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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2829528" data-attributes="member: 32740">Just prior to my swearing off the Realms indefinitely as a campaign setting I was working on a very large-scale revision of the Realms map:<img src="http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/cc2/pngs/toril.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />I too was eliminating the desert of Anauroch, but I was also eliminating and combining mountains everywhere into real mountain ranges, moved the Moonshaes into a long encircling chain of islands off the Sword Coast, shifted Evermeet, moved rivers, and was renaming and inventing new nations on the fly.  One of the things that came to bother me about the Realms was too many flavorless city-states and secret organizations, and not enough ordinary Kingdoms (kings, queens, emperors) in conflict for my tastes.Revising the map was part of a desperate attempt to maintain an interest in FR since it was the ONLY setting I played in for 15 years or so, both in games that I ran and games in which I was a player.  Familiarity breeds contempt.  Before I finished this little project I just gave up on it entirely and decided to either go homebrew or otherwise find some other setting.I never cared a whit about FR novels and whatnot, probably because I never bothered to read them.  I have never felt particularly compelled to repeatedly include major NPC's in the campaign except as they conformed to MY needs and desires.  For example, I knew of the character of Drizzt, but not only was he never featured in my campaigns but nobody else ever ran a character remotely like him and my version of the Underdark et. al. was still firmly rooted in the GDQ modules.  It was only when I TRIED to run the Realms as written that I ran into real problems as the Realms as written was VASTLY less interesting to me than the Realms as my PLAYERS influenced it to be.One thing is certain for me - the Realms is just too big for its own good.  There is SO much detail that has been provided for every nook and cranny of it over the years that it is for all practical purposes impossible to really fit it all in.  Each new supplement I read caused me to LOSE that much more of a grasp on the setting as a whole.  If you run a Realms-spanning campaign that touches on all parts of it then you aren't going to be visiting those parts you touch in any detail.  If you do put forth one or more areas in any great detail then you aren't going to need or much care about parts of the Realms much outside those areas.The Realms is not so much a single, unified campaign setting as it is dozens of seperate campaign settings tied together by random geography.  If I were to ever use it again I'd probably re-do my "remapping" project and advance the timeline 2000 years so that whatever history I wanted to retain would be ANCIENT history and thus only relevant as background.</blockquote>

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