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I'm going to hazard a guess that the words "Baldur's Gate 3," and "20 million sales," played a role in this decision making.

Ossian have been knocking around for almost two decades, starting off in Neverwinter Nights campaigns that were so well-received they got boxed product releases. They've been doing some mobile stuff (to pay the bills) and been looking at breaking into the wider video game market for a while. I...

Calimshan isn't really on the Sword Coast, as it's on the Trackless Sea rather than the Sea of Swords (which terminates at the Dragon's Neck Peninsula of Tethyr), and the bulk of the nation sprawls along the Shining Sea to the south instead. But it's certainly still on "the west coast of Faerûn"...

They're the same place. I think they misspoke and meant west, although Western Oerik is so massive that it's almost an equal distance (and probably faster sailing east, depending on the trade winds). As with any discussion of Oerth geography, Anna B. Meyer's website should be your first stop...

I remember when Alternity rolled out with its always roll-under mechanic. It seemed to evolve from one of the 2E complaints, that you were rolling low one second (ability checks) and then high the next (for attacks) but trying to get as low an AC as possible but as high EXP as possible. It felt...

They had the opportunity to reboot the Realms in 2014 but I gather than Salvatore and Greenwood decided that, whilst they hated the Spellplague, undoing it meant decanonising some six years' worth of novels (including their own!) and rolling back a whole ton of lore developments. So whilst it...

Canon, worldbuilding and lore is a hot topic in fandom generally but seems to be very important at the moment because of the general feeling that many adaptations have been made which try to instantly change the source material for what some feel is no apparent reason (whilst others may disagree...

Ironically, the showrunner of House of the Dragon, Ryan Condal, was only free to make that show because the project he was previously developing for Amazon was shot down. That was a lore-accurate version of Conan the Barbarian which would have adapted each Howard short story and novella in...

Chris Pine says yes, but it would need to be a lot cheaper. He also noted the same thing about his Star Trek films, that the problem wasn't the money they made (which was okay) but that the budgets had been set far too high for the popularity of the franchise in the modern cinema landscape...

The loose approach to canon is also more valid for a science fiction setting spanning the entire galaxy of billions of star systems and millions of inhabited worlds, where you can have entire wars involving tens of billions of people raging across hundreds of systems, and it doesn't even...

I suspect WotC are looking at the demographics and thinking D&D is not primarily an adult-focused game, but they're also looking at the colossal sales figures of the very R-rated Baldur's Gate III and going, "Hmmm." Vox Machina also seems to be doing very well on Amazon with an adult-leaning...

I would say that Forgotten Realms has an increasingly complex situation when it comes to authoritative statements. So Ed is the creator of the Realms, but he is not involved day-to-day on 5E Realms the way he was very heavily on 1-2E, somewhat heavily in 3E, and intermittently in 4E and the...

Turmish is somewhat North African in the sense it is home to dark-skinned people, but it doesn't seem to have Africa-specific analogues. It's the only pure democracy in Faerun, which was interesting but under-explored. The general idea is that the Shaar and the Shining South in general are...

A small group of people had a talk with Chris Cox this week and he confirms he's a roleplayer and is currently playing in a campaign set in Kara-Tur. He's keen on updating Kara-Tur for modern D&D but did not announce any firm plans. He listened politely to ideas for expanding coverage of the...

The map of Malatra confirms its size (~1000 miles across), and that the placement of Malatra on the FRIA map is impossible (it would only be ~150 miles across), so it was then a case of trying to fit in such a large area in the space available. I believe the final conclusion came from Markus...

I globified my 1372-ish era map here. The FRIA also featured the first globes of Toril, and they show the 1E/2E maps of Faerûn look absolutely fine when put on the globe (so that excuse for the 3E retcon went out the window).

I've been creating quite lengthy new map series for both the Nations and the History of Forgotten Realms, so this is a topic I've delved into quite a lot over many years. The OG map is Ed Greenwood's, that he had created in the 1970s and redrew circa 1986 to send to Jeff Grubb at TSR. This is...