Why I feel so abysmally let down by the "Ravnica" news...

[oreofox]

Carvorite, from H G Wells 1st Men in the Moon, is a magical power source for flying vehicles from a novel that is undoubtedly steampunk.


It doesn't have to be powered by steam in order to be Steampunk.


The John Carter stories are often classed as Steampunk, even though it's flying ships are powered by magic. Or if you want something contemporary, The Aeronaut's Windlass (Jim Butcher) is classed as Steampunk by Amazon, but features magic-powered flying ships.

Steampunk features Victorian era dress, steam power, and clockwork technology. Something that doesn't have steam power is not steampunk. It's literally in the name.

To be more on topic: I bought the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron (1 B, 2 Rs, it's not Ebberon. This irks me as bad as "should of" or "your welcome"). I have no desire to purchase the Ravnica guide. I fell out of interest with MTG many many years ago. I downloaded all those Planeshift MTG pdfs, but they were all highly disappointing, except for maybe the last 1 or 2, as they were all "Use this from the MM for this monster" or "this race is just an elf from the PHB with a different name". If this is their replacement for Planescape, I will be very disappointed (though like pming up there, the lingo used in the setting really pulls me out of it, despite it being one of my more favorite settings in theme).

It would be nice, if in the final product, they had a racial write-up a la Volo's Guide, for the gnoll since they have a blurb in the "Other Races" section of the Wayfarer's Guide.

 

[iserith]

For what it's worth, I'm running a Planescape game right now using my old 2e books as references plus I frequently call upon fan resources on the web (wikis, maps, etc.) for inspiration. There is also some material in the DMG. While an updated Planescape setting would be nice, it's not at all required to run a good Planescape game. I would say you don't even need the books as I only use them to do deep dives on this or that when I really want to bust out the canon. In fact, I would say most of the 2e Planescape adventures are garbage in terms of design and good only for sparking ideas or lore reference.

 

[Reynard]

The John Carter stories are often classed as Steampunk

Wait, what?

 

[Reynard]

For what it's worth, I'm running a Planescape game right now using my old 2e books as references plus I frequently call upon fan resources on the web (wikis, maps, etc.) for inspiration. There is also some material in the DMG. While an updated Planescape setting would be nice, it's not at all required to run a good Planescape game. I would say you don't even need the books as I only use them to do deep dives on this or that when I really want to bust out the canon. In fact, I would say most of the 2e Planescape adventures are garbage in terms of design and good only for sparking ideas or lore reference.

I was hoping for something along the lines of "Planejammer" -- marrying the Planescape and Spelljammer "universes" in such a way as to create a swashbuckling astral sea setting.

 

[iserith]

I was hoping for something along the lines of "Planejammer" -- marrying the Planescape and Spelljammer "universes" in such a way as to create a swashbuckling astral sea setting.

That sounds cool. I was never a big fan of Spelljammer back in the day but an updated version of that would be good to see.

 

[gyor]

Planescape and Ravnica are totally different settings.

 

[Jester David]

I was fairly disappointed as well.

There's already a dozen worlds D&D isn't supporting, and they choose to bring a new world into the fold. At the expense of classic settings.
I've played two hands of Magic in my life and never bought more than a starter deck, which I gave away to a friend. And I've never seriously been tempted to get back in. I have no affection for its settings. But I don't really hate the game. So, that it's a MtG world doesn't phase me much (I can totally understand the reasoning behind that) but I think I would have reacted just as negatively to a brand new world. Because it means far lesser support for the settings we DO care about.

Yes, it's something cool and new. Something different that we really haven't seen before in D&D... but ANY 3rd Party company can do something new. Morrus started a list of campaign settings, and there's twenty-five "new" settings you can play in. And that list is *only* for 5th Edition settings and doesn't include edition neutral settings.

New campaign settings are a dime a dozen.
But ONLY WotC can do Dark Sun or Planescape.

*

While I don't agree with the rest of the OP's first post, this does echo my thoughts.

Ravnica does bear a lot of similarity to something that longtime D&D fans would love: Planescape and the city of Sigil. It isn't, however, Sigil. In fact, its existence forces one to ask, "where is the design space for Sigil now that Ravnica is being released?" It seems to me that the existence of Ravnica makes an official Planescape product less likely, as so many of the concepts that would have been covered in a Planescape product are now being covered by Ravnica. It's like WotC spent months building up the idea of Curse of Strahd and instead gave us Curse of Innistrad. It would probably still be a cool product, but it would be a huge let down compared to Curse of Strahd.

And as the OP says, now there's far less chance of a Planescape product or product focused on Sigil. Just like Tyranny of Dragons pretty much killed any chance of a Dragonlance adventure, or Waterdeep leaves little room for a Castle Greyhawk style adventure.

Similarly, WotC is being very conservative with its releases for 5th Edition. And trying hard not to compete with past products, which stay on the shelf. So releasing this product means we're unlikely to see a hard copy of another setting anytime soon, to give Ravnica enough time to move as many copies as possible.
And it seems unlikely that they'd release a lower cost product like this (where they can use assets from the MtG team, such as art and the setting bible) if they expected another setting to do very well; they would have saved this for the follow-up.

So this makes it far, far less likely we'll see any other campaign settings in stores. Other settings will make do for the "Eberron" treatment, where they get a PDF update.
But, in fairness... the weight listed for Ravnica on Amazon is pretty small. Comparable to each of the Tyranny of Dragons books. So it could be 96-pages. Which would mean the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron is significantly larger. Still, it's unlikely to make any new Eberron fans. The DMsGuild is pretty niche and most players don't go there. I wouldn't be surprised is a large number of players hadn't heard about the product.

 

[Jester David]

Eberron is NOT steampunk, not even a little bit. It is magictech with a post WW1 pulp flavor, which definitely pulls it out of the bog standard D&D pseudo-medieval genre, but it isn't steampunk. People have been repeating that nonsense for 15 years.

I believe the term is "dungeon punk".

It features airships, which are generally associated with Steampunk.

So did Teddy Ruxpin, but I wouldn't call that "steampunk".
As did Stardust. And every Sky Pirate type story. And, for what it counts, Spelljammer has airships as well...

Really, there's no shortage of airships outside of steampunk. They're hardly a defining feature. Really, large zeppelins and gyrocoptors are far more steampunk than airships.

Carvorite, from H G Wells 1st Men in the Moon, is a magical power source for flying vehicles from a novel that is undoubtedly steampunk.

It doesn't have to be powered by steam in order to be Steampunk.

True it doesn't have to be powered by steam. But the defining characteristics is anachronistic technology. The technology is futuristic (or at the best contemporaneous) but looks antiquated, with steam or clockworks. Often with Victorian fashion. It's steampunk when you add modern tech to the past (or what is meant to be the past).

None of that applies to Eberron.
Firstly, the technology isn't futuristic: it's antiquated. It's deliberately 1890s-1920s tech. And it doesn't look overtly mechanical. Quite the opposite, it looks magical. And it's not being applied to a the "past" as the setting itself isn't Earth and isn't meant to be medieval.

The John Carter stories are often classed as Steampunk, even though it's flying ships are powered by magic.

The correct genre for that is "Sword & Planet", the counterpart to "Sword & Sorcerery".
John Carter is in no way steampunk.

 

[Pauper]

Totally did not expect that this thread would be salted with folks showing off their English Lit cred. Interesting.

Ravnica does bear a lot of similarity to something that longtime D&D fans would love: Planescape and the city of Sigil. It isn't, however, Sigil. In fact, its existence forces one to ask, "where is the design space for Sigil now that Ravnica is being released?"

That is kind of the crux of the issue, isn't it? More to the point, the existence of Ravnica (and by implication the rest of the M:tG settings in the D&D multiverse, via Plane Shift) makes Sigil a significantly less important location -- it's no longer 'the city' in the most significant location in the cosmology: it's just another place you can go and have adventures. The things that make Planescape special -- make it Planescape, the setting rather than just another location in an adventure book -- should stay unique to the setting, otherwise you've just got a bunch of interchangeable adventure locations, none of which has any specific flavor to it save the generic umami of 'it's D&D'.

It's like WotC spent months building up the idea of Curse of Strahd and instead gave us Curse of Innistrad. It would probably still be a cool product, but it would be a huge let down compared to Curse of Strahd.

As one of the folks who was disappointed in Curse of Strahd, your analogy works a lot better than I would have originally thought. My hopes for Curse of Strahd was that it would serve as the linchpin behind a revision of the Ravenloft setting, focusing on Barovia, but still containing connections to the other domains of the setting and references (and Dark Potentials) that could be expanded on by an ambitious DM (or DMs Guild author) to revitalize the setting for the new edition.

Instead, we got a self-contained plane (heck, even the Dark Powers physically live in Barovia now) with factions, different flavors of morality, and even an amnesiac planeswalker! (Depending on your definition of 'planeswalker', of course.) I suppose this should have been obvious once Chris Perkins stated that he was writing the adventure with the Hickmans (who have never been particularly enthusiastic about the setting), but the degree to which the adventure does actual violence to the concept of the campaign setting makes me understand to a much better degree why most of the actual DMs Guild community-created Ravenloft material is either expansions on Curse of Strahd material or bestiaries/monster books, with almost no exploration of the larger setting -- why explore the larger setting when the core adventure basically presumes the larger setting doesn't exist?

In many ways, this move feels less geared towards the interests of D&D's rich intellectual property and more geared towards the interests of WotC's overlord, Hasbro.

At some point, I'm giving up blaming Hasbro for the things WotC does that I disagree with -- Hasbro isn't dictating what WotC's higher-ups can say in their marketing to fans, nor are they editing products with an eye toward replacing unique, campaign-specific elements with generic 'fantasy tropes' that can fit in almost any setting. Hasbro may own the restaurant, but they don't cook the steak -- those decisions fall squarely in the D&D designers' kitchen, and if anyone should be held responsible for when those decisions go wrong, it's them.

--
Pauper

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I know I am not known for being too serious on the forums, but, in all seriousness, Eberron was a product of a particular time, and many things that made it exciting and innovative at the time aren't that exciting and new now (that is one of the problems of being influential: other people start trying to be like you) . So unless WotC decides to publish all future AP's in the Eberron setting (or it the setting for the D&D movie [or a sequel]), I don't see a lot "new Eberron fans" coming, except for people who think things like "that was my Dad's favorite setting, so I should give it a try."

As much as I like Planescape, it is in a similar boat.

It is easier to draw people back to older movies (where the actors' chemistry is hard to replicate) or a novel (where the specific dialogue and circumstances are factors) then a RPG setting, because most memories of them are as much about the party you are playing with and how they interact with the setting as the setting itself.