D&D 5E 5th edition Forgotten Realms: Why can't you just ignore the lore?

[GMforPowergamers]

Of course, the Realms predates Greyhawk as a fantasy setting.

wait... what?!?!?! that's not true...Greyhawk was Gary's setting

edit: OK I found that FR came out in 1987, greyhawk came out in 1972 (both before me roleplaying in 1995) but grey hawk predate FR by 15 years

2nd edit: I found that Ed Greenwood found D&D in 1975 (3 years post greyhawk) I do find 1979 is when he started to work on publishing FR, and he did say that it was based on stories he told as a kid... but I can't imagine "I used to tell stories in school" is the same as a published setting...

 

[billd91]

wait... what?!?!?! that's not true...Greyhawk was Gary's setting

edit: OK I found that FR came out in 1987, greyhawk came out in 1972 (both before me roleplaying in 1995) but grey hawk predate FR by 15 years

As a D&D setting, maybe. But Ed Greenwood had been working on the Forgotten Realms since 1967 as a setting for children's stories. So it does predate Greyhawk - just not as a D&D setting.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

As a D&D setting, maybe. But Ed Greenwood had been working on the Forgotten Realms since 1967 as a setting for children's stories. So it does predate Greyhawk - just not as a D&D setting.

yup gonna have to agree to disagree here, If next year I publish a bunch of articles based on my games from the 90's then WotC buys and published my setting after they reworked it... I don't get to claim it predates ebberon...


edit: and to clarify, these aren't children's stories like he wrote for children, he had not been published, these are stories he claims to have told other children when he was a child (unless Wikipedia is wrong, witch it may be),

 

[billd91]

yup gonna have to agree to disagree here, If next year I publish a bunch of articles based on my games from the 90's then WotC buys and published my setting after they reworked it... I don't get to claim it predates ebberon...

if it makes sense for the context you're talking about, as it did for the Greenwood quote, why not mention it? Greyhawk was D&D to him, incorporating D&D into FR meant incorporating or allowing for the incorporation of Greyhawk people and things. Made perfect sense to me.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

The Realms was in many ways realized before Greyhawk came along, as a fantasy world in which Greenwood set characters like Mirt the Moneylender and Durnan (a thinking man's Conan, if I recall Ed's Description of him correctly).

Again, IIRC, the first tale ever written in the Realms was "One Comes Unheralded To Zirta".

Greenwood adapted much of what D&D was at the time to the Realms to make it fit (you can see examples of this in early articles in The Dragon) so he could run campaigns in it, and TSR did his as well once they got ahold of the Realms.

I believe dark elves were albino white in the Realms initially, but I will have to check on that.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The Realms was in many ways realized before Greyhawk came along, as a fantasy world in which Greenwood set characters like Mirt the Moneylender and Durnan (a thinking man's Conan, if I recall Ed's Description of him correctly).

Again, IIRC, the first tale ever written in the Realms was "One Comes Unheralded To Zirta".

Greenwood adapted much of what D&D was at the time to the Realms to make it fit (you can see examples of this in early articles in The Dragon) so he could run campaigns in it, and TSR did his as well once they got ahold of the Realms.

I believe dark elves were albino white in the Realms initially, but I will have to check on that.

I can't find any of these stories, when and by whom where they published?

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

I can't find any of these stories, when and by whom where they published?

The early tales of Mirt and Durnan were never published, so far as I know. WotC may have done something with Zirta online, but I can't be sure.

I am not aware of Ed's initial work on the Realms being for the sake of children's stories. To my knowledge the stories were all very early attempts to ape the fantasy fiction he was devouring at the time.

 

[Henry]

I can't find any of these stories, when and by whom where they published?

I don't know if they were published, but they were written, by Ed, in 1967 - from what's been written before in Dragon Magazine, Ed has the original copy, and Zeb Cook from TSR confirmed it. I haven't gone back myself to Ed's hometown to corroborate with friends and family, but I doubt Ed nor TSR staff of the time would have any reason to lie.

As for Ed's comments on incorporating other materials into the Realms, I hate to disagree with one of The Great Ones, but I can't help it. Too much "muddying the waters" turns the Realms into the same kind of unappealing nondescript hodge-podge that Nerath was to me. I gave up white-label peanut butter for Jif and Skippy when I was able to afford it later in life, and I don't like white-label RPG settings, either. I'll take Eberron's 1930s pulp themes, or Golarion's Death of Prophecy, or Dark Sun's tenuous holding on to the shreds of goodness in a land ravaged by selfishness, in favor over "lets get the shoehorn, there's still some room left in the toe..." Not that he said that, but it's the natural conclusion to "everything's in the Realms!"

 

[Parmandur]

It was a fanfic setting; an involved one, that grew I to more. It is legitimate to say it predates GH.

 

[SirAntoine]

It is misleading without the context.