I never played much outside of Greyhawk or original campaigns.  But I have to believe that a lot of people who bought the RPG items also bought the books and vice versa.  So, I'm sure that FR had a big following.  Most people I knew had never heard of the Greyhawk novels.

ashmire13 wrote:
There were Greyhawk novels..!!    

Yup.  Some of them were actually pretty entertaining:
White Plume Mountain
Descent into the Depths of the Earth
Queen of the Demonweb Pits
(all three by Paul Kidd - quite fun to read as they were a light hearted take on those three adventures "Nobody touches the Faerie!").

Against the Giants
Tomb of Horrors
Temple of Elemental Evil
Keep on the Borderlands
(not as good but a fine way to pass some time)

Linkage

SoulCatcher78 wrote:Yup.  Some of [the GH novels] were actually pretty entertaining:
White Plume Mountain
Descent into the Depths of the Earth
Queen of the Demonweb Pits
(all three by Paul Kidd - quite fun to read as they were a light hearted take on those three adventures "Nobody touches the Faerie!").

I wasn't impressed with those, FWIW.

SoulCatcher78 wrote:Against the Giants
Tomb of Horrors
Temple of Elemental Evil
Keep on the Borderlands
(not as good but a fine way to pass some time)

Of these, I enjoyed Tomb of Horrors quite a bit, and thought ToEE was decent too.  I haven't read the other two.

The old 1980s Rose Estes novels that followed up on Gary's 2 Gord novels from TSR were atrocious, but Robin Bailey's _Nightwatch_ was also good, too:  worth picking up!

There ya go...because I couldn't stomach another Gygax novel after my third case of Gord the Rogue indigestion.

Gygax trying to describe D&D combat as if it were somehow relate to real swordfights was tedious.

I don't think D&D adventures make great fiction.  There is too little logical behavior and too much lawyering.

Imagine if a Conan (COH-nun) story involved Conan leaping off of a ledge and deliberately crashing into an opponent far below because he knows that he can survive the maximum falling damage...  

Oh...and Forgotten Realms was the world of 2nd Edition D&D, which automatically makes it less collectible.

Someone wrote novels for Forgotten Realms? Next you'll say there were DragonLance novels, too. I don't believe.

FR was so damn over-produced that I got burned out after about two products. It just seemed the entire concept was swallowed up by all that Elminster (who the hell cares) and his cronies.
I guess for me it lacked the mystery of Greyhawk. FR just gave me an impression of role-playing overload where GH was more of the hack and slash sort of campaign. I guess I am Hack!

bbarsh wrote:FR was so damn over-produced that I got burned out after about two products. It just seemed the entire concept was swallowed up by all that Elminster (who the hell cares) and his cronies.
I guess for me it lacked the mystery of Greyhawk. FR just gave me an impression of role-playing overload where GH was more of the hack and slash sort of campaign. I guess I am Hack!

Over-produced is an understatement. On the Realms-L, it was noted, at least once, that (A)D&D had never seen so much in so little time in one small area. Way too much.

Another problem: well, the Seven Sisters is an interesting book, but from a player's POV, is it like an S1 or a C1 or an etc ... FOR7(Seven Sisters) is just an example, but TSR's resources would have been better spent on something that the players could actually interact with ... an adventure, perhaps? But that would be an Adventure Gaming, and, as we all know, AD&D is a Role Playing Game. Hmm.

One great thing that came out of that era was the Knights of the Dinner Table ... just out of nowhere, smack dab on the Table. "OK, you fall down the pit, and find yourself in a 10' x 10' room, surrounded by ... thespians."

(to be continued in your imaginations ...)

I remember that was so much fun to read, more fun than sitting at certain game sessions, I can still remember getting hernias and broken knees, and waking up the next morning with one leg longer than the other, because of Jolly Blackburn. If you can sue someone for damages, why not for critical hits?



Realms of Role-Playing (Dragon 102, page is an interesting reference to the overall idea here.

That said, the FR vs GH comparison is a huge thing, as both settings are so vast and detailed. The above criticisms are valid, I believe, as I have more than a little experience with the FR (I used to run a FR index site called Virtual Fantasy, which covered hundreds of pages). I haven't touched on other areas, such as the virtues of the FR, and campaign considerations (world-building) .... I'm just echoing another's observations about some of the potential (D&D Is Only As Good As the DM) failings of the FR.

YMMV, but I wonder why role-playing is mature, the sort of desirable grown-up state of the AD&D gamer ... IIRC from some of the things that I read from that era. Perhaps a distinction should be made between maturity, and knowing what you like (whatever it is), and having fun with it.

John

I always liked Greyhawk because the feel I had was that no matter what the pre-written areas contained,  I could build anything and drop it into a world where it would fit.   The other realms, (FR, DL, etc.) seemed so pre-determined...

To this day my campaigns are all set in greyhawk....

The last three posters have raised an important point, and an error in my writing, comparing FR to GH, in terms of detail.

1. Somewhere (I'm sorry, I can't remember where I read it, but I am quite sure of it .... will keep an eye out for a proper reference), Gary writes about the open aspect of GH. It seems that this was a design consideration, from the start.

2. With the FR, there was this rampant flood of creativity (good, or bad, is for the reader to decide), and this was unleashed without thought towards leaving things open for individual DMs (well, with little thought, it would seem, Sembia being an open area for DMs, well, at least until the Sembia novels came out). The sheer amount of lore in just the AD&D sourcebooks was huge, and a lot of it was campaign detail, 'filling everything in'.

3. Taking the creative work of the many authors of both settings out of the picture for a moment, and thinking in terms of the technical details of world creation, GH seems to be a lot more well thought out. Although I have a personal preference for squares over hexes, from an adventure/campaign integration point of view, everything's set up in GH.
Made for mods, and what are mods, but adventures. I am not overly familiar with the JG lore (I have a few of the titles on the shelf, but they have to wait until a reading/re-reading of all the official 1E titles is unfortunately done), but from what I've seen, the same kind of 'open' design strategy was employed in the Wilderness / Wilderlands campaign settings.

The above said, GH has become hugely detailed, considering all the LG adventures, and all the good work by the sages at canonfire. One cannot measure the size and following of the setting by the official support that it has received over the years, even taking the LG adventures out of the context. GH doesn't have huge novel and computer game and licensing things to go with it (a few here, and few there), and that's probably a good thing. Probably a better thing is if GH is left in the hands of the fans, as much as possible.

That said, what is and what is not canon in a DMs campaign (using GH as an example), is, of course, entirely up to the DM. One can think in terms of layers, to use a Photoshop metaphor (probably not the best choice of metaphor, in light of what I've read Darlene write about the GH map .... again, I would like to supply a reference/quote: will have to keep my eyes open for this one as well) ... say the 1E stuff is one layer, the 2E another, etc. Any permutation of this, where one chooses what they like. Working within one's definition/configuration of canon, the 'open' aspect of GH, which does seem to be part of the original intent (or at the least, part of the intent when things started to coalesce into published form somewhen around 1980), can be easily kept.

Well, have fun with it, and thanks to those 3 posters who made that important distinction.

John