Forgotten Realms' creator has the perfect antidote to modern D&D's big problem

Ed Greenwood's new project comes at the right time for D&D fans who want more depth to their sourcebooks

If you are anything like me, you believe that “more is better” always applies to Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks: I want more pages, more content, more maps, more stat blocks, etc. The thicker the book, the happier I am when I bring it out of the store. (Support local commerce!) However, the recent trend seems to be going in the opposite direction: just take a look at Forge of the Artificer.

According to Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood, this trend harkens back to the old days of “corporate” TSR (D&D’s original publisher) taking over the game and suppressing its original spirit. Greenwood is busy working on his new RealmsBound project, which aims to “give back the Realms” to players with a yearly collection of four sourcebooks. Each year’s worth of books will focus on a different area of Toril. It’s a big, bold, and focused strategy at odds with ongoing trends in D&D at large.

“We've definitely become more corporate,” Greenwood said in a video interview with Polygon about D&D’s overall trajectory. He pointed out how, in the early days of D&D, the game's creator Gary Gygax just put whatever he wanted in a sourcebook. But then, when ownership of TSR transitioned to Brian Blume and his father, Melvin, corporate interests took over. “You should make the books a lot shorter, put a lot less in them to make people buy more,” Greenwood recalled of the pivot, and he pointed out to Forge of the Artificer as proof that this mentality is still there. It's a new, smaller supplement to the existing Eberron: Rising from the Last War book.

He also underlined how art has started to prevail over text in D&D sourcebooks. “From the very beginning, we wanted more and better art, but art is expensive — and text is cheap,” Greenwood said. “As a greedy gamer, I wanted maximum text, because I was paying for it. I wanted everything in it.” From a corporate point of view, the main goal is to sell the product, and having splashy art makes sure that a book stands out in a store. According to Greenwood, that’s one of the biggest changes that have happened over the last 30 years: art has pushed the text out.

RealmsBound aims to to give fans of the Forgotten Realms everything they want. It will cover all of the Forgotten Realms (or most of it) through regional sourcebooks, a type of product that Wizards of the Coast hasn’t focused on in years. Every year, a quartet of books will focus on a different region, expanding the scope of the Realms beyond the Sword Coast that has monopolized almost every fifth edition D&D product.

There will be a Regional Guide that gives an overview of the area; an Inn Sites book for social encounters and NPCs; a Dungeon Delves book for, well, dungeon delving; and an Adventures book, which has everything from short encounters to a campaign. This approach ensures each area is explored to the fullest without being constrained by the page count of a single book, also making it easier for DMs to find the information they need.

Space constraints and page count are some of the biggest obstacles to overcome in TTRPG design, Greenwood said. However, he believes that it’s possible to marry text and images, giving players and DMs all the information they want while also showing how this world and the people who inhabit it come to life visually. “That's the beauty of the internet that we didn't have when we started,” Greenwood said, “You couldn't put web enhancements or PDFs out there on the internet saying, ‘Here's the stuff that wouldn't fit.’” RealmsBound won’t take this particular approach, but Greenwood sees the potential for this sort of publishing structure in the TTRPG space.

I can’t help but draw a comparison with the most recent edition of the Forgotten Realms setting sourcebooks, published by Wizards of the Coast in 2025 with the duology Adventures in Faerûn and Heroes of Faerûn. These two books were accompanied by shorter, digital-only products, including an adventure in ancient Netheril and one focused on Baldur’s Gate 3’s lovable thirst trap, Astarion. Both were underwhelming and failed to expand the main product in any meaningful ways. Rather than publish thin tie-ins as digital-only supplements, a more effective route might be to publish content that was cut from the print editions, or have that be a place where additional resources like battlemaps and stat blocks are published.

Greenwood appreciates the work done by Wizards on the Realms with Heroes and Adventures. “I did not have any direct involvement,” Greenwood said, “but I was very pleased with what they came out with, considering how many pages they had to cram everything into that. Again, that's always the problem when you're dealing with an entire world: You've always got too much detail to fit into too few pages. So given that challenge, I thought they did a good job.”

The chapters of Adventures focusing on specific regions are a good source for DMs, with some standing out more than the others. They focus exclusively on the popular areas of Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, the Dalelands, the Moonshae Isles, and Calimshan. How much better might that book be if Wizards didn’t limit the focus to just those five areas? But again, this is the corporate mentality: give customers something now, so that they can buy more in the future. Except that there is nothing more on the horizon, at least for 2026.

Especially in the current vacuum that is official D&D’s 2026 slate, RealmsBound is coming at a great time with the first book due out some time in the first quarter of 2026. It’s a massive and ambitious project with many talented creators working with Greenwood to make it happen. “The published Realms has always been a collaborative thing where gamers get together and play in a thing they love,” Greenwood said. He may be the original creator of the Forgotten Realms, one who’s keen on letting players dive deeper into that world than ever before with RealmsBound, but he recognizes that over the years, his creation has become a playground for millions.

“One of the things you have to do when you share your world with everybody is accept the fact that other people are going to have other takes on it," Greenwood said, “We're all different in the world, and that is a feature, not a bug. It's everybody looking at things differently and doing things differently. That is the richness of life, the thing we can all harness to make us all better.”