RealmsBound explores a side of D&D’s Forgotten Realms we rarely see

If you are a Dungeons & Dragons fan worried about the surprisingly bleak release schedule for 2026, then I have good news for you: Wizards of the Coast may not have announced anything besides a D&D crochet book (yes, you read that right), but Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood has got you covered.

After creating the Forgotten Realms as the setting for his own fiction in the ’70s, Greenwood started using that world to run his own D&D campaign in 1978. He went on to write a series of articles in Dragon magazine that helped the Realms gain widespread popularity. That led to D&D’s original publisher, TSR, using it as the main setting for the second edition of Advanced D&D. For years, Greenwood kept working on the Realms with TSR and later, Wizards of the Coast, telling stories set in the world he created.

While he’s no longer involved with Wizards, Greenwood has embarked on an ambitious new project called RealmsBound. If you ever complained (like many fans) about D&D’s excessive focus on the Sword Coast, then get ready for an unprecedented look at the rest of the Forgotten Realms — and I mean all of it.

“The plan is to do something that I had wanted to do from the very beginning of the Realms and got derailed: the original FR series, starting back in 1987 up through 1989,” Ed Greenwood told Polygon during a video interview. “They started as regional source books, and I wanted to cover the entire surface of the globe of Toril. What we’ve seen over the years is the Sword Coast and then a little bit of Faerûn, and then it sort of fades off into the edges of the map, where people have stuffed analogs of real-world cultures. That wasn’t in my original Realms, and it brings its own host of problems.”

There’s Mulhorand, inspired by Ancient Egypt, and Kara-Tur, with its East Asia theme. But Greenwood argued that you can’t just transplant a culture without more holistically integrating it into the world at large. “If you’re going to put these in, you have to think it through,” he said. ”How do they get there? Why are they the way they are? You can’t just take a culture from the real world and drop it in. You have to work it into the world, and that’s what RealmsBound aims to do at a closer level.”

The RealmsBound project consists of a quartet of books published throughout 2026, all focusing on the Dalelands, one of the oldest core Forgotten Realms regions that Greenwood created. “You’re going to be standing on a hill in the Dales with somebody who is a guide, who knows the area,” he said. “You’re going to be looking over their shoulder as they point at that distant mountaintop, that spire, that forest over there. You’re going to be down at that level.”

Over time, the project will explore beyond the Dalelands as well: “Four books a year,” Ed said, “with each quartet focused on a different area.” Each annual publishing slate includes a Regional Guide, which is an overview; an Inn Sites book focused on social encounters; a Dungeon Delves book; and an Adventures book, which has everything from short encounters to a campaign. The next area after the Dales has not been decided yet.

Greenwood believes that from the beginning, Forgotten Realms has always been a collaborative project, and RealmsBound will be no different. Eric Menge, who produced the Moonshae campaign for the Adventurers League, serves as creative director. And Savannah Houston-McIntyre, who succeeded him in that role, is the project’s senior designer. There are also more than a dozen other experienced creatives and designers involved.

“We are going to explore these little slices of the Realms,” he said. “Our team has been showing off some of their art and the maps. And one of the things they’re doing is isometric maps of settlements. It’s as if you’re a drone about 10 or 12 stories up in the air, and you’re looking down at all the buildings. It’s very inspirational and really feels like you’re there. You just look at the map, and you get adventure ideas: ‘Oh, I’ve got to go there. I got to see this.’”

Image: Lori Krell/Mythmakers

The RealmsBound books will be available for Print on Demand via DMs Guild, and digitally on launch day for both the Roll20 virtual tabletop and the D&D Nexus on Demiplane. “I’m an old fart,” Greenwood said. “To me, it’s not a book until it’s physical. That’s the only way you evangelize new gamers. Many of us don’t get a chance to game with anybody else, either because we live alone or because we don’t know other gamers. But if we can take a D&D sourcebook, or an issue of Dragon magazine, or something to bed and just read it like a book, then it’s much better.”

As someone who read the third edition’s Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book so much that the cover fell off, I can understand what he’s saying. With so many iconic locations in the Realms, however, why start with the Dales? The RealmsBound collective chose from the first three areas in the Realms Greenwood created for his campaign in the late ‘70s: Waterdeep with Undermountain underneath it, Cormyr, and the Dales.

“The Dalelands are a crossroads of small, bucolic farming communities in the forest,” Greenwood explained. “They’re all slightly different in character. But unlike the border kingdoms, where every place is ruled by an ex-adventurer, the Dales are this place where decent folk live their lives and farm and all the rest of it. That gives you a cradle — and a crossroads between Cormyr, Sembia, and Zhentil Keep.”

Image: Lori Krell/Mythmakers

As someone who ran D&D campaigns almost exclusively in the Forgotten Realms for more than a decade, I understand the appeal of this world, but also the vastness of its scope. Why does Greenwood himself think the setting has had such a lasting impact on the game at large? It beat a lot of competition to become D&D’s most used “official” setting. Among a variety of reasons, he cites timing and the level of detail that went into it, at least compared to other settings like Greyhawk.

“The problem with Greyhawk from the beginning was that Gary Gygax was the bottleneck,” he explained. “He didn’t have time to run this gaming company and to write the rules of D&D, both of which were expanding wildly, and also bring us all of Greyhawk.” For better or for worse, Greyhawk had to suffer from big gaps in the lore, whereas the Forgotten Realms delivered a level of detail that Greenwood said gamers were hungry for. “That’s why it’s still being detailed, and why I still work on it every day of my life,” he said. “Because the questions don’t end.”

Greenwood also described the Realms itself as “the cradle” for a vast majority of gamers in the past, “when their sweet spot was crumbling castles, Sherwood Forest, guys in shining armor galloping through the trees, beautiful ladies with swords in one hand and a spell book in the other. It was all we wanted as a base.”

Image: Giada Del Vecchio/Mythmakers

D&D players and fans of the Realms have a lot to look forward to in 2026, and Greenwood plans to deliver with RealmsBound. “My personal main goal is to make my friends happy, the friends who are working on it, and the friends who will consume it will enjoy it,” Greenwood said. “The published Realms have always been a collaborative thing where gamers get together and play in a thing they love. We’re going to bring you the Realms. We are giving you back the Realms to play in.”

You can visit RealmsBound.com to find up-to-date information and join the mailing list for sneak peeks.