D&D General Origin of each Forgotten Realm

[Voadam]

Forgotten Realms has all sorts of real world gods from Deities and Demigods mixed in.

Finnish ones: Loviatar and Mielikki.

Norse: Tyr.

Greek ones renamed: Aphrodite (Sune), Apollo (Lathander), Demeter (Chauntea), Tyche (not renamed but turned into Beshaba and Tymora).

And a couple of Elric and Nehwon ones as well.

Hindu gods were part of Deities and Demigods in 1e and 2e, they were part of D&D before Kara Tur.

 

[Jer]

What makes them forgotten? Never actually heard an explanation for that.

Ed actually answered that in various places - and the answer is that the Realms are forgotten by the rest of the multiverse. Here's the answer I could find that was easiest for me to access (An interview with Ed from Dragon Magazine #244):

The “Forgotten Realms” name originally came from the notion of a “multiverse” of parallel worlds. Our Earth is one, the Realms another. In Greenwood’s original conception, Earth’s fantastic legends derive from a fantasy world that we‘ve now lost the way to-hence, the Forgotten Realms. “Concerns over possible lawsuits (kids getting hurt while trying to ‘find a gate’) led TSR to de-emphasize this meaning,” he says.

So it's a reference to us Earth folks and what we'd forgotten circa 196X when he was coming up with the fantasy world that would eventually become Toril.

(Funny tho that concerns over lawsuits over kids trying to find a gate to another universe didn't stop them from making that the premise of the cartoon branded with the D&D name.)

 

[pukunui]

Ed actually answered that in various places - and the answer is that the Realms are forgotten by the rest of the multiverse.

Here's what Ed wrote in his intro to the original FR grey box:

The "Forgotten Realms" derive their name from the fictitious fact upon which play in my campaign is based: that a multiverse exists, of countless parallel co-existing Prime Material Planes (including the world presented herein, our own modern "Earth", and any other fantasy settings a DM may wish to incorporate in play), all related to the Known Planes of Existence presented in the AD&D system. Travel betwixt these planes was once far more common than the case is now (when few know the means of reaching other worlds, or even believe in the existence of such fanciful places); hence, the Realms have been "forgotten" by beings of Earth.

 

[Jer]

Here's what Ed wrote in his intro to the original FR grey box:

That's closer to what I was remembering in my head, but I thought I'd read it in a Dragon issue. I should have checked the box set (though that's not as accessible - nor as cut-and-pastable - as my Dragon archive at the moment).