So the Forgotten Realms began ten years before I first saw those initial three booklets of D&D, as an imaginary world for one young boy to explore by writing stories in. Stories written to entertain myself, that usually flowed from something I’d read written by someone else, in a “So what happened next?” fashion.
This was more than twenty years before I would describe the Realms to Jeff Grubb as “a world of a thousand-thousand stories” to contrast it with Dragonlance, a world initially built to tell one epic story. As it happened, that’s exactly what TSR was looking for (a world to accommodate all sorts of D&D adventures, from pirate to arctic to jungle to exploring pyramids to Arabian Nights), which was why the wider world ever got to see the Realms, but I was being entirely honest with Jeff: the Realms was literally home to countless stories.
In those two decades, I’d built it into that, because stories entertained me and I needed a lot of entertaining.
Subconsciously, as I voraciously read nigh-everything I could get my hands on, from instruction sheets and cereal boxes to way-over-my-head quantum mechanics theses and steamy romances, I was mining everything for “what’s in here that I can use? And to tell what story?”
So I undertook worldbuilding. Informally and often without really thinking about it, I built conflicts into the Realms, and tactical geography (such as straits, and towns in mountain passes, and cities that would logically dominate trade routes by being transshipment points and so either supply bases, or controlling trade up and down a river they sat at the mouth of).
For conflicts, I had border strife between realms, intrigue within cities for daily control and taxation, and bigger intrigues between factions in the ruling courts of kingdoms, plus street-level power struggles between guilds over new innovations, competition between trading costers and caravan companies, and various small backroom cabals of merchants and shopkeepers. I called all of these groupings “power groups,” and ere long had decided that I wanted this setting to be awash in magic, so along came the sexier power groups that later received more attention in the published Realms: the Red Wizards of Thay, the Arcane Brotherhood, the Cult of the Dragon (spearheaded originally by wizards seeking to control dragons they’d convinced to become liches), the Zhentarim, and the Harpers.
These power groups, the conflicts, and the geographical hotspots are generators of endless stories, the “on the scene or in the way” elements that would have to be part of many tales, or that would shape stories even if omitted from them.
Later, I took a stab at explaining what by then was intuitive to me but that I saw again and again wasn’t to others (I recall a DM at an early Gencon, asked by his players what was in the wagons of the caravan they were raiding, who stared back at them in surprise and asked, “Er, does it matter?”). This stab was in the pages of The Dragon (Plan Before You Play in issue #63, and no, writers never got to pick the article titles), but the artist who illustrated it couldn’t resist jazzing up the map to look interesting, whereas my entire point was that tons of world detail could be logically built from a very plain, featureless map (my original was literally a backwards “C” of land about to bite down on a central island, with the mainland ruled off into alphabetized sections).
A less mystical way of describing worldbuilding thinking is to understand the basics of how the world works, from “water runs downhill, and does this to what it flows through, over time” to “sentients tend to settle here, there, and yonder because” to “caravans and cargo ships carry surpluses to shortages.” If you do this in one setting, for a long time, detail builds up in ever-richer, deeper layers until you can walk the streets of imaginary cities in your head, remembering where all the potholes and dangerous back alleys and interesting architectural features are. (Or as one of my early-grade school teachers put it, “You can glibly demonstrate that you’re utterly nuts.”)
This in turn lets you “know” what consequences a change will make, in the same way that you can see how the flow of a tiny stream is affected when you create a dam of stones across it.
Or in Realms terms: Sembia is a rich country full of energetic entrepreneurs, investors, and traders. Over time, their power and influence expands, reaching into Cormyr, the Dales, and Westgate (as well as, with lesser force, into more distant places). Some of these places, such as Zhentil Keep, Hillsfar, and Cormyr, have the means and inclination to strongly resist increasing Sembian influence (which often takes the form of buyouts: buying property, businesses, and the loyalty or at least cooperation of key individuals). If Sembian interests succeed in putting “their” pawn on the lord’s/lady’s throne of a particular dale, I can immediately see how this will affect trade and local governance, and how all the interested power groups will react.
And if Player Characters are going to live imaginary lives in the community, with day jobs and homes and the need to buy supper or drink somewhere if they can’t hunt for it or make it, they will be affected. And if their day jobs are as bodyguards or warehouse guards, or caravan or valuable-shipment escorts, they should be very interested in such power shifts, because their bread-and-butter employment opportunities are closely linked to such events.
Which is why, since regular D&D play began in the Realms (1978), I’ve always had “Current Clack,” the news and rumors brought to any Faerûnian locale by the latest wayfarers (usually caravans, but sometimes peddlers with mule-trains, or even local families on the move by cart or wagon). It’s customary for good tale-tellers to earn a drink or two, or even a meal, at a tavern of evenings by imparting the latest juicy gossip, colorful tales, and more. Inevitably embroidered in the telling, but still…that’s how backcountry folk form their changing opinions of the Realms, and how PC adventurers hear of new adventuring opportunities.
And with every tale told, the setting seems more alive.
This was more than twenty years before I would describe the Realms to Jeff Grubb as “a world of a thousand-thousand stories” to contrast it with Dragonlance, a world initially built to tell one epic story. As it happened, that’s exactly what TSR was looking for (a world to accommodate all sorts of D&D adventures, from pirate to arctic to jungle to exploring pyramids to Arabian Nights), which was why the wider world ever got to see the Realms, but I was being entirely honest with Jeff: the Realms was literally home to countless stories.
In those two decades, I’d built it into that, because stories entertained me and I needed a lot of entertaining.
Subconsciously, as I voraciously read nigh-everything I could get my hands on, from instruction sheets and cereal boxes to way-over-my-head quantum mechanics theses and steamy romances, I was mining everything for “what’s in here that I can use? And to tell what story?”
So I undertook worldbuilding. Informally and often without really thinking about it, I built conflicts into the Realms, and tactical geography (such as straits, and towns in mountain passes, and cities that would logically dominate trade routes by being transshipment points and so either supply bases, or controlling trade up and down a river they sat at the mouth of).
For conflicts, I had border strife between realms, intrigue within cities for daily control and taxation, and bigger intrigues between factions in the ruling courts of kingdoms, plus street-level power struggles between guilds over new innovations, competition between trading costers and caravan companies, and various small backroom cabals of merchants and shopkeepers. I called all of these groupings “power groups,” and ere long had decided that I wanted this setting to be awash in magic, so along came the sexier power groups that later received more attention in the published Realms: the Red Wizards of Thay, the Arcane Brotherhood, the Cult of the Dragon (spearheaded originally by wizards seeking to control dragons they’d convinced to become liches), the Zhentarim, and the Harpers.
These power groups, the conflicts, and the geographical hotspots are generators of endless stories, the “on the scene or in the way” elements that would have to be part of many tales, or that would shape stories even if omitted from them.
Later, I took a stab at explaining what by then was intuitive to me but that I saw again and again wasn’t to others (I recall a DM at an early Gencon, asked by his players what was in the wagons of the caravan they were raiding, who stared back at them in surprise and asked, “Er, does it matter?”). This stab was in the pages of The Dragon (Plan Before You Play in issue #63, and no, writers never got to pick the article titles), but the artist who illustrated it couldn’t resist jazzing up the map to look interesting, whereas my entire point was that tons of world detail could be logically built from a very plain, featureless map (my original was literally a backwards “C” of land about to bite down on a central island, with the mainland ruled off into alphabetized sections).
A less mystical way of describing worldbuilding thinking is to understand the basics of how the world works, from “water runs downhill, and does this to what it flows through, over time” to “sentients tend to settle here, there, and yonder because” to “caravans and cargo ships carry surpluses to shortages.” If you do this in one setting, for a long time, detail builds up in ever-richer, deeper layers until you can walk the streets of imaginary cities in your head, remembering where all the potholes and dangerous back alleys and interesting architectural features are. (Or as one of my early-grade school teachers put it, “You can glibly demonstrate that you’re utterly nuts.”)
This in turn lets you “know” what consequences a change will make, in the same way that you can see how the flow of a tiny stream is affected when you create a dam of stones across it.
Or in Realms terms: Sembia is a rich country full of energetic entrepreneurs, investors, and traders. Over time, their power and influence expands, reaching into Cormyr, the Dales, and Westgate (as well as, with lesser force, into more distant places). Some of these places, such as Zhentil Keep, Hillsfar, and Cormyr, have the means and inclination to strongly resist increasing Sembian influence (which often takes the form of buyouts: buying property, businesses, and the loyalty or at least cooperation of key individuals). If Sembian interests succeed in putting “their” pawn on the lord’s/lady’s throne of a particular dale, I can immediately see how this will affect trade and local governance, and how all the interested power groups will react.
And if Player Characters are going to live imaginary lives in the community, with day jobs and homes and the need to buy supper or drink somewhere if they can’t hunt for it or make it, they will be affected. And if their day jobs are as bodyguards or warehouse guards, or caravan or valuable-shipment escorts, they should be very interested in such power shifts, because their bread-and-butter employment opportunities are closely linked to such events.
Which is why, since regular D&D play began in the Realms (1978), I’ve always had “Current Clack,” the news and rumors brought to any Faerûnian locale by the latest wayfarers (usually caravans, but sometimes peddlers with mule-trains, or even local families on the move by cart or wagon). It’s customary for good tale-tellers to earn a drink or two, or even a meal, at a tavern of evenings by imparting the latest juicy gossip, colorful tales, and more. Inevitably embroidered in the telling, but still…that’s how backcountry folk form their changing opinions of the Realms, and how PC adventurers hear of new adventuring opportunities.
And with every tale told, the setting seems more alive.
