D&D 5E Happy 50th, Forgotten Realms!
- Thread starter Jeremy E Grenemyer
- Start date
It might not exactly be 28, but it is a lot closer to 28 than 50. He actually started playing D&D sometime in 75, so 40 years is reasonable for the potential start of a D&D campaign (I cannot find out if he started as a DM or player though). And Ed started publishing in '79, but although he had part of his homebrew in some of his publications, the published Realms as such did not really start as such until '87.
GMforPowergamers
Legend
It depends, if you count like every other published work this is 28 years, however the creator has gone out of his way to spread the story that he created the world as a young boy and it was the same world that would later become the FR... even if you believe it is older I doubt any sane person could point to the one moment when you where single digit years old and made up a story... so at best it is an exaggerated claim, at worst it is self aggrandizing story to make an old man feel more important then he is... so I guess it is up to you to decide, but I go toward 28 years old...
the creator of our hobby, and maybe the person millions owe how we play games to is Gary, and I find it more then a little off putting when Ed tries to set himself as being before him...
GMforPowergamers
Legend
I would totally stand behind calling this the 40th... but 50 is just to crazy...
From Wikipedia.
He began writing stories about the Forgotten Realms as a child, starting in the mid 1960's.
It's actually closer to 50 than you think. If it was 1965 then it would be 50 years ago. That means at the age of 6 he was writing stuff on the Forgotten Realms. There is no age requirement when something is actually acknowledged. It's for none of you here to make the decision.
He began writing stories about the Forgotten Realms as a child, starting in the mid 1960's.
It's actually closer to 50 than you think. If it was 1965 then it would be 50 years ago. That means at the age of 6 he was writing stuff on the Forgotten Realms. There is no age requirement when something is actually acknowledged. It's for none of you here to make the decision.
People repeatedly peddling their misconceptions like this used to really piss me off, and I used to REALLY enjoy delivering up a serving of holy hell to the ones who couldn't bother to learn a little bit before they put fingers to keyboard, but I have learned that it comes with the territory.
Ed vs. Gary drama only exists to the degree that anonymous online strangers care to gin it up.
On another note: I'd like to pin down exactly when the formative ideas for D&D came about and work got started. That would be a good day to hoist a beer and toast Gary, Dave, share a drink with friends and celebrate the birth of D&D.
I would not even go with 40. The stuff I did back in the same timeframe can hardly be called a living breathing canon campaign world. Sure, I invented gaming systems back then and took them to conventions and had notebooks of campaign stuff, but I don't consider my teenage scriblings with influences from every fantasy and sci fi book and movie and module that ever came out to be a solid campaign. At best, Ed's campaign really became semi-polished in '86 when Ed really sat down and started collating and working to make it a cohesive whole for publication the following year. Sure, he already had a lot of the ideas before then, many of them in various notebooks. But the ideas that he had in '75 (and earlier) were a small fraction of those from the decade longer campaign he got published in '87 (and many of those earlier ideas probably got discarded anyway). It became canon when it became published. Two years from now, I will celebrate FR's 30th anniversary (cause I have always really really liked FR).
GMforPowergamers
Legend
the common way is by publication date that isn't anyone here making up a rule. if 3 year old or 4 year old or 20 year old ed wrote something and got it published... cool, but he didn't it was published int eh 80's
You got me there. The post I linked to at Candlekeep indicates 50 years, but all the online sources state the story was written in 1967, not 1964 or 65.
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Gecko85
Explorer
I think the formative ideas can be traced to Gen Con I (1968), when Gary saw a demonstration of a medieval miniatures game "Siege of Bodenberg". This by all accounts interested Gary, and he began thinking about how to improve miniatures rules for 1-on-1 combat, eventually leading to the publication of Chainmail in 1971.
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