D&D 5E Mike Mearls on Settings

Lidgar said:

Just curious, what 5 other setting did WotC/TSR produce outside of Greyhawk/FR? Mystera, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape are your top 5?

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Birthright, Eberron, Nentir Valley, Rokugan, Jakandor, Ghostwalk?

darjr said:

So? What is the difference between Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms in the feel of the game?

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..... Detail.
Lots of detail. Maybe too much of it.

Point to a spot/region on the FR map. They've printed a source book & a poster sized map for it. It started back in 1e with FR?1: The Moonshae Isles & it continued on until 4e arrived.
And that's not counting the who-knows-how many novels.

Now do the same with the GH map.
Almost anywhere you point to falls into one of these categories:
1) No detail even after 40 years.
2) About two (short) paragraphs at the best. Maybe a page in the 3e Living GH Gazeteer?
3) Some very local area (that isn't picked out on the world map) detailed (kinda) in a specific module.

Lidgar said:

Just curious, what 5 other setting did WotC/TSR produce outside of Greyhawk/FR? Mystera, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape are your top 5?

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Eberron would be on my list instead of Dragonlance.

But as for your particular question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_&_Dragons_campaign_settings

Looks like 20ish with 9 subsettings that piggyback off the bigger ones.

As an aside I thought Ghostwalk would have been interesting, but nobody I know actually played in it, despite a few of them (including me) owning the book

Mistwell said:

Birthright, Eberron, Nentir Valley, Rokugan, Jakandor, Ghostwalk?

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Hah, forgot about Jakandor. Have that sitting on the shelf but never used it.

Jakandor/Hollow World double pack for the win!

darjr said:

So? What is the difference between Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms in the feel of the game?

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You're much less likely to come across world-changing events involving a bunch of high level players in Greyhawk. There are some high level NPCs (like Mordenkainen, the OG wizard), but as a setting it's mostly about plundering ancient ruins and dungeons for loot more than any sort of ultimate fight involving great powers for good and evil ala Forgotten Realms.

It's a much grayer setting morally wise, it's also a bit more static. If you read the novels they come off much more Fritz Lieber or Robert E. Howard as I mentioned before then Tolkien (or super hero comic book style like much of the newer Forgotten Realms stuff).

I have to say something very controversial, but I do say it as an old-timer with much love for both Faerun and Oerth:

Greyhawk really isn't that different from FR.

Difference in level of detail? That's really not a big difference. Liches with armies? Both have 'em. Mad reclusive wizards? Check. Secret racial supremacist organizations? Check. Big waterfront town that dominates the setting and the region's trade? Check.

Much as I love Oerth's history, and its Leiber- and Howard-esque origins, I don't think you could draw a hard line between the two and show a huge self-evident difference.

Dragonlance would be in a different boat, though a slightly similar boat. At least we had the Cataclysm and the divine isolation, and the magic moons, and the LotR-esque elements, but still somewhat classic fantasy.

Dark Sun is an example of self-evidently different. The minute you're fighting with a bone sword back-to-back with your six-armed insect-man ally, against a tribe of cannibal halflings, while your party wizard is sucking the life out of the ground and giving you body aches in the process just to cast magic missile, you KNOW you ain't in Faerun anymore.

Eberron is another - golem-men detectives interacting on lightning trains with good-aligned blood-priests while solving a whodunnit before going home to his two-mile-tall Mega-City while his friend with the inherited magic tattoo cuts a trade deal with a medusa diplomat from the next-door monster nation, that also screams a different brand of fantasy.

Much as I'd like to see Greyhawk goodness, and find out if Iuz still has his nation, or see a mega-adventure dealing with the mystery of the Invoked Devastation and Rain of Colorless Fire, it doesn't scream "drastically different fantasy" from Forgotten Realms to me.

This might sound weird. But it's how I identify a difference.

Forgotten Realms feels like a smoke filled den full of lore and detail. The outside barely held at bay.

Greyhawk feels like a wide open grassy plain, the outside always pervasive, even in the big cities.

As someone new to D&D with this addition, I don’t get the appeal of updating old settings. (I admit this is most likely due to the fact that I am new to this addition.) The one thing that I believe 3PP has done better than anything is settings. You have Primeval Thule, you have the Midgard kickstarter, you have the Talislanta kickstarter, and many more 3PP settings, do you really need WOTC to provide older settings.

Or is this just more of you need a rules adjustment, or new classes that aren’t covered in the PHB. If it’s rules adjustments those are pretty easily made on the fly. Take Primeval Thule it is a low magic world so I would strike out clerics and paladins, and warlocks, wizards, sorcerers and bards would be prestige classes that you could not multiclass into until 5th level.

eayres33 said:

Or is this just more of you need a rules adjustment, or new classes that aren’t covered in the PHB.

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Yes. We need official* rules updates to 5e. Some people would like to see more adventures or products set in those worlds, but I think that is the lesser drive.


*Because despite the fact that I just bought that giant Best of DM's Guild bundle full of non-official products (darn their marketing!), official still matters for a lot of us.

I wouldn't mind them doing Greyhawk if they actually took the time to flesh the world out and give us loads of detail they we never got before.

Unfortunately the current D&D team is the group of people to actually do that. I would rather see settings that all have their own unique thing done.