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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7125549" data-attributes="member: 40592">I bought the original Grey Box, and never liked it much even in its original form (which didn't last long before 2e came out and the 'troubles' began).For my tastes, Ed Greenwood has some interesting ideas, but no real ability to create a coherent whole from them.  His game world is an incoherent mis-mash of thinly disguised real-world cultures and places, like a bad pastiche of R. E. Howard's Hyperborea.  Ed's "adventures" were the worst - Galdalf-rip-off-DM-PC walks you through some 'interesting' stuff and helps you through to 'good wins'... oh boy!So much stuff makes no sense at all, and while the "shared world" aspects made some bits better e.g. authors and designers who had a clue made some sense of parts of the world, the down-side of that is you get 'over-development' i.e. hard for people to take the gem of an idea, and expand upon it where the PC's are genuinely the protagonists, not just spectators.Personally, I am running my first ever Realms adventure at the moment - a heavily altered Storm King's Thunder.  The fact that the time-line got moved so far forward with 4e, then 5e hand-waved a 'restoration' of sorts... well at least that gives us some more room to create things that are not already detailed somewhere.  The fact there's so much 'canon' around, at least means I can grab stuff from various sources as inspiration, and get away with putting my own spin on things because 'times have changed'.  Same for yet another "low-level PC's are tasked with saving the North" - I guess 'times have changed', so Gandalf / Elminster, etc, must be busy doing something else to the east, or whatever...</blockquote>

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