I would turn thirteen years old in 1987 a few months after the Forgotten Realms Grey Box (FRGB) came out. I must have bought it from the nearby KB Toys that year or early the next with birthday or paper route money. By that time I had been playing D&D for a few years and just beginning to run my friends as the DM. Our collection of books was whatever we scraped together between us from donations, toy stores and B. Dalton. We hadn't discovered hobby shops yet. Our source material, therefore, included a Mentzer Basic and Expert, an AD&D Player's Manual (the one with the wizard on the front), DM's Guide (the original one received from an uncle who played in the '70's), Monster Manual 2 (not 1) and an armload of modules and Dragon magazines, perhaps most memorable of these a copy of the Temple of Elemental Evil super-sized adventure. All of these we used interchangeably or ignored in varying degrees. We played in marathon sessions all weekend long, listening to punk rock and heavy metal cassette tapes, believing that Gary Gygax and TSR were just names on a book and that D&D belonged to us as much as anybody else.
The original FRGB fit right into this ethos. It wasn't complete nor did it represent some sort of canon. On the contrary, it was just a sketch of a world and a lot of what looked like notes from a home-brewed setting, including thumb-nail descriptions of personages we'd never use or meet in our game, but through which we interpreted a world. It provided a glimpse at what a played-in world might look like if somebody took the time to gather their notes and try to make sense of it for somebody else. Reading through the books made me want to play in Ed Greenwood's game or at least one somewhat like it. So I decided to use his notes and maps and broad strokes in the same way we were already using our hodgepodge of books, modules and magazines: as a launching point for our own explorations.
We played in the Moonshae Islands and along the Sword Coast. We played in Baldur's Gate a decade before the famous computer FRPG used it for a setting, then moved east to the Sea of Fallen Stars. Elminster never showed up in our game and we never passed through Shadowdale and only brushed up against Cormyr and Sembia. Myth Drannor was too compelling to ignore, but we tackled it from the east. I don't remember us consciously avoiding the well-worn places but instinctively we seemed to want to avoid re-treading somebody's footsteps, even if we didn't even know the somebodies in question. I'm not going to say those were great games, not from my current perspective, but they were great games for barely teen-aged boys.
By 1990 we were in high school and before abandoning D&D for a bit first for other games, then for girls, music and broader socializing, we participated in the explosion of 2nd edition. We consumed it. We bought all of the necessary books between us and even read some of the TSR fiction. I was a Drizzit fan, I admit it, but even I didn't want him showing up in our games. Once the company who owned the game began filling in Ed Greenwood's blanks the place seemed less and less ours and we went meekly into the night. Eventually the Forgotten Realms became truly forgotten. We moved on.
So between then and now I've run and played in countless RPG's, including and up to 3rd edition D&D. Within the last eight years or so I was swept up in the Old School Revival/ Renaissance/ Retread as I rediscovered D&D. I started and stopped and restarted a few blogs, played Traveller for a bit then wrote my own version of D&D. I bought and used Labyrinth Lord and a bunch of other odds and ends. Then I found and embraced Basic Fantasy Role Playing, which I've since suitably house-ruled for my tastes. I followed Rob Conley's advice on how to build a sandbox. I followed the Tao for a bit, having had the pleasure of playing in an online version of Alexis's game before stepping off of his path and back onto my own. All the while running the same friends from 1987, plus or minus one or two, through D&D games.
Most recently I stumbled upon the lone book remaining from my FR Grey Box bought nearly 30 years ago while cleaning out a closet. It was Cyclopedia of the Realms, with one clear plastic overlay and one of the regional maps crammed into it. Reading through it I recalled how neatly it once fit into my DIY ethos, as counter-intuitive as that seems to some now. I put it down, looked over the map and world notes the players are barely aware of anyway and decided they could easily fit alongside one another. One could skip all of the bloat that came after, use only this and fill in the blanks. Forgotten Realms remembered, only the gods may all be dead and there's more tentacles.
