About Our Forgotten Realms Campaign The Time of Troubles & Era of Upheaval We would like to welcome you to our homebrewed Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Inspired By Ed Greenwood

Choosing a campaign setting that you want to sink a "lot" of time into is not an easy job for a DM, well, a deranged DM such as myself I should say. I want that perfect setting, "I want it all" and I've found out, a DM can't have it all . . . unless he can. I know, that made no sense at all lol. Just humor me on this folks.

I want a campaign setting that has that classic feel but at the same time I want to have a campaign setting that has the epicness of Middle-earth (not really the Forgotten Realms style) while at the same time I want to be able to portray this setting to my players so they enjoy it as best they can. Yea, I know - good luck with that. Forgotten Realms is by far not my favorite campaign setting, hell, it's not even close, but it is more open-ended and might give me the freedom to do what I want with this campaign. I don't dislike "everything" about Forgotten Realms, but it does not hold a candle to the World of Greyhawk or the Dragonlance setting.

I'm a huge Middle-earth fan, and I mean huge, and it seems like every time I work on a campaign setting I end up comparing it to Middle-earth. In the end I would just get frustrated and quit, so I took a step back and just kind of looked at it all from a distance - sure, I could run the Adventures in Middle-earth RPG but then I'd be right back in the middle of the 5th edition system and if I have not made it clear how I feel about WotC and 5th edition then you clearly have not been paying attention lol. So, what other campaign setting could I dive into that would give me this Middle-earth feeling? Well, it sure as hell wasn't Forgotten Realms lol but as I said, it is more open-ended and easier to do what I want with.

In the end, I decided to settle on Forgotten Realms and stop worrying about that perfect setting. The problem with choosing Forgotten Realms was I did not really want to run a campaign during the WotC time period "the year where they jumped ahead 100 years", but in the end I decided to take it back to the TSR days and set the year of this campaign during 1358 DR, roughly a few months after the Time of Troubles and the big thing I settled on was I was going to focus on the Winterhaven location for my first campaign - Winterhaven was never actually canon in the Forgotten Realms, It just got ripped away from another setting by WotC/Hasbro and dropped into Forgotten Realms, "typical WotC behavior".

Gary Gygax himself said that everything about D&D is printed in the books but it is up to you as a Dungeon Master to mold it to how you like it. This is what I plan to do. I'll write up an epic campaign story that will take the companions into an adventure that they will enjoy - at least, that is the plan. Since Winterhaven was never actually Forgotten Realms canon, I will recreate it in my own vision.

The more I thought about this idea, the more I felt like this would easily be my best option in the end. I wanted to be able to take an adventure, expand on it and change it up enough so that those who were familiar with our adventures will still be surprised from time to time.

If my changes to this setting bother you, ahh well, go find yourself another campaign blog because I plan to do my own story. Everything that happened up to the year 1358 DR will remain, everything that happens after 1358 DR "might" change "some", then again - it might not. I'm not going to worry about it and just try to give my players a fun story.

I want to build my own campaign based off an opening adventure and then just expand on it over a period of time.

What was it that Joe Manganiello said, he called Dragonlance the "Star Wars of D&D", well, while I totally agree with him, I want to try and do my best to give my players something along those lines. I'll be starting this campaign off with the players characters being in Luskan preparing to head out towards Icewind Dale through the Spine of the World, and running it using my own modified Pacesetter B/X, Old-School Essentials & AD&D system (mostly AD&D).

This adventure will not be a "by the book" adventure since I am sure most people that play D&D will know all about this adventure. So, I plan to throw a monkey wrench into things to keep players familiar with this adventure guessing.