Forgotten Realms Grey Box/Savage Frontier campaign

[Yora]

While I had gotten rather bored with the 2nd/3rd edition Forgotten Realms after using it for many years, I later started to really appreciate the setting as it was in its original appearance, before it got a major overhaul with the Time of Troubles. The little 64-pages sourcebook The Savage Frontier still is the best written setting resource I've ever seen in any RPG.
I recently started getting into the OSE Advanced edition, which provides all the races, classes, and spells of 1st edition AD&D, without actually having to run AD&D. Which really is not a user-friendly game.

What I want to do is set up a campaign that uses the Grey Box and The Savage Frontier as the definitive sources, and follow the descriptions as they are written, ignoring whatever was stated about locations, history, and characters in later sources. I think it will be useful to treat this campaign as an alternative universe of the Forgotten Realms and not simply as an earlier point in the established timeline.
The two main issues on my mind now are what really are the important differences that separate the 1st edition Forgotten Realms from later changes and expansions, and how to make it into something exciting for the players and not just an academic exercise for myself. Any thoughts on this are hugely appreciated.

The biggest difference that I have noted is that the earliest form of the setting really was a human setting. Dwarves, elves, halflings, and gnomes exist, but they aren't even minorities and more curiosities. The Savage Frontier region (that is, The North) is one of the areas in which elves and dwarves still have one of their greatest presences, but even that is rather marginal. The dwarves have Citadel Adbar as their only major city and literally on the very edge of the world. Mithril Hall has not yet been retaken by Bruenor Battlehammer, and the only other significant settlement being the mining town Ironmaster near Icewind Dale. I'd guess there's maybe 100,000 dwarves in total left in the North. Waterdeep alone has more humans than that. Elven society in the North is pretty much nonexistent. The only notable mentions of elves in The Savage Frontier are a small clan of old elves living in Ardeep Forest, and Silverymoon being such a fantastical place that you can even meet elves there. (With exlamation mark!). Gnomes once existed in the North, but are said to be completely gone. Halflings are mentioned as being rare because of the unpleasant climate.

The Grey Box begins its introduction to the Forgotten Realms stating that the society of the setting is based on the 13th and 14th century. That's the time of the Mongol Hordes, the end of the Crusades, the Start of the Hundred Years War, and the founding of the Hanseatic League. That's very different from the more 16th and 17th century inspired version of the Forgotten Realms that we see in 2nd edition. I'm not sure how well informed the statement was that 13th and 14th century should be the reference, but I want to run with this as it was written. "Most of the area under discussion here has until recently been covered by wild forests and unsettled grasslands. Civilization is still a novelty in much of this world, even the oldest of cities on the Inland Sea, or the founding of Waterdeep, the greatest City of the North, are within the memory of the oldest living elves of Evermeet."

I think what this implies for the Savage Frontier is that it should be literally treated as the Frontier in the American cultural sense. It is a wilderness dotted with outposts, and the map reflects that. Most of the towns are located on the Long Road from Waterdeep to Mirabar, with the remaining ones on the Lower Delimbiyr River or the River Rauvin. And the area the region covers is huge. Pretty much the entire Northwest United States, British Columbia and parts of Alaska (which I think are the geographic and environmental reference for that particular region). Aside from the two major roads that exist in the North and the main rivers, I think most of the land would actually be more or less unexplored by the humans that inhabit it now. At least the new settlers from the South. The Uthgardt have been in the area for a long time, but they are also barbarians who aren't on too friendly terms with the city people. I think making them unavailable for player characters would be a good choice, at least for the start of the campaign. If the player befriend some of the Uthgardt, they could recruit new party members from them.

With the massive scale of the region, and established sites of interest being so far across, I think a typical hexcrawl would not make for a very interesting way to explore the setting. The party would end up stuck in a very tiny area and not get much opportunity to visit places the players might have heard of in the past. But since the distances are so great and the lands so desolate, I think making crossing the wilderness a major part of the campaign would be a great way to bring that aspect of the setting to life. And it is a setting for AD&D first edition, a game in which procedural wilderness travel was still a major element. Not sure how popular that still was when the Grey Box came out in 1987, but I still think that could be neat to differentiate the campaign from what has become commonly known as a typical Forgotten Realms campaign.

Old Elven and Dwarven Kingdoms are a big thing in the Savage Frontier, and most dungeons and ruins are specifically presented as such. With these ruins not being discarded castles from any local people, but the only remaining traces of almost completely disappeared cultures, I think there can also be a more pronounced archeological exploration element. With most Forgotten Realms material, I generally get the impression that the presented sites are places quite well known to the locals that have occasional adventurers poking around in them to fight evil that threatens civilization. But that's not really the situation here. Instead the adventures into ruins could have a much stronger sense of going into places that have been completely forgotten for centuries, without any way to tell what could be found inside of them.

[Thane of Fife]

The biggest difference that I have noted is that the earliest form of the setting really was a human setting. Dwarves, elves, halflings, and gnomes exist, but they aren't even minorities and more curiosities. The Savage Frontier region (that is, The North) is one of the areas in which elves and dwarves still have one of their greatest presences, but even that is rather marginal. The dwarves have Citadel Adbar as their only major city and literally on the very edge of the world. Mithril Hall has not yet been retaken by Bruenor Battlehammer, and the only other significant settlement being the mining town Ironmaster near Icewind Dale. I'd guess there's maybe 100,000 dwarves in total left in the North. Waterdeep alone has more humans than that. Elven society in the North is pretty much nonexistent. The only notable mentions of elves in The Savage Frontier are a small clan of old elves living in Ardeep Forest, and Silverymoon being such a fantastical place that you can even meet elves there. (With exlamation mark!). Gnomes once existed in the North, but are said to be completely gone. Halflings are mentioned as being rare because of the unpleasant climate.

Without actually looking at FR5 (I think that's The Savagae Frontier), I'll note that, per the GRay Box, gnomes and halflings are supposed to be much more common than elves and dwarves.

100,000 dwarves sounds really high to me. I think there's something like 25,000 between Citadel Adbar and Ironmaster (per FR1), and probably some in either Sundabar or Mirabar (forget which), but I wouldn't put the total number as being that much higher than 30,000 (and honestly, even that is a lot more than I expected - I would have guessed that even Citadel Adbar was maybe a 2-3,000 dwarves at most).

The Grey Box begins its introduction to the Forgotten Realms stating that the society of the setting is based on the 13th and 14th century. That's the time of the Mongol Hordes, the end of the Crusades, the Start of the Hundred Years War, and the founding of the Hanseatic League. That's very different from the more 16th and 17th century inspired version of the Forgotten Realms that we see in 2nd edition. I'm not sure how well informed the statement was that 13th and 14th century should be the reference, but I want to run with this as it was written. "Most of the area under discussion here has until recently been covered by wild forests and unsettled grasslands. Civilization is still a novelty in much of this world, even the oldest of cities on the Inland Sea, or the founding of Waterdeep, the greatest City of the North, are within the memory of the oldest living elves of Evermeet."

I think that the 13th-14th century is sort of the default for AD&D (see the weapon lists, which pretty heavily reflect a Hundred Years' War sort of period).

I think what this implies for the Savage Frontier is that it should be literally treated as the Frontier in the American cultural sense.

I think that the Realms as a whole are definitely pretty heavily inspired by Greenwood's being from North America. There's a lot of the western US and Canada to be seen.

And it is a setting for AD&D first edition, a game in which procedural wilderness travel was still a major element. Not sure how popular that still was when the Grey Box came out in 1987, but I still think that could be neat to differentiate the campaign from what has become commonly known as a typical Forgotten Realms campaign.

Well, note that the Gray Box does go into a lot of detail about overland travel, so I think that was certainly intended to at least some degree.

Old Elven and Dwarven Kingdoms are a big thing in the Savage Frontier, and most dungeons and ruins are specifically presented as such. With these ruins not being discarded castles from any local people, but the only remaining traces of almost completely disappeared cultures, I think there can also be a more pronounced archeological exploration element. With most Forgotten Realms material, I generally get the impression that the presented sites are places quite well known to the locals that have occasional adventurers poking around in them to fight evil that threatens civilization. But that's not really the situation here. Instead the adventures into ruins could have a much stronger sense of going into places that have been completely forgotten for centuries, without any way to tell what could be found inside of them.

(Bolding mine)

I don't necessarily disagree with most of what you've said here, but I will say that I think the bolded part sticks out to me. For most of the Realms, I would say that civilization-threatening evils are a poor interpretation of the setting (albeit one too common in actual modules). But in the Savage Frontier, I think they're actually much more common than anywhere else in the Realms. I think the Savage Frontier is really portrayed in Points of Light style, where civilization exists on the edge of a knife and the threat of orc invasion, Hellgate Keep, the Blue Bear, and so forth are all hanging over them like a Sword of Damocles. I think PCs are a lot more likely to get involved in high stakes adventures in the Savage Frontier than in, say, the Dalelands or the Western Heartlands.


One other thing I'll point out is that the gods are portrayed quite differently in the Gray Box than in later products - in some ways more involved in human affairs, and in other ways less involved.