Travel between most continents is difficult (the gate networks are largely forgotten or hidden or controlled) due to harsh terrain and prevailing weather, and long distances. The few who “make it” (e.g. fartraveled merchants) don’t want to encourage competition. Add to that the abundance of monsters and sentients who prey on any sort of critters passing by, or who just don't like intruders, and you have travel at a trickle.
And on top of THAT, place this: (control of) knowledge is power. Rulers don't WANT everyone to…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) December 21, 2021
….readily know alternatives, and where sources of desired things are.
And to that, add that communications is and continues to be lousy, with word of mouth from peddlers and other travelers the main news sources. The game gives us a distorted view of ease of… travel and communications due to magic, which is unaffordable or simply unavailable to the vast majority of sentients. Most in the Realms are either farmers or foragers; they are tied to terrain they know, and don't move around much unless forced to. So they see…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) December 21, 2021
little of the world and are limited to what they’re told. Which tends to be embellished and unreliable tavern-talk, or information they have to pay for (sages and tomes). If you’re not desperately interested in getting elsewhere, that’s a low-priority luxury spend. You have said that this Scholar's View is not an accurate map of Toril's continents. Not asking to see one, but curious to know if any explorer has braved all the perils you mentioned to chart an accurate one? Or maybe a few? (hidden away, of course 😉) pic.twitter.com/6xyRkVPg83
— Questing GM (@questinggm) December 21, 2021
..I don’t think any wayfarer has done the Grand Tour with an eye to mapping. Dabron Sashenstar did so, deliberately “exploring” to map out trade routes, for much of Faerûn, but little beyond that. Balduran set sail looking for forests that could be logged etc. and…there have been many like him, but they are seeking resources/income, not touring to see many alternatives and what's where; when they find what they're looking for, they stop looking.#Realmslore
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) December 21, 2021
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…conjunction, plopping down or rising up in empty ocean, and when the Second Sundering was over, it was back in Abeir and there was “just ocean” at that spot. I see the Scholar’s View art as an attempt to fancifully put continents that look like a twisted… projection of real Earth's continents into the Realms, because we have to have real-world equivalents and analogues. Except we don't. And trying to have them unnecessarily borrows all sorts of real problems with gamer audiences, when instead we could have a lot more CREATION..
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) December 21, 2021
Would it be safe to say at the current state of lore known about the other landmasses (big or small), any representation of Toril derived from them would be incomplete at best? Yes. That's putting it nigh-perfectly: "incomplete at best."
I have a master full-globe map (faint pencil, Mercator projection with all of the faults that has) dating from 1982. TSR had at least two updates of that (subsituting their Moonshaes for mine, then…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) December 21, 2021
…substituting KaraTur, Zakhara, and Maztica for what I had in those locations; that's why it's not as simple as my saying "Here's my One True Original" to you, because the published Realms diverged so much from my original.#Realmslore
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) December 21, 2021
