Exploring Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerûn

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Whereas FR:HoF touched at least lightly on all of the known areas of Faerûn, FR:AiF delves deeper into five locations, though I question a couple of the choices.

Advice for DMs​

But before the adventure for 1st through 3rd level characters starts, it explains what makes Faerûn different than other settings. I don’t like that the answer is “it’s epic” because that sounds trite and disregards the larger than life aspects of D&D’s other settings. Still, the book makes a good point that even a royal heir in Ravenloft is just another prisoner and that gods tend not to dabble in Eberron, though it ignores that Ravenloft is epic horror/tragedy and Eberron is epic magic steampunk pulp adventure.

FR:AiF does give DMs examples as to how to encourage players to kick their characters’ backstories up a notch while keeping them distinct and different. This ties into the Epic Destinies option presented here and how to work with players to craft both backstories and milestones as they play that will reflect how their character grows into their destiny and gain supernatural gifts, feats, magic items, etc. to represent the shifts. FR:AiF provides two examples of how to structure epic destinies (Heir to a Throne and Pupil of the Archmage).

On the flip side, it also explains how to bring an epic feel to low level adventures. Whether it’s through flashbacks, previewing a villain, or connecting to a larger conflict, concrete examples help DMs tailor adventure to their needs. How to set appropriately high stakes is also addressed.

I do like that it gives examples of where to get more Realms lore, like official 5E books on D&D Beyond and from prior editions on DMs Guild. It also highlights the Forgotten Realms wiki as a source of information and inspiration. And then I love that it continues with this quote:

“The most important thing to know about Realms lore is that you don’t have to know it. Improvisation is the most powerful tool in the DM’s toolbox. When your players visit Waterdeep, you don’t need the information in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. You can do what every DM does: make it up! Make Faerûn your own.”

It then gives examples of how to customize your own Forgotten Realms campaign as well as how to deal with players who may have a lot of Realms lore knowledge. It advises both making it clear to the players that you might not run things by the book and how to turn them into useful experts. It also explains how to plant Easter eggs for those players that already know the lore without hindering your customization.

The advice on how to keep adventure in Faerûn on the players’ shoulders and steering them away from trying to get legendary NPCs to solve their problems for them is good and important. It might not stop every player who says “Why can’t X handle it?” , but it’ll deal with a lot of it.

Onward to Adventure​

The structure of FR:AiF is a bit odd. It has a complete adventure that takes characters from 1st to 3rd level—and it’s in Chapter 7. Chapter 1 is all of the DM advice I mentioned above. Chapters 2-6 are overviews of five areas—the Dalelands, Icewind Dale, Calimshan, the Moonshae Isles, and Baldur’s Gate—and provide more adventure for characters third level or greater. So why put the initial adventure in chapter 7? I don’t know.

The adventures are centered around a deity or a faction or high magic or a regional adventure. A chart is available to make finding one of the right level easy. The adventures include a starting premise with a hook to entice characters, and key encounters. They either come with a map or suggest one from the 2024 DMG. Some are single-session adventures while a few may take multiple sessions.

The Lost Library​

That starting adventure, The Lost Library of Lethchauntos, can technically be set in any of the five featured locations. That might be why it’s placed after chapters 2-6, but that’s silly. It could have just as easily been chapter 2 and had the locations follow. That makes more sense to me.

The titular library belonged to a notorious wizard and is said to contain the Nathlum, a grimoire of poisons and spells. The players are hired by someone who wants to acquire the book for historical purposes for posterity. A rival wants to get it and sell it to the Zhentarim. It’s a good adventure, and the setting chosen for it will add specific flavor.

Exploring the Realms​

Chapters 2-6 follow the same format. They start with an overview of the flavor of campaigns in that region (i.e., the type of adventure subgenre it features). For Icewind Dale, that’s supernatural horror and survival horror. The Moonshae Isles have a fairy tale tone due to their fey elements and seafaring adventure. The Dalelands are classic fantasy, like protecting one’s home in a frontier with marauding goblins and the like. It includes the legendary elven city of Myth Drannor. Baldur’s Gate is gritty urban fantasy with cut-throat power struggles. Calimshan is for desert adventures of powerful genies fighting for control and the ability to explore the city of Calimport, City of Wonders (not to be confused with Waterdeep, City of Splendor). It includes genie factions, and the dragonborn there have earned a place in Calimport after helping the current sultana overthrow evil machinations.

That’s great, but why include Icewind Dale when it has had its own adventure book not long ago? The same could be said of Baldur’s Gate, but Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus focused more on the infernal realm, and I can’t fault Wizards for capitalizing on the popularity of and interest in the videogame Baldur’s Gate 3. I would have rather had another neglected region included.

The chapters then detail the people of the region, stories from the region, conflicts, a DM’s toolbox, and a gazetteer. Each one also gets region-specific material like Blood Night, The Temple of Transmutation, etc.

Monsters & Magic​

FR:AiF has 39 stat blocks. Charts let you know which of members of the FRHoF bestiary can be found in any region: Baldur’s Gate, Calimshan, Dalelands, Icewind Dale, or the Moonshae Isles.

Any bestiary with dragons is a good bestiary in my totally biased opinion. FR:AiF gets Spirit Dragons and Deep Dragons of various ages. Several of the stat blocks are for NPC types like cultists, Priestess of Lolth, etc.. Manshoon also gets an updated entry from the one in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist because he is a terrific recurring villain.

I really like the Polar Serpent, which is a heat-draining elemental of mist and cold. Pursuing prey through snowstorms and wrapping around them to steal their body heat is deliciously creepy.

I also like the build for the Swanmay, a fey shifter that can cast spells and fight with a bow and scimitar. I hated the art for it, though. Moody is fine. So dark that you can barely make anything out is not. Fortunately, that isn’t a problem for the rest of the artwork.

Rusted is a curse on the Moonshae Isles that coats the living with a thin layer of iron that rusts easily, transforming the character into a Rusted, a creature whose mind is gradually hollowed out and hates nature, attacking it whenever possible. The stats for a Rusted Behemoth, Rusted Berserker, and Rusted Wyrm provides a good overview of what can be done with Rusted creatures.

The magic items are fine. None blow me away or capture my imagination, which is odd since some of them involved histories. I do like the magical windskiff that transforms into a broach.

Should You Buy It?​

Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerûn is a good companion book to go with Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerûn. That said, it reflected some odd design choices that I didn’t love. I would have also preferred that it focused on regions thus far neglected by 5E. The art is good except for the one piece I noted.

Overall, Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerûn is quite good, but some small changes could have made it better. Obviously it’s great for anyone running Faerûn, but also useful for folks who reskin content for their homebrew campaigns. Overall I give it a solid B+.

 

[dave2008]

Is your complaint about the Swanmay art show in the article above? It is beautiful and I can make out every single detail. I love that the swan motif is incorporated into the hilt of the sword and the duality of forms suggested.

Yep, that is it. I am not sure what the issue is - it looks quite good to me.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well it depends on your perspective. I know very little and don't care about Drizzt. I know of Icewind Dale because it is part of the game / setting. I really had no idea Drizzt was connected to Icewind Dale. For me, and others like me, the two are not connected because Icewind Dale is a part of the game we play while Drizzt isn't in any meaningful way.

It’s really just The Crystal Shard (1988), the first and least bad of the Drizzt novels, that is set in Icewind Dale. The eponymous Crystal shard - crenshabon (or some such) crops up elsewhere, such as the Icewind Dale computer game (which is actually a prequel) and Rime of the Frostmaiden.

 

[Parmandur]

Well it depends on your perspective. I know very little and don't care about Drizzt. I know of Icewind Dale because it is part of the game / setting. I really had no idea Drizzt was connected to Icewind Dale. For me, and others like me, the two are not connected because Icewind Dale is a part of the game we play while Drizzt isn't in any meaningful way.

Those classic video games do tie into the Drizz't novels, as they are deep background prequels.

 

[dave2008]

Those classic video games do tie into the Drizz't novels, as they are deep background prequels.

Well I never played them so...no influence on my table!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well I never played them so...no influence on my table!

You should. Icewind Dale (game) tells a better story than any of the novels.

I’ve lifted quite a bit from it for my tabletop game.

 

[dave2008]

You should. Icewind Dale (game) tells a better story than any of the novels.

I’ve lifted quite a bit from it for my tabletop game.

I just don't really play computer games and I have never owned a gaming system (well not since the first gen or so Atari in the 80s). So it is not likely to change now!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I just don't really play computer games and I have never owned a gaming system (well not since the first gen or so Atari in the 80s). So it is not likely to change now!

It will run on a very basic PC.

 

[Parmandur]

I just don't really play computer games and I have never owned a gaming system (well not since the first gen or so Atari in the 80s). So it is not likely to change now!

Icewind Dale from GOG should run on a toaster at this point.

 

[Clint_L]

Oh, so I just finished running my adaptation with my beginner's group. They uncovered several NPCs with links to the Cult but got into a fight with them and then let them escape while heading back to the Caves of Chaos to try to infiltrate it (the party rolled the random encounter with the halfling bard, the cultists wanted to murder her as a witness, the party refused, and things went sideways from there).

Anyway, the party was pretty beat up and decided to camp and take a long rest before continuing on. So when they got to the Caves, they found that the Cultists and their allies were gone, and the party soon worked out from clues that, knowing the party was on to them, the Cult had preemptively attacked the Keep. This just made sense to me.

So the party rushed back to the Keep and had to help the defenders, culminating in a final battle in the heart of the keep against the cultists, including their leader, and an eldritch horror they had summoned. It was touch and go - at one point three characters were making death saves at once - but they pulled it out.

So...the plot became dramatically different but it all grew logically out of the source material and the player's choices, and left them with some good plot hooks to get them started on the next leg of the campaign, which I will be making up from scratch.

I found this to be a really great starter adevnture. It was easy to adapt to my campaign and a setting in Exandria, the VTT resources are excellent, and it had lots of RP opportunities.

 

[humble minion]

Finished reading this one yesterday.

On the whole, it's a pretty good product. The art is excellent (especially the big vistas illustrating a region - the Shadowdale one is gorgeous in particular) and should satisfy even the most old-school. My main quibble is too many pages spent on all the minidungeons at the start of the book - especially when there's even more small adventure-lets embedded in each region description, and then there's the larger Lost Library. Just seems a bit out of proportion. If the single-dungeon session is your jam or you['re looking for a pickup game, these will be golden, just not my style.

I thought the Dalelands part was very solid. Lots to do, you've got Zhents and Sembians and lycanthropes and all sorts of other bad guys roaming around, there' the leftovers of the Shades, undead Aencar, Moander's back. Smart decision to just have Elminster mysteriously disappear and make finding him a PC problen, rather than having him haunt the place solving all the problems (they really should have done this in 4th ed rather than all the Spellplague rubbish and saved everyone a lot of trouble...). Big section on Myth Drannor and how to adventure there. Very classic Realms, lots of familar names and places, hail-fellow-well-met kinda adventuring here. A little bit of everything from megadungeons to mysteries to politics. The Dales have always been your FR generic starter area, and this works the same way but still has enough to work with for more experienced players.

Icewind Dale is heavily influenced by the Frostmaiden module and (I think) the leftovers of some of the later Drizzt novels that I haven't read. Tonally much more survival-horror, darker and nastier, bit of body horror, nasty cults, unhappy endings, hostile locals, brain-eating aberrations, the apparent complete destruction of Clan Battlehammer, and so on, and a big scary gestalt lich-thingy as a pretty serious end of campaign BBEG (althout it needs more spellcasting variety in its stat block). Lots of GOOD plot hooks here, there's lots to do, you could wind parts of Frostmaiden in to it if you wanted. I thought this one had a lot of potential, though wasn't really a fan of the suggested campaign structures - things seemed to easy to solve. No Drizzt novel big name NPCs in sight, for what it's worth.

Calimshan has a lot of Zakhara in its DNA. Not just the obvious 1001 Nights inspiration material, but the way in which a generally respected and benevolent ruler manages the place competently, keeps the genies in line, etc etc. In fact, it probably goes a bit too far that way - it's all a bit too smooth-running, there's not really all that much wrong here that PCs need to involve themselves in fixing. There's a lack of hooks here - the big campaign structure suggestion is all about the Calimemnon crystal, but that's about all there is. The other settings do much better to establish their respective regions as adventuring locales with loads to do - Calimshan and Calimport in particular is an interesting setting to visit, but it lacking somewhat in adventure.

Moonshaes take a lot of inspiration from Witchlight, lots of fey here, and potential diplomatic rather than violence-driven solutions to many problems. This is specifically called out as a setting that could be used for younger players, you have a free-spirit young princess running around having fun and going to parties with fairies on her magic windsurfer, pet blink dogs, eeeeevil bad guys ruining the environment Just Because They're Bad, and so on. But it could also be run perfectly seriously as a regular 'adult' D&D setting and wouldn't require much tweaking. You'd need a stronger explanation of the origin of the curse (why would a vampire choose to rust things?) and some sort of quasi-mythical explanation of why the suggested method of raising the curse would work, because it just seems very arbitrary. But it could perfectly well work, and the craft involved in making this potentially usable for both types of group is impressive.

Baldur's Gate is presumably inspired by BG3 which i haven't played. Very urban, lotsa moral ambiguity, emphasis on humanoid enemies, everyone's a bad guy, cults and corruption and greed all over the place, brutal slums and gaudy mansions, don't expect many long-term lasting wins, etc etc. Shades of dark grey, cults of the Dead Three all over the place, casual brutality by the forces of authority and devil take the hindermost. Vast amounts of plot hooks here, especially if your group is into trying to actually do good, but the whole business seems a bit more aimed at morally grey parties who'd join right in with the politicking, backstabbing and assassinations and gang violence etc. But it's doesn't quite paint this as the ONLY way to play here, which I think is smart. It's probably my least favourite tonally of the five, but it's certainly not badly done - it's just a personal preference.

THe Library of Lethchauntos seemed (at a quick glance) to be a perfectly functional introductory adventure. I'm not sure an introductory adventire was entirely required for a setting as D&D-generic as Faerun where almost any plug-and-play introductory adventure would do, but some people might get use out of it. The monsters and magic items covered a few FR classics and big deals from lore. I would have liked a higher-level phaerimm though, and maybe a sharn? And while I'm not terribly familiar with their previous edition mechanics, if there's every a perfect opportunity for a dragon's breath attack to cause thunder damage, surely the song dragon is it?

All in all, if this is the new model of campaign setting that WotC intends to try out for Dark Sun etc, then I'm all for it. Stratospherically better than the debacle of Spelljammer and the not-much-better of Planescape, while Strixhaven and Dragonlance hardly bothered being settings at all. This is clearly a superior way of doing things. My disagreements with it are probably a matter of degree and emphasis rather than fundamental conception. Too many small dungeon maps (they could almost have included an entire new region by trimming those out) and maybe a bit too much time spent on the mechanics of renown etc, which I'm not personally a big fan of. But in general, a product that is a pretty solid lore product and a genuinely useful game resource. Thumbs up, on the whole.