На что похожа жизнь в Королевствах? - So what’s it like, living in the Realms?

The flippant answer is “More exciting than you would like.” Given the prevalence of wars, casual daily violence, and widespread natural or magical disasters, it’s hard to see things otherwise—yet Faerunians do. Unless hardship or outright di¬saster lands in their laps, they tend to regard such unpleasantness as happening to “outlanders, far away,” often as a result of crazed or evil rulers, bad mistakes, and “the will of the gods.”
Deities are paramount in Faerunian life. Every¬body believes in all the gods and worships every god (even if only in token “Please don’t frown upon me in the days ahead” venerations). The existence, power, and influence of the divine are unques¬tioned by all sane beings, so no god ever need be taken strictly on faith. Specific directives given by mortal clergy might be taken on faith—or more often, questioned or reinterpreted—but everyone knows the gods are real.
Atheists and agnostics are rare indeed, yet organized religion doesn’t dominate daily life be¬cause ordinary folk, and not just priests, know that divine aims, deeds, utterances, and desires are complex, confused, and sometimes contradic¬tory. The wants of one god necessarily conflict 
with another (Talos of storms and destruction versus Lathander of creation and mortals can never perfectly understand what the gods are up to. Moreover, it’s understood that deities are falli¬ble and can’t govern the future, though they work to correctly foresee and influence it.
As a result, most mortal lives are balanced be-tween daily needs and obligations, personal desires (“I want my own farm, someday”), and the endless great game (as Elminster once described it) of try¬ing to advance the influence and aims of this deity and thwart or lessen the influence and aims of that one, so as to tug the Realms closer to what you per¬sonally want it to be. There are less noble aims.
RACIAL VIEWPOINTS
Humans numerically and culturally dominate the civilized surface Realms. Most humans hate and fear creatures they deem monsters, such as beholders, illithids, yuan-ti, drow, and goblinkin. “Goblinkin” refers to hobgoblins, ores, goblins, and their lookalikes; most humans neither know nor care about actual species differences. In the words of the long-ago King Roreld of Athalantar, “If it looks like an ore, it’s an ore.” Many humans mistrust half-ores and all elves, and a few mis¬trust all nonhumans, but in Faerun, most humans grew up dwelling or trading with elves, half-elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes, and so accept them as fellow citizens.
The folk of the Dales have typical backland human attitudes, hating and fearing half-ores be¬cause they can’t distinguish them from the ore mercenaries used so often by Zhentil Keep in Daggerdale. Some also mistake half-ores for the beast-men (ogres) of Thar, having never seen real ogres (and lived to tell the tale), and will reach for the nearest weapon.
Almost all humans, elves, and dwarves in the Realms mistrust small, non-familial groups of ores (four or fewer), and will be openly hostile to larger groups. As an old upcountry saying plainly states: “Ores is trouble.” (Or, in full: “Ores is al¬ways trouble.”)
Ores are born fighters, which just keep coming back for more. (And, the smaller inner voices of most non-ores add silently, ores will kill you and then eat you. Some of them won’t even wait until you’re dead!)

Individual, urban-dwelling (in predominantly human trading cities) halfling and gnome fami¬lies gain acceptance by making themselves useful in the eyes of other citizens. They are the chief source of small, clever inventions (intricate dou¬ble locks, fold-down doorstops, removable boot scrapers that double as tools for other purposes, heat-reflecting stove hoods and fans whose blades are turned by the heat of cooking fires, and so on). They do the laundry, fix small everyday ob¬jects, make speedy deliveries, and seek and find what paying humans are missing (like a window catch of this precise style to replace yon broken one, or a dagger to exactly match this rapier, or an identical rug to this one that must be hastily gotten rid of—only one without a large bloodstain right in the center of it, please).
Urban-dwelling gnomes in the Realms usually seek to be the quiet collectors and refiners of good ideas from all cultures, keep low profiles, and make good livings trading useful items. Gnomes make the majority (and the best) of spectacles, magnifying glasses, spyglasses, and other devices involving glass lenses. Gnomes have perfected intricate nonmagical locks and hinges, and mas¬tered large-scale paper-making and bookbinding. They are experts on waterproof garments, por¬table containers for scrolls, and flat paper, and are building bigger and better looms for everyday cloth. Many gnomes are working to perfect ever thinner and more flexible wire, and they experi¬ment with fashioning everyday items from it.
This “quietly, quietly” manner has led gnomes to being the truly forgotten folk of the Realms, but also tends to make almost everyone view them as harmless, helpful, and friendly.
Across Faerun, “everyone knows” that elves flit from one delight to the next diversion, and they crave and master the most beautiful music, danc¬ing, and visual arts linked to flowing, growing life. It is likewise commonly held that dwarves are stolid, stubborn hard workers, and master forg¬ers, who have unequaled skill in working stone and metal, creating new alloys, and deep, swift mining.
Of course, as everyone in the Realms who re¬ally thinks about such things knows, all of these widely known views are stereotypes and gener¬alizations, with thousands upon thousands of exceptions. 
Whats in a Name?
Many racial attitudes are revealed in widely used terms for the intelligent races of the Realms. In the entries that follow, races mentioned in parentheses indicate those that use the term directly preceding it. If no race is mentioned, the term is in general use (certainly among surface-dwelling humans and merchant folk of all races). There’s little political correctness in the Realms beyond the strictures of polite society in a city or a well-ordered realm.
Drow: The Dark Elves, the Dark Ones, the Accursed (by other elves).
Dwarves: The Stout Folk, anvil-hammerers.
Elves: The Fair Folk, the People (by elves).
Gnomes: The Quiet Folk.
Halflings: The Quick Folk, the Sly Folk (by humans and dwarves).
Humans: The manyhanded (by halflings and elves, in reference to the Manyhanded Curse, an old elven insult), Brittle Bones (by ores), oroosh (by treants, using their term for “never-stopping talkers”), hurbryn (by brownies, halflings, korred, and satyrs, using their term for “heavy-footed”).

Korred: The Dancing Folk.
Ogres: Beast-men.
Ores: The Mighty (by ores), slaugh (by elves; this literally translates as “mud-wallowing-dogs,” and is creeping into the speech of half-elves, dry¬ads, and other forest-dwelling folk).
Satyrs: The Free Folk.
Svirfneblin (deep gnomes): The Deep Folk.
All Together Now . . .
The four most widely encountered collective terms are these:
Meat: All intelligent prey (by ores).
The Proud Peoples: Dwarves and elves col-lectively (by humans).
Ugrukh: Wounded, defeated, slaves, and those too weak to defend themselves or be worthy of atten¬tion (by ores, using their term for “broken bones”). Worms: Lesser goblinkin (by ores).
The drow and certain elder sun and moon elven nobility (House Starym, for instance) are haughty esthetes who view dwarves as their true foes; gnomes as degenerate dwarves; and humans,
halflings, ores, and crossbreeds as children so far beneath elves in their intelligence and cul¬tural development that they are dismissed as little better than animals able to follow instructions. This makes those latter races ideal—in their eyes— slaves who can be collected, bred for traits, experimented upon with herbs, poisons, magic, and surgeries, and—for entertainment and bet¬ting purposes—hunted or used in races, fights, and other sporting contests.