For those of us who got into D&D with 5th Edition, the Forgotten Realms, as a setting, is somewhat intrinsically linked to the game. Of all the published adventures, the vast majority of them are set within the Forgotten Realms, and more specifically, the continent of Faerun (and most of those being on the Sword Coast).
The Forgotten Realms are technically the oldest D&D setting, given that creator Ed Greenwood came up with the setting when he was a child in the 1960s, but it wasn't the original setting. I believe (and D&D historians can correct me if I'm wrong) that the first setting sourcebook was for Greyhawk, created by Gary Gygax. Numerous other settings have been put together as well. Dragonlance is a particularly famed one, but there are also ones like Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Eberron. There are some that I could not even begin to tell you about like Mystara, Birthright, or Gamma World, because I don't really have any idea what their whole deals are. And, of course, Matt Mercer's Exandria setting is one of the most recent additions to the canon.
Of course, for my part, one of the great joys of being a Dungeon Master is being able to create your own setting. While I'm pretty sure I've spent more hours running my Ravnica game than I did my original campaign (while the old campaign ran from 2015-2019ish, we did not play as consistently) I do feel a strong attachment to my Sarkon setting, and I'm going to be splitting the difference a bit when I eventually get my Sunday group up and running to do a Spelljammer campaign in my expanded, thousand-years-later science-fantasy version of Sarkon and its set of linked Wildspace systems I call the Celestial Expanse.
The Forgotten Realms is a perennial favorite, though. I believe that it was the most common setting during 2nd Edition - the era that gave us games like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. 3rd Edition, though, I believe, pushed things toward Greyhawk. 4th Edition gave us Nentir Vale, which was part of their revamp of the D&D cosmos that created the World Axis as opposed to the Great Wheel.
However, with 5th Edition acting in large part to recapture much of what people loved about older editions, the classic Forgotten Realms and Great Wheel were both restored.
And the Forgotten Realms is a pretty good setting for D&D - it's built on the concept of all these different eras of past civilizations (the eponymous realms) that provide plenty of ancient dungeons for parties to explore and excavate. Meanwhile, though, the political landscape is fairly stable, allowing for characters to travel to fabled and familiar sites.
The Forgotten Realms is a suitable place for all manner of adventure, which has the unfortunate side effect of also rendering it a little generic - it's the "everything but the kitchen sink" fantasy setting, and thus I think would be hard to pitch the way one can with, for example, Dark Sun ("Mad Max meets Dune") or Ravenloft ("the horror setting.")
Now, of course, One D&D is not officially a different edition than 5th, but WotC has made it clear that they feel they've done so much in the Forgotten Realms that they're willing to take an extended break from it.
One thing I have noted is that D&D's recent releases are hinting toward something that has also been a growing trend in the zeitgeist: the multiverse.
Obviously, in pop culture we have things from Marvel Studios' newly-announced "Multiverse Saga" to indie films like (the excellent) Everything Everywhere All At Once. D&D's recent releases have included Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, which presents the eponymous hub-city in the Deep Ethereal Plane connecting many other nations and locations on the Prime Material. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space might not have given us a lot of "setting" information (the biggest failing, in my mind, of the product) but it provided a consistent way to allow DMs to run multiverse-spanning campaigns (especially when you consider that the Astral Plane contains portals to the Outer Planes). In 2023, what might be the final 5th Edition release before One D&D comes out is going to be a Planescape sourcebook (official title TBD) which is, of course, all about planar travel in the D&D multiverse.
As such, I think it's not that crazy to imagine that One D&D might actually make the broader multiverse a big part of its setting presentation.
Now, how would that work?
One of the benefits of having most of 5th Edition's adventures take place in the Forgotten Realms is that there's a certain degree of continuity. NPCs like Artus Cimber or Volothamp Geddarm can show up in multiple adventures. The Bryn Shander in Storm King's Thunder has the same characters as that in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.
Even though it's unlikely players take the same characters through those adventures (given how character advancement works) it's something that the players can latch onto.
In previous editions, of course, the stewards of D&D (whether they be TSR or Wizards of the Coast) published a lot more material - each setting got its own product line, rather than a single (or in the case of Ravenloft and Exandria, two) books per edition. Thus, a play group that loved Planescape could really focus on those books and get a number of published adventures for that plane-hopping stuff. Not only that, but it created room to flesh these places out considerably.
This year we'll be getting Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. But this is not a campaign sourcebook - it's an adventure book that happens to be set in the world of Krynn.
I do wonder, then, if we might visit many established D&D worlds in this manner - getting an adventure book that gives us a taste of what's going on there. Dragonlance will give us some new backgrounds and feats (playing into the new way that backgrounds work with One D&D, especially the feat they come with) and thus give us a little bit of material for campaign building outside of that adventure.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some adventure set in Dark Sun, or other popular D&D settings.
If they wanted to make the "default setting" be "the multiverse," they could potentially have multiverse travelers show up in these adventures.
I guess the question is how that would be received. Personally, while I have nothing against the Forgotten Realms, I was often frustrated being stuck there. I like the reality-warping strangeness of non-Prime-Material settings. But I know that there are plenty of people who want to preserve the "fundamentals" of D&D - fighting goblins in a pseudo-medieval setting looking for treasure.
There are, of course, plenty of settings to do that that aren't the Forgotten Realms. But maybe we're ready to embrace the weird and go for a multiversal primary setting.
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