DMs Guild [Design Notes] Forgotten Realms Trail Guide: Faerûn, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara

[Epic Meepo]

And Then There Are Mountains

I’ve spent much of my free time this week adding details to the regional maps I'll be using in my book. Ideally, I’d add those details to a single, high-resolution globe of the world, which I would later break down into regional maps. Sadly, my ancient computer lacks the memory needed to manipulate a 3D-rendered object of sufficient resolution. As a result, I’m adding finishing touches to individual 2D regional maps, one map at a time, instead of adding them to a globe of the world all at once. It’s not the most efficient process, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

The work I’ve done on the cartography for this project has never been entirely smooth and efficient, but I was expecting that from the outset. Before I started this project, I had limited experience with digital imaging tools. I’ve essentially been learning to make digital maps as I go, often by trial and error. Thankfully, the maps I’m creating for this project are supplemental graphics, not the main selling point. I don’t need to compete with the best professional cartographers in the industry. I just need to produce a few simple maps to serve as infographics supporting the text.

I feel I’ve met the goals I set for myself. I have a series of maps that are respectable without trying to do too much. Line art, colors, and simple graphics delineate most of the terrain...

And then there are mountains. For some reason, I decided I wanted to add realistic, ridge-and-valley textures to my mountains. With nothing but a trackpad and limited artistic skills, I knew drawing ridges and valleys by hand wasn’t an option. Instead, I made several attempts using procedural tools available in the software at my disposal (primarily GIMP and Blender). In the end, those attempts were passable, at best. Ultimately, nothing I created with procedural tools felt worthy of the final product, so I abandoned that approach.

I decided there was no way I would be able to create better ridge-and-valley textures than Mother Nature herself, so I went straight to the source. I took a public domain satellite image of actual ridges and valleys and ran it through some filters to create a texture for the mountains and hills on my maps. (In honor of Canadian author Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms setting, I used a satellite image of the Canadian Rockies, specifically.) I can’t think of a way to create a more realistic ridge-and-valley texture than making one from an image of actual ridges and valleys.

But alas, I’ve spent too much time talking about mountains. Now it’s back to the trenches, where I’ll be adding more finishing touches to the regional maps I'll be using in my book.

 

[Epic Meepo]

This post is another progress report. I had less free time than normal this weekend, so there’s less progress to report than in previous weeks. (As much as I’d like to work on this sourcebook I'm writing full time, I can only look at it when I get a spare hour here or there.) I had enough time to fiddle with various maps to improve their color schemes and textures.

I also had time to review more previews of the revised Player’s Handbook, which releases in a little over a week. I now have enough information to update the new Species I’m including in one of my appendices. They now better match the rules which appear in the new PHB. I don’t believe I’ll need to make many changes once I have my own copy of that book to read through.

I suspect I will need to make more revisions once the revised Dungeon Master’s Guide releases in a couple months. The current draft of my sourcebook references a few sections of the 2014 DMG, but I suspect those sections will be altered or dropped entirely in the new DMG. My plan is to finalize as much as I can before that book drops, free time permitting.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Great Minds Think Alike...
...and fools all think the same.

Breaking news from Wizards of the Coast. They have just unveiled a previously unannounced product: the Forgotten Realms Player Guide, scheduled for release in late 2025. Needless to say, this throws a bit of a wrench in my plans, since my working title for my book includes the words "Player's Guide," and I don't want to be competing with Wizards of the Coast for that design space. I will need to decide on a more suitable working title and change the title of this thread to match.

Thankfully, I'm confident my guide contains plenty of material not covered by any upcoming WotC product. Every indication is that the official player guide will focus much of its attention on western Faerun. That leaves room for me to explore other parts of Faerun in more detail. I'm also fairly confident the official guide won't have too much to say about Kara-Tur or Zakhara. I suspect 80% or more of the material I've written will go unmentioned in any upcoming official product.

Ideally, I would just structure my book in a way that supplements the official campaign setting. Complicating that effort is the fact that my book is a few months away from completion and the official campaign setting won't be released for over a year. Obviously, I have no way of coordinating my efforts with WotC, so working to supplement their products instead of competing with them will entail significant production delays. I may or may not be able to avoid that.

As it happens, I do have a contingency plan for this exact situation. It's an option of last resort, as it will be time consuming and resource intensive, but I did anticipate the possibility that a future Forgotten Realms campaign setting product could drop before I finished my book. If absolutely necessary, I can pivot what I'm working on to avoid any overlap with upcoming campaign setting material. I'll provide more information about that plan if I need to use it.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Supplemental update to the previous post: I've updated my posts in this thread to reflect the situation on the ground as of August 28th, 2024. (Namely, I don't want to call my book a player's guide, because Wizards of the Coast has claimed that name for one of their products.)

The only thing I have yet to update is the title of this thread, which will need to be replaced with a suitable working title for my book. I don't want to be too hasty about picking a new name. That change will have to wait for a few days as I contemplate the situation.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Blazing a New Trail

When I started writing an all-inclusive guide to Faerun, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara, I included a lengthy section introducing the Forgotten Realms setting in general. That was before Wizards of the Coast announced it was releasing an official player’s guide which will do all that heavy lifting for me. Their announcement freed me up to dive deeper into some setting lore. More on that shortly.

Before adding any new content to my guide, I needed to give it a new working title. I’d been referring to it as a player’s guide, but the upcoming player’s guide from Wizards of the Coast makes that title—and the former title of this thread—redundant. To avoid any confusion, I’ve changed both titles to the Forgotten Realms Trail Guide: Faerun, Kara-Tur, and Zakahra.

Since my book is no longer a player’s guide, I’m adding some content geared towards DMs, while keeping almost all of the player-facing content. The latter includes: descriptions of over one-hundred cultures found throughout Faerun, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara; guidelines for creating custom Backgrounds specific to those cultures; and an appendix of new and updated Species options.

Being a trail guide, the book will also include information about trade routes that bring characters from far corners of the Realms together. This new content includes two setting guides for DMs. The first describes the Great Sea between Faerun and Zakhara. DMs can use the Great Sea as a setting for coastal and nautical adventures, or they can use it to bring Faerunian and Zakharan characters together.

The second setting guide covers the trade routes of Semphar, the busiest link between Faerun and Kara-Tur. At the halfway point, dragon princes rule a nation built atop the ruins humanity’s first great empire. Adventures in this setting can involve caravans, expeditions to ancient ruins, and princely intrigue. The DM can also use these trade routes to unite characters from Faerun and Kara-Tur.

At the time of this post, the setting guides mentioned in the previous paragraphs are in the early stages of development. Hopefully, people will be excited to see them in the final product once they’re done. Adding them to the book at this late stage in the production process takes my project down a road I wasn’t expecting, but I, for one, am excited to see where this new trail leads!

 

[Epic Meepo]

Plots and Rumors

One of the main goals of the Forgotten Realms Trail Guide is to compile and curate setting lore from older sources, especially setting lore which isn’t likely to appear in upcoming releases from Wizards of the Coast. My objective is to present that information in a new format with a fresh perspective. Ideally, even readers familiar with the sources I’m using will come away with new ideas for characters and adventures after seeing the trail guide’s take on established lore.

Because my goal is to curate and present existing information, I’ve placed a fairly significant constraint on the content I write for the trail guide: I will avoid changing old lore or inventing new lore unless absolutely necessary. For the most part, I consider changes absolutely necessary only when the existing setting lore is problematic from a real-world perspective, usually because it appropriates the name or title of a real-world country, ethnic group, or religious leader.

The first chapter of the trail guide—which provides overviews of over one hundred Realms cultures and related character origins—was relatively easy to write within these constraints. Some Realms cultures and nations aren’t described in great detail, but there’s enough information in older sources to fill in most of the gaps. In a few cases, I ended up extrapolating logical conclusions from details implied in older sources. The rest of the time, I just needed to compile information already in my notes.

The next two chapters—setting guides describing major trade routes—are proving to be more of a challenge. When describing a culture last mentioned in-world over a century ago, I can simply provide historical details about that culture. When writing a setting guide, I don’t have the luxury of glossing over missing information in that manner. To fulfill its intended purpose, a setting guide needs to provide Dungeon Masters with detailed information about the current state of the world.

To resolve this problem, I’ve added “Plots and Rumors” sections throughout the setting guide chapters. These sections list rumors and adventure suggestions which may or may not be true in a given Dungeon Master’s campaign. Since the content of these sections is explicitly called out as speculative, I can use it to fill in missing details about a particular location, even if those details aren’t covered in existing setting lore. Meanwhile, everything else in the chapter is grounded in established history.

Speaking of history, you may be wondering: what in-game year does the trail guide consider current? As it so happens, the guide’s narrator has already addressed this question sometime in the future. For more on that, stay tuned.

 

[Epic Meepo]

What Year Is It?

If you’re planning on writing a Forgotten Realms supplement, time is your enemy. Wizards of the Coast is constantly releasing new Forgotten Realms products, and quite a few of them advance the setting’s timeline. No matter what you write in your supplement, there’s a good chance some or all of your content will be rendered obsolete in the near future. Setting information rapidly becomes dated.

The easiest way to side-step this problem is to embrace it. Select an in-game year and explicitly declare everything in your supplement accurate as of that particular year. Alternately, pick a few years, and present facts that are true in each of them. If you create a snapshot of the Realms at one or more specific moments in time, you don’t need to worry about future developments.

Or you enlist the aid of a time-traveling chronomancer. Better yet, enlist the aid of the Chronomancer, a well-documented historical (from someone’s perspective) figure in the Forgotten Realms. Before his story ended many centuries ago, the Chronomancer served as the in-game narrator for the trail guide I haven’t finished writing yet. One relevant quote that didn’t make the cut:

“Chronomancer's Note: If someone claims to know precisely when and where (and if) an event happened, don’t take their word for it. Somewhere on the plane of time, so-called gods preserve an accurate, immutable history of the Realms. I will tell you what I know of that history, and everything I say will be true. But don’t expect it to agree with the past as you know it.”

The trail guide compiles information drawn from many existing products. Those sources describe the state of the Realms as it they exist shortly after the Second Sundering, an event which occurs in a single, definitive year. So what year is it? The Chronomancer isn’t going to say. From his perspective, recorded history is an unreliable narrator. Only your table’s DM knows the true history of the Realms.

 

[Epic Meepo]

No design notes today, just a progress report. I’m currently making headway on the two new setting guide chapters I’m adding to my trail guide. (I’ve changed the working title of the Semphar chapter to “The Great Silk Road,” since the Forgotten Realms highway called the Silk Road extends well beyond Semphar. The title also pairs well with “The Great Sea.”)

Between the Great Sea and the Great Silk Road, I’m including overviews of at least 30 settlements travelers can visit. (The Great Sea chapter currently focuses on the eastern half of that sea. I might add overviews of six additional settlements to cover some of its western reaches, as well.) For the 30 settlements I’ve already selected, I’m nearly finished converting my notes into finished text.

Composing all that settlement information has been a bit of a slog. I hadn’t planned on writing any of it until Wizards of the Coast announced its new player’s guide to the Forgotten Realms. With that product on the horizon, the thirty-page setting intro I was having fun writing became redundant. I need to replace it with an equal amount of non-redundant content, so now I write what’s necessary.

Back to the grindstone.