D&D General Favorite Forgotten Realms products of all time?

[Autumnal]

I’d put Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition up against it and win but yeah, it’s an amazingly dense book.

 

[Mercador]

3e forgotten realms campaign guide.

Hands down most dense book of all times.

I would be curious how many pages it would take to recreate this book with the current layout of DnD5x

 

[timbannock]

FRCS 3e remains the gold standard for an encyclopedic tome. My only complaint is that there weren't more instances of site adventure maps with an ultra-simplified key, so you didn't feel compelled to hunt down a billion sourcebooks to run adventures in some of these locales. That and leaving the big regional encounter charts for the DM Screen supplement.

Faiths & Pantheons is absolutely incredible. It did a great job of summarizing the deities, making them gameable for clerics, and making it clear how/why they were so involved in the material plane.

Lost Empires of Faerun was really good for making the history of the setting gameable. And for correcting a lot of really dumb naming conventions from late-era 2E supplements.

The 2E setting boxed set was great for the setting maps and hex overlay. Not having hexes on maps is a real, real pain, given its a conceit of the game through nearly every edition.

 

[Mercador]

FRCS 3e remains the gold standard for an encyclopedic tome. My only complaint is that there weren't more instances of site adventure maps with an ultra-simplified key, so you didn't feel compelled to hunt down a billion sourcebooks to run adventures in some of these locales. That and leaving the big regional encounter charts for the DM Screen supplement.

Faiths & Pantheons is absolutely incredible. It did a great job of summarizing the deities, making them gameable for clerics, and making it clear how/why they were so involved in the material plane.

Lost Empires of Faerun was really good for making the history of the setting gameable. And for correcting a lot of really dumb naming conventions from late-era 2E supplements.

The 2E setting boxed set was great for the setting maps and hex overlay. Not having hexes on maps is a real, real pain, given its a conceit of the game through nearly every edition.

Thanks, now I have two books to hunt down on Ebay! I have 2E setting on the revised edition (with Elminster on the front).

 

[BenjaminPey]

I, too, am in the outlier camp. I strongly dislike the 3E FR campaign book, which is a terrible mess on the editorial standpoint. Barely readable, way too dense by lack of a drastic, opinionated editorial eye with a good pair of scissors. I never use it. Strong contender for the title of perfect counterexample to the mostly good maxim of "a book is not perfect when there's nothing to add, it is perfect when there's nothing left to remove."

I think the FR books have used the most, despite them being relatively recent, are Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Baldur's Gate: Decent to Avernus, for the gazetteers they contain, which are more or less exactly what I want in a setting book: focused on a town or a small region, tightly designed, oriented towards actual play rather than fuliginous lore, packed full of directly actionnable locales, NPCs, factions and themes.

 

[Zardnaar]

I, too, am in the outlier camp. I strongly dislike the 3E FR campaign book, which is a terrible mess on the editorial standpoint. Barely readable, way too dense by lack of a drastic, opinionated editorial eye with a good pair of scissors. I never use it. Strong contender for the title of perfect counterexample to the mostly good maxim of "a book is not perfect when there's nothing to add, it is perfect when there's nothing left to remove."

I think the FR books have used the most, despite them being relatively recent, are Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Baldur's Gate: Decent to Avernus, for the gazetteers they contain, which are more or less exactly what I want in a setting book: focused on a town or a small region, tightly designed, oriented towards actual play rather than fuliginous lore, packed full of directly actionnable locales, NPCs, factions and themes.

Have you read the 2E stuf or expanded 3E splats? They murder the 5E ones quality wise. Except maybe art.

3E frcs is very dense.

 

[BenjaminPey]

I've read most of it, yes, and strongly disagree. They are needlessly wordy, needlessly detailed and poorly written as rpg products. I don't have any use for them.

 

[Zardnaar]

I've read most of it, yes, and strongly disagree. They are needlessly wordy, needlessly detailed and poorly written as rpg products. I don't have any use for them.

Fair enough. Ive been reading sone of the 90s 2E stuff.

They're not that dense relative to 3E frcs.

 

[BenjaminPey]

3e FRCS gets the prize, right, but the old ones are not that far behind. Good if you really want to know when it's high tide in the deep harbor of Waterdeep and how it affects oyster prizes, or if you need twenty taverns and their menus for each town in Faerun. But otherwise, for purely gaming purpose, the recent stuff is a net progress.

 

[Zardnaar]

3e FRCS gets the prize, right, but the old ones are not that far behind. Good if you really want to know when it's high tide in the deep harbor of Waterdeep and how it affects oyster prizes, or if you need twenty taverns and their menus for each town in Faerun. But otherwise, for purely gaming purpose, the recent stuff is a net progress.

Haven't looked to hard at Waterdeep but the North and Anauroch.

The North kinda reminds me a bit of Princes of the Apocalypse. Thought that adventure did a decent overview of the area.

Descent into Avernus. Very mediocre adventure. Decent source book though