Forgotten Realms
The "Campaign Set" (often referred to as the "Grey Box") was later released in 1987 as a boxed set of two source books ("Cyclopedia of the Realms" and "DM's Sourcebook of the Realms") and four large maps, designed by Greenwood in collaboration with author Jeff Grubb. The set introduced the campaign setting and explained how to use it, and reserved space on the map for SSI's Gold Box computer role-playing games set in the Forgotten Realms.
Forgotten Realms
Beginning with the periodical's 30th issue in 1979, Greenwood published a series of short articles that detailed the setting in "The Dragon" magazine, the first of which was about a monster known as the "curst". Greenwood wrote voluminous entries to "Dragon" magazine, using the Realms as a setting for his descriptions of magic items, monsters, and spells. In 1986, the American game publishing company TSR began looking for a new campaign setting for the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" game, and assigned Jeff Grubb to find out more about the setting used by Greenwood as portrayed in his articles in "Dragon". According to Greenwood, Grubb asked him "Do you just make this stuff up as you go, or do you really have a huge campaign world?"; Greenwood answered "yes" to both questions. TSR felt that the Forgotten Realms would be a more open-ended setting than the epic Dragonlance setting, and chose the Realms as a ready-made campaign setting upon deciding to publish "AD&D" 2nd Edition. Greenwood agreed to work on the project, and began working to get the Forgotten Realms officially published. Greenwood sent TSR a few dozen cardboard boxes stuffed with pencil notes and maps, and sold all rights to the Realms for a token fee. Greenwood noted that TSR altered his original conception of the Realms being a place that we could travel to from our world, "Concerns over possible lawsuits (kids getting hurt while trying to 'find a gate') led TSR to de-emphasize this meaning".