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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7715456" data-attributes="member: 17607">Chris Perkins has already answered the 'why is everything set in the Realms' question with a tweet from April 1 of this year:"The Realms accommodates stories of every flavor, every genre. It's a world of boundless diversity. Nothing & no one is excluded."On one hand, this makes sense -- if you know your Realms background, then you know that the Realms grew up as your typical 'kitchen sink' campaign setting, almost as if a young boy simply added things to his campaign world as he discovered them in school. "Ooh, let's have an area with a feudal king and aristocracy thing going on. Ooh, the Mongols are cool -- let's put a place for them in here! Whoa, dinosaurs!" And so forth. Sometimes deities from other cultures would just wander in and join the main pantheon, and sometimes there would be a whole new part of the world just so a pantheon could be added to the world.The weird thing about Perkins's point, though, is that actual fans of the Realms as a setting are fans in spite of this tendency, not because of it -- they (like Dragonlance fans) largely became fans because of TSR's fairly tight marriage of the various adventures and the fiction line put out by their publishing arm. It's the specificity of events in the Realms that makes Realms fans fans -- a Realms fan will have a much different reaction to things like the Time of Troubles, Vangerdahast, or Finder Wyvernspur than those folks who simply appreciate the Realms as a 'kitchen sink' setting.This is why I see criticism from those who prefer Greyhawk or Planescape as a setting as misguided -- not because WotC is ignoring those settings (as noted, most of the adventures have contained brief conversion notes for those who prefer other settings), but because they're simply using the Realms, not as a storied setting with its own history and 'canon', but as a catch-all for all the cool stuff D&D has done in its history, regardless of whether or not it really fits.As someone who's been a Ravenloft fan for over a decade, let me say that Greyhawk and Planescape fans do not want their settings given the same treatment as Curse of Strahd.--Pauper</blockquote>

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