Hi there!In these days I had the pleasure to check the original grey box of the Forgotten Realms. I know the setting got a lot of events since its inception, like games, novels, adventures, entire campain books... But at first I was a little surprised to notice that the Cyclopedia part of the box is pretty similar to the SCAG. Except for the "Gaming Notes", that explained how to play the realms, a lot of information is presented in the same way. Missing in the SCAG is the second book, about NPCs and last months recording.
So I'm asking: did WotC tried to reboot the realms? Like, if you are a newcomer, using the Core Books and the SCAG, you can create adventures like you did with 1e and new grey GR box. If you had played something FR related, then yes, you'll miss a lot of information, and I think this is why SCAG was not so well received.
I'm a newcomer, I play D&D since 2020 (altough I liked a lot Neverwinter Nights, but a lot of names were important after I read the 5e sourcebooks, like "Oh, Waterdeep was a bigger city than Neverwinter, go figure..."). I'm trying to create a campaign from scratch, after running premade campaign books... and I noticed that it's easier not having the burden of 200 years of minutiae to account for. I know the pubblication story of the realms, the sunderings, the 4th edition fiasco and so on... but for me it was like "oh, I like this place of the map! Checking for cities... oh, this city is nice (for the records, Scournbell, that had like a quarter of page in the SCAG, instead of the full city treatmen of the original box, I was shocked!), let's build an hexcrawl around the city for my 5 level party. I'll build Scournbell using the DMG tools for building settlements". You know? I think that is working. I've made a pact with my players to ignore inconsistences with what they know about the realms, and this is ok.
Maybe SCAG was the right book for the wrong audience? And, did WotC drop the ball about rebooting the realms? Other settings book are more dense, but was the idea of the 5e realms not to be a "Setting" but a "Empty space" to start playing?
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