Forgotten Realms Player's Guide: A 4th Edition D&D Supplement (Forgotten Realms Supplement)

This Player's Guide to FR is excellent and I'm not even a huge fan of the setting! There's good material there for just about any campaign. It's well written and laid out in a fairly logical manner. Good stuff that's for sure!

The best thing about this book is the introduction of Genasi. This race allows your character to harness the power of the elements, being that he is an elemental himself. You might argue that this makes a character too powerful, but it sure is fun to watch. This book also has stats for Drow PC, which serves no real purpose except in creating the ulimate rogue assasin. Also, this book introduces the class "Swordmage," which is perfect for anyone who likes being a fighter but regrets having no magical powers. With the swordmage, you get the best of both worlds.

Initially all I wanted from this was the actual character info for an FR campaign, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of stuff that is not FR specific, and that can easily be added into other campaigns. They kept the same simplified race and class formats from the 4E handbook, which means that Drow and Genasi can easily be used in your custom campaigns, etc.

The succinct city/region information is "just right" for this type of manual, and actually works well as feeder information for the players in a FR campaign that is not unidirectional.

Really though, my favorite thing is the Paragon Paths that were vast and detailed compared to the 4E PHB. Many of these can be used outside FR, but the simple fact that there are so many to choose from is a step in the right direction, as the PHB itself was a little lacking in direction passed level 20. Definitely a good pick up for any DM, and for any player that is going to play in a FR campaign, or that wants to play one of the added races/classes in a non-FR game.

The content is impeccable, and arguably more interesting than some of the things in the core. The Spellplague in particular seems to have set the creative juices ablaze. I am pleased.

For me the point of buying this product was to get some cool new content to take and put into my campaign. I don't personally play in a FR campaign, but i really wanted some of the content in the book (particularly swordmage and genasi) and it was setup perfect to do just that. On the other hand I imagine that if I was looking for more campaign specific type things I would also be a little disappointed.