D&D 5E 3 Classic Settings Coming To 5E?

Mecheon said:

Also Ghostwalk if we want to delve into the really obscure

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Rokugan and Mahasarpa as well. Kalamar was also an official setting for a while.

Birthright.
There, I said it.

Mecheon said:

Also Ghostwalk if we want to delve into the really obscure

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I would interpret "classic" as meaning "not obscure".

Paul Farquhar said:

I would interpret "classic" as meaning "not obscure".

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Then again, nothing is really obscure among D&D enthusiasts.

see said:

Ah, yes, yet another pile of repetitions of the deeply wrong idea that putting ships on the Astral Plane would have any similarity at all to Spelljammer.

That isn't to say you can't put plane-traveling ships into Planescape (the 5e Nautiliod sure does that), but in so doing you're not actually doing Spelljammer in any way, shape, or form. It'd be like adding a bunch of planar portals to the City of Greyhawk and declaring that you'd successfully hybridized Greyhawk and Planescape, because, hey, the important thing about Sigil was that it was full of portals, right?

"Planescape/Spelljammer hybrid" makes actively less sense than "Greyhawk-Dragonlance hybrid". You could put Ansalon and Taladas on the same planet as Oerik with a lot less invalidation of the two settings than you would by turning Spelljammer into planar travel, and any DL and GH fans would (quite rightly) scream bloody murder if you did that.

Anyway, the right way to do a Spelljammer revival would be as its own set of (properly detailed) neighboring crystal spheres supporting spelljamming adventures. Not planar travel, and not "connecting" existing settings (the level of spelljamming activity needed to support Spelljammer as a setting is incompatible with all the major settings, an issue the original boxed set handled by studiously ignoring the effect of fast flying ships on trade and warfare in FR, GH, or DL).

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A big thing about Spelljammer was connecting the other primes or at the very least the big three from back then (Realmspace, Krynnspace, Greyspace). A lot of it would be missing without that imo.
How I used it back in 4E was taking the idea of the Astral Sea and the Crystal Spheres together. If it is an Astral SEA then it should have a surface. So perhaps there is a way to DIVE into the Astral Sea and have the Crystal Spheres be suspended there and then break from the surface and get into the old Astral plane locations. So you'd replace the Phlogiston with a deep Astral of a sort (maybe made of ectoplasm?) You could rule that Githyanki Astral Skiffs cannot dive into the Sea itself (but perhaps also give them a few proper spelljamming ships of their own). Meanwhile Wildspace areas would work just as they did back then.

While Planescape does deal with Planar Travel, that's only part of it (imo not even the larger part). Sigil and the Factions were more of a focus of the setting (as was the Blood War) with multiple splatbooks on NPCs and locations for them. The original setting pretty much had a page or two per plane after all. The focus was on Sigil and Outland (with the Gatetowns) with the planes as exotic places to visit.

Mind you that doesn't mean they should become one setting. But getting rid of the Phlogiston and integrating Spellhammer into the Astral Sea would reduce a bit on needless complexities.

From what little I've heard of Birthright, it would take major work to bring it up to modern standards.

My guess is Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Spell Jammer.

• Dark Sun because it's been one of the most asked for on forums and social media
• Ravenloft because Curse of Strahd was possibly the most successful 5e adventure, so building around it is a safe bet
• Spell Jammer because it has strong proponents within WotC

Settings I would not bet about:

• Birthright because of moral/social issues they will probably don't want to touch
• Greyhawk because it might be too generic and competes with Forgotten Realms
• Rokugan because its IPR belong to another company
• Dragonlance because it never showed much potential for expansion beyond the core idea
• Planescape because it would be my favourite, and that's just not going to happen

Birthright was made for a very different style of gameplay than what 5E was built for tbh. It would require a significant investment in design.

One thing they could do is resurrect the Board Game. For me the best fit for Birthright would be an RTS that includes Hero units (think Age of Empires meets Warcraft).

The Mirrorball Man said:

Then again, nothing is really obscure among D&D enthusiasts.

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Regardless of what Ray defines "classic" as, I would say it is something that will make Hasbro a profit, and that really cuts down on the list of possibilities. No way they are going to revive some niche favorite.

Btw is Al-Qadim not even mentioned? I always thought it was well received (much more so than Kara Tur or Maztica).