Favourite Gameworld

The Forgotten Realms is by far my favourite because of the amount of detail that has been lavished upon it.

I remember seeing all the adverts in the comics I used to read advertising this wonderful new land to explore and play in.  It was my friends who first got me interested in the realms as they were reading the novels and I thought it sounded a pretty neat place to run adventures in.

I remember that I was overcome with joy when I finally got the original grey box edition and poured over the books inside, it left me feeling ecstatic and determined even more to use this world for my campaigns.  After that I bought each book I could and devoured the realms lore contained within; each volume adding more layers of detail that could be peeled back and digested at will.  For the hard to get stuff I tracked down the miniature reprint editions and did my best to read them.  Somewhere I have the Undermountain reprint boxed set signed by Ed Greenwood himself.

I really liked the Volo’s guides as they were written as a travel guide so I could hand that volume to my players and they could get a taste of what the area covered was like.

I even managed to get hold of the Forgotten Realms atlas and the CD-ROM with the Campaign Cartographer maps.  Now I had the ability to print out the areas that the players would visit, going down to the smaller regions for the hamlets.

I was less enthused when the world was updated for 3e as the physical geography changed and so all the lovely maps I had were pretty useless if I wanted to keep using the setting as is for this edition.

For the last campaign I started I went back to Greyhawk as I knew very little about the realm and thought it would be a different change of pace.