D&D 5E Mike Mearls on Settings

[pukunui]

I'd rather have Dark Sun and/or Nentir Vale updated. I struggle to take Greyhawk seriously with all its goofy names ("My PC's from Yeomanry. Where's yours from?" "The Duchy of Geoff!" "Oh yeah? Well, mine's from Verbobonc! Beat that!").

 

[Hussar]

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

A few others have taken a stab at this, but, if you don't mind, I'd like to chip in my 2 cents.

The biggest difference, for me, between FR and Greyhawk is the difference between high fantasy and sword and sorcery fantasy. In high fantasy, you get epic stories, cast of thousands, with mass armies moving back and forth across the landscape. S&S is more local. It's not about these big, massive plots, but, rather, focused on one city, one location (although, like in Conan, that location can obviously change between stories) and generally the actions of a small group of people who aren't the movers and shakers of the setting.

So, you get adventures like GDQ in Greyhawk. A smallish kingdom is threatened by giants. A group of adventurers gets shanghaied to deal with the giants. If the adventurers fail, well, at worst a single kingdom gets stomped by giants. Even the Drow modules deal with a single (insanely nasty) city of Drow for the most part. And, again, the price of failure doesn't really impact the larger setting.

Compare that to the AP's we've gotten for Forgotten Realms. The Tiamat modules are about summoning a GOD to the Realms who's going to lay waste to vast swaths of the Realms if successful. Out of the Abyss summons Demon Princes into the Realms, destroys vast swaths of the Underdark, and, if the PC's fail, this carries huge consequences for the setting as a whole.

Where Greyhawk went south is when they ignored that difference and brought in the Greyhawk wars. They added High Fantasy to a setting that didn't need or (in my case anyway) want it. Vast undead armies battling across the setting and the Fate of the World hanging in the balance. That's NOT what S&S fiction is about. At least, not very often .

To me, a Greyhawk build for 5e would focus on those core concepts:

• Adventures are local
• Adventurers are rare
• The higher ups of the setting, the big wizards, the generals, the kings, are background and backdrops (and possibly occasionally victims )
• Weird, weird, weird.
• Morality isn't really a thing. The heroes aren't doing it for God and Country. They're doing it because they want something for themselves.

A good example of how you can make a change towards S&S fiction in D&D is from Primeval Thule. In Thule, clerics gain access to their magic by training through the clergy, but, after they gain the ability to cast spells, the gods have nothing to do with them. They're essentially just another kind of wizard with better PR and generally more organization. That, right there, helps with moral ambiguity. That cleric of Pelor might very well be a chaotic evil cultist who's using his position to sacrifice souls to Demogorgon all the while still having access to everything a Pelorite cleric can do. :evil grin:

 

[Ancalagon]

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.

I must concur. It's like two pizzas and with the same list of ingredients. The two pizzas may end up tasting quite different - different king of cheese, sauce, pepperoni etc... but at a glance, they are very similar. And even if they are quite different pizzas... they still both are pizzas.

That's the situation to me here. FR and Greyhawk are quite different, buuuuut it's not easy to say why.

 

[schnee]

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.

Well, this is the 'bring everyone back to the table' version, so now that they have a solid series of adventures that call back to the big themes in D&D history, (i.e. Out of the Abyss is a remix of Descent into the Depths of the Earth, but in reverse!), they're moving on to other things that feel like big gaps in the D&D mythology that would be good to have represented in the 'one edition to unite them all'.

I heard Curse of Strahd was good. (I haven't played it yet.) That proved people wanted Ravenloft. So, Greyhawk? Planescape? Dark Sun? Eberron? We'll see how 'off the beaten path' they go.

 

[CapnZapp]

He says that he doesn't want to get into a situation where anyone has to ask, "what's the difference between the Realms and Greyhawk?" Instead, it's self-evident. He says that he sees it as an interesting design challenge: to take the things that makes a setting distinct and putting them front and center, but without having people who love the setting feeling like its been changed too much.

Then he will ruin it.

Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms ARE extremely similar to anyone except perhaps people like us, hardcore fans. (If you can't accept that, then you are definitely one of us )

His "interesting design challenge" is likely to FUBAR it all. Contrast a lead designer who accepts Greyhawk for what it is, perhaps drops a UA for specific setting support, but generally is at peace with the fact that of all the settings Greyhawk is perhaps the least different setting to the one they're using right now.

We should run a picture contest for non-nerds, where we show classic heroes and ask from which setting they belong. Guess if helpful hints like "more like Burger King than McDonalds", "less of a melting pot", "more old school feel", "slightly more grit, slightly less magic", "fewer world-shaking events" will work (all taken from this very thread).

Compared to something like "cannibal halfling in fantasy mad max" (=Dark Sun), that is. THERE you have something to leverage as difference. Publish Dark Sun instead, punk it up, remove the training wheels and let all the carebears die of thirst. I'm in!

 

[Aldarc]

Compare that to the AP's we've gotten for Forgotten Realms. The Tiamat modules are about summoning a GOD to the Realms who's going to lay waste to vast swaths of the Realms if successful. Out of the Abyss summons Demon Princes into the Realms, destroys vast swaths of the Underdark, and, if the PC's fail, this carries huge consequences for the setting as a whole.

Yeah, but it's not as if Greyhawk doesn't have its share of that, such as the potential return of Tharizdun in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

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.
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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.

I concur with your sentiment here. The differences between the two settings are much subtler which makes for a more challenging sell. It doesn't help matters any when a number of "classic Greyhawk adventures" have been ported over to 5e in the most recent adventures collection. Furthermore, selling the generic distinction between Forgotten Realms as "Epic High Fantasy" and Greyhawk as "Sword & Sorcery" only puts Greyhawk into an additional pickle: it's not alone in that niche. Dark Sun, for example, is unquestionably Sword & Sorcery, albeit of the post-apocalyptic fantasy flavoring. It has evil sorcerer-kings, hostile cities surrounded by deadly environments, corruption, moral ambiguity, selfish heroes, and almost all the hallmarks of the S&S genre. Then we also already have Primeval Thule. It is not D&D official, but it is a prominent 3pp setting adapted to 5e that also occupies the Sword & Sorcery niche, and one that evokes the more familiar Conan-esque Sword & Sorcery niche. It may be unfortunate, but since people are not really reading Leiber (and much of that era's S&S), it will likely be more difficult to appeal to Leiber as a clear aesthetic.

That said, I would like to see a Greyhawk supplement and an adventure or two.

 

[pukunui]

A good example of how you can make a change towards S&S fiction in D&D is from Primeval Thule. In Thule, clerics gain access to their magic by training through the clergy, but, after they gain the ability to cast spells, the gods have nothing to do with them. They're essentially just another kind of wizard with better PR and generally more organization. That, right there, helps with moral ambiguity. That cleric of Pelor might very well be a chaotic evil cultist who's using his position to sacrifice souls to Demogorgon all the while still having access to everything a Pelorite cleric can do. :evil grin:

Eberron has this too, though. A cleric gets its power from its faith. The gods might no even be real, and their servants don't have to be of the same alignment and so on.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, but it's not as if Greyhawk doesn't have its share of that, such as the potential return of Tharizdun in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?540556-Mike-Mearls-on-Settings/page3#ixzz4eDqcfu2F

But, compare the two though. Yes, it's possible for Tharizudun to return, but, there isn't really a timeline for it. It's not like the PC's are going through ToEE to stop a rite and are on the clock. It's more, "This is a Temple of Elemental Evil". They'd like to bring Tharizudun through, but, that's not particularly even an option presented in the modules. At least, not the 1e or the 3e Return module. Later adventures, I don't know. I haven't read them.

Another good comparison is the two premier Arch Mages of the setting. Elminister is a HUGE figure in the setting. He hobnobs with gods. Virtually every single major event in FR has his fingerprints on it. Compare to Modenkainen. What has Mord actually done? He doesn't talk to gods. He doesn't play around with massive, setting changing events. He's just kinda there. Inscrutable. Very powerful, to be sure, but, hardly playing in the same league as Elminister.

 

[Shasarak]

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

Nothing much.

 

[JeffB]

If you consider the GH wars and the Mona reboot for 3e, yeah the differences are not as cut and dried between FR and GH.

If you consider Gary's GH as published prior to his ouster, then the differences are significant. GH is completely different in it's implementation of those "shared ingredients". FR (post ToT) is like RAGU brand jarred sauce. GH is like homemade.

The Wars are a big turning point to introduce novels and metaplots. And while TSR screwed the pooch, they did give us probably the actual best core setting material for GH: From the Ashes is an amazing piece of GAMING work. Not boring history text of later works, and minimalism of previous. It is well written with a massive amount of useful at your table information on the setting. Not like the typical wannabe novelists that were employed for FR "gaming" books.

Carl Sargent unfortunately got saddled with the FRism of Oerth and made the best of it. Had it been for any other setting, people would have far more receptive of it.

All that said, I am not confident that WOTC, especially if Perkins is involved, could do GH justice. As a old Grog, even I say, time to get off the pot and push forward with something new. WOTC is becoming the K-Tel records* of the gaming industry


*For the kids who did not grow up in the 70s or early very 80s, K-Tel produced compilation albums of previously released "hit music" and sold via mail order. Oldies, Disco, Love songs of the 70s, blah blah.