From the bitter, windswept steppes of the Endless Waste to the storm-lashed cliffs of the Sword Coast stretches a wide, wild land of shining kingdoms and primal wilderness, Faerûn is only one continent of the world known as Toril. Other lands lie in distant corners of the world, but Faerun is the center of it all, the crossroads and crux upon which all else turns. Dozens of nations, hundreds of citystates, and countless tribes, villages, and settlements dot its expanse.
The continent of Faerûn is a landmass of approximately nine and a half million square miles, located mainly in the northern hemisphere of the world of Toril. Sub-arctic extremes chill its northern reaches, where ice sheets like the Great Glacier dominate the landscape in blinding white. To the south are the equatorial jungles of Chult and the tropical coasts of Halruaa. It’s bordered on the west by the Trackless Sea and on the east by the Endless Wastes and the Hordelands that separate it from Kara-Tur.
Faerûn is an open land full of kingdoms and empires, large and small, and scattered city-states and villages struggling to make their way in a landscape that can be unforgiving wilderness one mile and cosmopolitan city the next.
Countless millions of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, and other sentient beings call Faerûn home. It is a land of magic and intrigue, cruel violence and divine compassion, where gods have ascended and died, and millennia of warfare and conquests have shaped dozens of unique cultures.
Faerun is home to the frozen tundra of Icewind Dale, the swordcoast city of Waterdeep, the Artisan City of Neverwinter, and the legendary melting pot known as Baldur's Gate. Many are the legends of this varied continent, and greater still are the number of secrets it guards. Some even say that the source of magic itself can be found in these fabled lands.
Toril (pronounced: toh-RILL) is the third planet from the Sun in Realmspace. It is orbited by one moon named Selûne, and by a cluster of asteroids, known as the Tears of Selûne.
Toril is an Earth-sized planet that consists of various continents and islands, including Faerûn, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara in the central super-continent and, throughout most of its history Anchorome, Maztica, and Katashaka in the western region of the world. There is also one large and very mysterious continent east of Kara-Tur called Osse whose nature and inhabitants are all but unknown.
A crystal sphere, sometimes called crystal shell, is a gigantic spherical shell that contains an entire planetary system. Each sphere varies in size but typically they are twice the diameter of the orbit of the planet that was farthest from the sun or planet at the center of the sphere (the system's primary).
These spheres separate the wildspace within from the Phlogiston that permeates the universe outside the crystal spheres.
Crystal shells also mark the outer limit of a deity's influence. Divine magic that emanates from a deity worshipped on a world within a crystal sphere is severely dampened or completely non-existing once one crosses the crystal shell into the phlogiston and into other crystal spheres, unless the deity also enjoys considerable worship in the new location.