I’m just going through the book now, but my initial impressions are not good. Compared to the tour-de-force that was the 3E FRCS (probably the best DM product of the 3E era, IMO), I finding the 4e FRCG a disappointment. While I appreciate the notion of giving DMs the room to insert their own stories into a setting, the 4e Realms (so far) doesn’t feel like a living world.
Clearly the designers have run with the idea that regions and enemies should be able to be lifted wholesale from the Realms for placement in other settings. I suppose that might make the book more appealing to DMs who don’t run the Realms, but for those of us that do, it kinda sucks. What we’re left with is a setting without a thematic core or a sense of connectedness. Each element tends to stand on its own without much reference to those around it. And none, I have to say, is that compelling on its own. It’s not hard for a DM to come up with a nation with three or four major cities and a couple of ideas for major dungeons. What’s hard is to come up with an entire world, to create a complex mythology and history, to layer in the elements that turn cities and nations into a living, breathing world. That’s what I want in a campaign guide – not what we’ve got here, which is more like a kit of readymade city and dungeon ideas with few details attached.
And I hate, hate the new granny-type + white space layout that has been borrowed from the core books. A note to WoTC: we’re not buying this as a coffee-table book, or for casual reading on a train. It's not a magazine and we're not casual readers. We want content, and the more content there is, the more value we’re going to perceive in a book. The brilliance of the 3E FRCS was that it was bursting at the seams with details, plot hooks and locations. I don’t think anybody complained that the type was too small or that there wasn’t enough leading between lines of text. There was so much more information in that book, simply because the designers made maximum use of the available space. The seemingly much lower word count in the 4e Forgotten Realms book leaves a lot to be desired. Even when you’re devoting several pages to a region, it feels like you’re just skimming the surface. Major settlements are being skipped over or given the most cursory treatment because you’ve left no space to detail them.
And Loudwater. Why? Really, this seems like a total waste of space. We already have a starter town (of about the same size, too) in the DMG. You could have just said, “if you want a starter town, you can use Fallcrest. A good place to put it would be here…” What would have been awesome is if the designers had devoted that space to describing a major region in depth. A 32-page section on Cormyr, for example, would have been great.
Sorry if I’m sounding negative, but the new setting is a major disappointment when compared to the 3E and previous FR products. It has some good things about it – for a start it brings back some mystery to the realms, and leaves spaces for DMs to fill in with their own ideas, but it seems incomplete overall. I’d probably have a higher opinion of it if I knew that at some stage there would be additional material to provide greater depth to the setting, but at this stage it doesn’t appear there will be (and I’m not that interested in collating snippets from Dragon), so I’d have to recommend giving this one a pass.
