> Well it sounds interesting, though I'm not entirely familiar with FR lore, so any suggestions where to look for that would be nice.

Forgotten realms has a relatively easy lore to get around given that it is made up of relatively small and isolated Kingdoms, so if you are going to make a Dwarf from Mirabar, you don't need to be informed about the goings on of Silverymoon.  I don't need players to be read up on any of the book/lore.  But if you want the wiki has a good bit of information: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page as far as broad-strokes are concerned and you can find a PDF of the campaign setting book from 3.5 with a google search, which has a good amount of detail but is slightly out of date.