D&D 1E Forgotten Realms in AD&D 1st Edition a better setting for adventures?

[Plaguescarred]

A wiki on the book says Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster's Forgotten Realms - Wikipedia

back in January 2012 at the Dungeons & Dragons new products seminar, lead developer Mike Mearls gave fans of a preview of the D&D supplement 'Elminster's Forgotten Realms.' Mearls told the crowd that Wizards of the Coast staff approached Greenwood to ask 'why don't you take all your campaign notes, all the information you've been putting together for your campaign and lets compile it into a book? Show us the realms as you've developed it in your campaign setting and lets get that to everybody.' It's not often that fans get such an inside look at the creation of one of their favorite settings, but 'Elminster's Forgotten Realms' completely pulls back the curtain on Greenwood's design.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I remember reading that in an original iteration of the map of Faerun, the great desert and great glacier were geographically symmetrical, but because management wanted to tack on the Bloodstone adventure series into the Realms so they had the designers withdraw the southern portion of the glacier to they could fit Vaasa and Damara. The mountains separating Damara and Vaasa from the Moonsea region being left basically untouched hinted at the now ghost symmetry.

Later versions of the Realms maps stretched and morphed to reduce the hints of original symmetry.

Edit: ninja’d by Voadam.

 

[Alzrius]

From the commentary on the PDF sale page: "TSR also decided to incorporate projects then in process into the Realms, marking the first major changes to Greenwood's worlds (and the first major additions by creators other than Greenwood or Grubb). They rolled back Greenwood's Great Glacier to make room for the Bloodstone Pass adventures (1985-1988)

Which is rather funny since, since H1 Bloodstone Pass (affiliate link) has an NPC refer to a local circus as "the greatest show on Oerth," which is the World of Greyhawk. (Of course, as the sales page notes, the locality in that adventure doesn't actually fit on Greyhawk either.)

 

[Orius]

Plus Google what the 'festhalls' originally were.

I suspect a lot of people would like to see Ed's original Realms, but I doubt Wizards would want that--there are probably copyright issues I don't fully understand.

Oh I don't need to Google, I know damn well Ed had the Realms loaded down with whorehouses and that TSR decided to clean that up.

The Elminster's Forgotten Realms book was pretty good, it was just about all fluff but it gives an insight into Ed's campaign adjusted for some of the developments TSR and later WotC did. It's edition neutral and Ed mostly wrote it as 1356 putting in the Gray Box period, but he does talk how the future impacts some things. So it's generally useful insight for a DM regardless of edition used. There's also a lot of interesting bits and pieces of what Ed originally submitted to TSR.

 

[Parmandur]

I am not sure how much the map for Faerûn was changed over the editions (though it definitely was changed to get rid of large blank spaces), but the version here is just massive. Easily twice the size of all of North America. You can easily fit five or six Europes in there, and the map here doesn't even include good parts of the very south and east that are on many later maps. And this appears to be not accidental, as with the weird scale of the Eberron map, that doesn't make much sense when you compare it with the descriptions. Here the discriptions make it clear that the land is supposed to be huge and large unpopulated, or even unexplored. Though I guess being the creation of a Canadian, the sense of distance might have been very different from that of medieval Europeans. I checked, and it turned out that at a travel speed of 18 miles per day (reasonable for adventurers with all their gear), getting from Waterdeep to Silverymoon would take 50 days. Get some interruptions and it easily becomes 2 months. When you make that journey, you're probably expecting to spend the winter there, unless you want to turn back around and start your return trip right after you arrived.
But I think this is fun. If you're looking for a version of the Forgotten Realms that feels different from the more familiar one, making it a vast outdoor wilderness setting sounds cool.

They changed the map scale for 3E, at the same time they made the Sword Coast more cosmopolitan. 5E changed the map scale back, though: the Sword Coast area in SCAG is about the size of Europe.

 

[Alzrius]

they made the Sword Coast more cosmopolitan

How so?

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

How so?

Like mentioned upthread, back in the first editions, the non-human population of the cities were smaller, making the setting more human-centric, with only a few ''non-human'' cities in the whole region.

IIRC, the population size in general of the major cities also exploded. Cities with a few thousands inhabitants in 1st ed are waaaayyyyy more populous now.

 

[Parmandur]

How so?

More of a place for Elves and Dwarves, specifically: 1E FR was more humanoid tric, 3E on has had more if an interest of making all PHB Race options fit in, which is great.

 

[Parmandur]

Like mentioned upthread, back in the first editions, the non-human population of the cities were smaller, making the setting more human-centric, with only a few ''non-human'' cities in the whole region.

IIRC, the population size in general of the major cities also exploded. Cities with a few thousands inhabitants in 1st ed are waaaayyyyy more populous now.

5E hedged their bets on demographics, IIRC, not specifying the same highly specific numbers that 3E FRCS dictated per the DMG rules.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

5E hedged their vets on demographics, IIRC, not specifying the same numbers that 3E FRCS dictated per the DMG rules.

And I greatly appreciate that. I dont know why, probably because I'm such a fan of the idea of Point of Light, but having cities with millions of inhabitants breaks the dangerous-fantasy-land feel of the setting.