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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3557898" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm a huge hater of FR.&nbsp; It's one of the lamest, most poorly thought out, most cheesy homebrews ever to make it to publication.However, I take issue with the notions that there aren't really any unknowns on the map.&nbsp; One thing that strikes me about the published FR setting is that it assumes a certain style of play which boils down to, 'Leave a bar in a big city.&nbsp; Leave for a nearby dungeon in the howling wilderness just outside (or inside!) the gate.&nbsp; Return to the bar.&nbsp; Rince and repeat.'&nbsp; All the setting information consists of highly detailed bars, dungeons, and enough information about the big city to allow for a bit of political intrigue and to stamp on the players the fact that the NPC's in the big city will always be big and better than the PC's.&nbsp; In short, the entire game world is a tesselation on Keep on the Borderlands, only the Keep always has 25th level so and so's in it even in the rare case that its actually a village.It's the 'Orc and Pie' world. But to continue, anyone with the slighest knowledge of world building will immediately spot that the map is basically empty except for those 'mission critical' features of 'keep', 'inn', and 'caves of chaos'.&nbsp; And, if you wanted to do FR for some reason but wanted to run it as a more mature setting than it is published at, one place to start would be filling in those blank spots on the map.&nbsp; There are in fact alot of them.&nbsp; There are huge swaths of territory that can't be empty if those massive city states are to be supported (to say nothing of the industries they contain), but which are nothing but featureless voids in published content.&nbsp; So it is quite possible to run a complex FR campaign entirely in the blank spaces on the map where it reads 'here be dragons', and indeed find that there are more things than dragons out there.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 3557898, member: 4937"] I'm a huge hater of FR. It's one of the lamest, most poorly thought out, most cheesy homebrews ever to make it to publication. However, I take issue with the notions that there aren't really any unknowns on the map. One thing that strikes me about the published FR setting is that it assumes a certain style of play which boils down to, 'Leave a bar in a big city. Leave for a nearby dungeon in the howling wilderness just outside (or inside!) the gate. Return to the bar. Rince and repeat.' All the setting information consists of highly detailed bars, dungeons, and enough information about the big city to allow for a bit of political intrigue and to stamp on the players the fact that the NPC's in the big city will always be big and better than the PC's. In short, the entire game world is a tesselation on Keep on the Borderlands, only the Keep always has 25th level so and so's in it even in the rare case that its actually a village. It's the 'Orc and Pie' world. But to continue, anyone with the slighest knowledge of world building will immediately spot that the map is basically empty except for those 'mission critical' features of 'keep', 'inn', and 'caves of chaos'. And, if you wanted to do FR for some reason but wanted to run it as a more mature setting than it is published at, one place to start would be filling in those blank spots on the map. There are in fact alot of them. There are huge swaths of territory that can't be empty if those massive city states are to be supported (to say nothing of the industries they contain), but which are nothing but featureless voids in published content. So it is quite possible to run a complex FR campaign entirely in the blank spaces on the map where it reads 'here be dragons', and indeed find that there are more things than dragons out there. [/QUOTE]

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