Recent content by Paul Farquhar

I don’t think fragmentation of the market was the only problem associated with the 2nd edition glut. Setting books are often bought by players who want to read rulebooks, not actually play the game. After all, you can only use one setting per campaign (unless you are into lots of crazy...

If you were doing a Japanese translation, what would you call a battlemaster fighter?

To a degree, that’s what the D&D multiverse is for. It might be too late to put all the eggs back into one basket, but they can at least put all the little baskets in one really big basket! [We clearly need a setting for ridiculous metaphors.]

Indeed, and is exactly what Paizo do with Golarion. They even use it for Starfinder. There really isn't a great deal of mileage in WotC pushing out settings, new or old. It would be more useful if WotC took a region of an existing setting and expanded on it in more detail. Ravenloft does serve...

Dragonlance is a setting in which it is possible to tell tales of terror. Ravnica is a setting in which you can set an urban fantasy story. Subgenre is not built into a setting. A setting is just a place where you can set stories of whatever subgenre you like. Even true of Ravenloft - it makes...

If you have lived in a place for years you tend to notice just how fictional any version of that place in fiction is! But from a practical (and an avoiding politics) point of view, I can’t see WotC doing a real world based D&D setting. And real world with the names changed (Sikargow, Planet...

And if the author doesn’t mention it? There is generally no reason why they would. But as soon as the author mentions magic or fairies or whatever we know it’s not the real world. It might be set in some place called “London” or “Chicago” but they are not the real world cities with those names...

Forget about alignment, play the character.

Ravnica and Eberron have these. Pretty much every D&D setting has these. Where are the Dresden files set? Chicago? A city in a far off land that I am never likely to visit and know very little about. Baldur's Gate is more familiar to me than Chicago. There really isn't any difference between a...

Playing in a published setting rather than homebrew is the niche. WotC aren’t going to attract any new players by churning out yet another generic fantasyland.

It doesn’t take much resources to create a D&D setting, I’ve created several myself. All WotC can add is more fancy-and-completely-unnecessary artwork. WotC has a moral obligation to its shareholders not to play Russian roulette with their pensions, not an obligation to make stuff lazy gamers...

Why would you market to 1 million people when you can market to 10 million?! 3PP covers the niche markets, that suits the 3PP and that suits WotC.

It featured a female mummy and I think her name was Te-something.

And Godsbreath and Akarhan Sangar appear in further anthology adventures. It might be worth reminding people that the Dragonlance setting was described through adventures a couple of years before a dedicated setting book was released.

They have druids, who needs animal husbandry? Goodberries for everyone. It’s surrounded by a vast void of nothingness, it’s not threatening to destroy anything.