One of the things that I've sometimes thought that WotC should do, given the mess that they made of the setting in 4e, would be to reboot FR as an "Ultimates" version - redesign the setting from the ground up, but incorporate all the best ideas from the long history of the setting while discarding the dross (and, conveniently, any 'questionable' material like the cultural appropriation of The Horde or Maxtica).
They won't do that, but over the Christmas break I was pondering whether it might be worth digging out my old settings of yore, and rebuilding my ancient homebrew, Terafa, using that same "Ultimates" principle. Because there's a lot of good stuff there, but there's also a lot of dross, and much of it has many of the same problems as FR (and for much the same reason). And, indeed, one of the issues is that much of the best stuff is spread out across the long timeline of the setting, meaning that it can't ever really be used in a game - it's just a bunch of stories that PCs might perhaps hear on their travels, but who really cares about someone else's adventures?
That also does give the opportunity to break away from some of the decisions that seemed a good idea at the time, but which now don't seem so good - and it also allows an opportunity to redraw the various maps... (which a simple revision wouldn't really allow)
On the other hand, it would be a fairly significant writing project for a game setting I'm unlikely ever to use again. And it would begin with a process of revisiting lots of cringe-inducing handwritten notes I wrote in my teens.... (on the other other hand, that would give me incentive to dig out those notes, scan the ones I actually want to keep, and discard the rest. That alone almost makes the project worth doing.)
How that ties in with other world-building notions I've had in the past few years, some of which are incompatible with some of the best aspects of the old setting(s), I'm not entirely sure. I guess we'll see...
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