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If they group southern Faerun and northern Zakhara together, they could easily do a pair of Great Sea sourcebooks that cover the same amount of ground as the (northern) Faerun sourcebooks.

I'm guessing it's not a coincidence that the Forgotten Lands are all the lands in and around the Forgotten Kingdom of Impiltur. As an aside, I find it amusing we now have the Forgotten Kingdom (Impiltur) in the Forgotten Lands (northeastern Faerun) in the the Forgotten Realms (the world of...

Edit: Pay no attention to that map behind the curtain. More polishing is underway.

I've heard this before and it always strikes me as odd. I'm genuinely curious: if asking, "Are you sure?" identifies most hallucinations, why isn't "Are you sure?" functionality being used under the hood to proactively stop hallucinations from happening?

I'm a fan of the Atlas, but I wasn't happy with the poor scan job WotC did for the pdf version I purchased. I haven't checked to see if they've updated the file since I first downloaded it, but the copy I got a few years back had several maps cut off at the edges because the pages were cropped...

Fair point. But I'd say an AI GM is just one step removed from that; an AI GM would be an expert system that runs game rules paired with a LLM that generates adventure content and NPC dialogue. (You'd want an expert system like a VTT to handle the game rules whenever the LLM isn't needed to...

I'm sure someone will provide a passable AI GM in the not too distant future. A GM bot isn't that dissimilar from a call center bot, and AI call center bots are becoming a fairly standard tool for businesses. If nothing else, I could see one or more hobbyists cobbling together an AI GM of some...

That's a great question, one I had to answer for myself when WotC announced the upcoming Forgotten Realms books. The introduction to the Travel Guide addresses the possibility of discrepancies between different Forgotten Realms campaign setting products. To paraphrase, the Dungeon Master can...

I'm too busy polishing up the Forgotten Realms Travel Guide to write a lengthy post today, so here are two illustrations from the book: the shortest and tallest Humanoids native to Zakhara (shown to scale). (Some stock art courtesy of pixabay.com and shutter stock.com.)

Personally, I've had more fun playing a changeling against type. My changeling character was honest to a fault and refused to use shapechanging to deceive others. Instead, the changeling wore the same, identifiable face at all times, modified in small ways to reflect their current mood. (The...

I'm inclined to say "Zariel" is the name attached to anyone serving as rightful Lord of Avernus. Asmodeus strips the name from any former lord and gifts to their successor as a badge of office. (Bel was just a placeholder, so Asmodeus never renamed him. Bel was blinded by hubris after seizing...

There's some gaslighting in that Richard Baker article. He (correctly) observes that the 2e map of Faerun would have been about one-third ocean if placed on a 20" by 30" poster map. What he neglects to mention is that the 3e poster map of Faerun is still about 31% ocean. And to get that 2%...

Fantastic article! Incidentally... If you need to stack a mix of books and boxed sets, the best approach is to stack books inside unrelated boxed sets until every box holds just enough to keep it from closing all the way. At that point, you know the sides of the box aren't bearing any weight...

To answer the questions in the OP: 1. I'm fond of the Forgotten Realms for nostalgic reasons. The original grey box was my first exposure to any campaign setting (and to the idea of a campaign setting poster map). I was a kid at the time, and I didn't really understand what a campaign setting...

Now I'm imagining an epicurean campaign setting where the origin story of every Humanoid species other than Halfling is "Halfling that ate X." (It would be a world where Aasimar are the edge lords, not Tieflings, because Aasimar get their traits by killing and eating angels!)

Yep. That's what I was vaguely misremembering. The dragon-colored kobolds.

I haven't been following Pathfinder since the early days of its first edition. I do seem to recall Paizo leaning hard into the draconic nature of kobolds with dragonscale variants at one point. That probably subconsciously influenced my thinking about dragonborn and kobolds to some degree.

Hmm. Maybe kobolds as a group are becoming slowly more draconic over time. Early kobolds were dog-faced people. Modern kobolds are more dragon-like. And dragonborn are the next evolution of kobolds.