There’s an entire map full of cool place names begging you to customize them. Lyrabar, a port city with a seedy criminal underbelly? Boring. Lyrabar, the city in the sky, held in place by chains forged in an alliance between the dwarves and the giants? Now we’re talking
Where is this city?
That depends. Lyrabar, the port city with a seedy criminal underbelly is at the southernmost point of Impiltur, on the northern shore of the Sea of Fallen Stars.
The Flying City Lyrabar and its counterpart the Sunken City exist only in my campaign’s Faerûn
Ah. I see. I think I understand the notion, but if an approach to a map is changing it along with its respective lore, then I prefer just making my own cities alltogether. It’s part of the realms lore that not everything is a gigantic floating city. There are those of Netheril if you want some.
Is there a higher res version of the original map? Would love to learn more about broader Toril other than stumbling through the wiki.
…new sourcebooks coming next year, but fourth-edition maps kind of butchered the realms and third-edition maps compressed them into a fantasy theme park: i appreciate the proper scale of the fifth-edition map even if broader setting resources mostly entail tracking down older reference material…
…fifth edition does offer officially-sanctioned sourcebooks for the moonshaes, border kingdoms, thay, chult, and icewind dale in addition to the sword coast, though; you just have to delve into the DM’s guild for adept and adventurers’ league material…
…third-edition maps do alright in a pinch as long as you double the distances…
There’s a big one by Mike Schley. Most smaller ones are relatively old or just crops of that one.
Try this one. As the comments of the post say, it’s not entirely up to date, but it works well enough.
There are versions out there but afaik it’s super awkward to find them, I’ll see if I can find the one I used a couple months ago again and send a link here if I do
nvm not as annoying to find as it was when I went looking, wotc posted a 4k version in July https://www.dndbeyond.com/resources/1782-map-of-faerun
I don’t get it.
I think it’s implying that most campaigns take place on the sword coast
This is a classic issue on world building, you plan a whole and dangerous continent, but moving the PC means loosing reccurent NPCs and track of the ongoing conflict where PC are involved.
So you end up focusing on one city and it’s surrounding
They could also just make different adventures in different parts of the Faerun. But they’d have to actually update they’re lore then.
You explained the part I got, I don’t get the Phineas & Ferb or the title.
Probably refers to 90% of campaigns taking place on the Sword Coast
The one and only sourcebook for Fearun in 5e was just the swordcoast. Embarrassing. Farun is an entire planet!
Faerûn is a continent… Toril is the planet that it’s on.
… uhm… SEE, if they would have put out an actual Guide to Faerûn I wouldn’t have mistook it for Toril!
Remembered realms, eh? I’m not sure if I’ve heard of em.
If you want a real blast from the past, the old gold box TSR videogames (which have remasters available on modern hardware) tend to take place around the Moonsea area, with Hillsfar and Philan.
I saw this “remembered realms” map about half a year ago, and managed to determine that I have 8 DnD characters for 5e, in various on-and-off campaigns. Currently NONE of them are in the coloured area.
I’m afraid I don’t have the time to do so right now, but thanks for the suggestion.
I think its strongly connected to how many of your campaigns use modules, as with the exception of ToA, every module settled in the material plane takes place in the colored region and near it. And as lore for the 15th century DR is only well developed for the sword coast, I personally tend to stage my campaigns there.
That’s a fair assessment - although Rime of the Frostmaiden takes place just north of the coloured region (the ten towns aren’t really on that map at all.)
Of course, one of the advantages of this is that you have a vast amount of “undefined” space to grow your campaign into if you want to make something up. Need to set your game in a kingdom with a monarch and political dealings? Why not Cormyr or Sembia? It’s not like there’s any published materials on what’s been going on there in the last 200 years. Want a place where the Zhentharim are in charge and the local towns and villages are under the control of warring mercenary groups? How about the north Moonsea area, where Zenthil Keep is? Want to convert your game to a steampunk campaign without leaving Forgotten Realms? Boy do I have boat tickets to Lantan that you would love.
While none of this stuff has recent lore, the Forgotten Realms wiki has some surface level detail for everywhere, mostly cribbed from older editions. It’s a really good resource if you want to take your campaign somewhere more exploratory, just have a read of what was there, and build your campaign ideas on top of it. Works a treat I think.
Yeah. I’ve seen some of it and it looks quite promising. Unfortunately, I’m one of those DMs who, for the love of his life, can’t make a campaign with self-made stuff as it always ends in hyper fixation and over preparing on some parts, but complete lack of direction in others. I’m trying to get better, but modules just take of so much of that pressure, allowing me to fill in the gaps with actually well thought out content.
But if any DM wants to run a campaign in the places I so smugly called the ,forgotten" part of the realms, then I’m always happy to see it.
