So you'd be interested in campaign settings getting a treatment similar to the monsters in the new Monster Manual? Taking a bunch of old stuff, a bunch of newer stuff, and finding new ways to look at them/interpret the stories they have? If there were a CS book as inspiring and detailed as the MM monster lore, I'd love to get it. Well, not me personally, but if I later take an interest in a campaign setting beyond stealing any new game mechanics, I'll want something like that.
That's an interesting way to put the question. I feel like a lot of campaign settings are written like the Monster Manual -- low-detail map, major landmarks and settlements called out, brief cultural description, and a handful of vague hooks. Next page, new region. I'd rather see a whole book (read: AP) that gives us solid story- and player-affecting detail about a local region of import in narrative form. In my mind, this content would be set up like a module (conveniently enough), only instead of dungeon maps and encounter tables you have important locations laid out and a detailed account of recent history and major players. Then the adventure is layered on top of that setting material.
If I were just getting into the game you can be darn sure I'd want to buy full-fledged campaign settings. I'd also probably be a bit frustrated that I had to scour the web to find out what to get and how to get them. And then I'd have to wade through all the mechanical information that is completely obsoleted now.
If we're comparing personal opinions, now, it's worth noting that I'm the exact opposite of you. When I was just getting into the game I had no interest in campaign settings, and if the Internet had existed when I was 12 I would have been Googling every tidbit of D&D lore I could get my hands on and lamenting that I didn't have more money to spend on "completely obsolete" PDFs, just like I used to pore over the Mail Order Hobby Shop catalog and lament that I didn't have more money to spend on "completely obsolete" 1st Edition and BECMI sourcebooks.
Dndclassics.com looks to me like the /perfect/ environment for starting DMs.
That's kind of the point. People don't just play campaigns in FR and they may want to run it in a different setting. Making it generic-ish gives them the flexibility to set it elsewhere.
Besides, people don't specifically need to know that the Elemental Evils were related to the Dawn Titans who fought the gods at the beginning of time yadda yadda, they can make that up and fill in that flavor for themselves. They don't need that world-building spoon-fed to them.
If I'm making stuff up, why do I need to buy books at all? I buy books /because/ they tell me that the Elemental Evils are related to the Dawn Titans who fought the gods at the beginning of time yadda yadda. If they didn't, why would I bother?
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous sentiment. Any dungeon master worth his salt -- hell, literally /any dungeon master/ -- can /ignore/ fluff. It's substantially easier than ignoring crunch, which they can also do without breaking a sweat.
If you're publishing a D&D book, make it a D&D book! Wizards is not the Judges' Guild and this isn't the '80s -- they don't have to file off the serial numbers to avoid litigation or for any other reason. If it's a Forgotten Realms book, make it a Forgotten Realms book! That's why half of us are shopping!
They started referring to themselves by their old names during the same novels they came back to life. They only mention their old names to each other in one small scene and Regis tells everyone that he likes his new name and wants to stick with it. But, the rest feel like their old names are their real names and switch to them almost immediately when they move away from their new home towns where no one will recognize them.
And the facepalming is complete.
As for the FR, the problem is that the post-Sundering realms are actually somewhere between the 4e and 3e campaign settings. For instance, we know from the Sundering adventures, the novels and LMoP, HotDQ and PotA, that:
What I'm saying is that none of this matters. Farts in the wind, my son. I know there were changes. You can expect them all to be ignored and to never be mentioned again once 12 months have passed.
-A bunch of gods have returned. Even ones that were dead before 3e started.
No, my child, when you saw only one set of footprints in the sand, it was then that they were walking in single file, to hide their numbers. Like sandpeople.
-Neverwinter was still destroyed in the eruption of Mount Hotenow that existed in the 4e NWCS, Lord Neverember is still in charge of the city as per that book. Though we don't know how much of the city has been rebuilt, how much of an issue the Far Realm incursion still is, whether the Ashmodai still have a large presence there, and so on. Lost Mines starts in Neverwinter and you meet your contact there but the adventure doesn't say anything about the city at all other than it is a city and things can be bought there normally. We know that the Sundering has "completely cured the Spellplague" but we don't know if that means that all the spellplagued creatures went completely back to normal or not.
Neverwinter is fine, we're all fine here. How are you?
-We know the Sundering returned all the lands of Toril back to Toril...so presumably the map looks like the one in the 3e campaign setting again. However, Genasi have had their own country for nearly 100 years now. They've definitely spread out to other countries, however and their country vanishing leaves them without a homeland but they should be accepted as a normal part of the population by now. Regis in the novels remarks that his new mother was half genasi making him a quarter genasi and therefore he can hold his breath a long time. Likewise for Dragonborn. However, what we don't know is if the countries that have spent 100 years in Abeir have been changed at all by that process.
They didn't, they didn't, and they haven't.
-When the Weave returned everyone just pulled out old spellbooks and started casting spells the same way they did before the Spellplague. It works exactly the same as it did in 3e.
'Spellplague,' 'Spellplague,' 'Spellplague!' That's all you talk about! Stop it Majoru, you're scaring the children!
Using the best information we have now, it seems like the best option for running 4e is to use the 4e description of every country that isn't from Abeir. Then to replace the description of every other country with their 3e FRCS descriptions. Though, it would be nice to have an official post of information somewhere that at least had a summary of the Sundering changes so that we could make it work even without a CS.
Psst. I bet if you just use the 3rd Edition FRCS no one notices.
Apologies in advance, I'm definitely going off on a tangent here, but multiplayer games get a bad rep for a lot of reasons, some well deserved, others not so much. A lot of games get horribly marred by intrusive DRM
Oh ho. You don't need multiplayer to get intrusive DRM in this day and age, no sir.
Drop-in drop-out co-op is perfectly successful in some very CRPG-like genres -- I'm looking at the Borderlands, Saints Row, and Grand Theft Auto series, here. I kind of wonder whether if developers could actually write a game that didn't require the main character to be a Special Snowflake, if that wouldn't solve 90% of their multiplayer integration problems right then and there.
