Using Northeastern Faerûn as a Campaign Setting

[Yora]

After leafing through old FR books and boxes I still have and checking the sources lists on the Forgotten Realms wiki, I am actually surprised at how little information and material has ever been published on this region.
The 1st edition books are small little things you can easily read end to end in one evening, and the 2nd edtion Spellbound only covers Aglarond, Rashemen, and Thay. Impiltur, Narfell, the Great Dale, and Thesk are really more suggestions than developed areas. As far as I am able to tell, the awesomely named Shadowmasters of Telflamm are a one hit wonder that got covered only once in Cloak & Dagger and didn't even exist before that.

This is very different to The North and Sword Coast I've primarily been interested in back in the day. This might explain why this area is somewhat obscure and unpopular other than Minsc and Red Wizards. There's not a lot to work with. Though this also means lots of space to expand into.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

If they ever published a "sourcebook" or expansion book for a particular nation or region within the Realms, then that nation or region really can be (and probably should be) considered a setting unto itself.

I mean, if you have to hand DM's a whole 'nother book and say, "The original information on this part of the setting we sold you just wasn't enough for you to possibly grok it and do it justice," then what are you saying about what you originally sold them?

One of the best campaigns I ever ran was set in the Forgotten Realms and never left Cormyr. A bit of action took place on other planes but I didn't need any other information about the Realms beyond the Cormyr borders - and if I would have needed it, then I'd have preferred to make it up than buy another entire sourcebook to teach me every detail that the original setting didn't tell me (and which I'd ignore 98% of anyway). I expanded on the information I had about Cormyr with my own ideas - especially some stuff about the nobility throughout the nation. Another game that I never ran basically took that peninsula between the Dragon Reach and Easting Reach, placed "Barovia" on the south coast and a couple new nations of my own conception to the north of it (replacing Impiltur and The Vast), and pretty much wasn't going to leave that area. The rest of the Realms would be out there beyond that region in some measure, but none of it was really necessary for the setting I had in mind.

Really, this has been my experience as a DM for my entire life. Settings are WAY bigger than they need to be because when you design them to be sold to other people, you need variety of "sub-settings" within them to give people some choice about the kind of game they're wanting to run. You don't give people just Waterdeep and The North, you give them Baldur's Gate, and Mulhorand, and Cormyr, and Shadowdale, and Thay, and on and on. It's not because people need ALL those places in any given campaign - it's so that any given campaign they run can be set in a variety of places within that larger setting, or have adventures that DO expand beyond one area. Nobody want's all mountains, all plains, all forest, all jungle, ALL swamp, ALL sandy desert, etc. They want to have the variety out there somewhere when they want to take advantage of it, but not have to cram it all into a single smaller area like, say, Cormyr.

Hell, I eventually ran SO MANY Forgotten Realms campaigns set in various places ALL OVER the Realms that I just got incurably sick of the FR always hanging over my head as the end-all/be-all "setting to contain all settings". I vowed to never run another FR game again, and though I've had a few ideas about what I'd do if I did, I never have returned to it and I still don't see it ever actually happening.

 

[Matt James]

In Dungeon #170, we took some time to help expand content around Phlan (hey, old school Pool of Radiance fan here) for the Monument of the Ancients adventure. I agree with the comments around micro-settings with nearly limitless possibilities when zoomed in.