The New D&D Adventure Storyline Will Be Announced On June 2nd-3rd

epithet · May 21, 2017

doctorbadwolf said:
...
Greyhawk (but only because Mearls loves it for some unfathomable reason)
...
I don't see any value in updating Greyhawk, personally, but if it has to be there, fine. ...

I can't speak for Mike, but I'll tell you what makes Greyhawk a more interesting setting to me. Gary Gygax did not approach the setting from the mindset of a fantasy author, or a role-playing game designer. He built it from the perspective of a wargamer, and someone who had studied the history of the real world through the lens of the battles, incursions, generations-spanning wars, revolutions, insurrections, and conquests that shaped it. When he created Oerth, he started with a handful of different human tribes with different gods and different philosophies, then moved them forward through clashes and commingling to create a set of political and cultural subdivisions which seem organic and relatable. Yeah, it is a fantasy world where powerful wizards and demon princes pull the strings, but for all that it still has a certain verisimilitude that the Forgotten Realms lacks. I think that Eberron shares many of those qualities, since Keith Baker put a lot of work into crafting a coherent vision of the long and tortured history that shaped the world before the players got to it, so all the parts fit together. For that matter, even Dark Sun and the Points of Light setting had enough of a backstory to provide context and structure to those settings.

The Forgotten Realms, though, is different.

Pauper said:
...if you know your Realms background, then you know that the Realms grew up as your typical 'kitchen sink' campaign setting, almost as if a young boy simply added things to his campaign world as he discovered them in school. "Ooh, let's have an area with a feudal king and aristocracy thing going on. Ooh, the Mongols are cool -- let's put a place for them in here! Whoa, dinosaurs!" And so forth. Sometimes deities from other cultures would just wander in and join the main pantheon, and sometimes there would be a whole new part of the world just so a pantheon could be added to the world.
...

It's not "almost as if"... Ed Greenwood created the Forgotten Realms as a boy, and hasn't ever stopped adding stuff he thought was cool to it. Big stuff, like gods and world-shattering cataclysms, and stuff gets folded into the setting and then retconned into having been there all along even if it doesn't make any sense. This plasticity is a feature, not a bug--it allows several authors to write FR novels at the same time period that computer RPGs develop, and the characters all cross over and the world is almost destroyed 10 times, but then everything goes back to "normal" and the next story lines are started. That leaves a world so disjointed that it is natural for any and every part of it to be absolutely multiracial, multicultural, totally inclusive and supportive of whatever your fantasy trope happens to be. Pretty much any setting lets you be a ninja, a pirate, a knight, a tribal shaman, or a fairy princess. The Forgotten Realms provides a setting where no-one thinks it's strange of all of those to be in the same adventuring party, sitting at the table in a tavern, tea house, opium den, or flying ship. Sticking an adventure path in the Forgotten Realms is the path of no resistance, it just doesn't make any damn sense... because it doesn't have to.

There's no one reason why WotC defaults to the Realms. Part of it is that it's easy, because of the Realms' plasticity. Part of it is that Ed Greenwood is still providing support. Part of it is the cross-marketing of games, books, and related merchandise. But I think part of the reason is also a reverence for the other settings. From the Ashes wasn't well received, and I've heard that the 4e update to Dark Sun was viewed much the same way. While you can't really do anything to hurt the Realms (really, guys? A "Spellplague?" Whatever, reset...) that isn't true of Greyhawk, Eberron, or Athas.

I'm all for a book of mechanics that would make it easier to convert new material and update older material for these settings, but I would be very skeptical of a setting book that would update the setting narrative. I think it could definitely be done well, but it wouldn't be easy.

Jester David · May 21, 2017

Mercule said:
1) There just isn't a market for published adventures, regardless of what setting they're in. If this is the case, then why bother with any setting, at all? Just throw them into some random, undefined march, like was often done in 1E.

The size of the adventures is likely the deciding factor.

When you're doing a small dungeon crawl or single encounter area with little story - a 32-page story - you don't need much setting. But when you're doing a 265-page adventure - one eight times the size - you need a little more setting. You can do one or two megadungeons lacking any world or story, but after that you need to do something different.

Having to invent slows things down. You have to create those old empires that left ruins or generate nations and regions.
Plus, you eventually just end up making a new setting. Nentir Vale and Mystara both started as generic setting, placeholders for the DM. Making it up just means another setting the fan base will want a setting book for.

Mercule said:
2) There's a market for the adventures, but enough folks find the Realms unacceptable that they're willing to customize them to use elsewhere. Having attempted conversion of a couple of the adventures (PotA successfully, HotDQ, not so much), this is not a trivial undertaking and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. It's not necessarily an ordeal, but it's still a pretty strong statement.

I think that not everyone who buys the adventures end up running then. Some people just buy them to read, or for ideas. The percentage of gamers who buy the adventures is likely higher than the percentage running in the Realms.

Mercule said:
3) The market for published settings is pretty small and it doesn't so much matter which setting as it does how much official support there is for it. WotC could just as easily have made Greyhawk the default setting for 5E and the published adventures would have sold just as well. The Realms is sort of the Kim Kardashian of D&D worlds: it's the most played because it's the most played.

I do think the market is small. But the market for all D&D/ RPG products is pretty small. They do seem to be selling though...

It's likely that most adventures would sell well regardless of setting. Probably. But the more a setting differs from the baseline expectations the harder it might be to sell. The more pages of the adventure you might need to devote to explaining the setting and world.
You mention how hard it is to make a generic adventure like one in the Realms fit your world. Now imagine if that's an Eberron adventure with lightning rail travel and sky ships climaxing in a battle across the rooftops of Sharn. Or Dark Sun. That's going to make it harder to use.

Mercule said:
The real question, in my mind, is how much of the first group would switch loyalties to another setting vs. how many fans of other settings would step in to fill the gap. If, say, half of group #1 would switch (grudgingly or otherwise) to Eberron (just to be consistent with my example), then that means that the size of the dedicated, "from my cold, dead heads" fanbase for the Realms is roughly the same as for any other setting -- somewhere under 5% of the total player base.

The idea that the default setting has little-to-no impact on the overall success of the D&D game just smells right. I say the Realms has had a few good years as the preeminent D&D setting. Give the crown to another one for another 2-3 years.

I imagine fans of the Realms are twice as nunmerous as other settings. But still probably less than 5%.

I expect they will do other settings eventually. After all, Tales from the Yawning Portal is 'set' on other worlds and Curse of Strahd is in Ravenloft. Really, 2 out of the 6 have been non-FR.
But this is even assuming they'll stick with two storyline adventures each year. They might go down to one.

Mercule said:

Of all the alternate settings, if none see real first-party support, my hope is that they somehow open up Eberron so that Keith Baker can do more work on it. That could be DMs Guild, another license (Goodman, etc.), or whatever. Keith has been participating in an Eberron podcast for the past few months and clearly still has a love for the setting.

Click to expand...

I expect they'll open up another setting on the Guild soon enough.

I doubt they'll license out settings again. It becomes a problematic rights issue if they decide to do a movie or novels. They did Dragonlance and Ravenloft in 3e, which were somewhat successful as 3rd Party products. But it's tricky as now the fans have no idea if the events and details of those products is "canon" or not.

There's also the question of whether or not companies would license anymore. Kobold Press has their own fantasy world (Midgard), as does Green Ronin (Freeport, plus the forthcoming Critical Role book). They don't gain much by taking a WotC world.
I'm not certain I'd want a licensed Goodman Games campaign setting. I don't recall them doing colour art ever. It would also likely be Kickstarter dependent.

bmfrosty · May 21, 2017

Shasarak said:
Yes, what if that happens? Will Forgotten Realms still be the "least worst selling" campaign setting (as Jester puts it)?

Or will Goodman have achieved something categorically worse then digging a hole, filling it with money and then burning it?

The point is, if people are really burning for updated campaign settings, does it really matter who does the work as long as they're doing a good job, and it gets the type of distribution it needs for those who want that sort of thing to be able to get it?

gyor · May 21, 2017

epithet said:
I can't speak for Mike, but I'll tell you what makes Greyhawk a more interesting setting to me. Gary Gygax did not approach the setting from the mindset of a fantasy author, or a role-playing game designer. He built it from the perspective of a wargamer, and someone who had studied the history of the real world through the lens of the battles, incursions, generations-spanning wars, revolutions, insurrections, and conquests that shaped it. When he created Oerth, he started with a handful of different human tribes with different gods and different philosophies, then moved them forward through clashes and commingling to create a set of political and cultural subdivisions which seem organic and relatable. Yeah, it is a fantasy world where powerful wizards and demon princes pull the strings, but for all that it still has a certain verisimilitude that the Forgotten Realms lacks. I think that Eberron shares many of those qualities, since Keith Baker put a lot of work into crafting a coherent vision of the long and tortured history that shaped the world before the players got to it, so all the parts fit together. For that matter, even Dark Sun and the Points of Light setting had enough of a backstory to provide context and structure to those settings.

The Forgotten Realms, though, is different.

It's not "almost as if"... Ed Greenwood created the Forgotten Realms as a boy, and hasn't ever stopped adding stuff he thought was cool to it. Big stuff, like gods and world-shattering cataclysms, and stuff gets folded into the setting and then retconned into having been there all along even if it doesn't make any sense. This plasticity is a feature, not a bug--it allows several authors to write FR novels at the same time period that computer RPGs develop, and the characters all cross over and the world is almost destroyed 10 times, but then everything goes back to "normal" and the next story lines are started. That leaves a world so disjointed that it is natural for any and every part of it to be absolutely multiracial, multicultural, totally inclusive and supportive of whatever your fantasy trope happens to be. Pretty much any setting lets you be a ninja, a pirate, a knight, a tribal shaman, or a fairy princess. The Forgotten Realms provides a setting where no-one thinks it's strange of all of those to be in the same adventuring party, sitting at the table in a tavern, tea house, opium den, or flying ship. Sticking an adventure path in the Forgotten Realms is the path of no resistance, it just doesn't make any damn sense... because it doesn't have to.

There's no one reason why WotC defaults to the Realms. Part of it is that it's easy, because of the Realms' plasticity. Part of it is that Ed Greenwood is still providing support. Part of it is the cross-marketing of games, books, and related merchandise. But I think part of the reason is also a reverence for the other settings. From the Ashes wasn't well received, and I've heard that the 4e update to Dark Sun was viewed much the same way. While you can't really do anything to hurt the Realms (really, guys? A "Spellplague?" Whatever, reset...) that isn't true of Greyhawk, Eberron, or Athas.

I'm all for a book of mechanics that would make it easier to convert new material and update older material for these settings, but I would be very skeptical of a setting book that would update the setting narrative. I think it could definitely be done well, but it wouldn't be easy.

Forgotten Realms is more complex then that. Also not all of the realms developed from Ed Greenwood's original vision. Mulhorand and Unther, the Moonshaes (sort of), Kara Tur, Zakahara, the Cold Lands, none of these were Ed Greenwood's idea.

The catalyms make sense, it's almost certain to occur when you have frequent divine interventions and a lot of magic in a setting.

The Gods are both ultra powerful individuals that actively use their powers to shape events, but they are also the essence of Platonic ideas, so that their interplay shapes the Forgotten Realms physics, Sharess isn't just the Goddess of Cats, she's the Platonic ideal of cats as well as this divine being.

And there are major racial groups like in grey whose migration and interaction shaped the realms. The Imaskari kidnapped the Mulan's ancestors, who interbreed with the Imaskari, becoming the Mulan, who then migrated to healthier land, to found Mulhorand and Unther, who then expanded into Thay and future Chessenta which eventually gained their independence. They also interbreed with other regions such as Mulgohm.

Mulan and Calishites tend to respect each other culturally in a way they don't with most other cultures.

The effects of major magic usage and divine acts causes so much chaos that human and other races migrate often so that creates a more tolerant society. Also a profusion of sex gods (Sune, Shares, Llirra, Isis, Ishtar, Lovitar, Henali Celani, Inanna, and so on) have encouraged a certain tolerance for diverse sexual orinentions compared to a world with more sexually repressed gods.

It's a result of Gods and Godlike beings being allowed to run amok throughout the cosmos beyond what even AO can easily control.

It's a living setting, unlike Eberron which really doesn't change much between editions, which is largely a static setting.

So in practice the Forgotten Realms is a setting of settings that are interlinked.

You have the Sword Coast which WotC is basically treating as a setting, the lands of intrigue (Calimshan, Tethyr, Amn) which act as their own setting, the Old Empires (Mulhorand, Unther, and Chessenta and arguably Tymanther as well now), the Cold Lands, Chult, Kara Tur, Moonshaes, Zakhara, Abier, and so on. Each is complex enough to be it's own setting.

The Unapproachable East is basically the Conan setting for example, although I'd include Thay as both unapproachable East and a part of the Old Empires.

But it's more then simply a kitchen sink setting as none of it's just random, it all fits into the broader theme, the Forgotten Realms (hence the name).

doctorbadwolf · May 21, 2017

Jester David said:
I just had nothing to add to the idea of a Guide to the Multiverse. I think the idea of a splatbook that doesn't give generic options but instead provides all the crunch & rules needed for multiple past settings is a good idea - I've pitched it here myself a few times.
I doubt it'd describe the settings in any real detail. Because space would be at a premium.

Sure, I don't care if they detail the setting. It's available on the DMsguild in reprint, they just need to make it print on demand available, including the 4e Campgaign Guide, which even Kieth Baker thinks is a better campaign guide for Eberron, and a collected version or two of the Dragonshards and Eye on Eberron articles from 3.5 and 4e (asking folks to buy them individually is silly, IMO, just do some collections for goodness sake).
What the book needs is brief descriptions of how popular options work differently in different worlds, like a section on Dragons that talks about them in Eberron, Dragonlance, and Council of Wyrms, with some general world building notes about dragons that tie in those elements.
A similar section on Elves might include one or two new subraces, particularly if it talks about Athasian desert Elves, but wouldn't really have to.
Then, a chapter of new player options, and a chapter with stuff like treating items, economies, etc differently. A smallish bestiary in the back would help, too. Basically, Volo's, but for worlds.

Yes. I agree completely. They're more-or-less playing in the Realms. That doesn't mean they'd buy a FR book or play a homebrew campaign in the Realms. It doesn't mean they're FR fans. It just means they're playing the published adventures which just happen to be in the Realms but could just as easily be in a randomly generated world.

The point, since I really do seem to be failing at communicating it, is simply that those people probably responded to the poll with "I play in FR". What I am saying is, the numbers from that poll do not indicate what people actually want or care about, just what they are currently playing. A poll with similar numbers of respondents would be vastly more useful if there were actual support for any other setting.

If there is 1 well supported, effectively default, setting, in which very nearly all products are based/focused, that setting will see the highest percentage of non "homebrew world" responses.

I'd disagree with that. Ardently.
Looking at the DMsGuild and the D&D Facebook page and the UA Reddit there is a strong, strong desire among DMs to homebrew and create their own material.
You don't become a DM if you're not creative, and house rules and homebrew are a strong part of that.

I think you are confusing "people who are vocal on the internet" with "the norm". A lot of GMs don't think homebrewing is a good idea, unless it's really minor stuff, and/or strongly encourage exploring reflavoring before homebrewing anything.
Many don't allow any homebrew in their games, at all. Ever.
Some, like me and maybe like you, are looking forward to the ease of homebrew sharing that will come with the fully functional dndbeyond service, and encourage characters that require us to make up a new race, subclass, feat, item, etc.
But even many of the folks I know who run games in their own worlds use very little homebrew mechanical material in those worlds.

Being a DM does not require one to be confident in making up mechanical options. If it did, there would be far, far, fewer DMs.

I absolutely agree that if WotC released an Eberron or Dragonlance or Dark Sun campaign setting then new player *might* be interested in that product.

The problem is how many. What ratio?
The catch is it's an unknown. A potential audience. They might like it, but then again, they might not. They might be happy with their own world, as D&D players historically have been. Or they might just continue to play the adventures and use whatever setting those are in.

You seem to be assuming that a new setting published wouldn't come with a new AP set in that setting. I can't imagine why.

It's not like the number of D&D players had suddenly tripled. There's a hell of a lot of new players, but the majority of D&D players probably have some experience with the game dating back a decade or two. The majority of players know the settings.

Nothing I've seen indicates to me that the vast majority of people playing 5e have been playing for decades. I also don't see why that is even particularly relevant, here, but regardless, I think you're wrong on that.

Jester David · May 21, 2017

doctorbadwolf said:
Sure, I don't care if they detail the setting. It's available on the DMsguild in reprint, they just need to make it print on demand available, including the 4e Campgaign Guide, which even Kieth Baker thinks is a better campaign guide for Eberron, and a collected version or two of the Dragonshards and Eye on Eberron articles from 3.5 and 4e (asking folks to buy them individually is silly, IMO, just do some collections for goodness sake).
What the book needs is brief descriptions of how popular options work differently in different worlds, like a section on Dragons that talks about them in Eberron, Dragonlance, and Council of Wyrms, with some general world building notes about dragons that tie in those elements.
A similar section on Elves might include one or two new subraces, particularly if it talks about Athasian desert Elves, but wouldn't really have to.
Then, a chapter of new player options, and a chapter with stuff like treating items, economies, etc differently. A smallish bestiary in the back would help, too. Basically, Volo's, but for worlds.

Agreed. I'd love a book like that and have been advocating it strongly for a good year.
Once they started adding PoD material to the DMsGuild it's just become a better idea.

doctorbadwolf said:
The point, since I really do seem to be failing at communicating it, is simply that those people probably responded to the poll with "I play in FR". What I am saying is, the numbers from that poll do not indicate what people actually want or care about, just what they are currently playing. A poll with similar numbers of respondents would be vastly more useful if there were actual support for any other setting.

If there is 1 well supported, effectively default, setting, in which very nearly all products are based/focused, that setting will see the highest percentage of non "homebrew world" responses.

You're communicating that just fine. I agree with most of your conclusions.
While multiple adventures in multiple settings would increase people playing those settings (and decrease Realms players) that wouldn't make those people fans of the setting or likely to play in that setting outside of official adventures. It would just be artificially inflating the number of players.
Short of having a couple adventures for every setting and a few generic setting neutral adventures and allowing people to play in the setting of their choice, there's no way to really get accurate numbers. But that's super unlikely to happen in a single year.

doctorbadwolf said:
I think you are confusing "people who are vocal on the internet" with "the norm". A lot of GMs don't think homebrewing is a good idea, unless it's really minor stuff, and/or strongly encourage exploring reflavoring before homebrewing anything.
Many don't allow any homebrew in their games, at all. Ever.
Some, like me and maybe like you, are looking forward to the ease of homebrew sharing that will come with the fully functional dndbeyond service, and encourage characters that require us to make up a new race, subclass, feat, item, etc.
But even many of the folks I know who run games in their own worlds use very little homebrew mechanical material in those worlds.

My opinion dates back to before my time on the internet. Almost every DM I played with made their own spells or world or races or kits or monsters. To say nothing of adventures.
Customizing the game was just something you did. It's been noted about 1st Edition that no one ever played it by the book.
That's how the magazines existed. That's how other games came about.
Literally the first thing I did online was start downloading D&D netbooks (and Paladium content). This would have been ’95 or so. Maybe '94.

Hacking the game is super, super common.
Heck, that's the reason there's advice in the DMG for making classes, races, spells, monsters, and magic items. It's expected.

Honestly, I think RAW and no house rules or personal homebrew is likely the minority...

doctorbadwolf said:
Being a DM does not require one to be confident in making up mechanical options. If it did, there would be far, far, fewer DMs.

You gain confidence by doing. You start by making terrible content and learning by making mistakes.

doctorbadwolf said:
You seem to be assuming that a new setting published wouldn't come with a new AP set in that setting. I can't imagine why.

Well, maybe because they haven't published any campaign settings yet for 5e. And if they did do one, why would they start with a setting other than the Realms?
And only publish three books a year and have shown little interest in going to four.
And don't really have the staff to do two books at once, otherwise they wouldn't have licensed out the adventure while making the core rulebooks.
I doubt they'd release a campaign setting in April for an adventure path in August.

Pairing a setting with adventure is super unlikely.

doctorbadwolf said:
Nothing I've seen indicates to me that the vast majority of people playing 5e have been playing for decades. I also don't see why that is even particularly relevant, here, but regardless, I think you're wrong on that.

The peak of the D&D fad was the 80s followed by the 2000s. We might have passed the latter now, but maybe not. So there are far more lapsed D&D players out there than currently playing. So you can have a very, very successful edition of D&D without attracting a single "new" players.
I doubt very much that the current sales of D&D are spurred primarily by brand new players. New players are coming into the game, but the majority of players still have experience with 4e or 3e, if not 2e and 1e. So you have the core fanbase who has been playing for years bolstered by both returning players and new players.
If you've been playing since 3e, you have a good decade of experience now, closing in on 2. Heck, 4e came out 9 years ago, so even if you started with that edition you have almost a decade of experience.

What makes you think most people now playing D&D are "newbs"?

Enevhar Aldarion · May 21, 2017

This applies to myself and some other gamers I know, and probably others as well, but what percentage of D&D gamers this applies to, who knows? Anyway, I have a life and a job and bills and that leaves me with enough time and money to buy materials for one or maybe two systems/settings outside of what I can homebrew for games.

And for me personally, that is FR, and Adventures in Middle-Earth when I can afford it, and maybe one non-5th ed-based game. I do not have the money or the time or the interest for three or five or ten other 5th Ed settings and books. I also have no interest in spending money on a setting book and accompanying one or two adventures when I know there will likely be no more published for it, even if doing so would open up DMs Guild for 3PP in that setting. I want a setting with a consistent series of books published for it, not just some one-off. I got burned by that too often in the 90's and early 2000's, where I would see a new setting/system come out, I would buy the initial book or two and then the company or product, or both, would vanish and no more would be published. And this was before the 3.5 Ed glut happened. And that glut burned me out so much on D&D, that I did not buy a single 4th Ed book and played only non-WotC rpgs until 5th Ed and the focus on the Realms drew me back in.

I know this does not seem to be the view of people around here, as these forums seem to draw a lot of the more hardcore gamers who want everything possible updated and published, even if these same few hundred or thousand people would be the only ones to buy those products, which is not something that would in any way make WotC money.

CapnZapp · May 21, 2017

Jester David said:
From that data of over 6000 people, 5% play in a non-FR D&D world, 38% play in the Realms, and 55% play in a homebrew world.
(With only 38% of people playing in FR, it's hard to even justify a Realms campaign setting product... )

No, it isn't. If we assume half of the home-brewers at least tolerate FR, it makes perfect sense to place *every* adventure in FR.

The Realms really is the only option that makes the products attractive to a large chunk of the customer base.

It is no coincidence that all 5e products to date are either FR or setting-neutral.

Even the second-most popular setting would likely halve the potential sales. Thus, this will only happen once the first category is saturated.

Which is exactly what is happening. Dark Sun or Eberron etc will have to wait until people get tired of lightly FR themed content.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

epithet · May 21, 2017

gyor said:
Forgotten Realms is more complex then that. Also not all of the realms developed from Ed Greenwood's original vision. Mulhorand and Unther, the Moonshaes (sort of), Kara Tur, Zakahara, the Cold Lands, none of these were Ed Greenwood's idea.

The catalyms make sense, it's almost certain to occur when you have frequent divine interventions and a lot of magic in a setting.

The Gods are both ultra powerful individuals that actively use their powers to shape events, but they are also the essence of Platonic ideas, so that their interplay shapes the Forgotten Realms physics, Sharess isn't just the Goddess of Cats, she's the Platonic ideal of cats as well as this divine being.

And there are major racial groups like in grey whose migration and interaction shaped the realms. The Imaskari kidnapped the Mulan's ancestors, who interbreed with the Imaskari, becoming the Mulan, who then migrated to healthier land, to found Mulhorand and Unther, who then expanded into Thay and future Chessenta which eventually gained their independence. They also interbreed with other regions such as Mulgohm.

Mulan and Calishites tend to respect each other culturally in a way they don't with most other cultures.

The effects of major magic usage and divine acts causes so much chaos that human and other races migrate often so that creates a more tolerant society. Also a profusion of sex gods (Sune, Shares, Llirra, Isis, Ishtar, Lovitar, Henali Celani, Inanna, and so on) have encouraged a certain tolerance for diverse sexual orinentions compared to a world with more sexually repressed gods.

It's a result of Gods and Godlike beings being allowed to run amok throughout the cosmos beyond what even AO can easily control.

It's a living setting, unlike Eberron which really doesn't change much between editions, which is largely a static setting.

So in practice the Forgotten Realms is a setting of settings that are interlinked.

You have the Sword Coast which WotC is basically treating as a setting, the lands of intrigue (Calimshan, Tethyr, Amn) which act as their own setting, the Old Empires (Mulhorand, Unther, and Chessenta and arguably Tymanther as well now), the Cold Lands, Chult, Kara Tur, Moonshaes, Zakhara, Abier, and so on. Each is complex enough to be it's own setting.

The Unapproachable East is basically the Conan setting for example, although I'd include Thay as both unapproachable East and a part of the Old Empires.

But it's more then simply a kitchen sink setting as none of it's just random, it all fits into the broader theme, the Forgotten Realms (hence the name).

I never thought about how many sex god(desse)s there are in the FR. Hooray for horny teenagers! (Including those of us who are middle aged "grognards.")

Some of the things you mentioned I'll admit to not being very familiar with, but it makes me wonder how much of that background went into the setting from the very start, and how much was retconned into it later. I still think that the interference of the gods in the world of the FR is mirroring the work of dozens of authors and game developers who are constantly coming up with new stuff and looking for a place in the Realms where it can go--and have been there all along, in retrospect.

Mercule · May 21, 2017

epithet said:
Gary Gygax did not approach the setting from the mindset of a fantasy author, or a role-playing game designer. He built it from the perspective of a wargamer, and someone who had studied the history of the real world through the lens of the battles, incursions, generations-spanning wars, revolutions, insurrections, and conquests that shaped it. When he created Oerth, he started with a handful of different human tribes with different gods and different philosophies, then moved them forward through clashes and commingling to create a set of political and cultural subdivisions which seem organic and relatable.
<snip>

It's not "almost as if"... Ed Greenwood created the Forgotten Realms as a boy, and hasn't ever stopped adding stuff he thought was cool to it. Big stuff, like gods and world-shattering cataclysms, and stuff gets folded into the setting and then retconned into having been there all along even if it doesn't make any sense. This plasticity is a feature, not a bug--it allows several authors to write FR novels at the same time period that computer RPGs develop, and the characters all cross over and the world is almost destroyed 10 times, but then everything goes back to "normal" and the next story lines are started. That leaves a world so disjointed that it is natural for any and every part of it to be absolutely multiracial, multicultural, totally inclusive and supportive of whatever your fantasy trope happens to be. Pretty much any setting lets you be a ninja, a pirate, a knight, a tribal shaman, or a fairy princess. The Forgotten Realms provides a setting where no-one thinks it's strange of all of those to be in the same adventuring party, sitting at the table in a tavern, tea house, opium den, or flying ship. Sticking an adventure path in the Forgotten Realms is the path of no resistance, it just doesn't make any damn sense... because it doesn't have to.

You, sir, have just nailed why I dislike the Realms. I'd never really realized it, before, but the above sums it up well. One of my first comments on the gray box was something to the effect of "Why is there a desert next to a giant glacier? That makes no sense." Things like the Harpers annoy me because it's obvious someone found them to be too cool to not be ubiquitous, yet they don't interest me. The Realms is made up of a bunch of flashing neon signs that are thrown together haphazardly.

I definitely consider that a bug, not a feature.

The New D&D Adventure Storyline Will Be Announced On June 2nd-3rd

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