So I wanted to make an informative post, so here we go - fueled by an energy drink and too much internet.
I mainly was trying to research how long Player Characters had been in the Forgotten Realms (FR) being measured by FR standards.
If you're not too interested in the real life stuff and just want the fantasy answers, skip the first couple paragraphs.
The "Forgotten Realms" was created by Ed Greenwood when he started writing stories about the world somewhere around 1967 (according to a quick Google that brought up fandoms.) This is before Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) even existed yet.
When the magazine "The Dragon" released its 30th issue, in 1979, Ed Greenwood released several articles (the Wikipedia page made sure I kept reading "the first was about the monster known as 'The Curst'") which seemed to have marked the beginning of Forgotten Realms as a D&D setting. So far, Forgotten Realms had existed as Ed Greenwood's home run campaign for anywhere from 1 to 4 years thus far using first the city of Waterdeep and later Shadowdale as his campaign settings. (Makes me wonder if the famous "Critical Role" setting may one day be a common D&D realm.)
At 1986 Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) assigned Jeff Grubb to research more on Greenwood's world to see if it could be the new example/standard campaign setting for D&D.
Now things start happening a little fast and I couldn't find months listed as any time of time-stamp so I'm not sure if this is out of order. Just take it as one whole mess happening in a company.
In 1987 the first D&D official Forgotten Realms work is published. The first book in a trilogy. The book is "Darkwalker on Moonshae" by Douglas Niles. This was -one month- before the "Forgotten Realms Campaign Set" (also sometimes called "The Grey Box"... odd, I was told that Americans, like me, say "gray" instead of "grey") was released for D&D play.
Also in 1987 (sorry, haven't found much info on what "The Grey Box" or its contents at time of writing this) the first sourcebooks (some internet sources {a bit of Wikipedia and Fandom sites} say this was the first true "sourcebooks" for D&D) for the Forgotten Realms came out. The original being "Waterdeep and the North" which is fitting since it seems to be Ed Greenwood's first campaign setting.
NOW we get into the FR timeline for player characters. I read what seemed to be a decent transcription of this 1st Edition book on Waterdeep. Particularly it goes over history of the city. I'll leave it up to you to read about it, its kinda nice hearing how thing started. Anyways, after reading through a somewhat fair amount of text I found EXACTLY what sent me down this long rabbit hole. A player character start date in Forgotten Realms "Dale Reckoning" (DR) spelled out plain as day. The exact written text as I was able to view it said, "All information therein is current as of early Mirtul, in the Year of the Prince."
After just a couple Fandom and Wiki searches now that I had the exact words to look for let me know that "Mirtul" is the 5th month of the FR calendar year (yes, they have 365 days a year) also called "The Melting." And "Year of the Prince" (all FR years have names attached to them {or nearly enough}) which after a cross-check of a very extensive Fandom site stated it was D.R. 1357. <--- This is what I spent many hours trying to find out!
The Fandom also lists many, many things that happen during each year and it said, "On the alternate world of Earth, Ed Greenwood collates a collection of travelogues, maps, and other information given him by Elminster into the 'The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set' for its first publication." and the Fandom lists its source for that as the book "The Grand History of the Realms" authored by Brian R James and, again, Ed Greenwood.
In 1987 a small TSR team led by David "Zeb" Cook began a two year process of creating Advanced Dungeons & Dragon 2nd Edition.
WHOA BOY! Now we have, not only a date, but a month that a mass of official Player Characters started delving into Forgotten Realms. Mirtul, 1357 DR. (The Fandom mentioned lots of other important characters and events that happened that year too.)
But that's not quite it from 1st Edition. A couple of adventures written before "The Grey Box" were retconned as being part of the Forgotten Realms multiverse. So you can do a little more lore digging (in the minutes I spared to read about them, at least one of these adventures sounded neat cause you started at Level 0 instead of 1).
There are as follows:
Bloodstone Pass (1985) - by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson
The Mines of Bloodstone (1986) - by Doublas Niles and Michael Dobson
(The last two of the "Bloodstone Saga" didn't have to be retconned into FR as FR was out and they were apparently officially part of that multiverse by then)
Treasure Hunt (1986) - Aaron Allston
*** As a note, I have not read much more than the abbreviated cliff notes of cliff notes about those adventures so I don't know when or where they take place.
Amidst all this (and more actually), Forgotten Realms became "a ready-made campaign setting upon deciding to publish AD&D 2nd Edition." -a quote Wikipedia attributes to Allen Varney in February 1998... and something about ProFiles: Ed Greenwood.... Dragon magazine #244..... <I wish I knew what I was typing when quoting a source that seems complex.>
In 1988 "Dragon" magazine did a review of the Forgotten Realms setting and Ken Rolston (can't figure out if he was the writer or someone being interviewed - BUT now he is known for working on Warhammer, D&D, and Elder Scrolls 3 & 4) praised the setting, but seemed to feel that the books needed work. - Wikipedia lists something like "Role-playing Reviews" "Dragon"... um... TSR #129 (seriously, why can't these citations be easier to understand?)
OKAY! - Now lets skip forward some decades to D&D 5e.
5e was playtested in 2012, but was truly released in 2013 (been a few years already)
The latest (as far as the game world is concerned) date I can find for Forgotten Realms now is the adventure "Princes of the Apocalypse" which was released on 07 April 2015.
Each quick Google check I did listed this adventure as having the "current" date for the Forgotten Realms (an insane amount of events and adventures happened during all this time) and the official Realms date is ***1491 DR***
So the mass introduction of official Player Characters in what seems to be the most popular official world of D&D has covered the last 134 years. Which took something like 28 years in real life.
And since Ken Rolston mentioned Elminster (probably the most famous wizard of the Realms) as someone who is "an effective informant and presentation mouthpiece" it seems that the old wizard has been helping players and DMs (maybe not the characters themselves) since the beginning.
I truly hope anyone who read this found something they were looking for, found something that leads them to more ideas, or at least found it interesting to read.
I spent only a fair amount of a single day researching this stuff (and what I remembered finding out as I grew up) and then a few more hours typing it and re-referencing my sources. I trust that the community will be able to use this and not need to start some of their own research from scratch. Good luck and may you roll 20's when you need them and 1's when you need a laugh.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Good luck and may you roll 20's when you need them and 1's when you need a laugh. - myself
Honestly not sure how I would use it but it’s certainly interesting. I’m always curious on how other players from older editions play in the current campaign settings. Have their characters aged? Has time not moved forward and the adventures just take place back then? Does it not matter?
for me the realms is a living breathing world and as silly as it sounds I regret I wasn’t part of it when it took off years ago
Well I know that Elminster is a human that has been blessed with either extremely long life or immortality (from the goddess of magic, Mystra, I think) and some other famous characters like Drizzt are non-human and thus can live a lot longer than the time expressed so far.
As for player characters, I'm not sure if there are any famous player characters who have existed in the Forgotten Realms for an extended period of time. But even for short lived races, there are ways. Like a younger Clone generated by the spell, potions of longevity, time travel, undeath, stasis, existence on the Astral Plane where there is no time. So a DM dealing with such a character has options for keeping them around. My personal favorite, though, is just to let characters I've had that survived adventures age and exit the stage to make room for the next realm shaking character.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Good luck and may you roll 20's when you need them and 1's when you need a laugh. - myself
Kinda necroposting this, but it's funny I came across it when searching some timeline stuff for my 3.x Edition campaign.
In my campaign, we had already advanced past 1385 DR, when the Spellplague happened, and the story was still ongoing, so I didn't want to retcon it.
The party I'm currently running is the fourth one to adventure in the same timeline (some campaigns running concurrently), which has spanned since 1368 DR. It's now 1394, and all of the characters have aged as time has gone on. Many have retired.
It's been a fun and dynamic ride, and the current campaign I have in mind will take the PCs to around 40th level (they're at 13th now), assuming we continue to play weekly/bi-weekly like we have been.
So I wanted to make an informative post, so here we go - fueled by an energy drink and too much internet.
I mainly was trying to research how long Player Characters had been in the Forgotten Realms (FR) being measured by FR standards.
If you're not too interested in the real life stuff and just want the fantasy answers, skip the first couple paragraphs.
The "Forgotten Realms" was created by Ed Greenwood when he started writing stories about the world somewhere around 1967 (according to a quick Google that brought up fandoms.) This is before Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) even existed yet.
When the magazine "The Dragon" released its 30th issue, in 1979, Ed Greenwood released several articles (the Wikipedia page made sure I kept reading "the first was about the monster known as 'The Curst'") which seemed to have marked the beginning of Forgotten Realms as a D&D setting. So far, Forgotten Realms had existed as Ed Greenwood's home run campaign for anywhere from 1 to 4 years thus far using first the city of Waterdeep and later Shadowdale as his campaign settings. (Makes me wonder if the famous "Critical Role" setting may one day be a common D&D realm.)
At 1986 Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) assigned Jeff Grubb to research more on Greenwood's world to see if it could be the new example/standard campaign setting for D&D.
Now things start happening a little fast and I couldn't find months listed as any time of time-stamp so I'm not sure if this is out of order. Just take it as one whole mess happening in a company.
In 1987 the first D&D official Forgotten Realms work is published. The first book in a trilogy. The book is "Darkwalker on Moonshae" by Douglas Niles. This was -one month- before the "Forgotten Realms Campaign Set" (also sometimes called "The Grey Box"... odd, I was told that Americans, like me, say "gray" instead of "grey") was released for D&D play.
Also in 1987 (sorry, haven't found much info on what "The Grey Box" or its contents at time of writing this) the first sourcebooks (some internet sources {a bit of Wikipedia and Fandom sites} say this was the first true "sourcebooks" for D&D) for the Forgotten Realms came out. The original being "Waterdeep and the North" which is fitting since it seems to be Ed Greenwood's first campaign setting.
NOW we get into the FR timeline for player characters. I read what seemed to be a decent transcription of this 1st Edition book on Waterdeep. Particularly it goes over history of the city. I'll leave it up to you to read about it, its kinda nice hearing how thing started. Anyways, after reading through a somewhat fair amount of text I found EXACTLY what sent me down this long rabbit hole. A player character start date in Forgotten Realms "Dale Reckoning" (DR) spelled out plain as day. The exact written text as I was able to view it said, "All information therein is current as of early Mirtul, in the Year of the Prince."
After just a couple Fandom and Wiki searches now that I had the exact words to look for let me know that "Mirtul" is the 5th month of the FR calendar year (yes, they have 365 days a year) also called "The Melting." And "Year of the Prince" (all FR years have names attached to them {or nearly enough}) which after a cross-check of a very extensive Fandom site stated it was D.R. 1357. <--- This is what I spent many hours trying to find out!
The Fandom also lists many, many things that happen during each year and it said, "On the alternate world of Earth, Ed Greenwood collates a collection of travelogues, maps, and other information given him by Elminster into the 'The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set' for its first publication." and the Fandom lists its source for that as the book "The Grand History of the Realms" authored by Brian R James and, again, Ed Greenwood.
In 1987 a small TSR team led by David "Zeb" Cook began a two year process of creating Advanced Dungeons & Dragon 2nd Edition.
WHOA BOY! Now we have, not only a date, but a month that a mass of official Player Characters started delving into Forgotten Realms. Mirtul, 1357 DR. (The Fandom mentioned lots of other important characters and events that happened that year too.)
But that's not quite it from 1st Edition. A couple of adventures written before "The Grey Box" were retconned as being part of the Forgotten Realms multiverse. So you can do a little more lore digging (in the minutes I spared to read about them, at least one of these adventures sounded neat cause you started at Level 0 instead of 1).
There are as follows:
Bloodstone Pass (1985) - by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson
The Mines of Bloodstone (1986) - by Doublas Niles and Michael Dobson
(The last two of the "Bloodstone Saga" didn't have to be retconned into FR as FR was out and they were apparently officially part of that multiverse by then)
Treasure Hunt (1986) - Aaron Allston
*** As a note, I have not read much more than the abbreviated cliff notes of cliff notes about those adventures so I don't know when or where they take place.
Amidst all this (and more actually), Forgotten Realms became "a ready-made campaign setting upon deciding to publish AD&D 2nd Edition." -a quote Wikipedia attributes to Allen Varney in February 1998... and something about ProFiles: Ed Greenwood.... Dragon magazine #244..... <I wish I knew what I was typing when quoting a source that seems complex.>
In 1988 "Dragon" magazine did a review of the Forgotten Realms setting and Ken Rolston (can't figure out if he was the writer or someone being interviewed - BUT now he is known for working on Warhammer, D&D, and Elder Scrolls 3 & 4) praised the setting, but seemed to feel that the books needed work. - Wikipedia lists something like "Role-playing Reviews" "Dragon"... um... TSR #129 (seriously, why can't these citations be easier to understand?)
OKAY! - Now lets skip forward some decades to D&D 5e.
5e was playtested in 2012, but was truly released in 2013 (been a few years already)
The latest (as far as the game world is concerned) date I can find for Forgotten Realms now is the adventure "Princes of the Apocalypse" which was released on 07 April 2015.
Each quick Google check I did listed this adventure as having the "current" date for the Forgotten Realms (an insane amount of events and adventures happened during all this time) and the official Realms date is ***1491 DR***
So the mass introduction of official Player Characters in what seems to be the most popular official world of D&D has covered the last 134 years. Which took something like 28 years in real life.
And since Ken Rolston mentioned Elminster (probably the most famous wizard of the Realms) as someone who is "an effective informant and presentation mouthpiece" it seems that the old wizard has been helping players and DMs (maybe not the characters themselves) since the beginning.
I truly hope anyone who read this found something they were looking for, found something that leads them to more ideas, or at least found it interesting to read.
I spent only a fair amount of a single day researching this stuff (and what I remembered finding out as I grew up) and then a few more hours typing it and re-referencing my sources. I trust that the community will be able to use this and not need to start some of their own research from scratch. Good luck and may you roll 20's when you need them and 1's when you need a laugh.
Good luck and may you roll 20's when you need them and 1's when you need a laugh. - myself
Honestly not sure how I would use it but it’s certainly interesting. I’m always curious on how other players from older editions play in the current campaign settings. Have their characters aged? Has time not moved forward and the adventures just take place back then? Does it not matter?
for me the realms is a living breathing world and as silly as it sounds I regret I wasn’t part of it when it took off years ago
Well I know that Elminster is a human that has been blessed with either extremely long life or immortality (from the goddess of magic, Mystra, I think) and some other famous characters like Drizzt are non-human and thus can live a lot longer than the time expressed so far.
As for player characters, I'm not sure if there are any famous player characters who have existed in the Forgotten Realms for an extended period of time. But even for short lived races, there are ways. Like a younger Clone generated by the spell, potions of longevity, time travel, undeath, stasis, existence on the Astral Plane where there is no time. So a DM dealing with such a character has options for keeping them around. My personal favorite, though, is just to let characters I've had that survived adventures age and exit the stage to make room for the next realm shaking character.
Good luck and may you roll 20's when you need them and 1's when you need a laugh. - myself
Kinda necroposting this, but it's funny I came across it when searching some timeline stuff for my 3.x Edition campaign.
In my campaign, we had already advanced past 1385 DR, when the Spellplague happened, and the story was still ongoing, so I didn't want to retcon it.
The party I'm currently running is the fourth one to adventure in the same timeline (some campaigns running concurrently), which has spanned since 1368 DR. It's now 1394, and all of the characters have aged as time has gone on. Many have retired.
It's been a fun and dynamic ride, and the current campaign I have in mind will take the PCs to around 40th level (they're at 13th now), assuming we continue to play weekly/bi-weekly like we have been.
Based on how much effort you put into this, I think you might find this interesting. I did. 😁
https://alphastream.org/index.php/2020/04/09/the-official-timeline-for-the-forgotten-realms-and-its-adventures/