north along that eastern edge as far as a latitude in the Great Ice Sea that will allow the northern boundary of the rectangle to be brought back westwards in the Endless Ice Sea, north of the Spine of the World.
That’s the original ‘master map,’ with unmapped islands to the west and southwest, and unmapped, “unknown” (but understood to be extensive) lands extending to the east of Raurin, Murghom, and Semphar, and to the south and east of Ulgarth. Lantan, Nimbral, Ruathym, and Uttersea were part of my original Realms.
Now TSR makes some minor changes. A glacier is “pushed back” to make room for their additions of Vaasa, Damara, and the Bloodstone Pass. (The reason for the glacier’s southerly extent wasn’t revealed until fifteen years later, with the recent publication of the Epic Level Handbook, which showed Realms fans my character Iyraclea for the first time. A note to Realms fans: some of my other original “Secrets of the Realms” haven’t yet been revealed, bwoohahahah and so on.) TSR designers also named the Galena Mountains, after a resort that the TSR brass went to, “on retreat,” just as they celebrated some staff designers with Waterdeep street names with the publication of City System.
On the east side of the Dragonreach (the coastal lands known as the Vast) my port of Sarbreenar was sunk so Raven’s Gate could be built atop it for the RPGA. The name of this city promptly changed to Raven’s Bluff (I think a romance novel had used the Raven’s Gate name, and so prevented it being trademarked).
The nature of the Great Glacier changed when it was detailed by a freelancer (I had to abandon that project to do the first Volo’s Guide), and Troy Denning’s novel The Parched Sea (first in the Harpers series) made some changes to Anauroch, which I developed when I did the Anauroch sourcebook.
The original Realms maps showed the Endless Ice Sea north of the Spine of the World (Bob Salvatore added Icewind Dale and the Ten Towns), and “my original” Moonshaes were many small, rocky islands inhabited by fisherfolk (rather like the real-world Hebrides or Ursula LeGuin’s fictional Earthsea), but were replaced by the Celtic continents Doug Niles had already developed for his own project (hence the first Realms novel being Darkwalker on Moonshae). This with done with my approval, because the alternative replacement location was the Pirate Isles in the center of the Sea of Fallen Stars, which just wouldn’t have worked.
If you have a copy of the original (print, not CD-ROM) Forgotten Realms Atlas, which was derived from my original maps and from the events and maps of the early novels, pages 4 through 11 cover most of the extent of my original maps, although Evermeet has been “pushed closer” to the Sword Coast (to do away with a lot of that empty sea in the maps), and names added in the Hordelands and Kara-Tur design have started to creep into the regions shown on the western half of page 7.
A lot of my dungeon and village maps were never used, and many locales since then have changed to suit the needs of novels or adventures written by others. Some of my historical maps were drawn on for the histories of Netheril and Cormanthyr, and as the years have passed, many minor changes have been wrought (for instance, several designers have done things with Turmish, Chondath, and the Vilhon Reach, from my own original notes and POLYHEDRON articles, to the early Swords of the Iron Legion accessory, to Jim Butler’s Emerald Enclave, and the addition of Eles Wianar).
Please note that I’m not complaining about these changes. Alterations are the very nature of a shared world, and I gladly agreed to share the Realms with TSR and all of you.
However, even today, the vast majority of people (from Elaith ‘the Serpent’ to the Harpells to the Wyvernspur noble family, though not Giogi and Kat) and places in the Realms are of my invention and naming. So I still feel right at home when perusing Realms products.
In recent years, wherever possible (such as in my website and POLYHEDRON articles), I’ve tiptoed around the edges of the published Realms “painting in” details of areas not yet covered in any depth, and many Realms products that don’t have my name on them anywhere have made use of these notes, suggestions, and even maps. Moreover, dedicated Realms scholars like Eric Boyd, George Krashos, Tom Costa, Grant Christie, Bryon Wischstadt, and many more have enthusiastically detailed and “fixed” Realmslore and continue to do so, as well as fans who focus their energies on such places as Silverymoon and the Great Dale.
And I did it all in the first place for my players, like the beautiful lady known to you as The Hooded One, because they demanded that level of detail, and wanted a world they could care about and believe in. Long may the Realms endure, and long may more of you want and demand those same things of it.
