Forgotten Realms Atlas Project

Kraythorne

Hi

I have just installed CC3+ and I have seen the Forgotten Realms Atlas Project Page which says I need to install the Atlas as well as CC3, but I cannot find where to get the Atlas - I can only find the update.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

suntzu

i dont think this is available anymore , it may appear on ebay sometimes

Monsen

The Forgotten Realms Atlas is no longer for sale, the only way to acquire a copy is to find it on auction sites or similar.

Edit: Evil Ninjas are afoot, and managed to sneak in a post before me. (Or maybe I am the evil one?)

Loopysue

LOL! Its usually you ninjaing everyone else, Remy! :P

Gonzorgg

Question from a wannabe-dungeon-designer :

I have just bought the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas :-).

I'm a DM and a big fan of Forgotten Realms. But I really need a lot more dungeons, crypts, houses, inns, mansions etc.
Important cities like Neverwinter, Luskan and so on, have zero underlying maps which surprised me. I had the impression that there would be lots of cool detailed buildings, towers etc. in the atlas.

So now I would like to try and design some dungeons, crypts, houses, inns, mansions etc. on Toril myself.



QUESTION : If I buy the CC3+, Dungeon Designer & City Designer....will I then be able to design houses, dungeons and so on...AND import them to my FR Atlas somehow ?

Thank You in advance

JimP

Don't know what the FR Atlas does in the way of imports.

But CC3+ can export bmp, png, and jpg graphic files.

Monsen

The atlas is just a huge collection of linked CC2 maps. You can edit these with CC3+ and add hotspots pointing to any new map you make, just as the hotspots to the existing maps, thereby integrating these maps into the atlas.

Loopysue

That sounds really cool, Remy.

Am I venturing into 'lets not talk about it' territory if I ask why FR is no longer available?

Monsen

The FR atlas was a product commissioned by Wizards of the Coast, and the rights belong to them. They where also the ones selling it, not PF, and about the time when D&D 3.0 arrived and the FR maps had some drastic changes in some places, they stopped selling the FR Atlas with the outdated maps (Outdated if you play D&D3.0 or higher that is, for me still playing AD&D 2nd edition, it is highly relevant).
There are lots of nice maps in the FR atlas, but they are from the CC2 era, so they don't look all that nice compared to modern CC3(+) maps [No effects, no raster symbols, and while technically possible, raster fills weren't really used either]

Other products from the AD&D 2nd edition era was the Core Rules products, which included a product called Campaign Mapper, a cut-back version of Campaign Cartographer, which you could use to edit the atlas map if you wanted.

Loopysue

Wow!

Sounds all very complicated to me. How sad, though, that just because WoC moved on they had to cut everyone who didn't want to go with them lose!

Monsen

That's the way of most things. Supporting old software costs money, and if the sales volume is low, it is a net loss. Still selling old maps that are now technically incorrect also causes a lot of confusion in the customer base when the maps don't match up with the books any more, leading to even more support requests and requests for updates. (Of course, it wuld have been nice if they continued their deal with PF and updated it for newer versions, but they had their mapping software in the lineup [Dundjinni], and the atlas maps wouldn't have been compatible with that.)

Loopysue

Ooooooh.

Blimey!

That explains a whole load of questions that have always bugged me about lots of other things!

Thanks Remy

Wyvern

There is though an oddity in all this, in that WotC have now made available pretty much their entire back catalogue of published D&D works, going right back to the original three-booklet set, as paid-for PDFs via the DM's Guild OneBookShelf download site. The Forgotten Realms Atlas seems to be the one thing that's really been "forgotten" along the way. Presumably this is partly because those Atlas maps aren't "pretty" enough to match with people's expectations these days, as Monsen said, even if it might be useful for those wishing to play the game using older iterations of the FR world setting.

However, there may be too a software problem in all this, as I seem to recall there were experiments with earlier D&D versions for random dungeon designers and other tools (like the Campaign Mapper), which almost certainly won't work under the current MS operating system. I know I have a D&D CD-ROM somewhere that worked fine on my old, now defunct, Win XP machine, but which Win 10 refuses to acknowledge as a program!

Monsen

Compatibility concerns probably factor into it. Old books don't require support, and they still work just as fine on modern operating systems. Old software needs support, and is likely to stop working. It's unfortunate for us, but as a business decision, it is sound. (Don't mean that I like it though, just that I can see their point of view)

[Deleted User]

I have all the FR Atlas installed on my windows 7 and windows 10 computers - I installed it ages ago, and copied the files when I got a new computer. All FCW's and links work. If you added a new map,all you need to do is add the appropriate links to main map and back again - it works for me.
I guess I can't give the files to anyone else though, since WOTC still has the copyright - What do you say, Remy?

Monsen

Posted By: QuentenI guess I can't give the files to anyone else though, since WOTC still has the copyright - What do you say, Remy?

That's correct. Sharing them would be piracy, even if it isn't available for sale anymore. Unfortunate, but that's the laws.

JimP

Gee, its been too long since I looked at the FR Atlas, it is CC2 maps. Nothing to import. I think WotC should have updated with the newer software from Profantasy, but its not my decision.

thehawk

@Gonzorgg, do you have all three updates? Plus there's a map of Zhentil Keep floating around here somewhere, and Jay_NOLA has some posts about solving some of the challenges the Atlas presents.

If you're interested in later-era Forgotten Realms, the esteemed Mike Schley has some fantastic ones over at https://prints.mikeschley.com/ .

Solo4114

Can anyone who has said FR Atlas tell me if there's an actual map of the Abeir-Torill single continent circa -35,000? I have a plan in mind for a campaign to run that I think will be set there, but I'm wondering if such a map already exists to use in the first place so as not to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

JimP

Torill.fcw is about 24,000 miles across. Has terrain colors and area names. Also hyper links so zoom to smaller areas can be done. But doesn't have a way to go back. The previous maps have to be loaded from the 'previous file' list.

Don't see a map name with Abeir.

Some of the large maps have blank areas that just have trees, or green areas, or white areas for snow, etc. Lots of room to build on.

Solo4114

Ah, I'm talking about when (apparently, according to the lore) the world was a single land mass, before the "Sundering" and whatnot.

Basically, the world looked like this around -35,000DR (http://dnd.eizzn.com/?start_year=-35000&end_year&tag_name).

And it looked like this after the Sundering (http://dnd.eizzn.com/time-line/campaign/forgotten-realms/24000-dr/).

For the campaign I'm planning, the landmasses listed in these two entries are accurate, but the actual history from -35000 through -24000 is...not. The campaign will (if we end up playing the whole way through) end up with a cataclysmic event that results in the change in landmasses, but for different reasons than in the two encyclopaedia entries listed above.

So, basically, I was just wondering if the Atlas contained those basic maps, so I could have something to work off of. Otherwise, I'll just end up probably creating the whole thing myself (in time and to the extent necessary).

Monsen

No. The atlas contains the maps from the AD&D 2nd edition FR revision, which means about 1368 DR if I remember correctly. It doesn't contain things like historical maps and such, it is more like a modern atlas, i.e. this is what things look at present.

It is basically a properly hyperlinked collection of all the maps appearing in different products up to the release of the Atlas, so if it was included in a box, book or module from that time, it is probably in the atlas, but otherwise it's not there.

Wyvern

Solo, you might find more if searching for the continent of Merrouboros, the super-continent of Abeir-Toril during the time you're most interested in. The best map I can find of this is on the Fandom Forgotten Realms Wiki site here, which essentially shows just the same part of that super-continent as on the History of the Forgotten Realms page you'd linked-to, but which looks a lot prettier! Mind you, I think it's just that one from The Grand History of the Realms sourcebook from 2007 which you may have already anyway. It's not going to help you find a CC3+ version either way, unfortunately, and my limited searching today didn't turn-up anything in that line at all.

Tyranthraxes

Anyone have a good link for the update for the FRIA? I have the cd-rom but all the update links don't work.

Thanks,

Tyranthraxes

mike robel

https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/comment/81506#Comment_81506

I did a double-take when I saw "Abeir-Torill" as my wife's name is Torill. When she gets mad it lightning bolts, thunder, big rock hammer. ?

thehawk

https://www.profantasy.com/fratlas/fratlashome.htm

thehawk

Turns out I have a few more minutes, so here's the 'teaching you to fish' part. Or 'lighting you on fire', whichever you prefer.

1. Research the address you're trying to use - I try to get as close as possible to what I actually want in a 'living' page and work from there
   
2. In this case, after some bits and pieces from the above, I arrived at: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/ex20020218a
   
3. Feed the address in question to The Wayback Machine here: https://archive.org/web/
   
4. From there it's more or less a random guess as to which one will give you what you're looking for; in this case the snapshot from 2011MAR22 gave me a good download that I was able to open and extract
   

Tyranthraxes

Thanks the thehawk! That worked!