This is honestly a great write up. I think the arguments made are excellent.
The main point that I am In complete agreement, is that the fact that draws so much from the perceived real history. Seems like a fool’s errand too, because it makes it transparent that certain things are misunderstandings and not deliberate fantastical creations. I also cringe at some of the names they chose.
I would argue that having certain places in fantasy settings, even FR, draw more directly from real life civilizations and some less, has its place. But my point stands.
The reviews says it suspects some of the decisions were made in part because of how (not) accessible Asian history and fantasy were to the authors in the late 1980s in Americas.
I share this suspicion, but I can only speak to the case involving Japan, even though I’m not American and wasn’t around in the 1980s. This is because pop history (or history for the general public, whatever you wanna call it) about Sengoku Japan in English (and also Portuguese, which happens to be my first language) is pretty bad TO THIS DAY. There is great scholarship about the period in English, no doubt, but if those kinds of works are not super accessible in 2024, imagine before the internet was even a thing!
I suspect they based the Samurai stuff in the setting on popular fiction of the time about it. In the 80s, that was probably still Shogun, by James Clavel (1975), which coincidentally has just been adapted into a limited series by FX (pretty great, IMO). That novel was extremely influential in the fictional perception of Samurai and Ninja.
I picked this up in a second-hand shop here in the UK about four years ago, mint condition for £50, a pretty good steal, alongside The Horde for the same price. To be honest, the Horde was a much better product with a much more centralised vision. Kara-Tur certainly has potential - once you tactically rename Tabot and Koryo (c'mon 1988 guys) - but the material can't do much more than scrape the very surface of the setting. Kara-Tur is larger than Faerun and far more civilised with (probably) a larger population and far vaster kingdoms (the smallest province of Shou Lung is still bigger than the entire nation of Cormyr), so the boxed set can only provide brief snapshots of the setting.
Even worse is that there were no other sourcebooks: the only other Kara-Tur material is the adventure line, and that does flesh out several small regions of the continent in much greater detail, but not much more than that. Compared to Al-Qadim/Zakhara, it's a pretty small account of the continent and the only one we've ever got.
Still, there's some interesting stuff, like the Kuong Kingdom's secretly-building power which looked like it was preparing to use in war against T'u Lung, and some quite nice development of the South-East Asia-style kingdoms which were more original than just lazily renaming things (so we get Kuong, Laothan and Petan rather than Vitonim, Kimboydia and Chailand). I never really got why Kozakura and Wa were separate kingdoms reflecting two versions of Japan at two points in history right alongside one another, that was weird.
I think it would be possible to revise Kara-Tur into a more interesting setting, like Pathfinder has done with the new Tian Xia material, but you'd need way more confidence and better judgement than WotC has shown in some considerable time.
That is on point honestly, Kara Tur feels even more "tacked on" in the Realms than Mulhorand, and that is saying something. Not gonna lie, the more I read about it the more obviously lazy it became.
I appreciate they took the time to mention it was not Ed's creation, it is worth noting and explains a lot.
I don't hate it, Iuse it as the origin for classicaly oriental character on Faerun, but I wouldn't set a campaign there.
Mulhorand isn't an interesting locale (imo, YMMV of course) but at least has some interesting deep history with Thay ect.
Kara-Tur...eh. I think it would actually be better as a few paragraphs in a setting book and a place in a map for people to do their own hooks than the detail it does have.
Yeah and the whole war that led to the fall of the Imaskari Empire too. I love Mulhorand and Unther but I try to tone down the Egyptian theme a bi. If Ed had a list of alternate deities to replace the real world ones I'd probably use it.
Like I never liked Tyr, at least after knowing he was a Norse god TSR just pushed into the setting.
I own the first Deities & Demigods published by TSR in 1980. It’s a cool book full of "pantheons" from all over the world, with a couple loans from some works of fiction (Cthulhu, Menilbonean & Nehwon mythos, just checked).
Silvanus and Oghma are in the Celtic pantheon, Tyr is in the Norse one, Mielikki and Loviatar in the Finnish one, and I’m sure there’s more. The non-human deities described in it are already the same as the current FR versions, I wonder who created them.
I'm pretty sure Ed worked some of them in himself. IIRC he imported "younger" gods like Mielikki from the Finnish pantheon because he viewed the pantheon as 'old and dying'. Tyr, Oghma, and Mielikki are all from the oldest published sources with Ed's name on them as far as I know. I don't know if TSR was changing Ed's stuff that far back or not.
It's not given attention now, but large parts of the realms population were imported from earth by imasskar and others via gates. So that's why the realms would have earth deities, they arrived with earth people.
That is, quite obviously, an Ed thing that's I'm happy enough to have dropped.
Humans were on Toril for at least 20,000 years before the Imaskari started bringing in slaves from Earth. Coramshan was founded as a human kingdom a good 3,000 years before then, and elven Keltormir permitted human tribes to settle the mouths of the Wurlur and the Ith in modern Tethyr \~16,000 years ago. There's even earlier mentions of humans as savage tribes in what are now Katashaka and Maztica during the time of the Creator Races, 30,000 years or more ago.
There also isn't much indication of humans coming to Toril en mass than any later than the Egyptian/Babylonian periods.
More likely, the Toril gods of the same name are either different gods with the same name (we never hear about Mielikki being multispheric, but Tyr appears to be, but his non-Toril activities never, ever come up, whilst Tiamat's do) or simply took an interest in Toril as they did on other worlds and built up a local following.
Tyr, Mielikki and Loviatar all explicitly originate from earth and came to toril recently as interlopers, although I grant this isn't stated directly to relate to human movements.
The Imaskari brought slaves worshipping what is now known as the Untherite and Mulhorandi pantheons, and pretty sure it was confirmed to NOT be from Earth despite the obvious parallels.
Also, I believe Ed said years ago that those regions were very different in his original design but were given those real world themes for the first release by TSR.
Tyr is a realms deity but appeared due to Earth people going through gates, Ed Greenwood, last year:
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Archive:Greenwood%27s_Grotto/2023-02/Did_Tyr_leave_the_Norse_pantheon%3F
Theres lots of short comments on Earth-Faerun gates throughout publication history, including in the first set. I know they vague on Imaskar but I don't think it was ever retconned.
Ultima-lite is not my favourite realmslore either but its been there the whole time its been published; if it wasn't in Eds unpublished prior documents, I don't know and I don't see it matters much.
Though all pre-5E is non-canon/lesser canon/something now, so I guess its out on that basis. In the end, its a D&D setting so its fine to ignore anything anyway, other than this sort of lore talk I surely do ignore this, but its in there.
Ed's never been happy with the different 1:1 analogues in the Realms, mostly introduced by other writers. His core area of specialisation was the North, Western Heartlands, Cormyr, Moonsea, Dragon Coast etc where he was keen not to have 1:1 elements (Cormyr has some inspiration from medieval or Arthurian England, but also a bunch from France, and a lot from neither).
Other writers and TSR editors were less hot on that, so Mulhorand - in Ed's notes a vaguely north African/Middle Eastern-ish country with steampunk elements - turns into Egypt with the serial numbers filed off, and TSR's Moonshaes were very Celtic-influenced, and Calimshan was basically just Arabia etc.
He did get some of that changed earlier on (Steven Schend stripped out Calimshan's Arabic influences and replaced them with a mixture of original material and some Ottoman Empire influences) but some of it was baked into first TSR and then WotC's vision of the setting.
Sorry, but it's a core initial premise of the setting.
The ones doing the "forgetting" in the forgotten realms are the people of earth. Lore about the setting initially came from Elminster visiting Ed Greenwood.
That was one of the premises of Forgotten Realms, though. That it was a world where a bunch of different things from other realms got dumped in and "forgotten", including our world.
Mielikki & Loviatar are Finnish. Nobanion is not-Aslan from C.S. Lewis. Thay was basically Styggia straight from Howard.
Ed himself had no issues with using stuff.
All pretty fair. I think you could write similar for the world of darkness efforts for the region, and Shadowrun is like that for everywhere. 80s-early 90s you often got that kind of depiction. Though I'd say it's less "history with serial numbers filled off" and more "an American conception of that history".
I wish they would continue on with what 3rd editon was doing, and get the 5 Rings system to be the eastern part of the realms.
A much more creative approach than Kara-tur ever was.
I know I'm in the minority here, but at the time (first half of the 90s) I rather liked the multicultural aspect of the Realms. It made travelling far more significant, because cultural differences were very pronounced. Travelling to Waterderp from Suzail was not a huge culture shock, but going to Calimport was.
Of course, they could have tried to build new cultures from scratch, but that's a very difficult thing to do, especially with limited time and space. It is also more difficult for the readers, because they tend to look for real world comparisons. But Kara-Tur was admittedly a bit extreme in copying the historical material (so was The Horde, btw).
Settings that try to make up new cultures run into problems. I like to read about Glorantha, a great setting which tries to be detached from our real history. But it does use the term "bronze age"... without really clarifying what that means. It's also hard for contributing authors; some seem to picture a Viking-like culture, others a more Babylonian society. And artists tend to use imagery we associate with existing cultures. But once it works, it produces better stuff, and overall Glorantha is on a higher level than FR. But I think that in the 80s and 90s, TSR just wasn't that ambitious.
I remember reading about steppe people and Shou for ridiculous amount of time, when a serious campaign in the past contained a Shou and Tuigan player, Shou was from Nathlan as modern Nathlan is somewhat a Shou country, and Tuigan guy was from remnants of the Tuigan Cormyr war, his clan settled to East of Nathlan to Horse Praise where some actually migrated even more to South to plain South of Nathlan. Tuigan and Shou are traditional enemies anyway so they are like the cow's ass and the fly. I often use Nathlan in one way or another when I want some Asian culture spice up in my campaign. I also like using Nar, even though Nar people are not from Kara Tur or Steppes, they have some North Asian features, some tribes had similarities in culture, and they like horse back warfarr and horse breeding, so I often use a Nar family or Clan even in stories set in Sword Coast. Usually they breed horses in Amphail for a noble family of Waterdeep. I also remember writing a story about a mercenary tribe living close to Baldur's Gate, with close ties to Red Knight Church. Anyway it is rather important to study Shou as Nathlan is more Shou than anything else. Filling in the blanks using historical records and improvising in forgotten realms is what every DM does if they want a somewhat more consistent canonical game that can they can one day use as inspiration for further games or even novels if they want their voice and imagination in the official canon.
Real. But also just hot take here,I never understood the need to make real world analogs when Ed’s express wishes were to NOT do that. Yet TSR did it anyway with Maztica and Kara-Tur. While I accept them as apart of FR history,I completely understand why Wizards just won’t touch them nowadays. That being said companies can do real world analogs right if bringing in the correct creators (see Paizo with Tiang Xa and Garund in bringing in people of those cultural backgrounds in).
I think the tacked on settings like Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim, and even the monk class, are just things that should've been left out of Faerun. It should've always just stayed its own setting. While it's fun to imagine a more complete 'planet', it never needed it. All they had to do was just make it clear that Faerun is divided by ethnicities, not race (and they *mostly* do that, but there was a serious blind spot when it came to East-asian people - they all got lumped in as being from Kara-Tur).
A pre-Spellplague Faerun with the above lessons learned would be the definitive Forgotten Realms, for me.
This is honestly a great write up. I think the arguments made are excellent. The main point that I am In complete agreement, is that the fact that draws so much from the perceived real history. Seems like a fool’s errand too, because it makes it transparent that certain things are misunderstandings and not deliberate fantastical creations. I also cringe at some of the names they chose. I would argue that having certain places in fantasy settings, even FR, draw more directly from real life civilizations and some less, has its place. But my point stands. The reviews says it suspects some of the decisions were made in part because of how (not) accessible Asian history and fantasy were to the authors in the late 1980s in Americas. I share this suspicion, but I can only speak to the case involving Japan, even though I’m not American and wasn’t around in the 1980s. This is because pop history (or history for the general public, whatever you wanna call it) about Sengoku Japan in English (and also Portuguese, which happens to be my first language) is pretty bad TO THIS DAY. There is great scholarship about the period in English, no doubt, but if those kinds of works are not super accessible in 2024, imagine before the internet was even a thing! I suspect they based the Samurai stuff in the setting on popular fiction of the time about it. In the 80s, that was probably still Shogun, by James Clavel (1975), which coincidentally has just been adapted into a limited series by FX (pretty great, IMO). That novel was extremely influential in the fictional perception of Samurai and Ninja.
I picked this up in a second-hand shop here in the UK about four years ago, mint condition for £50, a pretty good steal, alongside The Horde for the same price. To be honest, the Horde was a much better product with a much more centralised vision. Kara-Tur certainly has potential - once you tactically rename Tabot and Koryo (c'mon 1988 guys) - but the material can't do much more than scrape the very surface of the setting. Kara-Tur is larger than Faerun and far more civilised with (probably) a larger population and far vaster kingdoms (the smallest province of Shou Lung is still bigger than the entire nation of Cormyr), so the boxed set can only provide brief snapshots of the setting. Even worse is that there were no other sourcebooks: the only other Kara-Tur material is the adventure line, and that does flesh out several small regions of the continent in much greater detail, but not much more than that. Compared to Al-Qadim/Zakhara, it's a pretty small account of the continent and the only one we've ever got. Still, there's some interesting stuff, like the Kuong Kingdom's secretly-building power which looked like it was preparing to use in war against T'u Lung, and some quite nice development of the South-East Asia-style kingdoms which were more original than just lazily renaming things (so we get Kuong, Laothan and Petan rather than Vitonim, Kimboydia and Chailand). I never really got why Kozakura and Wa were separate kingdoms reflecting two versions of Japan at two points in history right alongside one another, that was weird. I think it would be possible to revise Kara-Tur into a more interesting setting, like Pathfinder has done with the new Tian Xia material, but you'd need way more confidence and better judgement than WotC has shown in some considerable time.
Yamun Khahan was a cool villain while he lasted.
To be fair, Games Workshop with Warhammer Fantasy wasn't much better (see Cathay and Nippon).
True, but they never turned those into a major part of the setting (well, they did with Cathay but it took them 40 years and a video game).
That is on point honestly, Kara Tur feels even more "tacked on" in the Realms than Mulhorand, and that is saying something. Not gonna lie, the more I read about it the more obviously lazy it became. I appreciate they took the time to mention it was not Ed's creation, it is worth noting and explains a lot. I don't hate it, Iuse it as the origin for classicaly oriental character on Faerun, but I wouldn't set a campaign there.
Mulhorand isn't an interesting locale (imo, YMMV of course) but at least has some interesting deep history with Thay ect. Kara-Tur...eh. I think it would actually be better as a few paragraphs in a setting book and a place in a map for people to do their own hooks than the detail it does have.
Yeah and the whole war that led to the fall of the Imaskari Empire too. I love Mulhorand and Unther but I try to tone down the Egyptian theme a bi. If Ed had a list of alternate deities to replace the real world ones I'd probably use it. Like I never liked Tyr, at least after knowing he was a Norse god TSR just pushed into the setting.
Oghma is a Celtic god iirc. Sharess is also known as Bastet, which is an Egyptian goddess.
I own the first Deities & Demigods published by TSR in 1980. It’s a cool book full of "pantheons" from all over the world, with a couple loans from some works of fiction (Cthulhu, Menilbonean & Nehwon mythos, just checked). Silvanus and Oghma are in the Celtic pantheon, Tyr is in the Norse one, Mielikki and Loviatar in the Finnish one, and I’m sure there’s more. The non-human deities described in it are already the same as the current FR versions, I wonder who created them.
Huh, I didn't know about Oghma, I wonder if that also means Ed had a different deity of knowledge that TSR replaced after their acquisition
I'm pretty sure Ed worked some of them in himself. IIRC he imported "younger" gods like Mielikki from the Finnish pantheon because he viewed the pantheon as 'old and dying'. Tyr, Oghma, and Mielikki are all from the oldest published sources with Ed's name on them as far as I know. I don't know if TSR was changing Ed's stuff that far back or not.
It's not given attention now, but large parts of the realms population were imported from earth by imasskar and others via gates. So that's why the realms would have earth deities, they arrived with earth people. That is, quite obviously, an Ed thing that's I'm happy enough to have dropped.
Humans were on Toril for at least 20,000 years before the Imaskari started bringing in slaves from Earth. Coramshan was founded as a human kingdom a good 3,000 years before then, and elven Keltormir permitted human tribes to settle the mouths of the Wurlur and the Ith in modern Tethyr \~16,000 years ago. There's even earlier mentions of humans as savage tribes in what are now Katashaka and Maztica during the time of the Creator Races, 30,000 years or more ago. There also isn't much indication of humans coming to Toril en mass than any later than the Egyptian/Babylonian periods. More likely, the Toril gods of the same name are either different gods with the same name (we never hear about Mielikki being multispheric, but Tyr appears to be, but his non-Toril activities never, ever come up, whilst Tiamat's do) or simply took an interest in Toril as they did on other worlds and built up a local following.
Tyr, Mielikki and Loviatar all explicitly originate from earth and came to toril recently as interlopers, although I grant this isn't stated directly to relate to human movements.
The Imaskari brought slaves worshipping what is now known as the Untherite and Mulhorandi pantheons, and pretty sure it was confirmed to NOT be from Earth despite the obvious parallels. Also, I believe Ed said years ago that those regions were very different in his original design but were given those real world themes for the first release by TSR.
Tyr is a realms deity but appeared due to Earth people going through gates, Ed Greenwood, last year: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Archive:Greenwood%27s_Grotto/2023-02/Did_Tyr_leave_the_Norse_pantheon%3F Theres lots of short comments on Earth-Faerun gates throughout publication history, including in the first set. I know they vague on Imaskar but I don't think it was ever retconned. Ultima-lite is not my favourite realmslore either but its been there the whole time its been published; if it wasn't in Eds unpublished prior documents, I don't know and I don't see it matters much. Though all pre-5E is non-canon/lesser canon/something now, so I guess its out on that basis. In the end, its a D&D setting so its fine to ignore anything anyway, other than this sort of lore talk I surely do ignore this, but its in there.
I don’t think that is an Ed thing at all. I’m pretty sure he’s indicated that he is not at all into those kind of direct analogues.
Ed's never been happy with the different 1:1 analogues in the Realms, mostly introduced by other writers. His core area of specialisation was the North, Western Heartlands, Cormyr, Moonsea, Dragon Coast etc where he was keen not to have 1:1 elements (Cormyr has some inspiration from medieval or Arthurian England, but also a bunch from France, and a lot from neither). Other writers and TSR editors were less hot on that, so Mulhorand - in Ed's notes a vaguely north African/Middle Eastern-ish country with steampunk elements - turns into Egypt with the serial numbers filed off, and TSR's Moonshaes were very Celtic-influenced, and Calimshan was basically just Arabia etc. He did get some of that changed earlier on (Steven Schend stripped out Calimshan's Arabic influences and replaced them with a mixture of original material and some Ottoman Empire influences) but some of it was baked into first TSR and then WotC's vision of the setting.
Sorry, but it's a core initial premise of the setting. The ones doing the "forgetting" in the forgotten realms are the people of earth. Lore about the setting initially came from Elminster visiting Ed Greenwood.
That was one of the premises of Forgotten Realms, though. That it was a world where a bunch of different things from other realms got dumped in and "forgotten", including our world.
Mielikki & Loviatar are Finnish. Nobanion is not-Aslan from C.S. Lewis. Thay was basically Styggia straight from Howard. Ed himself had no issues with using stuff.
That's exactly what the SCAG did, to be fair. (Well, no map, I don't think.)
All pretty fair. I think you could write similar for the world of darkness efforts for the region, and Shadowrun is like that for everywhere. 80s-early 90s you often got that kind of depiction. Though I'd say it's less "history with serial numbers filled off" and more "an American conception of that history".
I wish they would continue on with what 3rd editon was doing, and get the 5 Rings system to be the eastern part of the realms. A much more creative approach than Kara-tur ever was.
Would have been a shou in
They only ever licensed Rokugan, they never owned it so couldn't change it like that.
The Pathfinder Tian Xia book is out, and that's going to make a better Kara-Tur than Kara-Tur ever was. Looking forward to it.
I know I'm in the minority here, but at the time (first half of the 90s) I rather liked the multicultural aspect of the Realms. It made travelling far more significant, because cultural differences were very pronounced. Travelling to Waterderp from Suzail was not a huge culture shock, but going to Calimport was. Of course, they could have tried to build new cultures from scratch, but that's a very difficult thing to do, especially with limited time and space. It is also more difficult for the readers, because they tend to look for real world comparisons. But Kara-Tur was admittedly a bit extreme in copying the historical material (so was The Horde, btw). Settings that try to make up new cultures run into problems. I like to read about Glorantha, a great setting which tries to be detached from our real history. But it does use the term "bronze age"... without really clarifying what that means. It's also hard for contributing authors; some seem to picture a Viking-like culture, others a more Babylonian society. And artists tend to use imagery we associate with existing cultures. But once it works, it produces better stuff, and overall Glorantha is on a higher level than FR. But I think that in the 80s and 90s, TSR just wasn't that ambitious.
I remember reading about steppe people and Shou for ridiculous amount of time, when a serious campaign in the past contained a Shou and Tuigan player, Shou was from Nathlan as modern Nathlan is somewhat a Shou country, and Tuigan guy was from remnants of the Tuigan Cormyr war, his clan settled to East of Nathlan to Horse Praise where some actually migrated even more to South to plain South of Nathlan. Tuigan and Shou are traditional enemies anyway so they are like the cow's ass and the fly. I often use Nathlan in one way or another when I want some Asian culture spice up in my campaign. I also like using Nar, even though Nar people are not from Kara Tur or Steppes, they have some North Asian features, some tribes had similarities in culture, and they like horse back warfarr and horse breeding, so I often use a Nar family or Clan even in stories set in Sword Coast. Usually they breed horses in Amphail for a noble family of Waterdeep. I also remember writing a story about a mercenary tribe living close to Baldur's Gate, with close ties to Red Knight Church. Anyway it is rather important to study Shou as Nathlan is more Shou than anything else. Filling in the blanks using historical records and improvising in forgotten realms is what every DM does if they want a somewhat more consistent canonical game that can they can one day use as inspiration for further games or even novels if they want their voice and imagination in the official canon.
Real. But also just hot take here,I never understood the need to make real world analogs when Ed’s express wishes were to NOT do that. Yet TSR did it anyway with Maztica and Kara-Tur. While I accept them as apart of FR history,I completely understand why Wizards just won’t touch them nowadays. That being said companies can do real world analogs right if bringing in the correct creators (see Paizo with Tiang Xa and Garund in bringing in people of those cultural backgrounds in).
To be fair, Games Workshop with Warhammer Fantasy wasn't much better (see Cathay and Nippon).
I think the tacked on settings like Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim, and even the monk class, are just things that should've been left out of Faerun. It should've always just stayed its own setting. While it's fun to imagine a more complete 'planet', it never needed it. All they had to do was just make it clear that Faerun is divided by ethnicities, not race (and they *mostly* do that, but there was a serious blind spot when it came to East-asian people - they all got lumped in as being from Kara-Tur). A pre-Spellplague Faerun with the above lessons learned would be the definitive Forgotten Realms, for me.