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<blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 3686928" data-attributes="member: 6318">That's the influence of the novels, especially the Realms-Shattering Events beginning with the Avatar trilogy, and the books department's favouring of high-level characters; and also of TSR often treating the Realms as a dumping ground rather than a setting with integrity, and using some poorly chosen freelancers. All this affected the way the Realms was presented much more than the underlying setting.At the same time, in the 1990s Ed Greenwood kept writing the same great material he always had, such as the FOR series and the Volo's Guides. Ed's Realms work is consistent in spirit from the 1980s Dragon articles through his latest writing.The late 1990s saw the period of Steven Schend and Eric Boyd, who were the first sourcebook authors other than Ed and Jeff Grubb to consistently get the Realms right in tone and detail.The 3E sourcebooks are mostly by multiple authors (and try to deliver a quota of sometimes gratuitous game-mechanical information); thus they're all better than the worst 1990s duds, certainly better researched, but they're also often bitty, rarely matching the depth and coherence of the best earlier single-author works.Well, that detail (and scores of boxes of papers more) always existed, it just took a while to publish. Some love it, others prefer not to use it. Similarly, festhalls were mentioned but not detailed in the early overviews.Yes (Grimstaff is mistaken here). Ed:There's no particular abundance when you take into account the size of the lands and populations; they've just been overexposed.Those adventures are for mid-level PCs.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Faraer, post: 3686928, member: 6318"] That's the influence of the novels, especially the Realms-Shattering Events beginning with the Avatar trilogy, and the books department's favouring of high-level characters; and also of TSR often treating the Realms as a dumping ground rather than a setting with integrity, and using some poorly chosen freelancers. All this affected the way the Realms was [i]presented[/i] much more than the underlying setting. At the same time, in the 1990s Ed Greenwood kept writing the same great material he always had, such as the FOR series and the [i]Volo's Guide[/i]s. Ed's Realms work is consistent in spirit from the 1980s [i]Dragon[/i] articles through his latest writing. The late 1990s saw the period of Steven Schend and Eric Boyd, who were the first sourcebook authors other than Ed and Jeff Grubb to consistently get the Realms right in tone and detail. The 3E sourcebooks are mostly by multiple authors (and try to deliver a quota of sometimes gratuitous game-mechanical information); thus they're all better than the worst 1990s duds, certainly better researched, but they're also often bitty, rarely matching the depth and coherence of the best earlier single-author works.Well, that detail (and scores of boxes of papers more) always existed, it just took a while to publish. Some love it, others prefer not to use it. Similarly, festhalls were mentioned but not detailed in the early overviews.Yes (Grimstaff is mistaken here). Ed:There's no particular abundance when you take into account the size of the lands and populations; they've just been overexposed.Those adventures are for mid-level PCs. [/QUOTE]

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