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The people who dismiss "The Concerns of the Mighty" are ones who've formed false impressions of the Realms from hearsay. Any kind of in-depth reading shows that that sidebar is an excellent but brief summary of a subtle, exquisitely complex, quite consistent milieu of high-level intrigue...

For me, the history, appearance and nature of magic items comes first, their rules effect is secondary. Certainly, items that are just mechanical bonuses are bookkeeping -- they aren't part of the group imagining, just an unseen part of the maths. Requiring a large array of magic items to stay...

Expedition to Undermountain contains an overview of Undermountain with small, unlabelled, sometimes partial maps, including the best published information on the main levels below the third; four separate encounter areas; and an appendix of magic and monsters. The first two adventure chapters...

The Realms was conceived independently of D&D and later partly adapted to its monsters and magic. Yes. The change to its flavour is evident from both the known changes and the tone of the designers' discussion. We don't know its extent, though. There was the option, but Wizards mainly decided...

It's a valuable insight, but most reviews aren't of that process but of reading and playing the game.

Two people who have are Gary Gygax, whose World of Greyhawk boxed set is an in-world document, and who disdains the notion of a fixed 'canon', and Ed Greenwood, who writes about the Realms through explicit or implicit unreliable narrators, and opened the DM's Sourcebook of the Realms with a...

Also, writing and self-publishing an RPG may indicate an inflated sense of one's own abilities as a designer rather than particular expertise.

I think Gary's original gnome concept is strong. Some of the reasons it wasn't taken to heart as much as elves, dwarves and halflings are that it didn't have their recognizable base in Tolkien, northern myth, folklore and Shakespeare; it wasn't dwelt on by Gary (except a nice section of S4) or...

In the new Grand History events and novels like the Lady Penitent series, Wizards is presenting Realms gods as they were in the Avatar novels: definite, knowable characters with humanlike motivations who exist and act in linear time -- quite unlike how the rest of Realmslore shows them. And the...

'Canon' is merely an agreement about which published sources writers of new material are supposed not to contradict. I sympathize, but I don't think a new Cormyr sourcebook should ignore the historical chapters of Cormyr: A Novel.

You might take that puzzle as a clue to the fact that those canards are Internet hot air without relation to the published Realms.

Male red great wyrm.

It's the cover to Ed Greenwood's first novel Spellfire, showing Rauglothgor's lair in the Thunder Peaks, with (foreground, left to right) Shandril Shessair, Florin Falconhand, Narm Tamaraith, and Elminster of Shadowdale.

I agree. It's just a fact that Western and Eastern comic art and book illustration have influenced each other through the last 60 years.

Most Realms novels aren't large-scale like RSEs, and I don't have any sense that authors clamour to write them over smaller books. If anything, the reverse: it took 20 years for Ed to get to write novels with his own choice of protagonists.

Rulesets often keep most of their fans through major overhauls, RPG settings rarely -- Greyhawk Wars and Fifth Age Dragonlance being chief examples. The changes made in Grand History of the Realms -- and moreover the shift in design philosophy that they indicate, together with designers'...

Agreed, too. Missing the point to decanonize books like the Knights of Myth Drannor and Songs & Swords series on account of the RSEs.

These are all different distinctions, aren't they? The one to use depends on what cut-off point is significant to what you're saying. More than one thing changed between 1975 and 1990. That's a matter of opinion. As I see it, Gary's thinking has been in motion from the early 70s through to the...

The book editors evidently identified a faction who do, who since the Avatar trilogy expect RSEs and aren't tickled by anything less. Of course, those books have a disproportionate effect for those who don't. Not quite. The only parts added by TSR to Faerûn itself are Bob Salvatore's Icewind...

The twenty years I mean is 1967–87. There are excellent and mediocre books both in the early and later parts of the line, surely. I'll take Silver Marches and Lost Empires of Faerûn over FOR1 Draconomicon and FA2 Nightmare Keep. I named them, as recently revealed by Rich on the Wizards.com...