The Forgotten Realms actually existed before D&D, but I fell upon the unfolding AD&D (1st Edition) rules with gladsome cries, because they allowed me to quantify and detail spells, monsters, and magic items against each other. Roleplaying came shortly after that, and has continued down the more than two decades (!) since...

So a new presentation of the Realms to go with the 3rd Edition D&D game, to me, is just a new way of expressing the same glorious world -- a new language, if you will. A new language that can express things a little more clearly and colorfully than the last one we used.

One example: as Jeff Grubb pointed out to me early on in the playtests, the new rules allowed us to express certain NPCs (in class and ability terms) a lot more closely to my originals from the "home" Realms campaign than did the first two editions. For example: 1st Edition had no guidelines for having a fighter who developed a psionic wild talent, and 2nd Edition eliminated psionics altogether at first (slowly re-introducing that and similar omissions over the course of time with new product releases). With 3rd Edition, the flexibility to customize any character to have nearly any ability, skill, feat, or power provides the groundwork to create (or more fully realize) many characters as they were in the Realms in its earliest form. So the new Realms will have some characters closer to my originals -- at last.

We're also freed at long last from the tenet of: "Good must always triumph. Evil must always be seen to fail and gain no shred of reward from their bad actions," which led the Cult of the Dragon, the Zhentarim, and the Red Wizards (among others) to seem not just paper tigers, but more like Keystone Kops at times. We can get grimmer now, thereby making the heroics of PCs more meaningful.

In the new approach to the Realms we'll also feature a little more about the vast network of forgotten, hidden, and sometimes guarded magical gates with which Faerûn is studded. They'll allow us to focus on some locations in great detail: Silverymoon and the emerging realm of Luruar/The Silver Marches, just to name a couple.

In the past, when we wanted to zero in on a specific town or village, detailing things like the trade and travelers passing by (what was carried, and why), we always seemed to end up covering an area of countryside the size of the United States in 65 or 96 pages.

Just to give one historical example of my own: the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar was supposed to be 96 pages -- with all of Eveningstar included, every last cottage and farmer and about two dozen adventure subplots for starting-level parties. What we ended up with was only half the dungeon, with my having to plead for an ad to go away just so I could include a few monsters (because they needed to be in full-page Monstrous Compendium format).

But now, by spreading our net over smaller areas, we can provide that level of detail we've always wanted. So although 'hard and crunchy' adventure details will almost always be in the foreground, now we'll also be able to give campaign-helpful details of specific locales to back them up.

Of course, no world, imaginary or real, can fit in any single book, or even a shelf of books. The Realms won't be "complete" in your hands when you pick up the 3rd Edition Realms book. It's a living setting that changes and grows and develops, leaving an ongoing history (that we all create) in its wake. What this book does is refocus our common 'window' to look at the Realms through, making it sharper, clearer, and more colorful. It doesn't make it richer... that's what the years ahead of new, as-yet-unthought-of Realms releases, and all of our imaginations, will do. It also distills a lot of useful Realms information back into one incredibly useful tome!

(Realmswatch Home Page)