D&D 5E D&D's Classic Settings Are Not 'One Shots'

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In an interview with ComicBook.com, WotC's Jeremy Crawford talked about the visits to Ravenloft, Eberron, Spelljammer, Dragonlance, and (the upcoming) Planescape we've seen over the last couple of years, and their intentions for the future.

He indicated that they plan to revisit some of these settings again in the future, noting that the setting books are among their most popular books.

We love [the campaign setting books], because they help highlight just how wonderfully rich D&D is. They highlight that D&D can be gothic horror. D&D can be fantasy in space. D&D can be trippy adventures in the afterlife, in terms of Planescape. D&D can be classic high fantasy, in the form of the Forgotten Realms. It can be sort of a steampunk-like fantasy, like in Eberron. We feel it's vital to visit these settings, to tell stories in them. And we look forward to returning to them. So we do not view these as one-shots.
- Jeremy Crawford​

The whole 'multiverse' concept that D&D is currently exploring plays into this, giving them opportunities to resist worlds.

When asked about the release schedule of these books, Crawford noted that the company plans its release schedule so that players get chance to play the material, not just read it, and they don't want to swamp people with too much content to use.

Our approach to how we design for the game and how we plan out the books for it is a play-first approach. At certain times in D&D's history, it's really been a read-first approach. Because we've had points in our history where we were producing so many books each year, there was no way anyone could play all of it. In some years it would be hard to play even a small percentage of the number of things that come out. Because we have a play-first approach, we want to make sure we're coming out with things at a pace where if you really wanted to, and even that would require a lot of weekends and evenings dedicated to D&D play, you could play a lot of it.
- Jeremy Crawford​

You can read more in the interview at ComicBook.com.
 

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The comic universe is still 616, yeah. But Multiverse of Madness also called the MCU 616. Later, Across the Spider-Verse had Spidey 2099 refer to it as Earth-199999, as Marvel reference books had named it, in a nod to Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Presumably in the infinite multiverse, there are an infinite number of universes in which the universe numbering scheme is different and allocates different numbers to different universes…
 

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Where do you draw the line between 'inspired by Arthur' and 'different retelling of Arthur'? Don't know Artoria, but that sounds more like the former. If anything 'inspired by Arthur' gets lumped into 'still Arthur but different', then this is pretty much game over for everything ever, there are then millions of retellings of the same dozen or so original stories
oh no why do I have to reveal how much I know about Fate lore

okay so its loosely like your pop-culture knowledge of Arthurian lore, including some of the more obscure stuff like Merlin being a cambion and Lancelot's whole states of madness, but Artoria is a woman. Which is also their explanation for how the whole Lancelot thing goes down as its basically a 'yup, king's gotta have a queen' marriage for Artoria, and Lancelot and Guinevere are genuinely in love, but even though Artoria's happy for them the guilt just eats away at Lancelot and it all ends, y'know. How it ends. Mordred's like a clone or something. A man can only take so much Nasuverse

anywho later Lancelot and Artoria get summoned into the future as heroic spirits and Lancelot uses a whole jet as a weapon (as he's perma in one of his famous Lancelot Rampages) to fight Gilgamesh. As you do.
 



oh no why do I have to reveal how much I know about Fate lore
As someone whose familiarity with Fate begins and ends with the '06(?) Fate/Stay Night anime adaptation, I salute you for your sacrifice.

Don't worry, if/when Raildex or the When They Cry franchise become relevant to a discussion here, I will take the bullet for us all...
 
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Bashir: Those are Klingons?
Odo : Mister Worf?
Worf : They are Klingons, and it is a long story.
O'Brien : What happened? Some kind of genetic engineering?
Bashir : A viral mutation?
Worf : We do not discuss it with outsiders.

"Trials and Tribble-ations", Deep Space Nine, season 5, episode 6
They did eventually explain it.
 


They did eventually explain it.
Which is weird, because they did not have to. It is the Klingon Empire. That doesn't mean every species in the Empire has to be native Klingons. maybe different clans were different strains? Maybe the Precursors (is that what they are called in ST) seeded a dozen nearby worlds with proto-Klingons. "Our special effects changed" is an opportunity to expand lore, not create convoluted methods to preserve it.
 

Which is weird, because they did not have to. It is the Klingon Empire. That doesn't mean every species in the Empire has to be native Klingons. maybe different clans were different strains? Maybe the Precursors (is that what they are called in ST) seeded a dozen nearby worlds with proto-Klingons. "Our special effects changed" is an opportunity to expand lore, not create convoluted methods to preserve it.
They used the same individual Klingons with both make up styles. They  did have to eventually explain it, and they did.
 

Bashir: Those are Klingons?
Odo : Mister Worf?
Worf : They are Klingons, and it is a long story.
O'Brien : What happened? Some kind of genetic engineering?
Bashir : A viral mutation?
Worf : We do not discuss it with outsiders.

"Trials and Tribble-ations", Deep Space Nine, season 5, episode 6
No, that was actually resolved with Enterprise.

But STD, and Strange New Worlds made a mess of all that (though I really like the latter, it's thrown several monkeywrenches into established lore).
 

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