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.

---