Today's
Dragon Talk podcast interview with Kate Welch, lead designer of Ghosts of Saltmarsh, offered a few more nuggets about this upcoming release. I pre-ordered GoS so I'm eager for any specifics about it. Some of this may be common knowledge, but here are some highlights that were new information for me.
Kobold Press was responsible for updating the old adventures to 5e.
The port city of Saltmarsh gets its own chapter. Best exchange of the podcast: "So what can you tell me about the town of Saltmarsh? ...Well, Saltmarsh is a pretty s#!tty place." There are different crime families and enterprises that are vying for control over Saltmarsh as well as law-abiding sailors. There will be "plenty of colorful new NPC's."
There will be stat blocks for ships, which we already got in the UA Of Ships and the Sea, and also more robust rules for underwater adventures than are found in the DMG.
For me, the most interesting part of the interview was about Greyhawk. If you are a fan of Greyhawk, and were hoping that GoS was a sign that WotC will be devoting a future release to exploring this legacy setting, Kate Welch's cavalier attitude about Greyhawk will break your heart. If her comments reflect the overall philosophy of the D&D team (aside from Mike Mearls) then we won't be seeing any Greyhawk updates ever.
Kate Welch: I saw a little bit of sadness in the community that it isn't a pure Greyhawk book, ha ha, and I know that Greyhawk has a ton of fans and a lot of fondness and nostalgia. I will say that Saltmarsh originally was a town from Greyhawk and we have extricated it from that setting and made it agnostic so you can put it in whatever setting. However, we have lots of little nods in there still to fans of Greyhawk who are excited about aspects of it. I think Tharizdun is a Greyhawk deity that we've got, and there is an adventure that has to do with him, so if you want to set this in Greyhawk this will be a wonderful time for you to do that and please feel free. But since so many people in 5e have been setting their campaigns in the Forgotten Realms, we didn't want them to feel that, "this is a book that is not useful for me"...
Until we actually do a robust Greyhawk setting book which - who knows - then it just makes more sense [to have agnostic settings] because like I said there is just so much FR campaigning that's going on in 5e that we want to make sure that everybody feels like they have stuff that is exciting to them in these books...
But I honestly don't know much about Greyhawk either...
It's easy to find people who are running in those vintage settings, so if it's something that's exciting to you those resources are definitely available. I don't know how much Greyhawk material is on the DMsGuild but that's probably where I would start looking if I wanted to find Fifth Edition old Greyhawk stuff, like if the Saltmarsh just wets your palette and you want to know more about that setting then you can definitely get out there and find stuff.
Greg Tito: You don't need to go in with a lot of lore or setting knowledge to enjoy D&D. I think there is a portion of the audience who enjoys that sort of stuff, and I am one of those people, but at the table it is not really necessary. I think the philosophy for 5e has been that from the get go, it's been like here's the setting of Forgotten Realms but you can do it anywhere.
Kate: That's partially because we wanted 5e to be more new-player friendly, and also that having a barrier to playing D&D, and that barrier being you have to know a lot about the history and the lore, that's a gate. That's not something that a lot of people have time for or even interest in, so the idea of gating anything behind this sort of vintage knowledge, certainly knowledge that I don't have, so if that had been a requirement of this job I definitely wouldn't have been sitting here. I did research it. I researched everything. The Forgotten Realms is just the most popular setting, and that's all there is to it.
