Perhaps its because all my experiences with FR are from the late 90s on, I'm having trouble figuring out why the original material seems to get a lot of praise.  Is it because it came out before the mass of supplements and tie-in novels?  Is it in a pristine form that just includes possibilities and not exhaustive detail?  What separates it from Greyhawk or any other fantasy settings from that time period?

Inquiring minds want to know.

I wouldn't say I love it (never played in the Realms) but I can see the appeal: it's got place to go and dungeons to delve, but it isn't yet drowning in the sea of its own convoluted backstory.  There are enough blank spots for you to twist the Realms into your own thing without having to deal with Canon Mountain.

It was a fresh and unsoiled setting.

What do I mean by that?

It left tons of room for a GM's own development. It was a nice basic framework to build upon.

It didn't incorporate the glut of novels that were to come. Thus the stupidity found in many of the novels had not impacted the settings legends and lore YET.

Elminster was not the meddling asshat that he became in the novels and later incarnations of the Realms.

It was very relatable. And I think after Greyhawk, it was a setting that offered more possiblities to players who wanted something familiar but new.

Regards,
David R

It had a lot of open space, which being both familiar and having a distinct feel.

The cover still sticks in my mind as something that made me go "What's this about?"

A lot of people around these parts loved it. As I recall they really liked the setting. I can recall people getting the maps out and being pretty happy with them.

Quote from: Serious Paul;491212A lot of people around these parts loved it. As I recall they really liked the setting. I can recall people getting the maps out and being pretty happy with them.

The map in the Waterdeep Box Set blew me away when I first put it all together.

For me, pure nostalgia for the grey box and first several splatbooks + Waterdeep box set.

For later editions of FR, the FR canon lawyers I encountered got really annoying.

1st AD&D Realms was the bomb
Maps - tons of maps, large and plenty of room to fill in stuff
Wild - It centered on the North, definitely a "Points of Light" area.
Focus on GMing - The area supplements were the best, focused not on uber-adds for characters, but stuff for GMs to use or not in their Realms.

Second Edition AD&D basically killed the Realms.  Time of Troubles, Novels, Metaplot straightjacket etc... instead of making the Realms a better Greyhawk, it made it a far worse oWoD.

It's got at least 80% of what makes the Realms cool while also being a convenient line to draw in the sand of whats you consider "canon".

It's like the original trilogy of Star Wars movies: You can draw a convenient line there and capture 80% of what's cool about Star Wars while simultaneously eliminating about 99% of what makes it crap.

It was a great framework without being over-developed. Add in the first few FR supplements and you could game the rest of your life. And even with Thay, The North, and Calimshan through Tethyr sets, they didn't over-develop it. Just gave a great framework to use.

Btw there's this picture of a group of orcs/goblins standing around done by Easly or was it Elmore ? in one of the books. Does anyone have a link to this picture ?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Justin Alexander;491221It's like the original trilogy of Star Wars movies: You can draw a convenient line there and capture 80% of what's cool about Star Wars while simultaneously eliminating about 99% of what makes it crap.

I'd say it's more like 99% for both.

I'm the lone voice here, but I didn't like the original grey box that much. It was made better with the regional supplements, but I liked the FR more when the lore and backstory became "heavy". To me 3E is the best edition of the Realms.

This doesn't mean that I'm a "canon-lawyer": I totally re-wrote the Time of Troubles and threw out of the window the most imbecile things that came from the novels. Elminster is used for fun, and he is half-way between Hitler in those Youtube parodies and the voice of the DM expressing his frustration at the pack of cats (read: "the players"). No other Mary Sue character ever appeared in my games.

However I like to have ideas to start from, even if at the end I use their exact opposite. Novels like "Elfshadow" by Elaine Cunningham gave me thew idea of a more shadowy approach to the Harpers. "The Last Mythal" is terminally lame, but I took the idea of the elves trying to get Myth Drannor back and the basic framework of the characters involved. And so on.

The only time in recent years that I referred to the original grey box was when I needed a good elven dungeon for a game and I used the ruins of the Naturalist's Guild mini-adventure contained within. At the end it gave me the bad aftertaste of "Ye olde way of gaming, soaked in the smells of pencils and rubber, the unique feeling of drawing the squares and the corridors of a totally illogical dungeon complex, all wrapped in ye memories of an high-school far away, ah the nostalgia!" of my balls which I hated even then, imagine now.

I'll probably get shot down for this but IMO the grey box is the closest a D&D campaign setting got to Middle Earth in the sense that the elder races were on the wane and it was the dawn of the era of man. There is a sense of lost grandeur woven right through the original setting.