The World

Where you're walking into. The short version, with all the homework removed.

The land is called the Sword Coast, and it sits on the western edge of a continent called Faerûn (fay-roon), which itself sits in a world called the Forgotten Realms. If any of that matters to your character, they already know it. If it doesn't, you can forget you read it. What matters at the table tonight is a road, a city, a forest, and a village at the edge of all three.

You don't need to memorize any of this. You don't need to Google any of this. This page exists so that when somebody at the table says "we head south on the Trade Way," your mental picture is the right shape.

The Map (ish)

Four Places Worth Knowing

Baldur's Gate

The big city to the south. Walled, wealthy, crowded, old. Every kind of person in the world lives here, and most of them are trying to sell you something. If your character ever needed to hire a boat, fence a ring, find a scribe, or lose themselves in a crowd, they did it here. In this adventure, Baldur's Gate is the rumored destination of things you can't afford, and the rumored origin of things you can't explain.

The Trade Way

The main road. It runs north out of Baldur's Gate, threads past Beregost, and keeps going into the rest of the Coast. Caravans, pilgrims, merchants, sellswords — everybody who needs to get anywhere uses it. It's patrolled in theory. In practice, once you're a day north of the city, you're on your own. The shoulder of the Trade Way is where most adventures actually begin.

Beregost

A working town — the kind of place where half the signs are hand-painted and the other half are written in chalk. It has a temple, a smithy, two inns that don't much like each other, and a stone tower somebody important used to live in. For your party, Beregost is the last real rest before the road turns toward the forest.

The Cloak Wood

An ancient forest on the western edge of the region, thick enough that the light doesn't reach the floor of it in high summer. It's said the old druids still gather in there — the kind of green-robed, forest-tending mystics who don't like being disturbed. It's said that other things are said to be said, too — doorways to other places, shadows that don't belong to the trees, songs at the edge of hearing. It's where we're going. The village that shares its name sits right up against the tree line, where the road ends and the wood begins.

Faces You Might Meet

These are names. You don't need to know anything about any of them. If one of them shows up at your table tonight, the DM will tell you everything your character would know. If none of them show up, also fine. The world is bigger than any cast list.

• Karlach A tiefling soldier — horns, red skin, a laugh you hear from two rooms over. Where a heart should be, there's an infernal engine that ticks loudly and occasionally needs cooling. Warm, loud, and running out of time.
• Minsc & Boo A ranger named Minsc who shouts tactical advice to his hamster, Boo — who Minsc insists is, in fact, a miniature giant space hamster plotting the overthrow of several kingdoms. Treat both with respect. Especially Boo.
• Halsin An archdruid. Tall, scarred, kind-eyed, fond of silence. You may meet him as a man. You may meet him as a large bear. These are sometimes the same meeting.
• Elminster The oldest wizard in the Realms — think Dumbledore, if Dumbledore smoked a pipe and never answered a direct question directly. Appears when he's useful, vanishes before you can thank him.
• Volo Travel writer. Self-promoter. Has written guidebooks to places he's only half-visited. If he says he's met someone famous, he probably has — though he may have their name slightly wrong.

There is a great deal of history in this world that you do not need to know. Your character knows what your character knows. Everything else is ours to discover together.