D&D 5E How do you hope WotC treats the upcoming classic settings?

[tetrasodium]

How do I hope D&D treats classic settings, going forward... Hmm. I think I'd like to go setting by setting on this one, Phil, with a single caveat:

All of them get updated to more modern sensibilities. More diversity of characters, less chainmail bikinis.

1) Dragonlance.
War of the Lance is the definitive era of Dragonlance. Oppressive police state, divine magic all but gone, magic users carefully ordered by society with heavy presumptions based on robe color. Good and Evil tangible and real -effects- upon the world, with straight up Good and Evil dragons in a hilariously blatant dichotomy of color coordination. I think that's perfect for Dragonlance.

Because at it's heart, Dragonlance is a child's view of D&D. I'm not saying you have to be a child to enjoy it, or anything. I'm saying that it's literally right there on the cover of a 5th grader's idea of fantasy: Riding dragons into battle like horses and wearing gaudy and awesome armor, fighting against a clearly demarcated evil which has a cosmic stamp of Red Lasers means Bad Guy type of morality.

Good is here. Bad is there. Go get 'em, champ!

LEAN INTO THAT.

Don't try to make it more complicated than it already is. Make it the simplest version of D&D narratives with the only moral complexity being interpersonal relationships against the backdrop of this horrible situation. Where a criminal type character might help the good guys even though they are, themselves, "Evil" because it sticks it to the fascist cops.

And then -market- it like that. Sell it to the youngest players. Aim for 8-10 to be introduced to Dragonlance through kids storybooks and comic books. Make a story about a young girl who finds a wounded little dragon and who grows up with the dragon as her bestest best friend and who eventually gets to be a knight and ride her horse-sized dragon into battle to save the world!

2) Dark Sun
It's taken me a while to come around but... Revamp it entirely.

Dark Sun is Sword and Sorcery with Weird Science tied into it and an Ecological Horror plotline. Adapt it for the current climate crisis and political allegory and move forward from there. Sure, keep the Thri-Kreen and the Sorcerer-Kings, keep Psionics and Defiling. But turn Magic into the full on Oil and Coal that it is, narratively.

Rather than just having magic only destroy, have it objectively and narratively pollute and corrupt. Change the setting from "All Desert" to "Hellish Mix of Landscapes". Yeah, Magic can destroy the world by ripping away all the vital and life-giving elements of it through desertifaction, but how about it also turning beautiful lakes into mire-valleys of thick mud, obnoxious insects, and poisonous water that glistens under the red sun that cannot be consumed without killing you?

How about a whole "Underdarkish" area where a Githyanki Sorcerer-King keeps ancient horrors in check beneath the world and her subjects toil in blackness to try and find the remnants of the collapsed portal or crashed spelljammer that brought their ancestors to this world, so long ago?

How about creating a magic-fuel resource in the world that can be used to keep spellcasting from harming the world... but it's only found underground and the uncaring Sorcerer-Kings employ Strip Mining to try and get every ounce of it for themselves so they can cast spells without destroying their city state in the process?

Keep the Giant-Striding Silt Sea with Skiffs on Skis and giant wheels that reach the bottom, obviously. Keep the massive tracts of wasteland. Keep the red mountains under the Olive Tinged Sky... just do more -nasty- landscape variety.

And the Political Allegory? Why stop there?!

Instead of Tektuktitlay as an Aztec God-King stand-in whose hopes of conquest are kept in check by Hamanu the Lion we go for a contemporary allegory instead? A petty tyrant far too weak to be a challenge for any of the other Sorcerer-Kings who talks a big game and uses a strong army to protect himself while he starves his people who sometimes escape to a nearby city-state to tell tales of the misery and hardship they've left behind, but occasionally change their tune and return to their city-state for the sake of those they left behind... His Templars enforce a form of thought-policing on the populace where any sort of divisive speech results in your neighbors turning you over to the state for Punishment... or Re-education.

And then come up with a new Metaplot beyond Tyr. Set it up more like Conan than Frodo. You're not the hero who is here to save the world, that ship has sailed. You're the hero who saves the sacrificial victim from the altar, kicks the villain's Lieutenant into the firepit, and then flees the reprisal while the sacrificial victim swoons over your big muscles and lustrous hair while exploring his own backstory as the descendent of some important bloodline whose sacrifice would be particularly powerful. Then you fight the horrifically scarred Lieutenant you set on fire before killing the High Priest in a climactic battle. Finally you take your new companion and/or lover to a seedy tavern and wait for the next High Adventure.

Oh. And use regional maps that don't connect, obviously. Gives DMs space to add stuff and makes the world feel disjointed. Love it in Ravenloft.

Aggressively market it to late teens and young adults (16-25) with short-story compilations and novels written in a bold and prozaic style that is very evocative of details.

3) Spelljammer
Planesjammer. Seriously, just do it. Make Sigil into a cool place for getting between different Planes of Existence, make Spelljammers the way you travel across starscapes to planets and do your whole schtick. There's no reason the two can't share the same universe and honestly mixing the flavors can be really nice. Make Sigil how people get from place to place for diplomacy, espionage, adventure, have Spelljammers be how goods and stuff move from place to place in bulk, and then let Githyanki Pirates attack those trade vessels and explorers and stuff.

Make the Spelljammer stuff a bit more serious than it was, to play into a more teenager vibe, but with plenty of room for the quirky Saturday Morning Cartoon play. Then market it to 13-17 year olds, specifically. Young Adult novels and comics, crossovers with Magic: the Gathering, the whole shebang.

4) Birthright
Just ... uh... y'know... Make things less patriarchal and have at, I guess? There's really not a whole lot about this setting that warrants serious consideration for change. It's very simple and straightforward and it basically just works.

5) Greyhawk
Lean hard into the He-Man vibe with Iuz. Like Dragonlance, mostly market it towards kids and young teens. Have it kind of take over from where Dragonlance leaves off to introduce more D&D-centric concepts like Pantheons of Gods rather than dualism, Orcs and Owlbears, the classics that Dragonlance doesn't really "Do" as core conceits.

"underdarkish" will be a disaster. Khyber is massively different from The Underdark but because of a stray "eberron's version of the underdark" or similar in one of the early books it's been an excuse to force FR lore and all of the incompatible baggage it carries into games where a gm is trying to make a clean break with a viscerally different setting. One of darksun's strengths is hat it does not have an underdark & even the gith colony stuck in the still semi-advanced blackspine(?) mountains module are very much not underdark.

Sticking with the other themes you mention it would be better to just toss a more advanced colonial power out deep in the desert with the motive of being able to do things they can't do back home while basically running forced labor camps with plentiful food/water shipped in from another sphere & former remote villages who never want to leave instead of that uderdarkish thing. Put it deep enough & it doesn't even need that much of a presence. Sure the workers can leave, but a mindrape with new memories that purge any recollection of the location or wonderful bounty in a place with the worse abuses of megacorps & such solves all kinds of problems. They just want to be left alone & might pay off some of the SKs with occasional water/food shipments to keep them looking the other way but other than doing their thing they are just happy to keep using a banana republic that doesn't care what they do.

 

[Steampunkette]

You had me in the first half...but no please. There was (or in my memory) a lot of adult type stuff going on in the original DL books (the first 6?) and thats the tone that should be strived for to me.

Tasslehoff. Burrfoot.
Fizban.

Yeah, you had Kitiara and her lover Tanis Half-Elven dealing with being on opposite sides of a war and the relationships that come out of that. Yes you have Flint dying and leaving the Heroes of the Lance undwarfed which broke Tasslehoff's heart...

But that stuff happens in kids books -all the time-. Maybe you could get into the argument about the Seekers and their collaboration with the High Dragonlords being a hint of Vichy France but honestly how many of us spent time poring over the politics as compared to fighting against the Bazaks because they were the bad guys?

Yesssssssssssssssss.

Glad we agree!

Nooooooooooooo. lol

Planescape needs to be, as was noted yesterday by someone else who is clearly wise, "90's Sandman style Fantasy." No MTG cross over please. I hate it, deeply.

Ehhh... Planescape needs to be that, yes.

Spelljammer needs to -border- that. Needs to bookend it on one side and be bookended on the other by the funnier more lighthearted stuff.

Especially since Sigil now lets out into the Domains of Delight as well as Dread. As high faluting and political as Planescape is, as high concept as it is, it still needs to be aimed at Teens and young adults.

As to M:tG crossovers: The toothpaste is out of the tube on that one. Strixhaven is a campaign setting whether you like it or not, and Sigil connects to it because it must.

 

[Steampunkette]

"underdarkish" will be a disaster. Khyber is massively different from The Underdark but because of a stray "eberron's version of the underdark" or similar in one of the early books it's been an excuse to force FR lore and all of the incompatible baggage it carries into games where a gm is trying to make a clean break with a viscerally different setting. One of darksun's strengths is hat it does not have an underdark & even the gith colony stuck in the still semi-advanced blackspine(?) mountains module are very much not underdark.

Sticking with the other themes you mention it would be better to just toss a more advanced colonial power out deep in the desert with the motive of being able to do things they can't do back home while basically running forced labor camps with plentiful food/water shipped in from another sphere & former remote villages who never want to leave instead of that uderdarkish thing. Put it deep enough & it doesn't even need that much of a presence. Sure the workers can leave, but a mindrape with new memories that purge any recollection of the location or wonderful bounty in a place with the worse abuses of megacorps & such solves all kinds of problems. They just want to be left alone & might pay off some of the SKs with occasional water/food shipments to keep them looking the other way but other than doing their thing they are just happy to keep using a banana republic that doesn't care what they do.

When I say "Underdarkish" I mean "Vast underground tunnel networks and collapsed caves".

Not "Menzoberranzan"

Though I definitely understand your trepidation. The Underground area should be just as barren and terrible as the rest of the planet, housing only horror and death in darkness.

And yeah, I was thinking of having it in/under the Black Spine mountains be just the thing. A depressing hole in the ground full of slave labor and cruel overlords who force those unfortunate enough to be their victims to dig and search and scrape for the Gith's way home, trapped in the mountains by a collapse, the location lost to time...

Play up a sort of Caste Society wherein the "Original Gith" are still powerful and immortal with metal weapons, while the everyday gith are corrupted by the wasteland and magic, as well as possible issues with inbreeding or crossbreeding with only partially-compatible species (Since the Gith are aliens)...

Could do a whole Valusians thing with the gith in that version of the setting. In the Hyborian setting their society broke down when the dinosaurs came and while they tried to infiltrate human society to control it, repeatedly, the serpentfolk wound up slowly degrading themselves by interbreeding with humans, inbreeding themselves, and generally losing all that they once were. In Conan Exiles you actually kill one of the last "True" Serpentfolk called "The Degenerate" because even he is actually a twisted mockery of what the Serpentfolk once were.

Definitely wouldn't want them working with other Sorcerer-Kings or having an "Advanced Society" with plenty of food 'cause it kinda goes against the core conceit of the world being royally screwed up and a handful of wealthy people controlling almost all the power and arable land. Especially not with letting people go, either.

And then, once the portal is found, you can grab that dusty copy of the Black Spine Mountains off the shelf and run it in 5e!

(Though I was kinda going at it without Nibenay being the driving force to unleash the "True Gith" on the world)

 

[tetrasodium]

When I say "Underdarkish" I mean "Vast underground tunnel networks and collapsed caves".

Not "Menzoberranzan"

Though I definitely understand your trepidation. The Underground area should be just as barren and terrible as the rest of the planet, housing only horror and death in darkness.

And yeah, I was thinking of having it in/under the Black Spine mountains be just the thing. A depressing hole in the ground full of slave labor and cruel overlords who force those unfortunate enough to be their victims to dig and search and scrape for the Gith's way home, trapped in the mountains by a collapse, the location lost to time...

Play up a sort of Caste Society wherein the "Original Gith" are still powerful and immortal with metal weapons, while the everyday gith are corrupted by the wasteland and magic, as well as possible issues with inbreeding or crossbreeding with only partially-compatible species (Since the Gith are aliens)...

Could do a whole Valusians thing with the gith in that version of the setting. In the Hyborian setting their society broke down when the dinosaurs came and while they tried to infiltrate human society to control it, repeatedly, the serpentfolk wound up slowly degrading themselves by interbreeding with humans, inbreeding themselves, and generally losing all that they once were. In Conan Exiles you actually kill one of the last "True" Serpentfolk called "The Degenerate" because even he is actually a twisted mockery of what the Serpentfolk once were.

Definitely wouldn't want them working with other Sorcerer-Kings or having an "Advanced Society" with plenty of food 'cause it kinda goes against the core conceit of the world being royally screwed up and a handful of wealthy people controlling almost all the power and arable land. Especially not with letting people go, either.

And then, once the portal is found, you can grab that dusty copy of the Black Spine Mountains off the shelf and run it in 5e!

(Though I was kinda going at it without Nibenay being the driving force to unleash the "True Gith" on the world)

That's the thing about Athas though. It's so awful topside that the colonial folks in charge of an outpost like I described can be horrified at how desperate the people are to work for food. 18 hour shifts with a brief lunch/dinner & magically accelerated rest period every day where they needed to claw back some worktime from the workers themselves to force a day of education/training or something on the labor to keep it from melting down physically type horror. It's horrible with the entire operation paid with a trivial amount of food & they keep trying angrily for more. It's a spin on shadowrun style megacorps rule all darkness twisted to "things are so bad the megacorps themselves are made uncomfortable".

 

[Steampunkette]

That's the thing about Athas though. It's so awful topside that the colonial folks in charge of an outpost like I described can be horrified at how desperate the people are to work for food. 18 hour shifts with a brief lunch/dinner & magically accelerated rest period every day where they needed to claw back some worktime from the workers themselves to force a day of education/training or something on the labor to keep it from melting down physically type horror. It's horrible with the entire operation paid with a trivial amount of food & they keep trying angrily for more. It's a spin on shadowrun style megacorps rule all darkness twisted to "things are so bad the megacorps themselves are made uncomfortable".

I get what you're saying, Hon... but it is a bit too "Megacorp" or "Cyberpunk" and not enough "Sword and Sorcery"

Like... Magically accelerated rest periods in a world where Magic itself is meant to be corruptive and destructive? For a -workforce- worth of people? That should utterly destroy any chance at life in those mountains. Wasting time -educating- your workforce of miners/farmers/etc rather than just breaking out the whip?

Try to imagine Conan attacking that place and the dissonance between that character and that backdrop. Conan kicks in the door of a classroom where the teacher is talking about different types of mining tools and all the students look up in shock and then run out the classroom door while the teacher yells "The Barbarian doesn't dismiss you, -I- dismiss you! Get back here!"

 

[guachi]

See, I already found good 3rd party 5e conversions of Dragonlance, Ravenloft and Planescape's mechanics, so I no longer care what they do with those. I want the same thing for Spelljammer and Dark Sun, but I dont expect them to do it in a way i would be happy with. I'm sure all those new fans would like it though.

Basically this for any old D&D setting. It's been long enough into 5e's run that I can find or convert for myself any old setting or adventure. No real need to pay WotC at this point.

That being said, the one setting I'd really be keen on is Dark Sun. I skipped every 2e supplement when they came out but I always liked the basics of what it was presenting and I'd love if newer fans of D&D were exposed to it.

 

[tetrasodium]

I get what you're saying, Hon... but it is a bit too "Megacorp" or "Cyberpunk" and not enough "Sword and Sorcery"

Like... Magically accelerated rest periods in a world where Magic itself is meant to be corruptive and destructive? For a -workforce- worth of people? That should utterly destroy any chance at life in those mountains. Wasting time -educating- your workforce of miners/farmers/etc rather than just breaking out the whip?

Try to imagine Conan attacking that place and the dissonance between that character and that backdrop. Conan kicks in the door of a classroom where the teacher is talking about different types of mining tools and all the students look up in shock and then run out the classroom door while the teacher yells "The Barbarian doesn't dismiss you, -I- dismiss you! Get back here!"

The dragonmark houses in eberron are basically fantasy proto-megacorps in a lot of ways. In eberron the treaty of thronehold & korth accords severely limit them & keep them from taking another step. Those wouldn't bind them in another sphere & athas just happens to be so awful that the people would try to drag them faster than they could themselves consider. There's no need for a whip when simply restricting the plentiful food they bring in from another sphere solves any problems. Overthrow them & the whole golden goose stops bringing in food for a couple weeks or months. The colonial force recognizes that athas itself is a crapshow that can't be fixed even if they wanted to because even they need to put limits on the good they can do to keep the workforce from self destructing like the chinese once did & the only way they could do that was to give them something inexpensive that makes them a better workforce

Your slavedriver forced labor type spin makes athas a nice enough place to support such a thing. Slavery already exists under some of he SK city states simply because slaves get to eat food/drink water and the economy is so destroyed that there's no way to feed everyone or pay everyone needed to keep things from collapsing further while still keepig rajat sealed. Athas doesn't need a kick the dog puerile grimdark version of what already exists in the "nice" parts of athas. You mention

 

[Steampunkette]

The dragonmark houses in eberron are basically fantasy proto-megacorps in a lot of ways. In eberron the treaty of thronehold & korth accords severely limit them & keep them from taking another step. Those wouldn't bind them in another sphere & athas just happens to be so awful that the people would try to drag them faster than they could themselves consider. There's no need for a whip when simply restricting the plentiful food they bring in from another sphere solves any problems. Overthrow them & the whole golden goose stops bringing in food for a couple weeks or months. The colonial force recognizes that athas itself is a crapshow that can't be fixed even if they wanted to because even they need to put limits on the good they can do to keep the workforce from self destructing like the chinese once did & the only way they could do that was to give them something inexpensive that makes them a better workforce

Your slavedriver forced labor type spin makes athas a nice enough place to support such a thing. Slavery already exists under some of he SK city states simply because slaves get to eat food/drink water and the economy is so destroyed that there's no way to feed everyone or pay everyone needed to keep things from collapsing further while still keepig rajat sealed. Athas doesn't need a kick the dog puerile grimdark version of what already exists in the "nice" parts of athas. You mention

Ohhh... Yeah. Now I get ya. You're going Spelljammery out of the gate! I misunderstood.

And nope. Not looking for "Kick the dog" "Grimdark". Just looking to have the Gith do a different thing than Black Spine as it was while still keying into the old adventure path to change things around. Rather than it being a fresh invasion force you're running toward thanks to Nibenay's mistakes, it's the crappy Gith of Athas trying desperately to claw and scrape their way off the planet by finding the way they came to Athas in the first place while a handful of "Noble Gith" lord over them. Think Skeksis, with the trappings of their once-powerful empire hanging as rags off their bony forms commanding literally degenerate gith to dig and tunnel to find the MacGuffin of Destiny!

I think the Rajaat storyline needs to be blasted from Orbit for this version of the setting. A complete revamp. In large part because the actual cool element of the setting was that there were mysteries everywhere, with answers left up to the DM in most cases, or reduced to shrugs when there was no clear "This is what really happened" provided.

I don't think, if they make Dark Sun, that they should include the full Spelljammer Treatment with invaders from Eberron or another setting. It would skew things really hard, and honestly any Spelljamming Magic User would just start Defiling the crap out of everything and not understand -why-... at least not at first.

Best to revamp what exists, change it, make it new while still touching on what came before, I think.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

"underdarkish" will be a disaster. Khyber is massively different from The Underdark but because of a stray "eberron's version of the underdark" or similar in one of the early books it's been an excuse to force FR lore and all of the incompatible baggage it carries into games where a gm is trying to make a clean break with a viscerally different setting.

Khyber is still Eberron’s version of the Underdark. They are both dark underground places full of massive tunnels and creepy monsters, and weird magic. Khyber could also be described as the Underdark +. As it also has traits of the Abyss and Hell.
Also what FR lore and baggage was forced?

 

[Faolyn]

Greyhawk as been around for decades, almost a half century at this point. It's already written... WHY do so many people think it's a good idea to try and re-write history? I don't get it. Just write something new with what YOU want to write. Then others will read it and they will think "Ok, cool", "Wait, that seems unfair" or "OMG!? What the carp?!". That's when you know how close you are to "modern sensibilities"...at least as far as the target audience is concerned.

So, I'm in my 40s, have been playing since 2e, and my absolute favorite setting is and has always been Ravenloft. As you probably know, they updated Ravenloft for modern sensibilities and a ton of history got rewritten in the process.

And the writers did, in my opinion, a pretty good job of it. And even if I hadn't like the majority of the changes--and no, there's a couple that make me go "why?"--I'm glad that the setting was updated. Why? Partly because it was old and therefore used many outdated and at best cringeworthy concepts. And partly because I'm not the only person who plays Ravenloft. There are kids and adults in their twenties who will buy Van Richten's Guide. Why force them to read through stuff that hasn't been acceptable since the 80s and 90s (and really, shouldn't have been acceptable then) just because it's what you're used to.