What Is Faerûn?

Welcome to the Forgotten Realms · Reading 3 of 8

If Toril is the world, Faerûn is where most journeys begin.

It is a vast continent of crowded cities, isolated kingdoms, frozen wildernesses, ancient forests, sprawling deserts, and ruins left behind by civilizations whose names have nearly disappeared from memory.

For many adventurers, Faerûn is effectively the heart of the Forgotten Realms.

But it isn’t a single kingdom, culture, or civilization.

It’s an entire continent, and no two corners of it are quite the same.

A Continent of Many Realms

Faerûn stretches across an enormous portion of Toril, and its geography has helped shape the civilizations that developed there.

Along its western edge lies the Sword Coast, home to some of the most recognizable cities in the Forgotten Realms: Waterdeep, Neverwinter, and Baldur’s Gate.

Travel north and the landscape becomes colder and increasingly unforgiving. Beyond the settled lands lie remote frontiers such as Icewind Dale, where survival itself can become an adventure.

Journey south and the climate changes dramatically. Great forests give way to warmer kingdoms, coastal settlements, and eventually the jungles of Chult, where enormous creatures wander among the ruins of forgotten civilizations.

And far to the east are lands with histories and powers entirely their own, including Thay, a nation infamous for its Red Wizards.

Faerûn isn’t one place.

It’s hundreds of places sharing the same continent.

The World Beneath the World

Even the surface only tells part of the story.

Far beneath Faerûn lies an enormous network of caverns, tunnels, underground seas, and buried civilizations known collectively as the Underdark.

Entire societies exist there without ever seeing the sun.

Drow cities rise within immense caverns. Duergar carve strongholds beneath the earth. Strange creatures inhabit ecosystems completely removed from the surface world.

In some places, the distance between a peaceful village and this hidden world might only be a forgotten cave entrance.

Faerûn has layers.

Sometimes literally.

A Land Built on Ruins

The continent’s modern nations are relatively young compared with the civilizations that came before them.

Ancient elven realms once controlled enormous territories. Dwarven kingdoms stretched beneath mountain ranges. Powerful human empires experimented with forms of magic capable of reshaping entire regions.

One civilization, Netheril, became so magically advanced that its greatest cities floated through the sky.

Most of these empires eventually fell.

Their ruins did not disappear with them.

They remain beneath forests, deserts, mountains, cities, and sometimes other ruins built on top of them.

This is one reason adventuring is almost a profession in Faerûn.

There is always something left to find.

A Dangerous Place to Be Important

Faerûn is also a world where powerful individuals can change history.

Kings and armies matter, but so do archmages, chosen champions, legendary adventurers, dragons, liches, and servants of the gods.

A single wizard can threaten a kingdom.

A forgotten artifact can start a war.

A group of adventurers who meet in a tavern can eventually find themselves deciding the fate of thousands.

That possibility is fundamental to the Forgotten Realms.

The world is ancient and enormous, but individuals still matter.

And despite all the distant kingdoms, buried empires, magical catastrophes, and unexplored wildernesses scattered across Faerûn, many of its most famous stories cluster along one particular stretch of its western coast.

A place of independent cities, dangerous roads, ancient ruins, ambitious merchants, powerful factions, and an almost unreasonable number of adventurers.

The Sword Coast.