Except...no one is making you do this with the Forgotten Realms. If you don't have the supplements with the extra info and don't feel like researching them online...don't.
Use what you have and ignore the rest.
Why is this not an acceptable answer? I'm truly confused.
For me, and perhaps a few others, it is the "Use what you have" that starts some weirdness.
I don't have almost anything.
Like, I know the Zhentarim are evil bad guys and spies... but beyond that I know nothing. I could use them in a game, it's a cool name and I'm bad at names anyways.
And let's say I look up a map and decide to play a game in some random city, I literally just pulled up a map and zoomed in. Looks like Westgate. So, either I can just use the name and nothing else... which is fine I guess, but really at that point why am I using the realms? The idea isn't to only troll for names. I could just use a random name generator for that.
So I look up Westgate, and it's near the Dragonmere so I should probably look that up. Looks like the Dragonmere is connected to something called the Dragonfall, that's cool. Creator Races, what the heck is that, is that important to my game? I don't know, better do some reading just to make sure.
Looks like this map has something called the Ruins of Starmantle a little to the south. Ruins are great adventuring spots. What are the odds there is a lot of backstory involved in those ruins? That I'm going end up reading, and figuring out what to do with because it is what? Less than a three day walk from Westgate. And there is this place called Cormyr to the North. Big name, I even vaguely recognize it as one of the major kingdoms. Better learn something about it since it is right there across the way from where I'm starting.
By the way, I didn't bother looking up anything after the Dragonmere, but I am fairly certain that I could have followed wiki links for hours just from this tiny subsection of a map I looked up. And I zoomed in as close as I could and there are dozens of more place names and therefore stories within less than a weeks travel of this place I just randomly picked.
So, having absolutely no materials as a start (though I will admit some knowledge of the realms because I've been posting on forums like this for years now) I have to start looking things up if I want to do more than steal the names from the places. And once you start looking things up, everything begins to cross-reference and you don't know when to stop, because while this war may sound unimportant, it could end up having changed something massive or some place nearby could have been a big battle site, and then you're down the rabbit hole again looking things up so that you know what this place is that your players are going to.
And I rarely see any PF players complain about that. It boggles my mind.
Why aren't the PF boards full of people demanding new settings? Why aren't there "Why Golarion is hated?" threads? Seriously, why aren't people on Paizo's boards demanding APs that don't deal with Golarion, or refusing to buy books that say "X of Golarion" on them?
If I may take a stab with very little knowledge of the PF fan-base or game.
Because unlike D&D Pathfinder has never had another setting.
If what you say is true Pathfinder has always been set in this one place, and has never been set anywhere else.
D&D has what? A dozen unused settings? Settings that used to exist and got support. Settings that were their own thing before being eaten by the Realms.
In the how ever many years Pathfinder has been out, people have just come to accept it is a game with a single supported setting. But D&D has never been that, not 100%, even know as we complain there is an acknowledgement that these other settings exist and could be used.
That is a pretty big difference in expectations.