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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 6793363" data-attributes="member: 6778044">Well, Egyptian-themed elements and adventures have been a staple in D&D from nearly the beginning. The Desert of Desolation series is one of my favorites (and I'm actually using elements of that in a campaign right now). I agree that tacking it onto the Realms in the manner they did wasn't great, but it was worked into the lore of the area fairly well, especially since it happened so long ago. However, it also provided precedence for doing the same with other cultures. (well the Moonshaes did really, since they were added on at the beginning, and it was much more European).I have had campaigns involved in Chessenta, Unther and Mulhorand in particular. I'm sure I'm not in a majority in this regard, but I am aware of other campaigns in the region. Of course, back in the mid-late '80's this was all quite new and exciting, and we were still on the path of more is better, in game releases and also in the gaming community. We just didn't know better. But they have been better integrated into the setting than the other settings. Tacking on Kara-Tur and even Zakhara worked OK because they were both very well developed, and also had product support for a while. And they were also very far away. So it really was irrelevant for most that they were in the Forgotten Realms. If you wanted to play in one of those locations, you just started a campaign there.Maztica was a mistake on pretty much every front. It's not that something like that couldn't work, but the various cultures were so different from the standard D&D concept, particularly when you get into magic, that it was really pointless. From a Forgotten Realms perspective, they just turned it into 'the New World' which pretty much meant that the Realms nations would be interested in conquest and the lands riches, essentially encouraging re-enactment of how Europe pillaged North and South America. Instead of a world where you'd be expected to fight and kill evil orcs, the 'enemies' were weak representations of actual historical cultures. Yuck. I'm sure somebody played in it for the novelty of the setting, which could be interesting, but after their two or 3 novels and adventures it was forgotten.The Hordelands were another largely irrelevant addition. Tymanther and Returned Abeir were less integrated, and really just forced. To me it felt like they had come to the conclusion that new campaign worlds wasn't the way to go (they certainly exploded in the 2nd edition), so instead they just came up with a way to cram a new setting into the Forgotten Realms. The Spellplague was fine, and there were a lot of interesting elements and such in the overall story. And I'm sure the idea of 'let's take a little used section of the Realms and replace it with something better because of this really cool story concept' sounded great at the time. But, the Old Empires, Desert of Desolation, Kara-Tur, Hordelands, Zakhara, and Maztica should have made it clear that the far-off lands in the Realms usually have little to no impact in the core Realms products or campaigns. Regardless if it was poor publishing and planning, or the natural order of things in the Realms, clearly races and cultures from regions that far from the Heartlands (with the exception of Thay), just don't have much of an impact on the Realms as a whole. That's one of the reasons why I think that other than if they had started trying to expand Tymanther that I don't think the dragonborn would have spread much, or had much impact on the rest of the Realms. I'm not even sure there's much action in the Moonshae's among the many Realms campaigns.Ilbranteloth</blockquote>

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