D&D 5E Is the Forgotten Realms experiencing a new Golden Age now that its NOT the default 5e setting anymore?

[see]

The Forgotten Realms’ cosmological situation was pretty funky during 4e due to the spellplague, but my understanding was that the great wheel and the world tree were (and, well, still are, I guess) contemporary competing models in-universe.

No, they weren't. FR was explicitly Great Wheel through the end of AD&D, then was explicitly World Tree in 3rd/3.5, and then explicitly World Axis in 4th.

There was fanon during 3rd that the World Tree was just an in-universe model, and that fanon got a bit extra popularity when the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide didn't explicitly lay out which plane which FR god was on in 5th edition (the way the god-to-plane correspondences were explicitly laid out in previous editions). But the actual published material for 3rd (FRCS) and 3.5 (Player's Guide to Faerun) was entirely clear, especially the latter.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Are you ok?

Of course! But sometimes people don't like being reminded that our time spent here on EN World is merely for our personal entertainment and has no affect on the game itself.

 

[Shardstone]

Of course! But sometimes people don't like being reminded that our time spent here on EN World is merely for our personal entertainment and has no affect on the game itself.

Who doesn't like that?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Who doesn't like that?

Don't know. Haven't asked. But folks are free to ignore me if they don't wish to discuss it. But for some reason people do Reply to me about it, which only inspires me to respond back. (And yes, I understand full well the irony of continuing a discussion about a response stating that the discussion will have no discernable affect, LOL.)

 

[Clint_L]

Only really familar with 1e,2e and 5e. Seems to me there is more of an unwritten sense of what is "core" material, what is "FR" and what is "Greyhawk" the whole time. The two Campagin settings are so generic that one can shift from non-setting to setting material pretty smoothly. I've never thought of one being default core but since late 1e FR more core than Greyhawk but both still "there"

Greyhawk is barely there in 5e. I'm hoping that gets rectified next year.

For me, it just seems obvious that FR is the default setting. It's not the only setting, but it's the only one that gets accounted for in pretty much every book, and it's the setting for almost all of the iconic 5e adventures. It's also the setting for other iconic brand properties, like the film and BG3. It seems quixotic to argue that it's not the default setting for 5e.

I use Exandria, though.

 

[Parmandur]

The Forgotten Realms’ cosmological situation was pretty funky during 4e due to the spellplague, but my understanding was that the great wheel and the world tree were (and, well, still are, I guess) contemporary competing models in-universe.

Nope, in 3E WotC went out of their way to emphasize thar FR was part of a distinct cosmology, just like Eberron. It didn't stick, but that's what they were doing.

 

[Parmandur]

Greyhawk is barely there in 5e. I'm hoping that gets rectified next year.

For me, it just seems obvious that FR is the default setting. It's not the only setting, but it's the only one that gets accounted for in pretty much every book, and it's the setting for almost all of the iconic 5e adventures. It's also the setting for other iconic brand properties, like the film and BG3. It seems quixotic to argue that it's not the default setting for 5e.

I use Exandria, though.

It us certainly the most popular Setting, and one that gets used often: but it has not been pushed as the One True Setting at any point in 5E. Even those early big Adventures included guidelines for hiw to use them in other Settings such as Eberron and even Dark Sun.

 

[Shardstone]

Don't know. Haven't asked. But folks are free to ignore me if they don't wish to discuss it. But for some reason people do Reply to me about it, which only inspires me to respond back. (And yes, I understand full well the irony of continuing a discussion about a response stating that the discussion will have no discernable affect, LOL.)

Oh man.

 

[Remathilis]

Late to the party so sorry if this has already been covered, but I think perhaps there’s a meaningful distinction to be made here between “default setting” and “assumed setting.” Forgotten Realms can kind of be seen as 5e’s default setting, in that published adventures seem to, well, default to being set there, if there’s no specific reason for them to be set somewhere else. Golarion is Pathfinder’s assumed setting, because all of the writing assumes the setting’s lore. It isn’t just the go-to example, it’s woven into the game itself.

If we do draw such a distinction, I would argue that 5e’s assumed setting is kind of a Planescape/spelljammer mashup, which uses the great wheel and the astral sea to connect all the various settings (Forgotten Realms included) into a unified meta-setting

I agree with this. The use of Forgotten Realms was to give things proper nouns and a sense of continuity. It was never designed to be the be-all end-all unless 5e remained a 2 book per year niche product. Luckily that did not happen.

 

[Knorrrssk]

All of the starter set materials are set in the Forgotten Realms, which should tell you something.