I skimmed Dungeon of the Mad Mage and as far as I can tell it's really 15 separate dungeons, each with it's own theme, with the occasional "the BBEG left this here..." as a lame attempt to tie everything together.
And, yes, why does just about *every* WotC AP have to be about preventing the end of the world?
Oh, right, I forgot: because in the Forgotten Realms the world almost ends every few months for some reason or another. There's a bazillion planes but somehow every evil entity in the multiverse wants to destroy THIS plane.
Bleh.
Aside from the fact that most of the APs don't actually involve threats to the whole world, what other plane would they care about? Did you mean worlds, rather than planes?
The Demons are trying to invade every single plane.
Most of the other things involve characters directly tied to the material plane. But also, dnd assumes that mortals, and their plane, is the center of the planar orrery. It all revolves around the place where mortals dwell.
Devils trying to take over part of the Feywild could certainly be a threat that could make a good adventure, and I'd love to see something like that, where the party is magically plucked from their plane by an Archfey and asked, or commanded under threat of eternal wandering in endless mazelike forests, (the Archfey, being an Archfey, is of course a CR 20+ threat, with knights and courtiers in the CR teens) to do what some dumb fey rule or other won't let them do themselves, and stop the agents of Asmodeus from taking over the neighboring kingdom of some other Archfey.
But, there's nothing weird about most of these beings trying to take a slice of the Faerunian pie.
I think I'm rowing in a different boat from most folks on ENWorld. There are already more monsters and character options than I'll likely ever use. There are more adventure paths than I have time to get through and lots of great third-party adventures. I have enough material that I can play for years without buying another 5e product.
What I would REALLY love to get and what would make me buy new adventures is if they would release a boxed set of battlemaps and an minis that would have everything I need to run all major encounters in an adventure at the table. These could easily be repurposed by homebrewers and may even be of interest as general toys.
Especially welcome would be shorter adventures or one-off adventures. Have a boxed set with 6-12 hour adventure, all the battlemaps and all the minis (or even just round cardboard tokens with nice art).
The other thing that would get me to open my wallet would be a good D&D video game that can be played on a console.
There are more options than I'll ever play, sure. But large swaths of them are stuff I wouldn't play even if there were on a PHB's worth of options in 5e, because I've no interest in playing a Cleric, or most Wizard concepts, or the 5e Sorcerer, etc. Meanwhile, there are concepts I've played in previous editions that I either can't satisfyingly build with what is present, or which I couldn't until some book or other came out.
Also, while I had both the Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster to choose from before, I couldn't play a magical swordsman whose every attack was both magical and swordy until SCAG came out, so neither of those options appealed to me. Also, I didn't want the restricted spell list of the AT, or and while 5e is the second best fighter of any edition, it still isn't a class that i find at all interesting thematically.
So, now, I play a Forest Gnome Swashbuckler Rogue/Bladesinger Wizard, with a Rapier and a repeating hand crossbow, with alchemist supplies and tinker tools, and he's great! I have him dialed in to this very specific mechanical representation of thematical elements, so that how he fights, how he explores, how he interacts socially, etc all tie in to who he is, and make everything he does reinforce the right image and theme. It's really satisfying and fun, for me, to do that with characters.
That's much more important to me than having a ton of potential hypothetical characters I could someday play.
Here you go:
https://prints.mikeschley.com/
There's a few adventures missing. And then you might have to pass a fairly high DC Persuasion roll (even when accessing the Terms page) to get your local FedEx/Kinkos or Office Max to print them for you.
That said, I know exactly what you meant.
WoTC (and others) wastes all this time & effort printing beautiful highly detailed dinky maps buried
within their books.
When if they'd just include several pages of decent sized maps etc in the back of the damned book.....
I think if you go in store and show proof of purchase, office depot or max or whatever is pretty reasonable about printing stuff. Probably depends on the management, though.
Anyway, I'd pay good coin for full sized roll up vinyl maps from the adventures. Paper maps work, but vinyl is so much nicer to put minis on than uneven paper, and I haven't room to store them unfolded.
I'd also buy full colour, full sized, high quality (both image and medium), world and city maps. I kinda just fricken love maps, y'all.
I'd also gladly back a kickstarter that got be these, and a collection of minis from their past minis lines, along with some new ones that cover each race and visually distinct subclass or faction they've got out.
And hell, why not, a big ass airship mini with removable panels and playable interiors.
Honestly, can we get some licensed 3d terrain from wotc? At a lower price than dwarven forge, bc I can't afford enough dwarven forge to make it worthwhile to buy any of it.
And no one seems to make really good "dungeon dressing" for reasonable prices. I don't want walls, man. I don't care about walls. I want all the sorts of things that came with HeroQUest back in the day, but painted and for more environments than dungeons!
You know what I'd pay 100-200 for? A deluxe box for Dragon Heist that had 3d city terrain, including the tavern you get from Volo, Jarlaxle's ship, all the minis, and roll-up vinyl maps.
