Quote from: Reckall;491295I'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.

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.

I get what you're saying but with regards to the supplements it became like panning for gold. What I liked about the grey box set is that it gave you enough to get the motors running. I always thought the Harpers were a shadowy bunch of do gooders subverting the bad guys through song and thievery. Zenthil Keep (and the whole Black Network) sounded way much cooler before they were needlessly elaborated on. Mileage varies, I reckon.

Regards,
David R

I bought the 1st edition box set and used the setting and flavour for my Rolemaster campaign at the time. I bought it because of the evocative artwork and because it was a chance to get into a new setting from the ground upwards.

Dragonlance seemed a little too twee for my liking and Greyhawk had too much baggage to find a starting point. It helped that RM didn't have its own world at that time, so FR Greybox suited my needs.

I know I'm atypical, but I read through the grey box once, and stopped when I got to the deities section and it was obvious the author had just yoinked a grab bag of deities from various human cultures straight from Deities and Demigods with no attempt whatsoever to make a cohesive pantheon out of them.  Killed any sense of verisimilitude for me whatsoever.

Quote from: CRKrueger;491225I'd say it's more like 99% for both.

Even if only .01% of the EU was cool, that would still be a crap-load of cool. (I'd say that EU probably achieves something closer to a 10% cool ratio.)

Quote from: daniel_ream;491351I know I'm atypical, but I read through the grey box once, and stopped when I got to the deities section and it was obvious the author had just yoinked a grab bag of deities from various human cultures straight from Deities and Demigods with no attempt whatsoever to make a cohesive pantheon out of them.  Killed any sense of verisimilitude for me whatsoever.

I'm with you on that point of criticism...though for me the problem is less one of verisimilitude and more that FR's gods are pretty fucking boring.

Quote from: Fiasco;491301I'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.

Having played it a bunch lately, I hear ya.

I get a strong elders-on-the-wane meets Deadwood from both the Sword Coast and the Dalelands.

I wasn't massively blown away by the grey box, but that is an amazing cover. The realms seem like generic fantasy to me, but the art at the time of release seemed to promise something a bit different.

However, that thing where they said outright in the book that they were never going to do anything with a few of the regions, and they were entirely for GMs to do their own thing with? THAT was fucking cool. I have no idea if they actually stuck to it though.

Quote from: soviet;491420I wasn't massively blown away by the grey box, but that is an amazing cover. The realms seem like generic fantasy to me, but the art at the time of release seemed to promise something a bit different.

However, that thing where they said outright in the book that they were never going to do anything with a few of the regions, and they were entirely for GMs to do their own thing with? THAT was fucking cool. I have no idea if they actually stuck to it though.

They didn't. One of my great disappointments with later Realms is that they actually mapped out Sembia.

They were always the "Forgettable Realms" to me.  Too much warmed over European history, bland gods, nothing really gripping.

Glorantha always seemed a more fantastic world.

The Realms in the original box set was amazing. It was simultaneously so incredibly detailed, with regions and cities receiving a level of attention that no setting had been previously given; and at the same time incredibly vast, empty, and forbidding. You had this sense of areas of great detailed civilizations matched with large expanses of savage wilderness filled with ruins of lost empires. The attention to detail was something that had really never been done before with a setting that wasn't insane and was actually playable.

You have to understand how radical this was, for the time.

As for why its still so well regarded compared to later books and boxed sets, I agree with the argument that 2e basically wrecked the realms; 2e and the novels, that is. The realms before it had any novels, or endless filler material that basically meant that every little nook and cranny of the place was filled in, was a much different place.

RPGPundit

Quote from: daniel_ream;491351I know I'm atypical, but I read through the grey box once, and stopped when I got to the deities section and it was obvious the author had just yoinked a grab bag of deities from various human cultures straight from Deities and Demigods with no attempt whatsoever to make a cohesive pantheon out of them.  Killed any sense of verisimilitude for me whatsoever.

Actually I kind of like that. While I'm a big fan of elaborate settings with similarly elaborate theologies, e.g. Tékumel, this scheme does have expediency in its favor. Rather than inventing fancy names for your hammer-swinging thunder god and your scheming serpent god, let's call them Thor and Set, and get this over and done with. If it's good enough for Robert E. Howard, it's good enough for me.

Also, I had no idea of who Oghma and Loviatar were before FR, so, more power to Ed for making me look into Celtic and Finnish myth.

What fantasy gamers tend to define as a "cohesive pantheon" basically looks ridiculous to actual students of religion.

The realms, to me, seems a step towards something far more credible, it represents the right sort of hodge-podge mix that was more typical of the classical world.

RPGPundit

Forgotten Realms hooked me to gaming, though not in the way they intended, I'm sure. I'd played a couple D&D 1e games in middle school, but they were basically 'you're in a dungeon, you can move three squares' kind of thing... (I'm not a big fan of miniatures because people have a tendency to turn it into a board game instead of actually role playing).

Then I read the Icewind Dale Trilogy, loved the story, and bought the game box. By that time though there was so much fucking back story for every damn thing that I was too intimidated to play. (same thing goes for DragonLance).

It ended up inspiring me to just create my own world, maps and mythos and all that jazz. I kind of made up histories as I played and expanded on them as needed. ThAt's what got me into gaming, seeing the potential squandered by the Forgotten Realms setting; and then creating an alternative.

Forgotten Realms has always been a mess, if you like it, you always liked it, but it was a mess on day one.  I always have liked it, though I agree 3e FR is the gold standard (adventure screaming from every page in every way except literally), but the grey box was pretty cool too.  Big catalogs of interesting stuff, a horribly organized hodgepodge of nonsense that you picked and chose from to carve out your own campaign.

I have to put the Grey Box just slightly ahead of the 3e book, but that might be pure nostalgia talking.

RPGPundit