Adding Some Chocolate to Vanilla Settings

[Dragonhelm]

We've talked some about Mystara of late and what makes it different. I thought I'd expand the topic some and talk about those vanilla settings and how to make them stand out from each other.

I think Chris Perkins makes an excellent point about how settings should have their own hook. When you look at settings like Eberron, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun, and so on, you see settings that have their own feel. You can just look at the art and know you're in that world.

Yet settings like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and Mystara all seem to blend in together. You can easily transplant materials from one setting and move them into another.

Now, I think there should be one vanilla setting from WotC, and the Realms fits the bill the best, IMO. After all, many D&D fans like some straight-up fantasy, and that's all cool. However, you can't market two different vanilla settings successfully unless each one has its own unique hook. When I look at Greyhawk, I see a lot of nostalgia value and some cool NPCs, but there isn't much there that makes it stand out.

As for 3pp, I can understand them wanting vanilla settings, but I don't think that does them any favors. How is Erde/Aihrde (sp?) from Troll Lord Games any more enticing than any other vanilla setting?

How can companies make their vanilla settings stand out? How can WotC take brands like Greyhawk and Mystara and give them their own spin so that they're marketable and don't compete directly with the Forgotten Realms?

 

[slwoyach]

The main problem with vanilla settings is that they're never actually vanilla anymore. Greyhawk and FR may at one point have been, but FR especially has been ruined by odd happenings, inter-dimensional invasions, and just plain trying to squeeze in every new supposedly "cool" idea. I wish they'd just go back to before the Time of Troubles and say "we're sorry about all the wang, we'll try not to do that any more."

 

[Faraer]

Krynn and Oerth, say, are more different in substance -- mid-20th-century swords and sorcery, wargaming and medievalism against sweeping sagas and Tolkienesque high fantasy and Mormonism -- than most of the settings that are superficially, gimmickily different are from them. Thus they have largely distinct player bases. If you want to sell multiple setting lines at the same time, gimmicks will help initial publicity, but in the longer term you need to emphasize their substantial differences in world-building sensibility, feel, influences, play style and look, giving them distinct art direction.

Wizards, instead, as part of its moves to counter the diminishing sales returns of extended product lines, is aiming to sell setting books in series, not parallel, with simplified mini-settings designed for relatively short campaigns, stressing interchangeability of rules and setting elements and making them subsidiary to the ruleset and 'core brand' of D&D.

With the Realms -- sometimes by design, often by accident -- TSR and Wizards have meandered between playing to its distinct qualities and making it conform to D&D and to marketing whims. Thus in the 1990s it was sometimes sold as a universal setting (and used as a dumping ground), sometimes not; in the 2000s it kept its own logo but its sensibility started to be submerged in the 'crunch'-peddling racket and it was never given a distinct art style as Eberron was (leading to the odd situation of hundreds of pieces of expensive colour art but only a handful you can accurately point to and say 'this place or character looks just like this').

I'd love if Wizards was to do all its settings justice as secondary worlds in their own right, but they're conscious of the market-splitting that happened under 2E. Smaller companies would be in much better positions to do that than a Hasbro subsidiary.

I don't think the 'vanilla'/'chocolate' thing makes much sense: these worlds all have definite tastes, have already suffered (the Realms, especially) from a succession of brand managers' inconsistent short-term 'bright ideas' ('sauce') that have only obscured and muddied those tastes. (And vanilla is obviously not actually bland and indistinct as this odd language makes it out to be, anyway.) For all the good reasons people may have had at the time -- for the latest revisioning of the Realms, too -- I don't doubt that future generations will see this as poor caretakership.

We'll likely never know whether the Realms' ongoing novel timeline and escalation of Avatar-modelled upheavals was essential to its continuing financial success, which helped keep TSR afloat for a while, or whether another course would have been as or more profitable, but it's fair to say that readers were to an extent trained to expect and demand those kinds of garish, gradually erosive events.

 

[Voadam]

As for 3pp, I can understand them wanting vanilla settings, but I don't think that does them any favors. How is Erde/Aihrde (sp?) from Troll Lord Games any more enticing than any other vanilla setting?

Having a $5 short gazeteer of the world providing an overview was nice for Erde. Enough for a DM to use as a background or a player to get a feel. Comparing to FR I don't think I've ever seen a small player appropriate description of the realms the way Greyhawk/Scarred Lands/Erde have. You have to go back to 2e to get a medium length player's guide to the realms.

FR has also accreted things from many authors and many styles over a long period of time. Egytian/Celtic/Babylonian/Aztec/Mongol/Arabian stuff jammed into the setting. High magic D&D with Thayan enclaves, guns from Lantan, wild magic, lots of spellcasters most everywhere, lots of active gods, drow in a lot of places, a cult devoted to making undead dragons, etc. There is room for a niche that is more of a vanilla medieval D&D setting than FR.

 

[Faraer]

Having a $5 short gazeteer of the world providing an overview was nice for Erde. Enough for a DM to use as a background or a player to get a feel. Comparing to FR I don't think I've ever seen a small player appropriate description of the realms the way Greyhawk/Scarred Lands/Erde have. You have to go back to 2e to get a medium length player's guide to the realms.

Ed's Castlemourn setting also has such a booklet; it's always been a sore lack for the Realms. Although Ed prepared 'what you know' handouts for his players that could have been adapted for print, the 2E 'player's guide' is a novelette with lore sidebars and the 3E one is a rules update with miscellaneous appendices; the 4E player's guide is closer to being one. The Realms also has never had a point-by-point summary like Eberron got in the introduction to its campaign setting book, which has led to much getting-the-wrong-end-of-stick as over time more and more delving and reading between the lines was needed to work out what Faerûn is about.

 

[johnnype]

How can companies make their vanilla settings stand out? How can WotC take brands like Greyhawk and Mystara and give them their own spin so that they're marketable and don't compete directly with the Forgotten Realms?

Vanilla settings have to work hard to grab me. Even a setting like Eberron that tries to be different fails IMO because part of it's "shtick" is that it is all inclusive. To me that's a top down approach, one where you start with everything and then start tweaking the specifics (without eliminating anything) to try to personalize it somehow. That doesn't work for me at all. I prefer more of a bottom up approach wherein you start with the limitations (limited cultures, races, classes, magic systems, whatever) and build upon that. It's the limitations and exclusions that make a setting different and original for me.

Good example include the Iron Kingdoms and Midnight. You would never dream of including something like Dragonborn in either setting. I like dragonborn just fine but neither has a place in a setting as thematically solid (for lack of a better word) as either of these two settings.

In addition I think a large part of the problem with vanilla or kitchen sink settings is that they focus on too large an area. The Forgotten Realms and the Pathfinder settings are good examples of this. Both are made up of numerous countries and span an area much larger than is needed. If you were to take a magnifying glass and say, detail Sembia (part of the FR) you would see a place perfect for numerous adventures without ever having to visit or caring about anywhere else in Faerun. Furthermore, think about all the campaigns you have played in. When it comes down to it most take place in a relatively small area. I'd venture to say that 98% of the rest of the setting goes unread and unused. It's all an amorphous mess that is in the background sapping the personality of the campaign and therefore the setting.

D&D, especially in 4E, being developed as a toolbox game where players and GM's are provided with a never ending list of mods to add-on or personalize their game. This is great except for the games wherein the GM decides to allow everything and thus fails to make it their own. You have a warlock dragonborn fighting alongside a tiefling Avenger. SNORE! Bland, bland, bland!Again, limitations and exclusions. That's what brings a setting alive afaic.

 

[Dragonhelm]

In addition I think a large part of the problem with vanilla or kitchen sink settings is that they focus on too large an area. The Forgotten Realms and the Pathfinder settings are good examples of this. Both are made up of numerous countries and span an area much larger than is needed.

I can see this point, but the contrast is the continent of Ansalon in the world of Krynn. It's perhaps too small of an area (1,600-mile diameter). You can still have adventures, but at some point, you have everything detailed to such a degree that there's little to explore.

As for limitations, they're good to help define a setting.

 

[Leatherhead]

The main problem with vanilla settings is that they're never actually vanilla anymore. Greyhawk and FR may at one point have been, but FR especially has been ruined by odd happenings, inter-dimensional invasions, and just plain trying to squeeze in every new supposedly "cool" idea. I wish they'd just go back to before the Time of Troubles and say "we're sorry about all the wang, we'll try not to do that any more."

The hook, something like "How do you describe this setting in one short paragraph (or less)?" is more important than the minutiae. Toril is supposed to have Abeir, a sister planet on a different plane. But there is so little information about it, that it almost dosn't exist.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

D&D, especially in 4E, being developed as a toolbox game where players and GM's are provided with a never ending list of mods to add-on or personalize their game. This is great except for the games wherein the GM decides to allow everything and thus fails to make it their own. You have a warlock dragonborn fighting alongside a tiefling Avenger. SNORE! Bland, bland, bland!Again, limitations and exclusions. That's what brings a setting alive afaic.

I think it is less that limitations and exclusions are important but more that things in the setting should feel like they build off one another, are influenced by them, etc. The difference between say Eberron and FR is Eberron looks at something and goes, "okay how would this be influenced by and influence the setting", FR on the other hand just chucks them into the setting wholesale.

To give an example from a Homebrew of mine, it has every manner of race possible. But the feel is distinct by them all being refugees of a planar cosmology torn apart and now live in the few cities that pepper the last remaining plane.

 

[Faraer]

People commonly fail to realize both how large these worlds are and how local it is to live there, even for adventurers. This is partly caused by the need for base setting works, which don't know where your campaign is set, to give continental overviews and maps that wouldn't be available to characters, and various reluctances to showcase daily life in print -- Gary Gygax assumed a lot of knowledge about medieval life, for instance (though he later spelled it out in Living Fantasy), while multiple RPG and magazine editors have refused to publish basic Realmslore on trade.

Presenting a whole world, suitable for many campaigns, rather than a smaller region is liable to distract precisely in as far as DMs and players fail to recognize this locality. The illusion of a world far beyond the immediate campaign, created by some combination of preparation (wide-ranging lore) and improvisation is an important way of making campaigns feel real.

There's been a wide and I think regrettable phenomenon in D&D and the published Realms (at least) in the last while that I call foreshortening, in which things become easier, quicker and closer, encompassing the 'players can do anything' philosophy, reviving past cultures, speeding level advancement, tieing encounter strength to PC levels, bringing drow to the surface, making gate travel and construction easier, and assuming modern geographical integration and speeds of communication.

I think it's telling that we talk about finite character race choices and so on as restrictions and limitations, which perversely assumes all-inclusion as a norm and characterizes deviations from that as a kind of authoritarian curtailment. Obviously, this phenomenon isn't unrelated to the selling of class and race supplements to players. It's like thinking of a sculpture as loss because bits of the stone block were carved away.

The difference between say Eberron and FR is Eberron looks at something and goes, "okay how would this be influenced by and influence the setting", FR on the other hand just chucks them into the setting wholesale.

That's how the Realms has sometimes been abused, in stark contrast to the coherence of good Realmslore -- the web of interrelationship represented in the setting itself as the Weave.