Copyright Polygon
For me, the Forgotten Realms are Dungeons & Dragons. I grew up with R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels, and Ed Greenwood’s Elminster in Hell remains one of my favorite fantasy books. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting from 3e is one of my most prized possessions. I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 2 more times than I want to admit. I enjoy and appreciate other settings too, but you can imagine the level of expectation I had for Adventures in Faerûn and Heroes of Faerûn, the two books that will be released on Nov. 11 but are already available for Master Tier D&D Beyond subscribers. After spending some time with the books, I can say that there is indeed a lot of good stuff in there, but the overall result is hindered by some general design flaws that are, at least in part, common to D&D products that have come out of late. Let’s start with an important statement: The two books have theoretically different targets (Dungeon Masters and players) but you have to buy both. Adventures in Faerûn is a great resource for DMs who want to run a Forgotten Realms campaign, as you will find detailed descriptions of five regions: the Dalelands, Icewind Dale, Calmishan, the Moonshae Islands, and Baldur’s Gate. However, Heroes of Faerûn describes the rest of the continent — in less detail but still providing plenty of ideas and info — plus the main gods and factions of Faerûn. As a Dungeon Master and a Realms fanatic, I wish I could get something similar to 3e’s Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, an atlas of a fantasy world that has all the info you need in one place. Instead, you’ll have to bounce between the two books, and the quantity and quality of the lore is limited by the presence of other things, such as rules that we didn’t really need (more on that later). This is what makes the Realms so fascinating to me: No other D&D setting has such a vast world and density of details. You can point your finger at a random point on the map, and you can be sure that there’s something going on there: a city with troubles to solve, an ancient ruin that’s begging to be explored, NPCs who have their own agendas and schemes, and so on. Recreating that in 5e in a single book was an ambitious project, but Wizards of the Coast also had 11 years to accomplish it. I didn’t mind the 5e approach of eschewing traditional campaign-setting books (which try to present a whole world in its complexity) to instead publish campaigns focused on a specific place or region. That gave us the best looks we had in years at places such as Barovia, Waterdeep, Icewind Dale, and the Underdark. Going back to the traditional way and trying to put all of Faerûn in one book was a gamble — one that I’m glad Wizards took, despite the issues with the product. Again, there are a lot of things here that make me happy and excited to run a Forgotten Realms campaign. Adventures in Faerûn lets you take a deep dive into some of my favorite regions of the continent. In each chapter, you will find a general description of the area, its people, its environment and hazards, and what sort of campaigns it fits best, followed by the places of interest and current events that can work as adventure hooks. The end of each regional chapter also has a “conflicts” section that provides further inspiration for story threads to follow during a campaign. All this is supported by an abundance of maps, drawn in the classic Forgotten Realms style. There’s even a sweet map of Myth Drannor that will let you venture into Faerûn’s most famous mega-dungeon without having to buy a copy of 2e AD&D The Ruins of Myth Drannor from 1993. However, the regional chapters are not equal in quality. Icewind Dale is fantastic, providing a treasure trove of information that was absent from Rime of the Frostmaiden. More importantly, it shows that the world has moved forward from the events of that campaign. There are new villains, new plots, and new locations, and the events of Rime had a tangible effect on the world, which is great to experience if you’ve played that campaign. The Dalelands and Baldur’s Gate are also good, but Calimshan and the Moonshae Islands, on the other hand, do not show the same level of attention because they were not based on existing 5e material. There’s still a lot of welcome new stuff here — the last books focusing on Calimshan came out in 2e! — but the Icewind Dale chapter is on another level. For any other place in Faerûn outside of these five, you’ll have to refer to chapter 2 of Heroes of Faerûn. Don’t expect to find the same level of detail in these 48 pages as in the five regional chapters from Adventures in Faerûn, which is a shame, because places like Cormyr, Sembia, Amn, and Damara have been waiting to get some love for decades. There is still enough here for creative Dungeon Masters to get the spark of inspiration and expand on what they find in the book — which has always been the purpose of campaign settings after all. Beside that, Heroes also has an entire chapter for the Faerûnian pantheon, which is great to see, and one for the factions of the world. We’ve already seen these detailed in many other products, so it feels a bit redundant, but I guess it’s still good to have your Red Wizards and Dragon Cultists all in one place. Putting all this in a single book would have been much better, especially considering that Adventures in Faerûn wastes its entire first chapter with frankly unnecessary suggestions on how to “run the Realms,” including something called Epic Destinies. After correctly recognizing that the peculiarity of the Forgotten Realms setting is that everything feels epic there, the book explains how a DM can, essentially, set out a character arc for each of their players that will develop during the campaign throughout milestones, and bring them to an “epic destiny” such as claiming a crown or inheriting an archmage’s tower. Two things rub me the wrong way about this. First, it really doesn’t add anything in terms of rules. The rewards that players get at specific milestones are all things that their characters would already get, such as feats at the appropriate level or magic items. So, the only purpose of this section is to railroad a campaign’s narrative in a certain direction, rather than let the story develop organically through how the characters interact with the world. In my opinion, it’s a terrible example of DMing, and I can bet this will be the most discussed and criticized part of the books, despite being only a couple of pages. There is already a never-ending debate regarding the balance of power between DMs and players. Some DMs believe that “it’s their world” and the characters just live in it (a notion I disagree with), while others try to incorporate players as much as possible in the development of the story. It’s a choice made at every table, and we didn’t really need non-rules for that. Their only purpose seems to be pandering to players, an unfortunate trend in recent D&D products. Adventures in Faerûn’s first chapter also includes 32 pages of adventures that once again feel like a bit of wasted space. They follow the template introduced in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, being one page each, with a “situation” and a “hook” that summarize the problem and how to get the players involved in it, followed by a series of encounters and a map. The small format means that these adventures are merely a sequence of combats or basic quests (mostly “fetch”) that would have been better situated in a supplemental product. The locations and NPCs are single-use throwaways, which is the opposite of what I want from a campaign setting. At least the maps are good and easily reusable. Overall, the Forgotten Realms bundle still shows some of the design flaws that have become prominent in D&D 2024. Rather than provide a world that is as detailed as possible and tell us “go and play in it,” these books sometimes try to guide players and DMs too much. I would have preferred it if all the information about the world had been contained in one book, with the other reserved for new rules, class options, items, and so on. However, I welcome the attempt made to provide us with something similar to past Forgotten Realms campaign settings. If you are a DM who wants to run a campaign in Faerûn, you’ll find plenty of information here, but the thing you’re actually looking for is inspiration. Look at the world in these pages as an incomplete jigsaw puzzle that you have to fill, and you’ll have a blast.
