To Mike Mearls: C'mon, bring back the whole D&D Multiverse!

double post

Morrus said:

I like them separate. It makes each freer to do its own thing.

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Which in 5E, except for Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft, and except for a few adventure placement notes, and maybe some cameos (Mordenkainen from Oerth), means: Nothing.

Aficionado writings about the Other Worlds continue, of course. Which is great. But interest in, and mastery of, the Other Worlds would only be amplified by fully resurrecting all of the D&D Worlds as active scenes within 5E-era novels and meta-plots.

Ah well. To each his own.

You guys are no fun. An atlas and unified timeline of all the D&D Worlds would be wonderful.

It's hard enough to get them to do 5e updates in the world(s) they do support.

I expect to see some new information about Greyhawk and Dragonlance at the very least in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.

I also expect them to release a kind of "guide to Settings" sometime in the next couple of years, featuring in-depth chapters on Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron, Mystara, and Dark Sun.

Until then, I'm already happily running a homebrew campaign heavily influenced by Dark Sun.

I dunno.

I can see a case for the weird ones (Planescape, Darksun, and maybe Eberron) to get, like, maybe one setting book, just to show young DMs how to bend the system a little. Heck maybe even some kind of [So-and-so's Guide to the Multiverse, with a chapter on each one]. Shoot, you could even just publish a web "conversion guide" for the stuff on DMSGuild. And I say this as a big Planescape fan from back in the day.

But the rather generic D&D-style fantasy worlds? (Mystara, Greyhawk, Dragonlance)....I just don't see why. File off the serial numbers from the relevant adventures and plop them into FR...if that. Converting to 5e isn't really hard, for the general D&D stuff.

Don't we know that most campaigns are pretty much homebrew? I gotta figure the effort vs. reward would be a pretty slim ROI.

Ratskinner said:

the rather generic D&D-style fantasy worlds? (Mystara, Greyhawk, Dragonlance)....I just don't see why. File off the serial numbers from the relevant adventures and plop them into FR...if that.

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That's the kind of well-meaning but vague thinking that crafted the 4E setting of Nerath: "Hey we'll just ignore the entire history of the D&D worlds, and just cram them into a single world, and hope people forget about the others."

It'd be like saying: "Well, a bunch of the countries in Faerun are kinda European-ish fantasy cultures, so why not just reshape Faerun into a single rectangle-shaped continent with a few blob shaped countries...they're all kinda the same anyway."

If I just wanted a genericized setting that completely ignored the 40 years of continuity of the D&D Multiverse as depicted in hundreds or thousands(?) of modules and novels, then I'd just play in Nerath or Thunder Rift (the setting of the D&D Black Box).

Yet, I agree that every adventure should be placeable in every setting (well, except, like aquatic adventures in Dark Sun). I'm all for giving a suggested placement of every D&D adventure within every world, including Forgotten Realms. But that doesn't preclude the conceptual unification of the D&D Multiverse which I'm calling for.

The next generation of D&D enthusiasts need to be "educated" (though I realize it's a kinda arrogant word) to become "masters" of the D&D continuity. Otherwise there are fractures and things are lost, and the D&D Multiverse becomes vague-ifyied and genericized.

I mean, the stewards of the Transformers IP (who also work for Hasbro), have gathered together every dot and iota of Transformers stories and imagery, and assigned it to various complex, interweaving continuities, each with their own numerical designation called "universal streams". And that's all just based on some action figure toys. And people aren't put-off by the complexity and thoroughness.

I thought D&D aficionados were at least as detail-oriented and passionate as Transformers aficionados.

Polyhedral Columbia said:

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I mean, the stewards of the Transformers IP (who also work for Hasbro), have gathered together every dot and iota of Transformers stories and imagery, and assigned it to various complex, interweaving continuities, each with their own "timeline number". And that's all just based on some action figure toys. And people aren't put-off by the complexity and thoroughness.

I thought D&D aficionados were at least as detail-oriented and passionate as Transformers aficionados.

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"And that's all just based on some action figure toys." And a multi-hundred-million dollar film franchise. Let's not leave that out.

Polyhedral Columbia said:

I thought D&D aficionados were at least as detail-oriented and passionate as Transformers aficionados.

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Most aren't. A few people are, and I think most D&D fans feel as if there are a number of tropes and concepts that are appreciably D&D enough that they should be maintained. But I don't think there's any sort of groundswell for a linked D&D ubersetting, with some kind of metaplot continuity, and I think a lot of players would actually be quite against it.

Warmaster Horus said:

"And a multi-hundred-million dollar film franchise. Let's not leave that out.

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True. And comics and merchandise and so forth.

But what I'm saying is that D&D was based on intricate stories and mastery of details from the start. Whereas Transformers started with just some toys with a stat card and paragraph-long bio on the back of each card.

But Mearl's team has only half-heartedly synthesized the vast D&D legendarium, whereas Hasbro's Transformers team (largely via the "Ask Vector Prime" at the Hasbro website) has lovingly gathered every scrap of continuity and beautifully shaped it into an intricate story of hundreds of distinct continuities and continuity families, all within the Transformers Multiverse and Megaverse (which includes cross-overs with non-Transformers universes, such as GI Joe and Star Wars).

Maybe you're saying that if Mearl's team had a larger budget (like the Transformers department of Hasbro) they could gather and unify the various D&D continuities. But no, that's a cop out. Surely they have enough money to hire somebody like Brian James (author of the Grand History of the Realms) or Echohawk (the master of monster histories here at ENWorld) to gather it all together and synthesize it into an in-house Reference Guide, and publish it as a chronology.

I have no interest in published settings which are just generic pseudo-Tolkien (Forgotten Realms, Krynn, Mystara, Greyhawk, etc.). Neither do I want special places like Dark Sun smushed into those.

I do however recognize the need for published adventures which are set in stranger places. Until then we just have to homebrew our own gonzo stuff.