1) FR is still my favourite D&D setting. It has breath, some depth, and many good elements despite the (often valid) critics. I’m familiar enough with the setting that I can start a game with little prep and can run a believable world simulation without investing a lot of time in reading and assimilating setting information.
2) Like many posters above, I made the Forgotten Realms my own and pretty much play an alternate reality of the published FR. While my FR campaigns aren’t directly connected, I often make elements of past campaigns (both DMed by me or played as PC) as canon and integrate them in current ones. For example, I joined a FR campaign after a previous group kind of fell appart, with only the DM and one player remaining. Since then, in all my games, the fact that the Duke of Everlund left off on an adventure and never returned has always been an important pivoting point in the game’s current or past history, even if I never knew the guy who played that PC in the first place.
Otherwise, my FR tend to be a bit less high-magic and a bit more medieval, with events dealing with the timeline of 1e and 2e FR (though often not in exact chronological order). I never took my own campaigns to the chronology of 3e or beyond.
3) I’ve been playing and DMing in the FR since the early 90s (around the transition to 2e AD&D.
4) Favourite FR products at are 1e Savage Frontier, 2e Waterdeep and the North, and 3e Unapproachable East. Honorable mention to 3e FR Campaign Setting Guide as one of the most comprehensive and complete setting guide ever created IMO.
5) I’ve read a few FR novels but they never really interested me for some reasons. The Menzobereanzan parts of the Drizzt books were great however. A good example of how a book can tell a decent story, be decently written, and expose good world-building all at once.
