Ruin Explorer
Legend
Only getting started? Someone wasn't playing D&D in the 1990s!
The is moribund now compared to how it used to be, in terms of the amount of attention and description its getting, yeah that includes all the FR-set adventures as FR.
The novels and so on are only selling to an aging audience. The video games are introducing it to new people - but in a such bland and forgettable and non-FR-ish way that people will barely know or care that it's the FR. This was a specific criticism I had of BG3 before I played it. It remains a specific criticism I have of BG3 after playing it, unfortunately. It's also true of the latest sadly-terrible game, which could be in any rando fantasyland.
The movie is a chance to flip that a bit, but... uhhhhh... judging from the set-photos, it's gonna be SUPER-generic, like "Do they even know it's a specific fantasy setting?" levels of generic. I hope that's just a natural result of a film being shot vs a film being shown of course, but LotR did not look that generic when being shot.
Possibly the TV show will help?
And now it has Exandria to compete with for "generic fantasy setting". The "kids today" are much more likely to pursue Exandria fan material than FR fan material (i.e. books, shows, etc.), like drastically so.
So I think we're actually on the edge of a precipice for the FR. It may survive and come back as an interesting setting people actually actively want to use, if the movie and TV show help, and if the new setting book is FR and makes a compelling case for the FR.
Or it may face the same fate Greyhawk has. Greyhawk is dead. Sometimes people dig up bits of it and sell them to the faithful (c.f. Saltmarsh etc.) or just those who have heard of its magical powers, but it's dead. It was basically dead in 3E even though it was the official setting and had a whole RPGA-type campaign going (ultimately rejected as non-canon by WotC). FR may continue to be the default D&D setting in this edition and the next, but unless people start getting actually interested in the FR as its own thing again, it's on the road to being Greyhawk 2, another dead generic setting that used to be big.
We shall see, but I don't think "just getting started" is really it. It's at a risky point. Either it renews itself and draws in an audience (probably via TV/movies) or it'll start to look awfully replaceable and low-priority.
If this book isn't an FR book, I think I'll need to declare the FR to be in a coma, frankly. Because the situation will be little different to GH and 3E, where it got a little support at the start of the edition, continued to be the "default setting" for adventures, but never saw anything more. If so we could see "BRING BACK THE FR!" campaigns as soon as * checks watch * 2030.
