Faraer's page

Between the sourcebooks and website archives for both d20 versions of the game, Star Wars Gamer (available from Paizo) and miscellaneous other sources, there are scores and scores of SWRPG adventures, and scores more if you convert West End Games scenarios.

My browser isn't displaying the poll either. The two Star Wars campaigns I'd like to run or play in are:

-- a Jedi campaign set in the century before the films, in the great Republic that the Rebellion later fights to restore, where the PCs do what Jedi do -- most of all, settle conflicts by negotiation (rather than fall into constant duels with Sith-subtitutes), with a strong element of Senate politics. This could transition into the Clone Wars, which would be all the more poignant for having played through and defended the peaceful Republic then turned upside down.

-- an Empire campaign, which might straddle the years before and after Episode IV, in which the PC rebels may do some of the movie tie-in stuff like finding the Death Star plans that the EU farmed out to various other characters.

I wouldn't use d20 rules, though.

Reason 1 - If You're Going to Use the Setting, Use the Setting

The 'NPCs overshadow the PCs' thing can be divided into two parts (and it's an insoluble discussion unless you do). The first is a legitimate variation of preference for how dense and thick a layer of established power-players to have in a campaign, and thus the ease with which PCs can become big dogs. The second is a long, tangled catalogue of misconceptions of who these characters are, what they do, and how the Realms works. By all means use Elminster in your campaign, but to blame the Realms (as some like to do) if you use the internet fiction of Elminster rather than the one in the sources (who isn't even in Faerûn much/most of the time, a point that always gets stony silence from people uninterested in facts) is simple projection. Of course, in many scores of these discussions I can count the cases of any such problems reported as occurring -- irrespective of whose 'fault' -- on one hand.

I remember advertisements for the Star Wars RPG which pointed to Random Crowd Guy #137 and asked "What's that guy's story?" And the obvious answer is: "Who the Hell cares?"

I'm sure that's obvious to some people. But the Realms is exactly the place where that guy matters just as much as the handful of characters TSR regrettably and arbitrarily spotlighted, protagonized and iconized against their creator's wishes. I can't think of a better point to get across to newcomers what Ed's world is like.

Reason 2: The Lure of Canon

And yet the original Realms sourcebooks are positively layered with reminders that home games aren't in the least beholden to the books, and a literalistic approach to 'canon' goes as much against the spirit ingrained in every word as contempt for lore.

Do people feel that because far more Realmslore exists in Ed's basement and in his head than in published sources, they can't start a Realms campaign until they ask him loads of questions and burgle his house?

Do people GMing historical Earth campaigns feel they need to become world-class experts first?

Do people not GM in the Star Wars Republic and Empire because the post-Episode VI Expanded Universe exists?

If people think they have to catch up with an advancing official timeline, do you advance it even further, keep it advancing, and stress the appeal of playing in the newest, most up-to-date version of the setting?

Should all secondary worlds be capped at the same low level of detail in case anyone thinks they need to know it all, when they don't? Not according to what I value about all this.

Sorry, KE, I was being a bit glib there -- I know you didn't have much time to react. How about a Candlekeep.com thread to work out in advance what (and how) you might ask/say this time?

I'm always interested to hear from Phil Athans, because his side of things hasn't communicated as much to us as the game people.

Because of that, I can see why Wizards might want to pair down a few obscure cultures like the Mulhorrandi, or even eliminate some obscure gods like Elistraee.

Did you notice the pared-down Realms-2008 pantheon has about the same number of gods as the Old Grey Box? There are a few aspects of all this that still baffle me, and one of them is what the advantage is supposed to be of explicitly removing elements over just not mentioning the rarer stuff that might not figure in most campaigns.

Another is, why make PC races like tieflings -- part of whose appeal is that they're rare and special -- more common? (This thinking began in 3E with the common adventurous halflings and dwarven wizards.)

Rotten-tomato sales will be sky-rocketing at Gen Con this year.

I hope at Gen Con people ask Wizards employees the real, hard questions about this, and don't accept evasions or contentless marketing-speak. I gather people rather wussed out (or weren't at the seminars) last year.

The people who designed the 4e Realms, for the most part, HATED the Forgotten Realms (this comes from reading WotC designer blogs, Wizard's web page and what not, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say this isn't an opinion).

If I had to guess, mostly younger people (on both sides of the equation) who felt like outsiders since they weren't there to watch the Realms grow organically from the beginning.

Eberron, on the other hand, is all of what, five or six years old? Nothing to miss there. No forty years of lore to absorb.

And this is not an insult directed at a particular person, this is a clear observation based on poor decisions, products and outcomes, and directed at the roles of desginer and executive stakeholders who make final decisions.

Well, it's a company! If their 4E schedule didn't leave time to create a new world for the first setting book, that's a big shame, and we might prefer they gave settings more respect, but it's no surprise.

I agree with Mykull's post.

Maybe they were just intimidated knowing that casual posters at Candlekeep knew more Realms lore than the 4e Realms design team...

And again, we can understand why the Renton folk wouldn't want to be beholden to Realms-knowledgable freelance designers outside their circle of control. They could use fan lore-checkers, we say, but from a point of view that doesn't place value on setting integrity, that's just a needless overhead, the kind of thing you cut in times of economic difficulty.

Looking in the longer term, it's hard to see how moulding the Realms to D&D -- the analogy of a software 'skin' occurred to me and isn't that unfair -- and suspending the Realms brand (logo, trade dressing etc.) on game products could do anything other than harm its licensing value. But if you noticed how Wizards fumbled the cross-over promotion opportunities with Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, you wouldn't be surprised.

Chris, my guess is the Avatar thing was first of all motivated by a wish for a Dragonlance-style epic trilogy (plus modules) in the Realms, which fortuitously coincided with the pre-existing Godswar concept, the new edition and its bowdlerizing (removal of assassins, etc.), and TSR people's wish to leave their mark on the world.

That concept was suggested years earlier by Ed in Dragon #54, as a means of carrying out setting changes already desired for other reasons (and of course for home campaigns, not published worlds). I also felt the biggest problem with Avatar was that it was just too soon: for most at least of Richard Awlinson to know the Realms very well, and for people to get to love the world before it got blown up.

Realms-Shaking Events vicious-circled to where we are now. I wonder when the statute of limitations will run out, and we'll hear this whole story from the TSR/Wizards insiders' point of view.

The model of the ruleset as a lens onto the world was still current as of 3E -- Sean Reynolds talked about it, for instance. While the published Realms was always moulded around the rules to a degree, the 4E approach -- with D&D alone one of the staff-shedding Wizards of the Coast's two 'core brands' -- is openly not the same.

I didnt know that.

You sure aren't the only one.

Ed has told us a little about the Avatar Vortex days, including the changing manuscripts he had to base the FRE modules on. It's well acknowledged that their follow-the-novel-characters structure wasn't the best, but I ran them successfully, and Ed hung a lot of very worthwhile and transferrable place, character and adventure lore on that creaky frame. So it may be a good comparison with 'Abeir'.

Chris, do you have any Tales of the Vortex to tell? Do you remember who thought it would be a good idea to get rid of Bane, Bhaal and Myrkul after just two years?

We've known that since the late 1990s when Ed started posting to REALMS-L.

I can't see them telling design to blow it up because research has said that has worked in the past. Something like that must have been said at some point though.

Rich Baker has compared the situation to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Marvel's Ultimate series. Of course those are passive-consumption properties, not RPG settings, which is consistent with the designers' discussion in terms of stories they want to tell.

While White Wolf's new World of Darkness is a moderate commercial success, there indeed isn't any precedent for successful setting resets within D&D. But the thing is, commercial success for Realms-2008 means selling through print runs of two sourcebooks and not harming novels sales too badly. They aren't attempting to maintain or revamp the Realms as a long-term RPG setting, they're giving it up along with other settings as a bad job.

However, there are some comments about the amount of material that had been produced over the past 15 years or so that does lead me to ask you a question Pax. Given the large amount of 3.0/3.5 FR material already available, what further products (specific or general) would you like to see published presuming there was a way to disentangle the original IP from WotC?

Ah, that fantasy. Here's a sampling of what I'd love to see, today:

A treatment of Faerûnian magic: the society of mages, metaphysical workings, the full scope of wards, numerous spells alluded to but never published, non-adventuring magic, and so on. This huge subject has for various reasons only been touched on and detailed around the edges.

The second central subject never tackled head-on is adventuring: the adventuring culture, bands past and present, rules and guidelines for adventuring companies and how they work together.

The many already-designed dungeons that have never seen print, including the lower levels of Undermountain, the complete Haunted Halls, and many famous dungeons of the Sword Coast North.

Proper treatments of the Dales and Cormyr. The 15-year-old Volo's Guides are narrowly focused on shops, inns and brief notes on adventure sites; contrary to what some assume, the society and culture of these central areas have only incidentally been described. Much historical and noble lore of Cormyr has been worked up but not generally released, while only scraps are known of the history of the individual Dales. There are entire past Dales, rich with adventuring possibilities, that have never even been named.

The remaining written-but-unpublished Border Kingdoms articles, and a good number of Ed's submitted Dragon and Dungeon articles and short stories now fallen into Renton's black hole.

Material on the high-level worlds-spanning intrigue, centred on struggles over control of gates, that we've known of since Dragon #32, that influences much behind the scenes but has never been detailed through fears of children getting lost (really) and through planar material being overwritten by the AD&D planes and Planescape.

Ed's original Moonshaes and Anchorome.

Merchant lore, which is only niche in so far as repeated cycles of player-powers trash phase out of the playerbase people who want worlds.

The rest of the Knights of Myth Drannor novels, and short stories about many legendary heroes from Mirt and Durnan to Sharanralee.

The crucial thing to realize is that this is not new material made up, as it would be for most worlds, to fill books. It's the project of publishing the largely already-generated lore that dwarfs the published material and has been awaited for 20+ years.

Who's idea was the destruction of the forgotten realms, anyway?

The Wizards people have been coy about that. We know there was a meeting, and when it was proposed, some people spoke against the move and others cheered.

I can't see how this is different from any number of hardships and surprises DMs can run, or why it would be unfair or unfun in principle. It wouldn't be wise to use it to excess, but then neither would a campaign be of nothing but dungeons, where all NPCs were mad, all treasure cursed, etc.

Of course this is social contract rather than any matter of principle. If your players feel they have the right to use their characters' powers predictably and not be surprised, obviously they won't like those things happening.

What does 'DM fiated' mean, and why would it be bad? Almost everything a DM has happen in the campaign world is 'fiat'.

For myself, I do enjoy playing in settings with complex magical ecologies, lands with ancient sorcerous hangovers, long-term fields and wards, and such factors that keep magic dynamic and mysterious rather than a series of simple one-off rote effects.

Rewriting the rules will do little to draw new young players if they don't know what D&D or RPGs are. That will take serious advertising -- which only Wizards, of all RPG publishers, is in a position to do, and which they haven't done so far.

Do we know what's planned?

Apart from that, 4E looks to me to perpetuate 3E's rules-for-rules'-sake overcomplexity. Having to read 300-page rulebooks will put off far more people than the relatively subtle play dynamics discussed above.

Though I haven't played it, Mark Arsenault's Gunslingers, published by Gold Rush Games, is well written and authentic and certainly deserves to have been mentioned by now.

As a matter of interest, what was it about 1st ed that made you enjoy it so much? Was it nostalgia or the system or something else?

I find this kind of question quite bizarre. If you tell someone you're reading a book written before 1985, they don't ask if it's from nostalgia.

The idea that using certain books and not others constitutes 'restricting', 'limiting' or 'disallowing' grants using all the books as a norm which is then deviated from: a presupposition which is the opposite of the attitude that seems sensible to me: using the rules you need to represent things in your campaign, and not more rules than that.

Bear in mind, as well, that we (people to post to RPG message boards) buy far more rules supplements than the average player or DM, which skews our idea of what's common.

Newer systems generally have the advantage of having seen many mechanics and ways of doing things in an RPG and can pick and choose from among the various systems avoiding the failures and emulating success.

That is a factor, but in my experience it's mainly potential and will take decades to become more actual; and it's not a major factor in D&D because the designers of each edition have had such diverse design goals and personal likes.

Unlike other games, the rules are meant to be a guide…

If that. There's been almost a reversal: originally the rules are a tool to be resorted to by the DM to help him resolve certain situations, now they're idolized by some as if they were the game and everything else is seen as aberrant 'DM fiat' -- what I call normal DMing.

If the game is all about combat, then yes, I think game balance is important. But if the emphasis is story, them I'm not sure it needs to be.

Here's a great example of Wizards' hijacking of the term 'game balance' that I mentioned. The term doesn't inherently refer solely to combat, but does in its Wizards jargon sense.

Wow, has the game evolved.

No, the game hasn't evolved. Different people have produced different versions of it according to their own and DMs'/players' (actual or supposed) tastes and fashions. Companies like Wizards talk about evolution -- it's been a major industry buzzword in the last 10 years -- to deceptively connote inevitable progress.

But I started to wonder...is a 'dynamic' gaming system better?

Who calls it dynamic? Is it dynamic, in practice? Does it lead to more dynamic play than Gary's? Not in my experience.

For example, today there is a lot of emphasis on game balance, so Wizards and Fighters and Rogues all have something to do.

Not just on game balance, but on one narrow understanding of game balance that Wizards talked about again and again until people started assuming it and associating it with the term.

Sometimes I wonder if trying too hard to create a balanced game system gives "balance" too much emphasis and therefore supports the "rules lawyers" and "power gamers" and those who try to find the loopholes.

3E and 4E have checks in the ruleset that in 1E and 2E are managed by the DM. Both approaches have pros and cons, and neither is 'better' in general, only for specific purposes. Claims that one competently designed ruleset is better than another are either insincere hype or illegitimate universalization of personal preferences.

Yes, Brandobaris first appeared in Roger Moore's "The gods of the halflings" in Dragon #59. No original setting affiliation.

Ed's name on the book is like putting the Forgotten Realms logo on the new setting... hoping that name recognition will pull people in despite the fact that it's really not the same thing.

His totemic use is particularly obvious when you realize he's mainly working not on the familiar places but outlying regions, whether they're new or just newly detailed.

She's actively worked against other gods whose actions offend *her* sense of morality, denying them access to the Weave and, in so doing, incurred a 'talking to' from Ao.

In a single novel that has her act, for the sake of the plot, in a way that's quite inconsistent with the rest of Realmslore. That one tale is no more representative of Mystra than Storm Silverhand's misportrayal in the original Avatar trilogy.

Reading Faiths & Avatars and Grand History of the Realms, it's quite clear that Mystra's nominal alignment is almost irrelevant to her worshippers and (extremely rare) actions in Faerûn. Thus the fact that she's actively worshipped by almost all mages regardless of alignment, as Tempus (CN) is by warriors.

So the new 'halflings' are short Rhennee?

Well, OK. But claiming that these mix-and-matches are superior or 'more fun' is ridiculous.

Telling stories is as fundamental a part of being human as walking and breathing. If stories weren't true, no one would bother to tell them.

I've found that with a lot of the "cool and arrogant" stuff out there (you see this argument with regards to anime "jerk-heroes" too) that there's really two firm camps. There's the people who get furious about it and just can't stand them. Then there's folks who really love and get behind them and think everything they do is awesome and that people should just understand that they really are that cool and awesome and that if anything the stats should be rewritten to make them even MORE cool and awesome.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon.

It's tribalistic intellectual laziness: you put people in a dehumanized group (grognards, fanboys, whatever) so you don't have to consider their individual thoughts and feelings. (I also wonder how many are pronouncing it with a hard g.)

http://www.acaeum.com/
http://pied-piper-publishing.com/
http://www.dragonsfoot.org/
http://doomsdaygames.proboards3.com/
http://knights-n-knaves.com/
http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/osric/

Eberron made one of many possible consistent interpretations. That it happened to tell us about it doesn't make its take better or more coherent than Greyhawk's or the Realms'.

I see no evidence that this has been done with Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk for sure . . .

Look more closely. Gary Gygax shares much of his long-implicit thinking on the integration of magic in D&Dlike worlds in Living Fantasy. If you haven't read Ed Greenwood's posts at REALMS-L and especially Candlekeep.com, you may not appreciate the great depth at which he considers almost everything about the Realms. For instance, communication magic such as farspeak (one of several known common Realms spells never written up in print, due to the sources' focus on adventuring) is indeed used between communities, but there are also passages and scenes that show its susceptibility to magical eavesdropping. The question of using gates to transport trade goods figures in Ed's latest book, Swords of Dragonfire. But bear in mind that D&D rules are only a rough, incomplete approximation of how magic works in Faerûn.

It's also important to realize that the magic system and spells presented in D&D don't determine how magic works in society in any definite, deterministic way. They're simple game abstractions that ignore magical and ecological subtleties, social traditions of magic use, long-term side-effects, spell rarity, and such matters, and the nature of the surrounding society. So while people will tell you that their favourite setting is how it 'should be' and that others 'don't make sense', it's not so simple. Consider the wide variance in Earth societies with access to the same technologies.

I have a gut feeling that, while we would get a world that was more internally consistent, we might, paradoxically, get one that does not 'feel' realistic.

My advice is to freely make up mitigating factors to get the results you want, as there's so much scope to do so, rather than retcon an existing campaign.

And this is an open-ended project that you won't accomplish by just considering the PH spell lists, unless they're the only spells that exist. (They aren't in the World of Greyhawk, and they're a small sampling of common spells in the Realms.)

Why do some people bash it? Because it doesn't match their tastes, because they have fair criticisms of it or how it's presented, or because they misunderstand it or believe internet canards. And, in part, straightforward tribalism.

... PCs are unimportant until "epic" (15th+) level ...

To me it's seemed like the Realms were set up for high level/epic level play, which I'm none to fond of.

This may be the most off misperception here. The Realms is a radically egalitarian setting which values common folk above the pretensions of the mighty, where given character levels are explicitly only rules of thumb for the DM, and where friendship, wits, teamwork, and intrigue weigh far heavier than power measured by levels. Look no further than the Knights of Myth Drannor, the prototypical Realms heroes, who've achieved so much as mid-level characters (after 25+ years of play).

And with all these gods, why can't any of their priests become powerful enough to actually rate up there with all these wizards?

The relative lack of high-level clerics in print is one part of TSR and Wizards' wider neglect of the Realms' priesthoods in favour of mages and the gods themselves. Here you're casting a publishing injustice done to the Realms as a criticism of it, as with the books department's divine soap opera, and the overexposure of elves.

My one big problem with FR is the endless supply of powerful organizations. Sometimes it seems you can't throw a rock without hitting some agent of the Harpers/Zhentarim/Cult of the Dragon/Church of Shar/latest power group dujour. It get's annoying. I'm still waiting for them to introduce the Order of the Flummph.

This is one of the 'look again at the scale of the map' things. Those organizations are, at most, a few tens of thousands of people over the area of North America.

Does every FR DM do this? I hope so.

Your approach is exactly that advised by the Old Grey Box and the unreliable-narrator presentation begun in Dragon.

Your "letter" has merit and makes some good points, but I admit I was stunned to see Kim Mohan's name on this. He had a really good run as EIC of dragon in the past, and will likely do so again.

Yeah. I agree with much of what Sebastian wrote, but Kim Mohan is perhaps the great editor of D&D, responsible for a great run on Dragon and making many books much better. Of all potential Dragon editors he needs no more qualification.

How the hell do you beat the dm anyway?

Quite. 'Another ten monsters come through the door.'

I'm sure I have read about a d20 book which deals with a political campagin, but don't remember the name.

Power of Faerûn! If you're looking for Meso-American material, I can't help.

In the World of Greyhawk, St. Cuthbert is LG(N). The LN St. Cuthbert came about because the Player's Handbook authors needed a recognizable Greyhawk deity for that alignment. Only the alternate St. Cuthbert in the Greyhawk Light 'default' pseudo-setting is LN.

Some intelligent weapons in the Forgotten Realms:

"Lady Bluetip", longsword (FOR4 The Code of the Harpers p. 102)
the Singing Sword (Volo's Guide to Waterdeep p. 30)
Skysplitter, war axe (Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting [1993] p. 95)
Sylabra, long sword (FR7 Hall of Heroes p. 116)
short sword inhabited by the ranger Harrikas (Ruins of Undermountain p. 37)

The game Description is a vague dreamland compared to the medieval realities.

As it's supposed to be. If you want to play in medieval Europe, the setting to use is medieval Europe.

I'd like to see footnotes too. If the Paizo guys are convinced that readers are put off by scholarly apparatus, and that that outweighs the tradition of "From the City of Brass to Dead Orc Pass", perhaps they could be done as web expansions. The lineage of these ideas should be celebrated, not hidden.

The fundamental source on the World of Greyhawk is the 1983 boxed set, on which everything else, for better or worse, was built; it's a shame I can't wholeheartedly recommend the ESD, as it's bloated and poor quality (at least when I bought it).

Yes, "After the Dragon" in Dragon Annual #5. See also "The Long Road Home" in The Best of the Realms, Book II: The Stories of Ed Greenwood.

I think it's historical accident.

In terms of subject matter, fantasy fiction is read by as many women as men, but disproportionately more whites than non-whites.

In terms of the medium of the roleplaying game, its origin in male-dominated wargaming skewed it from the start toward
-- violent situations, biased to male
-- people who play things called games, biased to male in Western culture
-- complex rules, with a feedback loop whereby products are biased towards people who like detailed rules (or settings) and so buy more books -- which has something of a cultural male science/engineering bias but more importantly is an impediment to new players in general, which makes the subculture (self-identified 'gamers') demographically more stable/static

And as mentioned, art and leisure activities are biased toward richer people with more leisure time.

I was actually trying to reference the Time of Troubles. From what I've heard, both in the setting's book, and from posts of FR fans here on the boards and even from what novels I have read, there is more emphasis on the gods themselves.

Like many, I think the Godswar was a bad idea and an incoherent mess. Even so, its point was that these gods coming down to Faerûn was cataclysmic and extraordinary! And there are other cases of direct divine action, but among the long, dense stretch of history they're few and far apart. Apart from this one ill-considered novel series, which portrays the gods as self-willed beings as a literary convention, the emphasis is firmly on the priesthoods, not the gods, who are mysterious and unknowable to mortals -- who don't have anything like the DM's-eye view of the gods (and the afterlife) given in the FRCS.

If you ever want to look into the Realms deities in more detail, here's where you can buy Faiths & Avatars, which has more detail than Faiths and Pantheons and fewer pointless (company-mandated -- none of the three authors wanted to include them) stats.

Prestige classes look all cool, but they're pretty much useless to a group of first level characters. And if your campaign never reaches 5th or 6th level, then you're never going to see any prestige classes in your games.

This factor also drastically limits the value of prestige classes in representing cultural differences.

I'd welcome an article detailing the original concept of drow worship: slut demonolaters, with a certain affinity for Lolth but switching to the Elder Elemental God and other demon lords such as Graz'zt as whim and expedience takes them. This is at least as attractive a set-up as the Realms-derived drow pantheon.

Rather than Laogzed, I think the equivalent deity to Lolth -- introduced at the same time but not cursed by the fetishization of the drow -- would be Blibdoolpoolp.

Oh, yeah, my player also dislike the general idea of Greyhawk. He doesn't really know a thing about it, other than hearing that it is "low(er) magic" than other settings, and he doesn't like that for some reason. He feels that it's set in a more historical Medieval times mode, and doesn't want that.

A player jumping to conclusions based on such scant information is a warning sign. The World of Greyhawk is as abundant in magic as D&D, which is much more than the literary fantasy norm, though a little less than the Realms, though it's a subtle and complex question. Greyhawk does owe more to our-world historical norms than the Realms or Eberron.

It does seem that this splicing of Faerûn with the PH gods would be a lot of work for the sake of one player, who doesn't even want it.

(Incidentally, perhaps the biggest difference between the PH deities and Oerth's is that the latter are members of three different pantheons, not a single homogeneous one worshipped across the continent.)

I understand what you are saying, but there is a lot of evidence to support that the "office" of Mystra is LN, its just that the current Mystra just happens to remember her mortal life enough to keep her NG for the time being. Its not a way of saying that magic is itself a good phenomenon.

And this is clear from numerous sourcebook and novel references. With respect, Saern, you're jumping to conclusions on insufficient information, just as your player is. Your comment on the 'Realms vs Eberron' thread that 'A lot of its history and lore revolves around the activities of gods' is mistaken: gods rarely intervene personally in the Realms. And Mystra is worshipped by mages and priests of all alignments: it makes little difference in practice what her nominal alignment is.

The original module did not have any real hook to start the game other than "hey, there's this place you can go to to beat down on some bad guys." which has its place as a hook, but, well... come on.

What do you mean, 'come on'? It isn't a module's job to provide the motivation of the PCs! Yet there's no better D&D motivation than the search for adventure.

See The Candlekeep Collection, compiled by Steven Schend.

You'd have to modify or ignore a fair of detailed continuity, but it's not impossible in principle. It should work OK if you're using the source material loosely and don't mind the work. Although, have you read Faiths & Avatars? You might be more enthusiastic about the Realms gods if you did.

Ignoring the Avatar Crisis is certainly a good idea. Ed's campaign does, and I always have.

If you look at representative material for the two settings, you'll see that the chief difference is in feel and sensibility, and most likely you'll simply be more in tune with one than the other (or you might not like either of them).

I suggest for the Realms this introduction, and Ed Greenwood's "Realmslore" column; for Eberron, the introduction from the Eberron Campaign Setting and Keith Baker's "Dragonshards".

Be careful with the comments here, as they include a couple of popular misconceptions about the Realms, such as that it favours high-level play.

Bryon Wischstadt of RealmSpeak fame has a piece called "Historical Heraldry" in #275.

Because the RPG medium isn't widely known, and given Wizards' refusal to promote it more widely, the only viable business model is to sell lots of stuff to the limited existing market, which means that published RPG lines cater to people who enjoy complex rules (or complex settings) more than the average roleplayer -- and damn sure more than the average *potential* roleplayer, for whom 16 pages of rules are daunting, let alone hundreds. Luckily, there are many simpler games old and new for GMs and players who don't enjoy rules for rules' sake and prefer to shoulder creative and play tasks themselves rather than relying on a complex ruleset.

But Locke1520 is certainly right about inflation. D&D books are cheaper per page than they've ever been, especially with modern bookselling discounts, and you only need the three core books to play D&D.

Looking at artistically and commercially successful secondary worlds, there's no consistent pattern of development. Successful worlds have come out of a dungeon and a city, scattered short stories, created languages, dream-inspired fragments, and various top-down conceptions. What do you know and what are you good at? If you're wise and learned in mythology, write mythology (which will only sound lame and cheesy if you're no good at it). If you know history, sociology, if you can paint, write poetry . . . make that start, and expand from there. What's the purpose of this world? How does it help you tell stories that you can't tell in historical Earth or a published setting? How do the people of this world think and speak? . . .