T O P I C R E V I E W |
tauster |
Posted - 01 Mar 2005 : 15:21:33 the following question came up on the spelljammer list:
is the term "forgotten realms" used by faerun“s (or toril“s) inhabitants, or is it only the name "we earthlings" use?
i am quite sure that ed wrote something along that lines: faerun is connected with a multitude of worlds, among others with OUR planet earth. we (= the majority of "eartlings") have forgotten these gates/portals to these realms, hence the term "forgotten realms".
can someone confirm this and please guide me to where ed wrote it?
the discussion started with my question why the sphere housing (among others) toril is called "REALMspace". i argued that the term "forgotten realms" is neither used nor known to torils inhabitants (although individuals like elminster, khelben and laeral who visited our world may know it). if the sphere is named after the planet with the most inhabitants, the proper term should be "torilspace".
...or am i wrong somewhere? |
2 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
tauster |
Posted - 01 Mar 2005 : 17:20:57 thank you, exactly what i was looking for. |
Faraer |
Posted - 01 Mar 2005 : 17:05:05 It's as you surmise. Here's once place where Ed has discussed this, posted to REALMS-L in 2003:quote: I have never placed the Realms anywhere but in my own conception of a multiverse of many alternate, parallel worlds ("prime material planes" in D&D parlance). You as DM can have your favorite fictional fantasy worlds (Vance's Dying Earth, Zelazny's Amber, Piper's Otherwhen, etc. etc. and yes, Athas, Krynn, and Oerth, too, if you'd like) as some of the other worlds, if and only if you want to (hey, how about one world that's 1st Edition D&D, another that's second, a third that's 3E, and...well, no, perhaps not :}). Note that this doesn't mean you can't use Realmspace's crystal spheres and phlogiston-voyaging as well as plane-hopping.
To cut down on lawsuits from angry parents from heck, TSR downplayed this concept because its implied real-world connection might lead someone to injure themselves through their misbeliefs of the fictional magic of the game and Realms fiction being real, but no reasonable revisionist of gaming history can deny that the concept existed, because my very name "Forgotten Realms" exists because of it: the idea that there were many gates ("portals" in 3E parlance, but check my gates article in issue 37 of The Dragon, as it was called then, for the original view) linking our real-world Earth and Faerūn (I purposely left the "rest of the globe" hazy, so Jeff Grubb contributed Abeir-Toril as a world/planetary name). These links are now largely "forgotten," and the world they reach (the Realms) with them, but they are the reason for our real-world tales of dragons, vampires, wizards hurling castle-shattering spells, and so on.
Folk of Faerūn refer to 'the Realms', but not 'the Forgotten Realms'. The term 'Toril' is rarely used save by academics. |
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