Donmai

Forgotten Realms

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gfz

CurePikachu said:

If we go through with this we will need to replace the existing implication Baldur's Gate has to Dungeons & Dragons before doing the BG -> forgotten realm one

Good point, that's probably too much.

I decided to step back and take a look at all of the Dungeons and Dragons content. Here are my findings.
Looking at the posts in Dungeons and Dragons I see (in order of popularity)
1) Baldur's Gate/Baldur's Gate 3, which is in Forgotten Realms
2) Original characters
3) Critical Role, which takes place in a world called Exandria, but uses the Forgotten Realms pantheon.
4) Planescape: Torment, which is in the Forgotten Realms
5) Shadow Over Mystara which takes place in the setting Mystara
6) post #397286 has Erandis d'Vol, a character from the Eberron setting.

(since I can't search for more than 2 tags, I have some trouble checking thoroughly, hopefully I didn't miss anything)

Edge cases:

Many deities and some characters, notably Vecna, were brought over from the Greyhawk setting to Forgotten Realms.

Similarly, Critical Role used the Forgotten Realms pantheon. Consider post #6216629 which shows Forgotten Realms deities fighting in the Critical Role continent of Exandria.

post #3669135 features original characters from a campaign played in the Ravenloft/Curse of Strahd setting, who are also visually flavored towards that setting. However, it features no canon material from the setting, so you wouldn't be able to say that it's curse of strahd without reading the caption.

Mystra and Shar are both Forgotten Realms deities, but their only posts on here are portraying their appearances in Baldur's Gate 3.

Summary

Forgotten Realms only characters: Zariel, Elminster Aumar, Volo, Iymrith.

Characters shared by multiple settings: Tiamat, Asmodeus, Gruumsh, Vecna, Bahamut, Lolth

These characters are from the Forgotten Realms, but also canon in Critical Role: Mystra, Shar, Eilistraee, Myrkul

Closing Thoughts

Campaign settings in D&D, broadly speaking, serve to define the aesthetic of the game. Forgotten Realms represents the most iconic and popular high fantasy Dungeons and Dragons that most people expect. Other settings, like the steampunk Eberron, gothic fantasy Ravenloft, or sci-fi Spelljammer, have little to no content on this website. This means it's not especially useful to have an all-encompassing Forgotten Realms tag, so I think we should drop it entirely, and use dungeons and dragons as a replacement as needed.

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7HS

gfz said:

Planescape: Torment, which is in the Forgotten Realms

It's a bit more complicated than that, if I am understanding things correctly myself. Planescape includes the Forgotten Realms. It also includes every other official D&D campaign setting (Eberron, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, etc.), usually as facets of other planes that Planescape itself isn't really concerned with, but nonetheless incorporates in such a way that a character from the Planescape setting could theoretically travel to them.

I think this strengthens your conclusion by showing that D&D already has a unified setting, which pedants might insist ought to be called "Planescape" but may as well be called (and tagged) "Dungeons & Dragons" for our purposes.

Critical Role's Exandria is an edge case, as it isn't an official D&D campaign setting, but the strong connections to Forgotten Realms suggest it can be brought into the fold.

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Veraducks

evazion said:

This would mean Baldur's Gate 3 gets four copyright tags. This is too much.

It already does, when the uploader remembers to tag it.
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Planescape is a setting that “has access” to all the other settings. It includes Faerun, Eberron, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and all others (except maybe Critical Role, I’d have to double check that). It’s essentially the multiverse excuse plot to allow Warforged and Kender in Faerun. Planescape: Torment is a specific game that takes place in Placescape.

Critical Role and Exandria were originally in Pathfinder, not D&D. It transferred for both ease-of-use and brand recognizability. Tagging it as D&D probably correct given that it’s what it is most famous for.

For the purposes of tagging, I feel that it’s best to think of D&D as a media conglomerate/franchise, like Marvel and DC. There are many images on-site that are not any specific D&D setting but an original setting for a homebrew game at their own table.

I actually think it’s weird that we’re tagging D&D settings as copyrights alongside the specific. We don’t do it for Pathfinder, as we do not have a Golarion tag (the actual 100% official default setting for the system).
D&D + Original covers a majority of non-BG3 images. Baldur’s Gate + D&D is no different from Superman + DC.
To continue the comics analogy, I feel almost that our insistence on tagging Forgotten Realms and the like is akin to tagging Earth-313 or something.

I’m almost convincing myself that we don’t need them as tags, especially since there are virtually no features of any of them that are actually 100% specific to that setting and not a specific depiction from one of the games.

inb4 📜

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gfz

Veraducks said:

I actually think it’s weird that we’re tagging D&D settings as copyrights alongside the specific. We don’t do it for Pathfinder, as we do not have a Golarion tag (the actual 100% official default setting for the system).
D&D + Original covers a majority of non-BG3 images. Baldur’s Gate + D&D is no different from Superman + DC.
To continue the comics analogy, I feel almost that our insistence on tagging Forgotten Realms and the like is akin to tagging Earth-313 or something.

I’m almost convincing myself that we don’t need them as tags, especially since there are virtually no features of any of them that are actually 100% specific to that setting and not a specific depiction from one of the games.

inb4 📜

I agree completely. I don't think there's anyone insisting we tag Forgotten Realms though, I was the one who wrote wiki pages for the series above and brought the topic up, but like you and the others have said, upon closer examination it's not really a good idea. I think we should have all of the neverwinter/baldur's gate/etc games imply dungeons and dragons and nuke forgotten realms. The only things that come close to being forgotten realms specific are Volo (Forgotten Realms) and Elminster Aumar but I think it's fine for them to live in Dungeons and Dragons.

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