erm, interesting thread
not certain how it went into an all FR vs Kalamar all the time thread, but ok.
Well, I certainly won't deny that FR has its weaknesses they do seem overly exaggerated by the opposition to the point of caricature.
It would seem to be counter-intuitive that FR still stands strong after all of this time simply under the weight of content when something like Dragonlance has had so much trouble and there has never been a stable Star Trek game.
If FR weren't viable from a gaming perspective it should have fallen apart by now, instead it continues to grow.
Even if there were nothing to FR than its rich network of support and cannon and the promise of continual dynamism than these are things that should also be looked at in terms of the advantages they offer.
And possibly contrasted against the imposibility of that sort of dynamism in Kalamar.
I mean, if you really want your players to be the centers of the action than you should go to Exalted or Oathbound. But if you want your players to be one series of actors among many, then Forgotten Realms is your very best choice.
Kalamar fits someplace in the middle of that. There's only so individual epic you can go before you break Kalamar, and you can't go much farther with a corporate story either.
Kalamar is neither the individual adventure of the Odyssey nor the ensemble experience of the Iliad. It's just never going to be Homer.
The Forgotten Realms, on the other hand, will never be anything other than Homer and Herodotus. The place is always quaking with immense events that have a real and true effect on the world. It's not the wild fantasy of Exalted, Planescape, or Oathbound, but it is a place where there are several Cyrus's a generation. Moving peoples and rewriting history. Which, of course, is one way history gets written.
That said I do think that Forgotten Realms is getting a bum wrap on the history treatment. It certainly isn't as clear cut, simple, and easily supported as Kalamar. But someone mentioned earlier that you only need to scratch the surface of history to see the superiority of Kalamar and that's absolutely accurate.
It's once you spend more time in history and anthropology that Kalamar seems more like a high school text book and less like something really interesting. Where Forgotten Realms seems more forgivable in its crimes.
This doesn't mean that FR is off the hook just that the gap is not so broad as this thread seems to say.
Take, for instance, the much touted Horde running up against the Egyptians. Admittedly, there's some anachronism there, as I said FR is not off the hook. But FR is pretty deliberate about its anachronism, and the Mongol Horde did reach one of its boundaries in its battles with the Egyptian Mamlukes. Also true of Persians and Turks, at least for a while.
While, with the exception of the Turks and Arabs, hordes are only blips on the larger ideas of history and anthropology of the Middle East, in any more detailed study they occur with fairly regular frequency. Riding in from the North and East, and on two notable occasions from the South, mucking up the more stable politics of the middle east, and having trouble affecting any sort of change on Egypt, again with two notable exceptions.
If the distribution of seas disturbs you, please account for your comfort with the whole dynamic of Atlantic, Medditerranean, Black, Caspian, Red, Indian, and Aral.
If that isn't what disturbs about the geography of FR than please do give some specifics. FR has a lot of individual apparent crimes, that can be defended or not, but that in and of itself points out the fact that the geography does not simply not make sense.
There are a lot of different cultures in FR, but they occupy reasonable areas, unlike the vast and somehow homogenized cultures of Kalamar, and they do live in a version of 'Europe' in which the culture fragmenting affects of the Balkans and Black Forest are universal and in which there is no equivalent of the Danube, Rhine, or Meditteranean super cultures.
In my mind their only really blatant crime, aside from the super cool crime of Anauroch, are the jungles of Chult. But they're really only misplaced in Europe, in a situation like India the transition from fairly dry to extreme jungle is about as short.
Still not an argument that totally forgives Faerun, but one at least that should dispel the idea that FR has nothing going for it. Particularly in comparison to Kalamar.
