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.
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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?
The 4E Realms actually feels pretty different from Greyhawk and Mystara (which in my opinion feel rather different from each other.)
The 4E Realms are basically recovering from giant magical apocalyptic upheaval. Many old kingdoms have been destroyed, new monsters and entire sentient races have appeared, there are people mutated by magic wandering around, the old powers of good have largely died or are now hiding or pouting, etc. Gods have died, new gods been born, etc. Humanity is, if anything, on the retreat.
Greyhawk is a human-dominated world in which other sentient races (at least friendly ones) are much fewer in number and much more isolated. Vast sprawling feudal states are slowly crumbling, losing their hold on feudatories and vast wilderness sprawls between cities but it's mostly fairly normal wilderness where you won't end up mutated or in an anti-magic zone, etc. Magic is fairly rare, but often very powerful and those who command magical items and spells have a huge edge. Those few places with common high magic are also ruled by nasty, nasty things that need to be destroyed like the demon-haunted dynasties of the wreckage of the Great Kingdom or the Kingdom of Iuz.
Mystara is a world where men become gods. It's not an every day event but it's a lot more common than other game worlds and it's the default future of any long running campaign. Further, it tends to be more gonzo than Greyhawk or even the Realms. It is a world where elves are building a nuclear reactor underground and the source of the most potent magic in the world is the engine of a crashed spaceship altered by the gods themselves. The two most potent nations in the default setting area command giant air fleets and command large numbers of high level wizards. The largest cities and multiple nations are drenched in magic. Undercover dieties do things like run schools of magic or become the mistress of Emperors to manipulate them. Further, Mystara is set up to encourage PCs becoming rulers of their own territories on the way to becoming one of the Immortals.
