Forgotten Realms

A boy spent his childhood inventing a world, and decades later it became the home address of Dungeons & Dragons. The Forgotten Realms are the most-played fantasy setting in the hobby. Most of what we carry from them sits in the Golden Age Vault and across the wider D&D shelves.

What it is

The Forgotten Realms is the great kitchen-sink fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons: a whole planet of kingdoms, gods and ruins where almost any story fits. Its heart is Faerun, and Faerun's heart is the Sword Coast, with the city of Waterdeep at one end and the port of Baldur's Gate at the other. It is widely considered D&D's most popular setting and has become the default home of most modern D&D, which is exactly why so many roads, in print and on screen, eventually lead here.

How it began

The Realms started as a boy's daydream. Ed Greenwood began inventing them as a child in the 1960s, kept them alive as his personal home campaign for decades, and shared pieces in the pages of Dragon magazine through the early 1980s. In 1986 TSR asked to make it official, and Greenwood mailed in packages of raw notes and maps for Jeff Grubb to organise and Karen Martin to edit. The result was the 1987 Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, the famous "grey box": two 96-page books and four big maps that handed players a living world one man had been tending his whole life. It remains one of the warmest origin stories in the hobby, a private world made a gift to everyone.

The lineage, honestly

The Realms outlived the company that first printed them, and we tell that as one continuous story rather than pretending it stopped when our shelves do.

• The TSR years (1987 to 1997). The grey box for AD&D 1st edition, then a revised boxed set in 1993 for 2nd edition, surrounded by a flood of sourcebooks, the Volo's Guides, and region boxes. This is the deep end of our shelves, and the most collected Realms material there is.
• The WotC years (1997 to now). When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR it inherited the Realms and never let go: 3rd and 3.5 edition (2000 and 2003), 4th edition with its world-shaking Spellplague (2008), and 5th edition with the Sundering (2014). The 3e and 3.5 hardcovers are themselves out of print now, and quietly climbing.
• The living present. In 2023 Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 set millions of new players loose on the Sword Coast and made the Realms, briefly, the most famous fantasy world on earth. We are a shop for the out-of-print roots, but a community does not gatekeep its own future, so if the Realms are where you want to play today, go, and come back when you want to hold the books they grew from.

The fiction, and a dark elf named Drizzt

The Realms may be the most novel-rich setting in the hobby, and one character carries the flag. In 1988 a young author named R.A. Salvatore published his very first book, The Crystal Shard, and created Drizzt Do'Urden almost by accident, on the spot, when an editor needed a character replaced. Drizzt went on to become arguably the most beloved character in all of D&D, and Salvatore became a New York Times bestseller. Start with the Icewind Dale Trilogy or the Dark Elf Trilogy, follow the Avatar books to watch the very gods reshape the world between editions, and you have a reading project that can last years. (A Reliquary Drizzt reading-order guide is on the way.)

Beyond the page

For a great many people the Realms were a screen before they were a book. BioWare's Baldur's Gate (1998) and its sequel, the Icewind Dale games, Neverwinter Nights, and most recently Baldur's Gate 3 all unfold in this world. It is the same Sword Coast every time, which is part of the quiet joy: the map in the video game and the map in the 1987 box are the same map, decades apart.

Identifying and collecting the Realms

The hunts most collectors care about: the original 1987 grey box against the 1993 revised box (different contents, different value, often confused in listings), the 2nd edition Volo's Guides and region sets, and the now-out-of-print 3e and 3.5 hardcovers. As ever, printing and condition decide everything, and a local printing is its own distinct thing, not a lesser import. Not sure how we rate a copy? Here is how we grade. You will find Realms material threaded through the Golden Age Vault and the wider D&D shelves.

Editions and reception, honestly

The Realms are loved hard, and loved hard means argued over. Every edition change has rewritten the map and the gods, from the Time of Troubles that carried the world from 1st to 2nd edition, to the Spellplague that fans still grumble about, to the Sundering that tried to set things back. Some readers think the canon grew too vast to love; others think that vastness is the whole point. Both are right, which is the most Realms thing about it.

Dig deeper

For the forensics and the lore: the Forgotten Realms Wiki (exhaustive on people, places and products) and Ed Greenwood's own decades of Dragon articles. The Realms were born at TSR and are kept today by Wizards of the Coast. Or just ask the Reliquarian, who has opinions about which edition got Elminster right.

Got Realms books gathering dust? We buy, sell and trade, and however they are stored, here is how to keep them alive.