TREASURED MEMORIES

Celebrating PC gaming’s long love affair with D&D’s FORGOTTEN REALMS.

- Jeremy Peel

The great irony in the title of Dungeons & Dragons’ most popular setting is that we’ve never been allowed to forget it. Since the 1980s, when the genre we’d recognize as the RPG was born, any year without a release that takes us to the Sword Coast, or Icewind Dale, or the dungeons beneath Waterdeep has been an exception. If history is made up of stories that exist in the collective memory, then the city of Baldur’s Gate is as real as Los Angeles or New York. Strange, then, to think of a time when the Realms existed only within the bounds of a single head, situated somewhere in the suburbs of Toronto in the mid-1960s. The author Ed Greenwood invented the setting in his childhood daydreams, scribbling stories that followed a wheezing, Falstaff-inspired rogue named Mirt the Moneylender from port to port as he dodged his creditors. Where Mirt moved, the world grew, ultimately spawning the stretch of coastal cities where the lion’s share of Forgotten Realms games still take place. Greenwood imagined the Realms to be part of a multiverse including Earth, a world which humanity had visited but quite literally forgotten—hence the name, and the knights and dragons that so resembled archetypes from Earth’s own mythology.

When Dungeons & Dragons invaded hobby shops across the West, Greenwood began telling his stories on the tabletop, filling in the gaps at the behest of his players. By the time he sold his hand-drawn master maps to Dungeons & Dragons’ initial publisher, TSR, the continent of Faerûn and its best-known landmarks were firmly established.