Nentir Vale Coming to Dungeons and Dragons

[Jester David]

I have conflicted feelings about this. Nentir Vale is my favorite D&D setting, but I hate almost all of the changes Mearls has teased that he’s made to it for his home campaign.

Speak for yourself. I found it awesome and is mildly worried what Mearls will do to it.

Wasn't the entire point of the setting for it to be a place you could customise for homegames and make it your own?

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Wasn't the entire point of the setting for it to be a place you could customise for homegames and make it your own?

Yes, but most people will base their adjustments on the official version, plus new players etc. will be inclined to read the new version as the 'correct' one.

 

[Count_Zero]

Well, without much more to go on, it could be that with the success of other streaming videos, this is to put one out from Mearls. It is to have fun, to put it out there, and perhaps to see how much interest there is in it.

If there is enough interest, perhaps something will be invested, but perhaps other areas of the stream will spark interest with various aspects of the game that people will ask more about.

Maybe it'll be opened up for content o the DM's Guild

 

[Henry]

Yes, but most people will base their adjustments on the official version, plus new players etc. will be inclined to read the new version as the 'correct' one.

I’m glad to hear it had fans, I just wasn’t one of them, because to me it was TOO generic and customizable - I never saw anything distinguishing to me, and I think my distaste for the Primordial War multiverse reshuffling was part of it. This whole thing about “extremely dangerous world” is new to me, because despite all the talk at the time about “points of light”, I just couldn’t see it, it seemed too simplistic at the time, perhaps also due to a real campaign setting for detailing any of this. If he plays up this “whole world is trying to kill you” aspect, I can dig it a little better.

Then again, if they want a “whole world is trying to kill you” vibe, Athas would have fit better - you can’t even scrape enough metal together to make a spear tip, and even the plants are psionic carnivores...

Can I ask fans of Nentir Vale what features and themes really stood out to them back when it was a thing for 4e?

 

[Azzy]

My NV certainly requires playable gnolls, but otherwise yeah.

I don't know if you'd be interested, but the Southlands Heroes by Kobold Press has a Gnoll PC race.

 

[Charlaquin]

Wasn't the entire point of the setting for it to be a place you could customise for homegames and make it your own?

Sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the particular way Mearls is customizing it. Of course, when it was just his home game, it didn’t really matter to me that he was customizing it in ways I didn’t care for. But now, it’s going beyond just his home game and becoming performance art which will be a lot of people’s first introduction to the setting. Hence my mixed feelings, I like that it will be introducing new people to the Nentir Vale, I dislike the interpretation of the setting it will be introducing them to.

 

[Satyrn]

I’m glad to hear it had fans, I just wasn’t one of them, because to me it was TOO generic and customizable - I never saw anything distinguishing to me, and I think my distaste for the Primordial War multiverse reshuffling was part of it. This whole thing about “extremely dangerous world” is new to me, because despite all the talk at the time about “points of light”, I just couldn’t see it, it seemed too simplistic at the time, perhaps also due to a real campaign setting for detailing any of this. If he plays up this “whole world is trying to kill you” aspect, I can dig it a little better.

Then again, if they want a “whole world is trying to kill you” vibe, Athas would have fit better - you can’t even scrape enough metal together to make a spear tip, and even the plants are psionic carnivores...

Can I ask fans of Nentir Vale what features and themes really stood out to them back when it was a thing for 4e?

The points of light thing is what made it stand or for me. It made the world feel kinda Dark Ages Arthurian. Like the Excalibur movie but with D&D magic. In contrast, Greyhawk feels more like D&D set inRobin Hood's Europe to me, and Forgotten Realms is the world during the Renaissance.

(While Dark Sun is set on a whole different planet . . . or Mad Max's Australia)

 

[Charlaquin]

Can I ask fans of Nentir Vale what features and themes really stood out to them back when it was a thing for 4e?

Well, my favorite thing about it was the unobtrusive way it was presented. Like a From Software game, there was a lot of rich and detailed lore about the setting, but it was all implied rather than directly stated, so players and DMs could engage with it as much or as little as they wanted. And engaging with the lore was less like reading a history book and more like piecing it together from all the little tidbits scattered throughout the books.

As for the “the world is trying to kill you” bit, I feel like that’s a Mearls embellishment. It’s true that the world was dangerous outside the scattered bastions of civilization, but the world wasn’t actively hostile towards humanoids, so much as wild and uncaring. Less post-apocalyptic wasteland, more Wild West frontier. I got a similar vibe from keep on the borderlands.

The Dawn War was one of the most interesting parts of the lore, of course. And the War of Winter, depending on whether you interpreted that as part of the Dawn War or its own separate event. It was cool having a setting whose present is so directly shaped by this massive titanomachy-like conflict between gods and primordials. Kind of odd that Mearls has decided that all of the surviving pantheon were former mortals. That was explicit the case for the Raven Queen, and probably also Vecna, which was cool and made them stand out. But it seems like a very strange choice for others like Corellon or Pelor or Asmodeus. It also directly contradicts some of the established lore. Which isn’t a huge problem, it just, again, seems like a strange choice to me.

Speaking of the pantheon, I like how small it is. Most D&D settings have too many gods to keep track of, makes it hard for me to care much about any of them. Nentir Vale has a nicely sized one, enough to feel multifaceted, but not so many as to be overwhelming. And a lot of them have really cool combinations of domains in their portfolios. Of course, the Raven Queen is my favorite with Death, Fate, and Winter. Pelor is a really cool parallel with Life, Time, and Summer. Melora was an awesome combination of earth mother goddess and tempestuous sea goddess. Just a really rad pantheon overall.

Some of the non-deity-related history was really cool too. One of my favorite bits was the lore surrounding Bael Turath, the origin of Tieflings, and their conflict with the Dragonborn empire of Arkhosia.

 

[Jester David]

Yes, but most people will base their adjustments on the official version, plus new players etc. will be inclined to read the new version as the 'correct' one.

And that's bad because...?

If more people learn about the Vale, isn't that good?
And to learn more, wouldn't they turn to the 4e products and fan wiki? And thus see the original?
Won't they also just do their own thing anyway?

 

[Charlaquin]

And that's bad because...?

If more people learn about the Vale, isn't that good?
And to learn more, wouldn't they turn to the 4e products and fan wiki? And thus see the original?
Won't they also just do their own thing anyway?

Ever had a video game series that you really loved, that was kind of obscure, but just fit your tastes perfectly? Then a sequel came out, that wasn’t as good, but was way more popular? Sure, you’re happy that the series is finally getting the recognition it deserved, but you know that most of the newcomers aren’t going to go back and play the originals. And you can’t even blame them - those older entries are amazing, but the graphics have aged really poorly, and the later games have a lot of quality of life improvements that would make the old ones feel really inconvenient to anyone who got into the series with the new games. So, while you’re glad people are getting into the series, it kinda sucks knowing that this newest entry will probably be seen as the definitive example of the series, when to you, it’s just the inferior casual-friendly version.

That’s kinda how this feels. I love Nentir Vale. I love that it might finally get the attention it deserves. But it’s kind of a bummer that new folks will be getting what feels like the more casual-friendly sequel. And I very much doubt that many who are introduced to it through Mearls’s Vale are going to go back and read the source material in books for an outdated version of the game, let alone actually play 4e. More likely, Mearl’s Vale is what most people are going to think of when they hear “Nentir Vale.” And that’s too bad, cause the original is (in my opinion) so much better.