D&D 5E 3 Classic Settings Coming To 5E?

On the D&D Celebration – Sunday, Inside the D&D Studio with Liz Schuh and Ray Winninger, Winninger said that WotC will be shifting to a greater emphasis on settings in the coming years.

This includes three classic settings getting active attention, including some that fans have been actively asking for. He was cagey about which ones, though.

The video below is an 11-hour video, but the information comes in the last hour for those who want to scrub through.



Additionally, Liz Schuh said there would be more anthologies, as well as more products to enhance game play that are not books.

Winninger mentioned more products aimed at the mainstream player who can't spend immense amount of time absorbing 3 tomes.

Ray and Liz confirmed there will be more Magic: The Gathering collaborations.

 

[tetrasodium]

Wait... so why does it make you cringe with India/Hindu beings but not Babylonian? I know a ton of people actively worshipping the Babylonian deities. This comment makes no sense to me. Religions have been used for fictional fodder for generations. The Babylonian deities are as real a religion as the Hindu or even Abrahamic religions.

I'm pretty sure it has to do with the fact that babalonian people became other things (ie followers of abrahamic religions in that region) after the fall of the babaonian empire. Not many people were around 1895-539BCE. I could be wrong, but I don't think babalonian describes anyone alive today & what little we have from the period is spotty with lots of holes

 

[The Glen]

The only bit of Mystara I'm familiar with is the Savage Coast/Red Steel, but I suspect WotC would want to do some very significant re-invention of that part of the setting before releasing it in the modern day. Non-human cultures who are fairly ham-fisted photocopies of, for example, indigenous Australian and Louisiana bayou people, from memory, with fairly minimal research or sensitivity - that wouldn't play now. As an Australian, the portrayal of the Wallara raised my eyebrows 20 years ago, it's certainly not going to fly in 2020. Not to say it was actually malicious or anything, but it was not sensitive, informed, or aware, and I don't think modern WotC would want to grasp that particular nettle when there's seemingly more popular settings still in their back catalogue.

Mystara is a cultural mish-mash, the Savage Coast was largely various Iberian themed regions including South America with the Republic of Texas thrown in for good measure. The Wallara or Chameleon men were redesigned decades ago into a pure reptilian race back in the Savage Coast Monstrous Compendium. Most of the critique was about the art, but the art was largely changed since then. The biggest problem was the Atruaghin which represent various Indian tribes, but that was more because the book was obviously rushed and was incomplete with padding like 1" margins and 14pt fonts. The entire gazetteer was rewritten in the Vaults of Pandius to fill in the numerous gaps in the book. It was one of the best selling settings in D&D, has a massive catalog of books (2nd only to Forgotten Realms), and since BECMI was translated into other languages more than 1st ed it has a large following outside of the US. The capcom beat 'em ups didn't hurt its reputation either.

 

[Zardnaar]

Mystara is also the home of the stunningly racist Drums on Fire Mountain.

There's definitely a lot WotC would need to hack away before republishing it as a big single package.

That said, Mystara mostly came out one gazetteer at a time. Both Karameikos and Glantri, almost certainly the two most popular nations there, by a huge margin, would require much less work to fly in 2021.

Karameikos is a traditional D&D Good Guy Kingdom, with an ancient civilization lurking in the woods and a fairly famous evil wizard rubbing his hands together gleefully in his tower.

Glantri is basically Italian petty kingdoms, if all the rulers were high level wizards who didn't want anyone interfering in their business. Oh, and a canal city for their capital.

Both would be very easy to re-release today. Glantri could be the anchor for a big book of spells and arcane goodies, if WotC wanted to do one of those again this edition, and they didn't want to use MTG's Strixhaven for its mini-setting.

I ran that adventure in Polynesia with a Polynesian not to long ago.

The art is terrible. He thought it was so bad it's kinda kitsch.

It's actually a fun adventure though.

They're not going to fix it but it's not to hard. That cover art though.....

 

[The Glen]

Mystara's patchwork quilt is an odd one, and given we have Eberron, I think being "pulp fantasy" isn't going to be strong enough for genre appeal. They could however do something completely innovative with it and end up picking it.

Mearls description of Mystara is quite inaccurate, the theme was Cold War with a focus on exploration on top of that. You've got two massive empires (Thyatis vs. Alphatia) that are evenly matched with a lot of smaller nations stuck in the middle if they decide to settle things once and for all. Both empires are evenly matched, so any war would be a meat grinder. Then you've got two economic powerhouses fighting for international market share (Darokin and Minrothad), Minrothad controls the sea trade and plays dirty, while Darokin runs the ground commerce and plays nice, though is also playing the long game for maximum profits. All over the map you've got rivals evenly matched looking for an advantage. Cue players being given land grants and similar for helping tame the lands, as most of the nations have large chunks unexplored.

Throw in a hollow world with a huge collection of bronze age civilizations crammed together in a poorly conceived plan to save them, and the thrice-cursed Red Coast and it's three settings in one. It's an expansive setting, with a lot of unique races thrown in, though it doesn't have the need for a lot of newer races. There's 5 different humanoid reptilian races, making Dragonborn a bit redundant for example.

 

[teitan]

That's not how LG works - LG characters have no obligation to uphold a law that is chaotic or unjust. "Lawful" in alignment terms simply means logical or orderly, not "always upholds the laws as written". Otherwise things could get interesting in places that, say, have Thelema-type law systems: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Could LG characters there be allowed to act as chaotically as they want since the law allows (and even encourages) it?

Ahem, Thelemite here. Thelema is very much a lawful, disciplined religious system. Just throwing out "DWTWSBTWOTL" portrays us in a very negative light as some sort of hedonistic devil worshippers when to accept the Law of Thelema (see it's in the title) is to accept an awesome responsibility on one's shoulder to find and follow one's True Will with the utmost discipline and focus. Reading the documents one does not find a system of wanton drug abuse, alcoholism and sexual abandonment and it can be highly offensive to those of us who follow the system to imply such a thing as you have. Thelema includes the practices of Raja Yoga (discipline the body & mind), Qabalah (discipline the mind & spirit) and ceremonial work to integrate those exercises. It is NOT Do what you want.

 

[teitan]

I'm pretty sure it has to do with the fact that babalonian people became other things (ie followers of abrahamic religions in that region) after the fall of the babaonian empire. Not many people were around 1895-539BCE. I could be wrong, but I don't think babalonian describes anyone alive today & what little we have from the period is spotty with lots of holes

Yeah but that's not the context. The context was "real world religions".

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The biggest problem was the Atruaghin which represent various Indian tribes, but that was more because the book was obviously rushed and was incomplete with padding like 1" margins and 14pt fonts. The entire gazetteer was rewritten in the Vaults of Pandius to fill in the numerous gaps in the book.

The vaults are just fan work, though. They don't alter the fact that Mystara, like most RPG settings and games, could get pretty sketchy whenever they depicted peoples other than Western Europeans and European-descended Americans. Some of the settings were fine -- from memory, Ylaruam was OK, for instance -- but plenty more were problematic.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Mearls description of Mystara is quite inaccurate, the theme was Cold War with a focus on exploration on top of that.

Even that was a somewhat later addition to the line. They mostly made it up as they went along until they got to Dawn of the Emperors, eight years after the publication of Isle of Dread, and six years before the final Mystara product, Savage Baronies, came out.

For the most part, Mystara's tone was the tone of whichever gazetteer you were using. The Five Shires was neither about the clash of empires nor exploration, for instance.

In any case, it definitely wasn't a pulp setting.

 

[Faolyn]

Wait... so why does it make you cringe with India/Hindu beings but not Babylonian? I know a ton of people actively worshipping the Babylonian deities. This comment makes no sense to me. Religions have been used for fictional fodder for generations. The Babylonian deities are as real a religion as the Hindu or even Abrahamic religions.

I was not aware that people still worship Babylonian gods. I stand corrected, then. Do you know the name of the modern Babylonian religion, by any chance? I'd be interested in reading up on it more.

 

[teitan]

I was not aware that people still worship Babylonian gods. I stand corrected, then. Do you know the name of the modern Babylonian religion, by any chance? I'd be interested in reading up on it more.

Depends on the people, usually it falls under the Neopagan crowd but there are people locally following the Babylonian deities by working back through the Picatrix and Goetia to recover the tradition. It is also closely related to the Phoenician practitioners like the Ordo Templi Astarte but the ones I know refer to themselves as just followers of the Sumerian deities and think it's cool when their deities show up in fiction. I have a friend who loves that Pazuzu is the demon in the exorcist.