The Forgotten Realms Gray Box: The Other Swords and Sorcery Setting

Timothy Brannan over at The Other Side blog did an excellent review of the AD&D 1st Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, lovingly known as the “Gray Box.”  I have a few thoughts on the ol’ Gray Box as well, but I’m not going to steal his thunder.  Go ahead and read his review, then come back and hearken to my tale…

My first D&D campaign setting wasn’t the Forgotten Realms.  That honor could have gone to the Known World/Mystara, especially after I ran the adventure The Eye of Traldar for my original middle school group of players, but that campaign was short-lived, and I ended up switching over to AD&D 2nd Edition soon after, not going the Rules Cyclopedia route until many years later (I did have some photocopies of Mentzer's Companion and Master sets that I got from a high school senior who saw us playing in the bleachers, but that is a story for another time.)

With some birthday money and my humble paper route earnings, I ordered the 2e Player’s Handbook and Monstrous Compendium binder from TSR's Mail Order Hobby Shop catalog.  I got one of those catalogs in the mail because I sent back the consumer reply card (remember those?) in my 1991 “black box” basic set.   I also managed to pick up the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Monstrous Compendium Vol 2, and the Ravenloft: Realm of Terror  boxed set at the local comic book shop in the meantime; so much for that college fund!

“I didn’t go to college, and I turned out just fine!”  That’s great, Mr. Murder Hobo, but nobody asked you.

While Ravenloft was pretty nifty, it was a little too much for a beginner DM to grok at the time.  I needed something a little more generic.  I guess I had been drawn to Ravenloft because I enjoyed a certain Nintendo video game series.

Somewhere, in an alternate timeline...or is it?

I was at the local mall’s book store one day, pondering this conundrum (and patiently waiting for the AD&D 2e books in the mail; Amazon has spoiled us) when I saw a certain horseman staring at me.

It seemed as if that horseman on a desolate plain was beckoning me to explore his mysterious and “Forgotten” world.  I had a strange sense of déjà vu.  Did I have some connection to these “Realms?”  (the book does speak of a connection between the Realms and Earth.)  Had I been there before, perhaps in a dream?  It turns out I had just read a couple of DC Comics’ Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms titles.  That’s where I had seen the name before.  Regardless, I picked up the box and devoured its contents when I got home.

The first thing that struck me was a) how vast the world was and b) the many evocative names on that map like The Great Gray Land of Thar and The Jungles of Chult, with little information about these mysterious lands.  This kind of stuff is like pouring gasoline on the fiery imagination of a young mind.

Left: A size comparison of the Realms vs. the continental U.S. from the Campaign Set.  Right: the Outdoor Survival map (Original D&D wilderness) superimposed over the map from the Campaign Set at the scale of five miles per hex.  In other words: more wilderness than you can ever use!

This then became the setting of my high school years’ campaign.  Despite a couple of side trips into other TSR worlds like the aforementioned Ravenloft, and other, wackier settings like Spelljammer and Dark Sun, the Realms was the main home of the now infamous (at least in our head canon) adventuring company, the Warriors of the Flame.  The Warriors rampaged through much of that vast map; from Raven’s Bluff (still named Ravensgate in my copy,) to the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar and Undermountain in Waterdeep.

The Warriors of the Flame were murder-hobos before it was cool.  They may be wanted in Raven's Bluff in connection with the burning down of a tavern.

Besides the couple of supplements above and the 2nd Edition update, Forgotten Realms Adventures, I never really delved too deeply into additional content and lore for the setting, let alone the novels, so the Realms always felt uniquely mine (which I believe was the intention.)  The common complaints of powerful characters like Elminster, Drizzt, and the Seven Sisters showing up and overshadowing the player characters were never really an issue.  Indeed, tucked right at the beginning of the NPC entries in the DM’s Sourcebook of the Realms is a little random table where the DM could determine whether an NPC was as powerful as their reputation says, even more so, or just all talk.  I’ve a mind to use such a table for my own NPCs.

I never got the feeling that the Forgotten Realms was a high fantasy/high magic setting.  That's not really the vibe the Gray Box had.  However, sometime after high school, I picked up a copy of the revised 2nd edition boxed set.  Despite much more information than the original, nicer maps, and cardstock goodies, the world just didn’t seem the same.  Whereas the original Campaign Set seemed to evoke something like: “In the years between when the sands of Anauroch devoured glittering Netheril, and the rise of the sons of Sembia, there was an age undreamed of…” the later box screamed something along the lines of: “All the characters from the novels you love!  Magic!  Gods!  EXPLOSIONS!” 

Michael Bay's Forgotten Realms

With that and the mountain of supplements available (several which were admittedly very good,) the Realms had become a little too crowded for my tastes.  Even Sembia, which was promised in the Gray Box as an open playground for the DM, had been detailed.  

By the Third Edition years, with the release of Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (which I still bought,) the Realms had lost some of their luster for me.  On the bright side, this prompted me to explore my own creations, as well as another famous setting that appealed to my swords and sorcery predilections.

While I no longer use the Forgotten Realms for my home campaigns, the venerable Gray Box holds a place of honor on my shelf to this day.  I even managed to corner Ed Greenwood at Gen Con and got the old, battered thing signed!  He was in kind of a hurry, but was gracious enough to acquiesce to my request.  It reads something like: “May your Realms adventures be [unintelligible.]” 

But as the saying goes: you never forget your first love, so who knows?  I might pick it back up one day and start a classic campaign with it, employing all the old school lessons I've learned.  Heck!  Maybe even try to get the old band back together for an online game.  What are the Warriors of the Flame up to these days, I wonder?