D&D 4E D&D Fluff Wars: 4e vs 5e

[Sunseeker]

None of the D&D fluff ever really spoke to me. Either everything was too specific, seeming to be too closely tied to the actions some author-write-in-heroes or too distant. 4E often fell in the "too distant" category, but I never played it for the D&D-specific fluff.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Actually the most interesting parts of 4e's cosmology survived. Feywild? Check. Shadowfell? Check. Elemental Chaos? Check. The most interesting part that didn't make it is "Arcadia got invaded by demons", and that they can make that happen easily enough, although I am sure we will be inundated with "something actually happened on the outer planes, it messes up my homebrew" (as seen in the "Hey the demon lords actually did something" complaints from the Monster Manual and Volo's Guide) .

I did like the primal spirits and wish they got preserved as a druid/ranger thing.

Pre-4e eladrin vs. 4e eladrin: talk about a race to the bottom--super elves vs. super melodramatic elves. A 4e djinn made a better pre-4e eladrin then a pre-4e eladrin did.

4e angels did suffer from a little too much of "this is the angel version of X class", but previous edition's angels did the same except that X class was pretty much limited to clerics and paladins, so I will say that was a win for 4e (a book of Deities and Demigods with a bunch of templates for god-specific angel variants ["my Solar is different from your Solar"] would go a long way to improving that in 5e [and almost make up for the lack of celestials so far]).

I do have to laugh at anyone who thinks there is too much stuff in the outer planes in 5e, since almost all of that stuff was still there in 4e. Some of it was better (Hell and Archeron in particular, and the elemental chaos was better than the elemental planes and limbo, but since it is in the 5e's GW, I guess everyone wins). Let's take a look:

Mechanus: showed up around the time of Essentials (with a surprising backstory that I really liked)
Archeron: became Chernoggar, which I admit was an improvement
Hell: Still there
Gehenna: Just Tytherion by another name (although it does make sense that Tiamat was hanging out there)
The Grey Wastes: Pluton was basically the Wastes without the tourist trade of the Blood War
Carcini: Still there (just islands instead of a planet)
The Abyss: Still there. Hmmm--if demons were elementals, and we know elementals were in Dark Sun, does that mean demons were in Dark Sun?
Pandemonium: Still there
Limbo: doing the limbo in the Elemental Chaos
Ysgard: part of it moved to moved to Mt. Celestia with Kord (they needed to get those extra mountains from somewhere). The elementally parts fell into the Elemental Chaos.
Arborea: Split into Arvandor and Shom
Beastlands: Okay, lost that one.
Elysium: Well when Pelor shacked up with Erathis, I think they paved over Elysium to make Hestavar.
Bytopia: I am really surprised it didn't make into 4e, since the weird gravity when the two mountains met would have been neat with the 4e rules.
Celestia: Still there with 6 more mountains and 100% more Olympic games (because there wasn't enough evil to fight in 4e?)
Arcadia: as mentioned above, it got renamed and invaded (or maybe in the opposite order) by demons.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I quite like both, but if I had to choose, I guess I'd go for the "classic" AD&D branch of fluff, but overall it's very much on a case-by-case basis. My original entry point was neither, but rather Basic's version, which while similar to the AD&D line's version, differed in some fundamental ways.

But I've always taken a very toolbox approach to D&D, so my cosmology and fluff can vary wildly from campaign to campaign. For my 4e game I used the 4e baseline, but grafted what I missed from the old cosmology and fluff onto it on an ad-hoc basis. I did like a lot of the streamlining of the monster fluff in 4e and how their origins would often tie together in a logical way, but what I found that I missed the most was the metaphysical stuff, the pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo of how the universe ticked, so I brought a lot of that back, even if I gave the great wheel itself a pass.

For my current game, I'm using another blend of cosmologies, a fusion of sorts of concepts from Basic's, AD&D's, 4e and Marvel's and DC's cosmologies.

 

[JeffB]

I started in the late 1970s. As much as I love all the original fluff that came out those.early games and products that became "canon", After decades of it being rehashed over and over and over, 4e was a breath of much needed fresh air for me.

Having back all the vanilla fluff in 5e is pretty boring afaic. There are plenty of old materials that are far more nteresting and inspiring to reference when it comes to this sort of canon lore/fluff. But wizards is counting on this Story Story, Story.becoming their meal ticket since they know in the end, rules don't last and can be copied. The shared experience of samey-ness. yay.

 

[Bawylie]

I prefer the world axis to the great wheel. I always found the wheel incomprehensible and silly.

As far as the world axis goes, i like "Stranger Things" Upside Down as a representation of the shadowfell. And "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" Lost Hope as a good representation of the Feywild.

For adventure-writing reasons, I prefer points of light to every bit of faerun well mapped and filled-in. Even for highly populated or dense urban areas, I like one or two safe spaces as islands in a sea of dangers.


-Brad

 

[Igwilly]

For those who remember my days as a WotC forum member (cassi_Brazuca) (not that I expect that to happen) it's no surprise that I prefer 4e’s lore to the other editions. However, I do like many other settings which I “mine” to my campaign.
And honestly, talking about what was kept from 4e in 5e, I didn’t like it. The Feywild is actually 3.X Plane of Faerie, the Shadowfell is actually 3.X Plane of Shadow, and the Elemental Chaos is much more Planescape than 4e. Even in the list of Dawn War gods, they got all sort of alignments wrong – that is, many 4e gods belong to alignments other than those listed. It was so changed and so disconnected that I don’t see any reason to be there: it’s not a “thing from 4e” at all, and certainly didn’t appease my need for a 4e setting. It would be a better idea to just roll back the old Great Wheel alone and publish an “alternative” setting with the World Axis Cosmology. I don’t really understand this urge to merge every setting into one: some worlds are better being separate from the rest. And this new cosmology pretty much ruins any hope for PoL/Nerath, because they would – obviously – do one of those “edition cataclysms” and completely change the setting so it can fit into the “Multiverse”.
That’s not a nice time to be a 4e fan, that’s for sure

 

[QuietBrowser]

I think there are lots of changes. Lamia for instance - are they similar to sfinxes, or are they creepy swarms of beetles?

I might be uninformed here, but can't the entire list of changes be summarized simply to "they rolled back everything from 4e to 3e or even 2e"...?

That is - what lore elements of 4e has survived? What elements of 4e that were rolled back do you miss?

(Point is: we can't assume every reply replies to the same thing. We might have very different perceptions of what the 2e, 3e, or 4e fluff really was. Responding to a particular reply will be very hard unless we understand from where that poster is coming from)

That's a hard question to answer, because whilst there are surface things that remain the same (for example, the existence of the Feywild, Shadowfell and Elemental Chaos, gnolls being creations of Yeenoghu), under the surface, they're a lot different. I can't speak of any changes to the Feywild or Shadowfell off the top of my head, but the Elemental Chaos is now more of a third "intermediary" plane - like the Astral or Ethereal Planes back in the classic Great Wheel, it's basically a barrier between the Elemental Planes and the land beyond, plus with lore tweaked so that the Elemental Planes as a whole functions more akin to the "Pillars of Creation" in Exalted. Likewise, though gnolls in 5e share the same base roots as 4e's gnolls, they have none of the versatility in characterization that 4e's "Playing Gnolls" presented us with.

I will thank you for pointing out the Lamia switch-over, though, because that's one of the few things I prefer about 5e to 4e. I mean, the skin-wearing carnivorous beetle-swarms of 4e were an awesomely creepy monster, but the weirdly sexy beast-taurette monster is more what I associate with Lamias. I just wish they'd gone a step above and either brought back the Lamia Noble or else made all Lamias snake-taurs, like they are in every non-D&D presentation of them.

 

[Sunseeker]

I will thank you for pointing out the Lamia switch-over, though, because that's one of the few things I prefer about 5e to 4e. I mean, the skin-wearing carnivorous beetle-swarms of 4e were an awesomely creepy monster, but the weirdly sexy beast-taurette monster is more what I associate with Lamias. I just wish they'd gone a step above and either brought back the Lamia Noble or else made all Lamias snake-taurs, like they are in every non-D&D presentation of them.

D&D isn't wholly incorrect in it's presentation of the Lamia, since the term was applied to both snake-noids and weirdly-sexy-beast-taurs. Some presentations of Lamia actually present them closer to the D&D vision of the Naga, while some presentations of Naga put them closer to the sexy-human-on-a-snakebutt.

Really I would just be happy if someone realized that pulling from mythology brings a lot of baggage and renamed them completely. I mean, someone made up the name "Illithid" and it stuck. Surely we can rename snakes-with-human-heads, snakes-with-sexy-ladies-on-top, cats-with-sexy-ladies-on-top to something suitably fantasy sounding (and also proprietary!) without too much tadoo.

 

[Xeviat]

I really like the 4E fluff. My group mostly hates the 4E mechanics, but I wonder how much 4E fluff I could sneak on them because they never really gave it a chance.


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[thanson02]

I really like the 4E fluff. My group mostly hates the 4E mechanics, but I wonder how much 4E fluff I could sneak on them because they never really gave it a chance.


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The player side can get clunky, no lie. The DM mechanics are fairly flexible though and I thought it flowed into the fluff fairly well.

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