D&D 4E 200 Words or Less: Pitch WotC a New 4e Setting

[Dice4Hire]

Please nothing else new and imaginative! Please just regurgatate another older editions work back on us! We loved it then so we will just love to buy it again but updated for 4E! YAY!

Maybe this time you guys can*wink* create Waterdeep as a setting! The six older copies of the city I already have need another friend!

How about Longsaddle the setting! Or Menzo...err wait nevermind!

The point is that many new things are rather risky. You actually have to you know,think of something new and not stupid.

Much safer to just hit us with the endless reprining of old stuff that sold well but with the new rules!

Wait! Wait! I have a idea! How about another Forgotten Realms setting book! After all its been a while now and the game has progressed beyond the old one. Add the new math and backgrounds and all the other stuff to bring it up to date!


Sorry about that guys! This post is a direct result of looking at all my new 4E books I got for Christmas that are just almost carbon copies of earler works that are on the same bookcase.

I think I have seen this kind of post before. Many times!

 

[Mirtek]

Please nothing else new and imaginative! Please just regurgatate another older editions work back on us! We loved it then so we will just love to buy it again but updated for 4E! YAY!

Maybe this time you guys can*wink* create Waterdeep as a setting! The six older copies of the city I already have need another friend!

How about Longsaddle the setting! Or Menzo...err wait nevermind!

The point is that many new things are rather risky. You actually have to you know,think of something new and not stupid.

Much safer to just hit us with the endless reprining of old stuff that sold well but with the new rules!

Wait! Wait! I have a idea! How about another Forgotten Realms setting book! After all its been a while now and the game has progressed beyond the old one. Add the new math and backgrounds and all the other stuff to bring it up to date!


Sorry about that guys! This post is a direct result of looking at all my new 4E books I got for Christmas that are just almost carbon copies of earler works that are on the same bookcase.

The thing is: I would like that very much. Advance the time-line by 4 years and give us more FR stuff. A lot of people beside me would like that too.

I know that a lot of people wouldn't like that, but I and many others would. At least it's a market WotC has experience with as opposed to try something entirely new which might just bomb.

 

[GSHamster]

Existing D&D settings cover a lot of ground. It's hard to find something that hasn't been done before.

My idea would be an explicitly mythological setting. Take the ancient Greek, Norse, and maybe Irish myths, and use them as the primary setting. Make the gods the primary movers and shakers in the manner of the ancient gods, rather than avatars of concepts. Invoke Hercules, Loki, Thor, Zeus, Achilles, etc.

Make the setting pre-medieval Iron Age. No heavily armored knights.

 

[Tallifer]

I was intially baffled by the calls for old settings: those are already readily available. I do not need statistical blocks to run an adventure in Greyhawk or Krynn, just the old maps of lands and castles and stories and backgrounds. (Although I have seen a well done Fourth Edition rewrite of the Dragonlance adventur path.)

I like Eberron, but I was somewhat disappointed to read the Fourth Edition Eberron Campaign Guide: it just repeated everything I already knew form the Third Edition setting.

On the other hand, I can understand the excitement over Players' Guides for different old settings. Reviving old classes, races, items and backgrounds with new feats, powers, themes, paragon paths and mechanics makes sense. Dragon marks and dragon-marked houses were terrific additions to the game. Dragon shards, warforged and alchemists likewise. Unfortunately changelings and kalashtar saw insufficient support.

Which brings me back to the beginning, because now I am not so baffled by cries for new-old settings: exciting players' guides for Krynn, Greyhawk and Spelljammer require refreshing the old setting guides so that new dungeon masters can be acquainted with the worlds from which their players want these goodies.

 

[GameOgre]

Every 4E world setting so far that I have, has had to alter the old worlds is a HUGE way to make it 4E compatible.

Even Dark Sun had to rework a lot of things in order to include all the new races and class's into it.

Instead of shoehorning 4E into 3.5 molds why did 4E never create its own setting that could highlight all those great things about it?

No shoehorning stuff in regardless of if it fits but a setting designed to showcase 4E from the ground up!

I love 4E just as much as I love 1E,Basic and even my semi-secret 2E sweet tooth(core only).

Basic had the known world,1E had Greyhawk,2E had the Forgotten realms,3.5 had Eberron and 4E has.......err yeah well the same settings but altered so bad some hardly seem like the same worlds.

4E needs something Epic to go with its Epic rules.

Something flashy and over the top.

Give us Stargate/Sundered Skies meets planscape/Birthright

Give us Ancient Greece with the Gods on Mount Olympus!

Give us......something that shows off 4E and makes people go WOW! Now that' friggin IT!

 

[Dice4Hire]

Every 4E world setting so far that I have, has had to alter the old worlds is a HUGE way to make it 4E compatible.

Even Dark Sun had to rework a lot of things in order to include all the new races and class's into it.

Not true. The DS Campaign book pretty much specifically says a lot of races and a whole power source are just not there. DS is the only campaign setting thus far that specifically leaves out vast sections of 4E.

And is a lot better for it, IMHO

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

Every 4E world setting so far that I have, has had to alter the old worlds is a HUGE way to make it 4E compatible.

Adding to Dice4Hire's comment, Eberron hasn't changed much, either.

Dragonborn have been added to Q'barra and Argonessen, and some Eladrin feyspires can now be found in remote locations thanks to the Mourning; all in keeping with Eberron's tone and flavor. One or two planes have been changed, but since Eberron didn't use the Great Wheel cosmology in the first place and planar travel is also pretty rare, it's no big deal.

You're thinking of the Forgotten Realms, which have been changed in a huge way. And that's almost a tradition for that setting, I might add.

 

[GameOgre]

Ok,Ok! Since you hold my feet to the fire I will admit to a certain level of over exaggeration of my comment on settings.

To be honest both Eberron and Dark Sun while having some amount of changes are (at least to my tastes) are both fine and dandy!

There! you beat it out of me! However.....both of those settings I already had! I know,I know it isn't all about me and my bookshelf!

I still stand by my comments that 4E needs its own dang setting!

 

[Pour]

This was inspired by Crucible of the Gods, but I think it’d make a pretty sweet campaign setting...

It is the End Times. The world of Surridan is overwhelmed by floods, plagues, meteoric storms, and famines. The gods have deemed their creations unfit and seek to start anew, a cause which unites good and evil deities in a merciless wiping of the slate. As the sun flickers out, the sea turns to blood, and the vegetation grows blackened and scarce, desperate races and once-proud cultures seek strange alliances and dangerous pacts to survive. Angelic killing squads scour the surface of Surridan exterminating at will, while devils overrun the Underdark to drag the corrupt into Hell’s maw. Only a handful of prophets scattered across the realm have managed a tentative truce, requiring not the offering of blood or prayer, but proof. The few gods who will listen must be convinced their children still deserve to exist. The adventurers, treasure hunters, gladiators, and mercenaries of the old world have risen to meet their demand, recognized now as an exalted class of Redeemers, scaling ever-more-impossible climbs, besting increasingly horrendous foes (including the new races of the gods, designed to replace them), delving into deeper and deeper dungeons, and returning with grander and more prodigious offerings for the fanes and crucibles to show the creators they are worthy. Some are given cause to rejoice, becoming fanatical in their faith, while others lose all love for their makers. Madmen turn to undeath and golemizing as means of salvation, while others secretly pursue the only real solution: godhood.

Notes: Firstly, I like justifying adventuring, dungeon crawling, and D&Disms as vital to the world's survival. I think the moral shift which has fairly ruthless and greedy dungeoneers becoming these redeeming heroes really takes the moral and spiritual side of the game (RP) into some really grey, great territory- and must repurpose a lot of once holy and learned orders, much to their chagrin or dislike perhaps. How the population has reacted to the end times, how these great leaders, now Prophets, are on their knees begging must have all sorts of tolls on the races. I like how good-aligned angels and evil-aligned devils are on the same side, agents of Armageddon, is an even more fun way to use all of the Monster Manual than calling angels neutral soldiers. These angels also have faces and legs (see MtG). The idea that part of their trials, which have been given no timetable, include fending off new races the gods have made to replace them is amazingly ripe. And, as always, there's people who want to be liches and sentient golems (new history for warforged, perhaps, not as soldiers but as men and women attempting to endure beyond the apocalypse... maybe more selfless ones imbuing their consciousness into machines in order to better face the trials- calling into question the value of mortal races and machine).


This one is just something I've been playing with...

Garuul is a prison crafted by the majority of Good and Unaligned pantheons. For his sins, Man has been interred for all eternity in a brutal world of iron expanses and steely outcroppings, whose red skies are caged in barbed crosshatch and all means of planar travel have been barred. They are not alone... Here Avandra, once goddess of freedom, is locked in the impenetrable core of the planet. Melora thrashes chained at the bottom of an acid sea. Mad Erathis, civilization incarnate, survives as dismembered heaps entombed in the four corners of the uncivilized jail-land. Ioun, perhaps the only genius capable of working out a means of escape, has been lobotomized, a titanic, blithering idiot slowly shuffling across Garuul’s surface- impervious to harm, an unwitting natural disaster than tramples and crushes as it mumbles. Proud Kord witnesses it all and weeps, the strong one now crippled and paralyzed on the highest mountain top. The fate of the gods mirrors their children’s grisly and troubled hardships, made all the more difficult for their cellmates: other races with unforgivable histories who’ve been thrust onto Garuul numbering the orcs, tieflings, dragonborn, and races more savage and alien still (space for a new interpretation of the Thri-Kreen as more cockroach-like and Shardminds as failed alien invaders). Despite the absolute oppression, some prisoners still seek freedom, delving to reach or repair their broken gods, to invent new magic and technology to take them from Garuul, supported by the black-market run by the slippery, mercantile drow hopping in and out of Garuul by the graces of one of the last surviving champions of evil: Lolth. Even she is hard-pressed, as are the would-be escapees, for Garuul is guarded over by two watchtower worlds, the Feyward and the Shadowcell, whole planes worth of guards and wardens.

Notes: I think Garuul utilizes a lot of 4e assumptions in new and interesting ways. First off, it puts a lot of the PHB1 races in the forefront and welcomes some of the weirder and more monstrous as baseline. It also more or less excludes elves, dwarves, gnomes, and the children of the gods who've now turned on Man and his creators. That's not to say a particularly sympathetic or bad member of the race couldn't be cast into this hellhole, but it's not common. 4e gods are front and center, and again D&D's need to delve, crawl, adventure are set into the core assumption- you must find and heal your gods in order to escape, or help the organizations working on new magic and technology to escape, or maybe the opposite, become kings of the damned. The drow escaping race-wide imprisonment to be the suppliers in this prison-setting also leaves a big spot open for them (and they do seem to be getting a lot of 4e coverage). And retooling the mirror worlds of Feywild and Shadowfell as watchtower planes, basically the prison walls and yards beyond Garuul itself, leaves a lot of fun reimagining of fey and classes like wardens as actual wardens, the whole Primal power source made out to be oppressive. Same with the Shadowfell, and the Shadow power source, undead, vampires, vryloka, shades, all of them kind of like the other have of the penal system, maybe fashioned more like laywers and judges on cosmic scale. Or maybe we can reserve that for Hell, devils like lawyers and judges, torturing Garuul with mocking trials. Just kind of riffing now, but it can be taken a lot of places.

 

[Kalontas]

Seeing most of the propositions being rather contradictory either to basic D&D premise ("it's no age for heroes" - well, there goes your chance to it ever having been featured), or to my personal preferences in D&D, I don't think anything I would make would be voted up by the members of this forum.

What I'm currently working on is my own setting, Olam, which I essentially built based on the same rules that were outlined in the old setting competition by Wizards - anything from 4E has to fit there, and it's "showcasing" all the best (at least in my opinion) parts of this edition. So I have prominent Shardminds, Minotaur states, Devas having their own state... The world itself was based on it being young, with cultures mainly based on ancient civilisations, and full of plenty of different races - none of which are monsters. The monsters are, in this philosophy, inside us and between us - and you can't easily tell them by ugly teeth or scaly skin.

Though what I actually want to pitch to Wizards during the next pitch window as a kind of "mini-setting", which can be attached to Nerath or perhaps even Forgotten Realms or your home setting (like Oriental Adventures used to be), I'll leave it secret. You know, just in case it turns out good and they like it. But I tell you one thing - it really does let you play in a whole new way, unlike another piece of FR.