Forgotten Realms: Reborn
Scope
The motivation behind building Forgotten Realms: Reborn
I wanted the Realms to be not a nice place, not a safe place, but I wanted it to be a place I wouldn't mind exploring and spending time in. As in nicer than the real world when you're a lonely nerdy kid, which I was.
- Ed Greenwood
- Ed Greenwood
The goal of the project
What I’m really proud of is making the decision to sell the Realms and have it be a shared world, and to do all the work (almost all of it behind the scenes and unpaid) I’ve done since then to support other creators working in the setting, to make it a true shared world without me as a “bottleneck” sole source of lore, and with just one viewpoint and creative style and skill-set. The diverse voices have really enriched not just what stories get told in the Realms, but [also] how they get told—as have the diverse interests of gamers, one wanting to know detailed geology, another interested in harvestable herbs, yet another on detailed cuisine and recipes for dishes, and so on. I try to answer and help with lore, and stitch it all into an ongoing, ever-expanding coherent tapestry.
- Ed Greenwood
- Ed Greenwood
Theme
Genre
Fantasy
Reader Experience
Forgotten Realms is a fantasy world setting, described as a world of strange lands, dangerous creatures, and mighty deities, where magic and supernatural phenomena are quite real. The premise is that, long ago, planet Earth and the world of the Forgotten Realms were more closely connected. As time passed, the inhabitants of Earth had mostly forgotten about the existence of that other world – hence the name Forgotten Realms. The original Forgotten Realms logo, which was used until 2000, had small runic letters that read "Herein lie the lost lands" as an allusion to the connection between the two worlds
Dungeons & Dragons ©1995 - 2025 Wizards of the Coast. The Forgotten Realms was created by Ed Greenwood circa 1967.