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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 346141" data-attributes="member: 1106">Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, I think that that's almost the exact opposite of the approach of a "microsetting" such as what I'm describing.FR, from the 1E boxed set forward was as an entire continent thousands of miles wide detailed very sparsely, with sporadic points of a bit of detail (such as Shadowdale) or, later, an airy sparrow's eye overview of each region.  When a boxed set did go into detail, it often bit off more than it could chew (e.g. Undermountain).  The Volo's Guides come close, but they too almost attempt to cover too many square miles of territory - it would take the collective page count of all of them to cover the Dalelands without skipping much, as they always do.If you ripped out all of the pages of macro level overview (which is almost the entire Cyclopedia of the Realms) and replaced them with a level of detail equal to the Shadowdale book of the 2E boxed set on a limited area (such as the Dalelands), that would be more like what I'm suggesting.  Yes, there are focal points in the Realms (the classic ones being Eveningstar, Waterdeep, and Shadowdale, and to a lesser extent, Daggerford), but for the most part the focus is on a birds eye view of a continent, not expanding out in rings from one of these focal points in a "2E FR boxed set Shadowdale book" level of detail.Apply the "microsetting" approach to Eveningstar, and you'd not only have a fully detailed Eveningstar, but populated nearby dungeons, lairs, wilderness, villages, towns etc. all down to encounter level.  Building in a ring around that, you might eventually cover Cormyr at that level of detail.  Likely that would take a page count equal to all the FR regional supplements to do, but unless you're doing a road trip campaign, you probably wouldn't need a sparsely detailed continent much anyway - DMs are generally good at sparse high level detail because they love creating it - look at any homebrew web page for evidence.  Low level stuff is too much like hard work.  Guess which kind of work designers prefer to do too. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />No, it wouldn't be a "something for everyone" campaign setting, because obviously, if you don't like Cormyr, you're screwed.  But then again, it wouldn't be Cormyr, but something more generic on a high level of detail than that.  FR has a lot of high level detail already decided for you, and thanks to the metaplot, more of that each quarter.</blockquote>

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