Recent content by Parmandur

No idea: they are covered in the recent official books.

All over: the Moonsea city states, particularly Zhentil Keep and the expansionist Zhentarim are present threats, and there is a giant Megadungeon that is like if you made Lothlorien into Moria, filled with tons of threats as well as loot.

The whole Setting came because grade school Greenwood was writing Lankhmar fan fiction, Waterdeep is the more core area.

The Sword Coast and the Dalelands are part of the same region, the Heartlands. More specifically, Shadowdale and Waterdeep are the locations of Greenwood's multi-decade home games, so that is where the deepest detail is actually found.

Vanilla is not bland, it is just the extremely popular default. The Dalelands is definitely "Standard issue D&D" as it gets...but people like standard issue D&D High Fantasy.

Yeah, I was thinking that they could put these options in with that Astarions material reformatted to match. Along with many less explicitly sinister Paths.

I would agree that it shows that a system does not need to explicitly have universal ambitions to be engineered to do something else.

Yes, some sort of Saint/Demigod Path seems obvious, something Draconic as well...there are some PC derived characters in D&D who have become Archfey, like Tasha, so an Archfey Path would seem plausible. There are definitely lots of different possibilities for Tier 3 Path transformations a PC...

70s/80s Marvel is more all-encompassing: everything in Star Wars, plus more.

The second and third lace Setting were repurposed and used in Eberron, actually. The Order of the Stick guy was one of the other finalists, and apparently the positive energuly undead Elven court was part of his proposal originally.

Yeah, the Paths feel like something they would want more than two options for. Hard to say when this is intended for, but could be Season of Champions or one of the first two Seasons next year.

I agree, the Paths are far more edgy, both design wise and villain-ishness. If these end up in a book with, like 8 or nine Paths with these being the edgy two...not all that Villainous in impact. They posted a designer insight article just a bit ago, as well, and the intro blurb shows that...

On the other hand, all the Subclass options can be easily run as anti-heroes, or even pretty morally neutral heroes. The Druid isn't really even partiicularly sinister.

Well...no,not necessarily. If these are the only explicitly "villainous" options, that would not be enough for a full product to he "evil" - themed. More likely is we are getting a product with a bunch of Paragon Path type options (the Feat chains are both called Paths), other options might...

The cinematic trailer for Neon Odyssey is pretty amazing, great Saxophone solo amongst the barrage of 80s/90s Sci-fi nostalgia: