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DOC2

Uploaded by

Jeremiah Seth Breitenbach
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Starting in 1979, Greenwood published a series of articles that detailed the setting

in The Dragon (later Dragon) magazine, the first of which was about a monster
known as the curst.[5]: 72 Greenwood continued to write extensive articles for Dragon,
in which he used the Forgotten Realms as the setting to detail magic items,
monsters, and spells.[7] When Gary Gygax "lost control of TSR in 1985, the company
saw an opportunity to move beyond Greyhawk and introduce a new default setting".
[9]: 87
In 1986, TSR began looking for a new campaign setting for AD&D,[5]: 72 and
assigned Jeff Grubb to find out more about the setting used by Greenwood as
portrayed in his articles in Dragon.[9]
Greenwood states that Grubb asked him "Do you just make this stuff up as you go,
or do you really have a huge campaign world?", and Greenwood answered "yes" to
both questions.[6] TSR felt that the Forgotten Realms would be a more open-ended
setting than its epic fantasy counterpart Dragonlance, and chose the Realms as a
ready-made campaign setting upon deciding to publish AD&D 2nd edition.
[6]
Greenwood agreed to work on the project and began working to get Forgotten
Realms officially published.[10] He sent TSR a few dozen cardboard boxes stuffed
with pencil notes and maps, and sold all rights to the setting for a token fee. [6] He
noted that TSR altered his original conception of the Realms being a place that
could be accessed from Earth, as "[c]oncerns over possible lawsuits (kids getting
hurt while trying to 'find a gate') led TSR to de-emphasize this meaning". [6]
Jon Peterson, author of Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History,
said that Greenwood "was that rare obsessive DM who just seemed to have more
ideas and energy to pour into his world than even the folks at TSR did. Naturally
when TSR was shopping for new campaign worlds as part of their cross-media
strategy, they had to get the Forgotten Realms. R. A. Salvatore took Greenwood's
world and created characters and stories for it that made him a bestselling author
and sustained TSR as a major fantasy book publisher". [11]
Publication history
[edit]
1985–1990
[edit]
In 1985, the AD&D module Bloodstone Pass was released by TSR and is
retroactively considered to be a part of the Forgotten Realms, [12] although it was not
until the module The Bloodstone Wars was released that it became the official
setting for the module series.[13] Douglas Niles had worked on a novel trilogy with a
Celtic theme, which were then altered to become the first novels set in the
Forgotten Realms, starting with Darkwalker on Moonshae (1987).[5]: 73 It is the first
book in The Moonshae Trilogy, which predates the Forgotten Realms Campaign
Set by one month.[14]
The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set was later released in 1987[9] as a boxed set of
two source books (Cyclopedia of the Realms and DM's Sourcebook of the Realms)
and four large color maps, designed by Greenwood in collaboration with Grubb. [15]:
99
It sold ca. one hundred fifty thousand times in its first two years. [16] The set
introduced the campaign setting and explained how to use it, [15]: 99 and reserved
space on the map for SSI's Gold Box computer role-playing games set in the
Forgotten Realms.[17]
TSR began incorporating elements by other designers into the Forgotten Realms,
including the Moonshae Isles by Douglas Niles, the "Desert of Desolation" by Tracy
Hickman and Laura Hickman, and Kara-Tur by Zeb Cook.[5]: 73 The setting also
provided a new way for TSR to market its Battlesystem rules, which it had
supported with the Bloodstone adventure sequence which started with Bloodstone
Pass; the last two adventures in the series, The Bloodstone Wars (1987) and The
Throne of Bloodstone (1988), were unambiguously set in the Forgotten Realms. [5]:
74
Some characters from Egg of the Phoenix (1987) by Frank Mentzer were
incorporated into The Savage Frontier (1988).[5]: 40
The compilation module Desert of Desolation reworked the previous adventures to
fit as part of the Forgotten Realms.[18] The module Under Illefarn published in 1987
is set in the Forgotten Realms,[15]: 108 as is the module released in 1988, Swords of
the Iron Legion.[15]: 103

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