I've talked to Ed about the differences between the commercial setting and his setting in some detail. A couple of things:
* The gods are impersonal and mysterious in Ed's Realms.
* His major NPCs either exist as a byproduct of his fiction, were former PCs, or were constructed for eminently sensible, average RPG play reasons, and should be looked at as ciphers for characters that *you* create for those reasons. The patronage that people like Elminister, Mirt, et al provide are not much different than what NPCs do in many games.
* There are many, many aspects of the published Realms that have nothing to do with him, but he isn't unhappy about that. He freely admits that some of his background detail is unpublishable in a commercial market (and not just the, er . . . naughty bits).
* Much of this came out of a seminar where Ed and Ken Hite discussed how to incorporate the Cthulhu Mythos into the Realms, which resulted in ideas so cool that they will pretty much dominate how I run any high level play there. Think, "The gods of the Realms are the equivalent of microbes feeding from the spare essence of the sleeping Old Ones," and "The Drow live underground because they know what's going on; they were the original elves who survived past ages and the happy, Evermeet-tripping elves are the refugees who don't know what's coming to get them." Cool, cool stuff.
