D&D General D&D Settings with No Problematic Areas?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Maybe Eberron? I don't know enough about it. Is it Wildemount? Is this going to be the default campaign setting?

I'd say Exandria/Wildemount is the least offensive one, IMO. Eberron is pretty close as well.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

With the popularity of the first two Magic: the Gathering world books, that is the direction WotC will probably keep going, so expect the M:tG Multiverse to start to take precedence over all the old, broke previous settings as the main focus.

 

[ChaosOS]

With the popularity of the first two Magic: the Gathering world books, that is the direction WotC will probably keep going, so expect the M:tG Multiverse to start to take precedence over all the old, broke previous settings as the main focus.

Not to mention WotC fully owns the mtg settings, so they can cut out authors who receive royalties from those settings still.

 

[DND_Reborn]

You know, when I read the title of the thread I thought it was going to be about a D&D setting with all the areas settled and basically peaceful and what kind of setting would it make? (IMO, boring really...)

Instead, it was all this... oh well. shrug On to the next thread topic!

 

[humble minion]

Not to mention WotC fully owns the mtg settings, so they can cut out authors who receive royalties from those settings still.

I’d be staggered if there were still TSR-era writers entitled to royalties from older settings, and I’d be even more staggered if those authors had deals that carried over to future products that happened to use some of the old TSR IP. Greenwood is rumoured to have possibly-apocryphal eternal input into FR, and maaaaybe Weis and Hickman have some sort of rights to dragonlance, but planescape, Dark sun, al-qadim, ravenloft etc? Zero chance.

 

[Charlaquin]

In trying to think about what the future of the hobby might look like, I'm looking at some of the past products to see what D&D might end up shaping into.

We can infer that certain campaign settings will not be the basis of the future of D&D. Forgotten Realms (unless you use only the Sword Coast) has too many real world parallels with Maztica, Al-Qadim, etc. Mystara is a perfect example of "what not to do" in today's climate. Ravenloft is based on almost entirely real world horror stories and myths, so that's out too. Dark Sun has slavery. Birthright is too Euro-centric/Arthurian.

Maybe Eberron? I don't know enough about it. Is it Wildemount? Is this going to be the default campaign setting?

Really curious what you think.

I think you may be over-correcting a bit here. Do a lot of D&D settings have problems? Yeah, absolutely. Do we need to disavow any setting with any kind of real-world parallels? I don’t think so. What we need to do is engage with our problematic faves critically, and consider that they could be improved greatly with some revision, preferably with input from the people negatively affected by them.

I would also say that just because Dark Sun has slavery doesn’t automatically make it “problematic.” On the contrary, Dark Sun has some incredible potential as a progressive work. The key there (as with elsewhere) is to center the narrative around the oppressed, not the oppressors. The world has been destroyed by a small group of once-people turned monsters reaping its every last natural resource to fuel their insatiable desire for power. The remaining wealth and resources are concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. And here you are, at the bottom of the social hierarchy. You have to struggle and toil for every last drop of water you consume while the Sorcerer-Kings use it freely to keep their gardens green. What are you going to do? That’s a powerful and potentially empathy-building scenario to roleplay.

 

[touc]

A D&D setting with no problematic areas? Sounds like a fantasy world to me.

Seriously though, WOTC has no financial incentive to make a new setting. It's attracting quite a few players new to the hobby with generic Realms-type material. I'm very sure it's taking a lesson from the bankruptcy of TSR, which previously owned D&D, in that TSR actually harmed itself by putting out too many settings (over a dozen for AD&D alone). If my table plays Dark Sun all the time, I'm probably not buying incompatible material like Lankhmar or Council of Worms.

So far, the 5E model has been to give us an adventure or sample of another setting. Wildemount has been the true exception, but it came with built in hype thanks to Critical Role. For WOTC, it was perfect. Someone else had already built up the hype and established a demand for the product, and it works with all material we already had.

If we look back at Dark Sun, it was surrounded in AD&D with a lot of hype: novels, video games, and marketing efforts. Same thing in 4E. Big exposure at conventions, novels, a free adventure, promotions, and again hype before the product hit the shelves. It paid off. Both were best-selling lines at the time.

So I'm curious if WOTC will someday go big and bold and hype up a new setting. It's a big risk for them, but they do have a pre-existing successful model. However, until the winds of the market change and players get tired of the "same old thing," I don't expect to see much more than another adventure in the Realms.

 

[Tonguez]

The Birthright setting Cerilla is perfect for a future DND setting, even without the Domain rules.

Ravenloft being based on real world stories is good as it gives game designers framework for what’s acceptable (Carpathian vampires, crazed Nun and Cannibals are ok) there’s also the built in defence of ‘faithfulness to the source material’

 

[R_J_K75]

I’d be staggered if there were still TSR-era writers entitled to royalties from older settings, and I’d be even more staggered if those authors had deals that carried over to future products that happened to use some of the old TSR IP. Greenwood is rumoured to have possibly-apocryphal eternal input into FR, and maaaaybe Weis and Hickman have some sort of rights to dragonlance, but planescape, Dark sun, al-qadim, ravenloft etc? Zero chance.

Id be surprised if they ever got any royalties. As far as I know once they sold their IP to TSR/WotC owned it outright. Anything they did beyond that was just a paid job, same for the other authors. Once bought, everything belongs to them not the authors/creators. I could be wrong.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

With the popularity of the first two Magic: the Gathering world books, that is the direction WotC will probably keep going, so expect the M:tG Multiverse to start to take precedence over all the old, broke previous settings as the main focus.

Oh, don't worry, there's plenty of old, broke stuff in the Magic multiverse too. (And even some pretty new broke stuff.)