• Heroic fantasy adventure.
• The definitive D&D setting - everything plus the kitchen sink.
• The largest number of playable races.
• Lots of legendary NPC characters.

The Forgotten Realms is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. Commonly referred to by players and game designers alike as "The Realms", it was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as a setting for his childhood stories. Several years later, Greenwood brought the setting to the D&D game as a series of magazine articles, and the first Realms game products were released in 1987. The Forgotten Realms has become the default high fantasy setting because it is easily adaptable, and easy to break apart into segments or take as a whole. No other campaign setting has as much detail as the Forgotten Realms - too much, some would argue. Over the last thirty years various authors have contributed to the setting, leading to continuity issues.

The Forgotten Realms encompass' Abeir-Toril (usually just called Toril), an Earth-like planet with many large continents. The other continents of Toril include Kara-Tur, Zakhara, Maztica, and other yet unspecified landmasses. There is also a vast subterranean world called the Underdark beneath the surface. Religion plays a large part in the Forgotten Realms. Deities interact directly in mortal affairs, answer prayers, and have their own personal agendas. All deities must have worshipers to survive, and all mortals must worship a patron deity to secure a good afterlife. The continent of Faerûn is a landmass of approximately nine and a half million square miles, located mainly in the northern hemisphere of the world of Toril. It is the continent at the center of it all, the crossroads and crux upon which all else turns. Dozens of nations, hundreds of citystates, and countless tribes, villages, and settlements dot its expanse. Sub-arctic extremes chill its northern reaches, where ice sheets like the Great Glacier dominate the landscape in blinding white. To the south are the equatorial jungles of Chult and the tropical coasts of Halruaa. It’s bordered on the west by the Trackless Sea and on the east by the Endless Wastes and the Hordelands that separate it from Kara-Tur. Faerûn is an open land full of kingdoms and empires, large and small, and scattered city-states and villages struggling to make their way in a landscape that can be unforgiving wilderness one mile and cosmopolitan city the next. Countless millions of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, and other sentient beings call Faerûn home. It is a land of magic and intrigue, cruel violence and divine compassion, where gods have ascended and died, and millennia of warfare and conquests have shaped dozens of unique cultures.

See also Feywild

• Series of computer games based on the setting exist.
  • Baldur's Gate
  • Icewind Dale
  • Neverwinter Nights
  • Eye of the Beholder
  • Pool of Radiance Forgotten Realms
  • Savage Frontier
• Menzoberranzan is a computer game released in 1994.
• Blood & Magic is a computer game released in 1996.

Related Microbadges
Forgotten Realms fan