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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Derulbaskul" data-source="post: 5316529" data-attributes="member: 1581">By way of background, I use the 4th edition version of the Forgotten Realms. I have DMed in the Forgotten Realms since the first grey boxed set. (I also like most of the other campaign settings so please don't read this as me being pro-FR; I'm just trying to answer your question while also declaring my biases.)I design my own NPCs, adventures and campaigns but I use the background/history of the various FR nations and deities to help flesh things out. Having a fully mapped out world is also of great assistance.Also, having a lot of that stuff in memory means it is much easier for me to ad-lib if my players choose to go somewhere else: a quick look at the campaign guide is typically all I need to spark an idea and then I can generate some appropriate encounters that will allow me to finish the game session on a high... and thus buy me time to prepare properly for the next session.Also, I know FR well enough that, no matter what my players suggest as the type of game they want me to run, I can find a logical setting for it.My current game involves pirates and dinosaurs so it's set in the region of the Sea of Fallen Stars where the Pirate Isle is now (thanks to the Spellplague) a tropical island (at least in my version of FR!). I don't have any ninja yet,  but I did have a kenku avenger running around that would double as a ninja in a pinch. So, yes, FR will do a campaign involving ninja, pirates and dinosaurs.If you want to run The Mummy movies, FR used to have a pseudo-Egyptian land called Mulhorand which is now basically buried under the remnants of another world (Spellplague again). But it's perfect: now adventures based on The Mummy movies make more sense! I could go on and on with similar examples... as I could if I was using Eberron as my campaign world. I know it can be incredibly rewarding, creatively, to create your own world but I find I would rather put my time and energy into creating adventures and campaigns (plus monsters and NPCs) and simply used a published campaign world for all the background material.For me, a large part of running a game is immersion and verisimilitude. A lot of the work to provide the framework that underpins those things is done when you use a published campaign setting whether that's FR, Eberron (another wonderful setting that I plan to use one day) or the "points of light" (which, when the campaign guide comes out next year, may even become my next preferred setting).Fair warning: the 4E version of Forgotten Realms is a lot more "bare bones" than earlier editions. While there is the positive in that there is much more room for your own stuff, it means that a lot of the information you list as examples of things you can find in a campaign setting are either missing or simply glossed over.Second fair warning: mentioning the 4E version of Forgotten Realms often attracts a lot of negative responses. I've only mentioned it because it's what I'm using but if this thread attracts the usual threadcrapping because I've mentioned it please PM me and I will delete everything I have written.</blockquote>

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