D&D 5E Us Building a "Fundamentally 5E" Setting From Scratch Together

[Charlaquin]

ooh. I like the idea of a world where the "Planes" are RIGHT THERE. As such, shouldn't the gods be right there, too?

I’ve long liked the idea that the feywild and the shadowfell are so metaphysically “close” to the material plane that one can wander into them entirely by accident if one strays too far from the safety of settled lands, and the line between “the wilderness” and “the feywild/shadowfell” is very blurry. I also mention the two mirror planes in the same breath because I kind of see them as two sides of the same coin. There’s a lot of overlap in myth and folklore between the land of the hidden folk and the land of the dead. My personal preference is to make the shadowfell just be the feywild’s underdark, but I’m not sure if that quite fits the “fundamentally 5e” bill, so maybe just making it the unseelie aspect of the fae realm works better.

 

[Sulicius]

If you want to make a fundamentally 5e setting, I think you have to take a close look at the existing mechanics. Every class and subclass should be part of the setting. Not only that, spells and features should be woven into the setting. Is there the ruin of a village destroyed by meteor swarm? Is there a city ruled by a cabal of enchantment wizards? What is the effect of resurrection magic on religions?

Then the gameplay loop. The world needs places to explore: ruins, dungeons, magical forests. There has to be a reason why there are magic items to be found there. Why are there so many dungeons filled with slumbering vampires? Is there a keep where a retired barbarian has spent their well-earned gold?

Finally, monsters. Where are the dragons? Why are there undead? How do celestials interact with mortals?

These might be pretty high concept things to think about, but since the game is about the players, it can be very useful to make their character options part of the world.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

All spell verbal components are bad puns, presented in rhyming couplets. If it doesn't rhyme the spell backfires spectacularly.

 

[Corinnguard]

The cosmos is now a shattered patchwork of overlapping planar echoes bleeding into the material realm - the feywild and the shadowfell flicker in and out of the ethereal, tracts of Abyssal wastelands sit beyond the borderlands, fragments of multiple worlds collide and wild magic storms rage

It is the duty of mortals to explore the fractured worlds and reforge what was lost

To continue @Tonguez 's idea here, the planar bleed touched life here and there in the material realm and brought about the birth of numerous planetouched creatures and species.

 

[Reynard]

To continue @Tonguez 's idea here, the planar bleed touched life here and there in the material realm and brought about the birth of numerous planetouched creatures and species.

It also means that the characters can go to the City of Brass or Dis as easily as Waterdeep, which means we don't have to gate "planar" adventures by level anymore.

I think wide open options is a fundamentally 5E thing, and so a setting conceit like this where players can choose from a very wide variety of species, and live in the "Star Wars cantina/Pirates of Dark Water" style world is a good idea.

 

[Corinnguard]

It also means that the characters can go to the City of Brass or Dis as easily as Water-repellent, which means we don't have to gate "planar" adventures by level anymore.

Take an Airship high into the sky to visit the new Elemental Plane of Air or a submersible to visit the depths of the ocean where the new Elemental Plane of Water now resides. It's quite likely that the new Elemental Plane of Earth has supplanted this world's Underdark. As for where the new Elemental Plane of Fire resides, that world's Ring of Fire? Or in the middle of some vast Sahara-like desert?

This would be setting could be like the D&D version of the Torg RPG. Only with the echoes of the Inner and Outer Planes involved.

Torg - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Oofta]

I’ve long liked the idea that the feywild and the shadowfell are so metaphysically “close” to the material plane that one can wander into them entirely by accident if one strays too far from the safety of settled lands, and the line between “the wilderness” and “the feywild/shadowfell” is very blurry. I also mention the two mirror planes in the same breath because I kind of see them as two sides of the same coin. There’s a lot of overlap in myth and folklore between the land of the hidden folk and the land of the dead. My personal preference is to make the shadowfell just be the feywild’s underdark, but I’m not sure if that quite fits the “fundamentally 5e” bill, so maybe just making it the unseelie aspect of the fae realm works better.

I do that myself, it is quite easy to stumble into my versions of the feywild and shadowfell quite easily. An underlying theme of the last (and current) campaign is that the boundaries between worlds are becoming more porous as a result of some of the cataclysmic events that happened a little over a century ago. I'm not sure my players have realized this just yet.

But my world is heavily based on mythology, primarily Norse. So Odin leads the wild hunt once a year, you have to be careful to appease the fae, ghosts and things that go bump in the night come from the shadowfell. For that matter people sometimes travel the planes (particularly the shadowfell) when they dream deeply enough or have a particularly bad nightmare, dying in your sleep may not be a particularly peaceful event.

But my campaign world isn't particularly 5E since I don't really use the planes as written. Instead I have different realms, 9 worlds as established by Norse mythology. It's even to the point that the underdark is really just another realm that can be accessed from deep underground.

So I like the idea of leaning more into different planes and that they can be accessed (frequently accidentally) by anyone because I do it myself, even if I have a slightly different spin on it.

 

[CreamCloud0]

an arcane focus is treated like the modern day convenience of having your smartphone that serves as a phone, camera, map, notepad, calculator, watch and a dozen other things as opposed to carrying them all around individually as casting components.

"what do you mean grandnanna still uses bat droppings for fireball? why doesn't she just get and use a focus?"

 

[Remathilis]

This is still kinda hard to do because we lack the MM and the changes it will bring. But I will start with an idea that I feel seems appropriate for the tone of 5e/5.24.

"Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked."

I am going to go into this at a later date, but I feel the current design paradigm is that the world is fundamentally good, and it must be defended from the incursion of Evil. An idealistic view that feels at home as much in Tolkien as it does in Master's of the Universe. An opposite to the grimdark fantasy that Game of Thrones brought and was embodied in 4e's Points of Light world building. That is not too say everything is good and just, cruelty and malice exist and violence and oppression are parts of life, but they are to be fought against and minimalized rather than accepted.

I've heard this called Hopepunk, but I think it's a little different. Hopepunk is the idea that the world is bad but can be made better. This is the world is good, but must be defended from going bad. At least, that's the vibes I've gotten from 2/3rds of the core books. Maybe the MM with how it handles the myriad of threats will put the whole thing into perspective.

 

[Stormonu]

Planar airships are the primary way different city-states send and receive goods, with the Gith(yanki) having a stranglehold control on the legal movement (and taxation thereof) of goods and enforces it with their Red Dragon patrols. This has led to pirating, the greatest of who is Greenbeard, a undead fey lord who lashes out from the Great Sargasso - a chaotic swirl of the Feywild, Shadowdark and Elemental Chaos and the graveyard of many a ship from which Greenbeard (unwillingly) recruits his ragtag crew.