Forgotten Realms Didn't Always Suck, Part 3

Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

FR9 - The Bloodstone Lands

Full disclaimer, we spent years playing on this map in high school. There's a lot of nostalgia there, but also there was a lot of my DMs creativity that ran free during that time. The Bloodstone Lands allowed him to do it. You could own this and no other FR products and you get a 'here's a kingdom, there's these towns here, this barony there, and here's some influential shit that happened, now you fill in the rest'.

Historically, this takes place after the events of H1-H4, which you can happily ignore. Zhengyi's forces were overrunning Damara, the heroes defeated him, but the kingdom is left without a solid grasp on who the current king is. That's all you need to know.

The map is something I've run in my games plenty of times. I've converted into hexes, I've knitted together the surrounding kingdoms, and it saved me the trouble of naming a bunch of places and detailing every single city and town. While I've moved on from this recently, it gave me exactly what we needed for our groups in terms of: well-varied terrain, plenty of adventure rich locations, plenty of civilization and wilderness to explore, and it never once stepped on our nuts.

There is plenty of material inside that we never even got to. Like the adventures section, it gives you plenty of information to build on. 

There's even a suggestion on how to play a campaign out, that we never used.

What we used was simply the map, the town guild, the history, and the major NPCs. If you wanted a setting that, especially at the time, didn't have a dozen novel NPCs that players may or may not have read about, where expectations were pre-set, and you felt like you were in a campaign straight jacket, this was the place for you.

FR11 - Dwarves Deep

Dwarves Deep was printed during a time when the product line was starting to fall apart. The actual game usefulness for some of the FR series (I'm looking at you FR7, 8, and kind of 10) was questionable. It was fluff. NPCs from novels that might have been cool if you and the other 15 year olds were constantly arguing over who was tougher, Drizzt or Dragonbait... Elminster or Raistlin... Wulfgar or Caramon... we did this. I'm not sorry. I digress.

Most of the FR products coming out were really just not something that were helping people run games. The FR line was going the way of the rest of the TSR product line, even leading the way. However Dwarves Deep brought it back to usefulness.

Information about families, runic alphabets, brotherhoods, clans were all good to see examples of. And if you're like me, you're not going to weave an entire Dwarven Civilization from nothing. This can save you some time to inform your design decisions. Why is this abandoned dwarf mine like this? What kinds of stuff can players find evidence of? 

There's a lot of information on society and religion that can help that too, but you probably won't need it.

Too greedily and too deep?

However, Dwarves Deep gives us The Great Rift. This isn't an adventure. It's an overview where it could be expanded into it's own setting by itself.

There's a great section on The Lost Kingdoms which gives you just enough of a mental starter to form your own 'what remains of those lost Dwarven kingdoms?' What drove them out? Where did they go? What lives there now?

Finally, there is a dwarf name generator and information on Dwarven Runes (and Runestones, which is probably where Dwarrowdeep drew some inspiration). Seeing an example of the Runestone shows how the dwarves write in a wrapping spiral and how they express numerals. Little things like that help bring an old Dwarven ruin to feeling like one.

The Ruins of Undermountain

Often brought up in conversations about Megadungeons, Undermountain gets passed over. Why? Because it's not a full service Megadungeon. The boxed set just has three levels. And those three levels aren't even fully detailed. Over three massive, sprawling maps, there's 70 keyed locations. Some of them repeat too.

This thing requires patience to the degree of either 1) just taking stuff and moving it to your own dungeon or 2) sit down and key out a few hundred rooms yourself. Do you want to keep the ideas intact? Do you want to use the maps? 

Whatever the answer is, there's cool keyed areas in here. There's not that many compared to the scale of levels covered. While the room descriptions are almost Arden Vol in length, but they are usually worth absorbing. 

Fun fact about Undermountain. Portions of the maps were lifted from B1, B3, B5, and Empire of the Petal Throne.

If you ever found yourself looking for inspiration on how to set up some dungeon rooms, then flip this PDF open and pick a room at random. Most of the time you'll walk away with some pretty great ideas.

Forgotten Realms Didn't Always Suck, Part 2

If you haven't read part one yet, give that a read first. The Forgotten Realms line of products used to be useful and in this series, I talk about the ones worth pira... buying off eBay.

FR3 - Empire of the Sands

Empire of the Sands is a great supplement if you plan on introducing a desert-like kingdom to your game. It primarily details three major cities in the region, but does an admirable job providing ideas for desert raiders, social customs, and a lot of notes on climate and geography. Honestly, it's a weaker entry but not without value if this kind of setting is one you are looking to flesh out.

There's notes in here about certain slang phrases, which really can set apart an area in a very subtle way. Probably what has more heft is describing how the collective city mentality is. For example, "poverty is the ultimate sin."

FR4 - The Magister

How many of you AD&D guys use UA for basically just spells and/or magic items? This is a book of kick-ass new magic items. This really doesn't need to be a Forgotten Realms product. It just needed to be an AD&D product. If this had been expanded on scale, this would have been the best orange spine since Monster Manual II. It has a section that adds on to the DMG for magic item creation that might be useful to others. Additionally, it has new spells.

FR5 - The Savage Frontier

The cold north, the icy seas, barbarian tribes, and the settlements in between. Many of you will just be running games in a more centric area. However, there's the chance that your campaigns will grow to the icy howling winds of the north tundras. I love this shit. 

You get a snapshot of the people, how travelling in an chunky ice sea works, the mountains and rivers of the north, and a gazetteer style explanation of all of the areas which you can shamelessly borrow to flesh out your north. And it's well-written; look at who wrote it.

FR6 - Dreams of the Red Wizard

FR6... is awesome. Expansion of the world map, a unique nation based on... pretty fucked up wizards. A gazetteer of the area is well detailed, of course. But the politics in this area are very revealing. Giving this a read will really think about how you give wizards rulership roles in your world.

Of course, there are new spells. Nothing earth-shattering, but there are pages of them. Not everything in this book is original, reprinting spells and items that have been seen before in Dragon Magazine.

Finally, FR6 has a whole battery of adventure hooks to steal, rob, modify, or mangle. Multiple pages. Anecdotally, back in the day, we laid out all the FR maps from all the different products at the time and filled my living room. It was vast. Do you have an evil empire or kingdom? This has a ton of things to inspire you or let you steal from it.

FRE1 - The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar

Okay, okay. I know. The cover sucks all the dicks. The art has that 2e stink. It reeks even. Just ignore that because the inside is really nice. The only shameful thing about it is that TSR sucked ass at this point in time and made Ed Greenwood truncate this entry. There should be a kick-ass second level and more entries but we got just most of one level. But that level is solid.

Seriously, just ignore that 2e logo and art.

It opens up with some local flavor. You can ignore that. You won't be needing it. Just plop this bad boy in there somewhere and let her rip.

Now this module (as with most of TSR modules) is going to need a read through and some note-taking, but it's worth it. This thing is full of solid traps, kick-ass treasure, and proper exploration. It even has some new fuck-off monster that lives in locks just waiting for someone to peek through or try to pick it. 

You can expand upon the place easily by putting entrances downward at 14 and 31, near the crumbled areas. It also can fit in with an upper level that's a stronghold of at least 45 kobolds. Yeah, you gotta do the work. But maybe you already have a few maps that fit the bill and this can save you a whole floor of planning.

Drop some kobolds, traps, and treasure here.

There's also new magic items and the aforementioned locktrap monster and a winged cat. Cool shit.

Expand it or just run it by itself and it'll be a good time. Especially if you get them with the doppleganger.