D&D Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerun

Written by Randy Kalista on 2/18/2026 for TTOP  

What This Book Is Trying to Do

Heroes of Faerun is the player-facing half of Wizards of the Coast’s two-book Forgotten Realms relaunch. Adventures in Faerun expands the map. Heroes expands the people who inhabit it—the cultures, traditions, factions, and magical lineages that make the Forgotten Realms feel like a place and not just a backdrop.

Does Heroes of Faerun meaningfully deepen character creation in the Forgotten Realms, or just dump more subclasses and feats on the table?

The answer, thankfully, is that this is a book with a mission: to make characters feel like they come from Faerun, not just adventure in it.

Here is a quick snapshot of what’s inside:

• 8 subclasses
• 18 backgrounds
• 34 feats
• 19 spells
• 12 items
• 3 magic items
• 2 monsters
• Cultural writeups for major ancestries (including Dragonborn origins)
• Lore primers for factions, regions, and faiths as they relate to character identity

It’s a broad toolbox. Not bloated, but dense.

Subclasses: Do They Feel Like Faerun?

The subclass design philosophy is clear: Every subclass should express something about the Forgotten Realms.

The Spellfire Sorcerer finally treats the Weave as the Forgotten Realms’ signature magic and not just a sorcerer reskin. The Oath of the Noble Genies paladin digs into Calimshan’s elemental politics. The Banneret turns battlefield rhetoric into leading and healing. The Knowledge Domain Cleric treats scholarship as devotion. The College of the Moon Bard channels Moonshae folklore with a fey-touched flair. The Bladesinger Wizard combines sword and sorcery as they were always meant to be.

Mechanically, these subclasses stay with the 2024 Player’s Handbook guardrails. A few push into fresh territory to experiment with new playstyles (Spellfire’s resource loop, Banneret’s support-tank hybrid), while others are more thematic than innovative.

But I love how place-driven they are. They feel like they belong here. Which is not contradictory to D&D Fifth Edition’s everything, everywhere, all-at-once multiversal approach. It rather makes it feel like there’s more of a point to the Forgotten Realms’ existence…a place that has—a little too intentionally—felt like kitchen-sink fantasy for the past decade.

Backgrounds: The Real Heart of the Book

This is where Heroes of Faerûn arguably does its best work. These backgrounds don’t just hand out proficiencies. They tie characters to regions, factions, cultural traditions, and story hooks that form the backbone of a DM’s relationship with their players.

The Chondathan Freebooter gives you your sea legs and turns Faerun’s inner sea into a personal sandbox. The Dead Magic Dweller of Anauroch is the low‑magic counterpoint to Calimshan’s high‑magic Genie Touched. You can tweak the D&D: Honor Among Thieves movie with a Harper and a Zhentarim Mercenary running a two‑person con. And the Purple Dragon Squire is finally a stepping stone toward becoming a bona fide dragonrider—something earlier editions of Purple Dragon Knights could only gesture at.

Compared to the 2024 Player’s Handbook, these backgrounds feel less like stat packages and more like campaign starters. They meaningfully differentiate characters and give DMs ready‑made motivations to plug straight into Adventures in Faerun. A few backgrounds overlap in tone, but they still define the Forgotten Realms more clearly—and more evocatively—than any subclass could on its own.

Feats: The Big Mechanical Payload

There are 34 new feats in total. Eight of them are Origin Feats, each tied to a Forgotten Realms–specific background. These feats anchor a character’s regional identity (Moonshae, Calimshan, the Vilhon Reach), faction allegiance (Harpers, Zhentarim), or cultural and mystical heritage (Mythalkeeper, Spellfire Initiate). They’re excellent flavor-setters, especially at level 1, where characters often feel like they haven’t quite found their place in the world yet.

Of the 13 General Feats, eight keep players on a background‑specific track, reinforcing that Realms identity. Enclave Magic, for example, requires the Emerald Enclave Fledgling Origin Feat. Harper Teamwork naturally requires Harper Agent first. The system nudges you to grow along the same narrative arc you started with.

Epic Boon Feats enter the picture at level 19 and beyond—a tall order in a game that caps at 20. At this point, the Forgotten Realms identity fades into the background, which makes sense. Characters operating at this tier are dealing with threats and adventures that eclipse their regional or factional origins.

What is interesting is how several Epic Boons—and even one General Feat—interact with the Bloodied condition. Bloodied, returning from 4e, marks a creature that has lost half its hit points, and it usually makes enemies fight harder. Now, a handful of feats let players hit harder once they’re Bloodied. It creates a compelling risk‑reward dynamic: do you take the heal, or do you ride the edge to squeeze out the benefits of a Bloodied‑state feat?

Many of these feats—including the Epic Boons—manage to support both narrative play and optimization. That’s not a balance 5e has always struck, and it’s refreshing to see it land here.

Spells and Magic Items: Small but Punchy

The list is short. It takes a moment to realize that the italicized items in Aurora’s Whole Realms Catalog are actually magic items amidst the mundane. And while I’m calling that gear “mundane,” it’s still doing real work: these items flesh out the Forgotten Realms’ texture while giving adventurers tools that make needlessly complicated scenarios a little less complicated.

Take the Adventurer’s Ring, one of the book’s few magic items. Pop the top and it produces a heatless flame that needs no fuel, shedding bright light for 20 feet and dim light for another 20. Because it’s a ring, it doesn’t occupy a hand the way a torch or lantern does, freeing you to hold a weapon, shield, or magic item instead. It’s a small thing, but it’s a problem solver. That’s the quiet design philosophy running through this section.

Even the nonmagical items carry a faint air of magic, and they’re no less focused on solving environmental problems. The Warm Fungal Clothing fends off the freezing temperatures of the bitter north. Desert Clothing shields you from extreme heat in Faerûn’s harsher climates. A traveler in Calimshan or Anauroch would kill for gear like this.

The list may be small, but everything here has purpose. These items aren’t about raw power. Nor are they iconic artifacts. They instead smooth the edges of adventuring life and reinforce the Forgotten Realms’ lived‑in feel.

Magic of Faerun: Making the World Feel Enchanted

The chapter on the Magic of Faerun reinforces that magic in the Realms is far bigger and more pervasive than whatever comes out of a wizard’s spellbook or a sorcerer’s bloodline. It offers a fuller explanation of the Weave and its physical manifestation as Spellfire, then threads that directly into how Detect Magic, Dispel Magic, Antimagic, Dead Magic zones, and Wild Magic surges all interact with it. It’s a reminder that the Weave isn’t just a lore backdrop—it’s the infrastructure of spellcasting in this setting.

The return of Circle Magic is another example of that broader magical ecosystem. It’s not a new invention for 5e; it’s a revival of a long‑standing Realms mechanic. Circle Magic first appeared in 2e and carried through multiple editions until it vanished in 5e 2014. Now it’s back, and with it comes the classic image of Red Wizards of Thay standing in formation, chanting in unison, and funneling their collective power into exponentially stronger spells. It’s a piece of Forgotten Realms identity that feels restored.

The new spells, like most spells, are hard to fully judge outside of actual play. What they do accomplish right away is adding to the legend of the Realms’ great mages and deities by introducing incantations that literally carry their names. You get Elminster’s Effulgent Spheres, Laeral’s Silver Lance, Simbul’s Synodstodweomer, and several other tongue‑twisting bits of arcana that immediately signal their pedigree.

Beyond the name‑drops, the spell list ties itself directly into the setting through effects like Spellfire Flare and Spellfire Storm, which reference the in‑world manifestation of the Weave. Even that small touch helps these spells feel like Forgotten Realms magic rather than generic fantasy effects you could drop into any campaign.

Factions, Faiths, and Roleplaying Tools

The Forgotten Realms’ social web gets a tune‑up. Heroes of Faerun helps players understand what it means to join a faction, how faith shapes identity in a world where gods are active participants, and how allegiances and reputations can drive story arcs.

These tools integrate cleanly with Adventures in Faerun, giving players ways to plug themselves into the world’s power structures without needing to take a class at a community college. These religions and factions all thread together to form a complete tapestry of the Forgotten Realms.

There is the Cult of the Dragon: doomsayers expediting the apocalypse. Emerald Enclave: survivalists balancing nature and civilization. Harpers: honorable (for the most part) spies and investigators seeking peace in Faerun. Lords’ Alliance: a band of metropolitan cities seeking to live long and prosper. Order of the Gauntlet: the mean mother-loving hands of the gods. Purple Dragon Knights: bonding with dragons and lifting up Cormyr. Red Wizards: arcane absolutists chasing ancient power. Zhentarim: wielding greed and pride as weapons in the pursuit of ever-greater fortunes.

These factions weave a shifting web of friendliness, indifference, and hostility. Where one stands with another depends on the week, the weather, or who stole whose artifact this time. Even when goals align, that’s no guarantee of cooperation; when they diverge, that’s no guarantee of conflict. But turning faction standings into a mini‑game? That’s where Heroes of Faerun flexes. Working in favor of one faction might get your coffee card punched, but it could just as easily get you uninvited from the team meetings of their rivals.

This faction warfare mini game doesn’t necessarily railroad players into one line of work or another. It can put agency into their hands by letting them navigate the campaign’s political weather.

Criticisms and Missed Opportunities

We’ve looked at the subclasses, the backgrounds, the feats, the spells, the factions, the magic, and the cultural scaffolding. Taken together, they answer the book’s central question: does Heroes of Faerun make characters feel like they come from the Realms, not just adventure in them? The answer is yes. Not perfectly, not universally, but with enough clarity and conviction that the setting feels like it has a pulse again.

What stands out isn’t any single subclass or feat—it’s how the whole package plays. Heroes of Faerun expands character creation, sure, but it also changes the texture of the table. Characters walk into the campaign with regional loyalties, factional baggage, magical traditions, and cultural fingerprints that matter. It may be the first time in years that building a Forgotten Realms character feels different from building a generic D&D one.

Somewhere between the Spellfire Sorcerer’s Weave‑bending theatrics and the Dead Magic Dweller’s low‑magic grit, Heroes of Faerun finds the Forgotten Realms again. Not the kitchen‑sink version of the past decade, but an opinionated setting with texture, culture, and a point of view. This isn’t just another book with more options: it’s a book that gives you reasons to care about where those options come from.

It restores the sense that the Forgotten Realms is a place worth coming from, not just a place where adventures happen.