This article is very interesting. I had always suspected that 5e’s big-honking-adventure books were backdoor setting guides. Tyranny of Dragons and Princes of the Apocalypse don’t really fit the pattern, but they were the first two such adventure books for 5e. Starting with Out of the Abyss, which was pretty transparently built like “everything you need to know to run adventures in the Underdark” with the plot mostly being an excuse to tour the PCs around the major Underdark cities. Curse of Strahd was the Ravenloft (though limited to Barovia) source book; Tomb of Annihilation was the Chult sourcebook; Dragon Heist and Mad Mage were Waterdeep sourcebooks; Descent into Avernus was both a Baldur’s Gate and Nine Hells sourcebook… Storm King’s Thunder and Witchlight don’t fit the mold quite as cleanly, but the intent is clearly there with a lot of them.
This also explains why those campaign books all feel like they have paper thin plots to me. As Chris says here, they focused on the locations first and then came up with reasons for the players to need to go there after. That results in them all being “and then” stories, instead of “but/therefore” stories. The motivations feel weak because they’re just excuses to get the party to the next location the designers had already decided they were going to go. Needless to say, I do not share Polygon’s apparent adoration for this approach to adventure design. Seeing that they have taken a different approach with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms gives me hope that maybe they’ve moved on from this experiment and will try writing future adventures with the primary goal of being good adventures instead of that being secondary to the goal of being secret setting guides.
Agreed. I'd note that
The Wild Beyond the Witchlight had an
Extra LIfe-funding supplement that's available on both DM's Guild and D&D Beyond,
Domains of Delight, which essentially is the remaining setting material that didn't make it into the book. While I'd still have loved to see a more fleshed out Feywild setting showing domains like Mithrendain and Mag Tureagh, I've got my 4E books for that, and
Lorwyn: First Light seems to be an additional supplement trying to fill some of that gap too (they outright state that you can treat Lorwyn as if it's the Feywild as a way to tie it into the FR campaigns books – they say best if you take a planar crossing from the Moonshaes. In any case
The Wild Beyond the Witchlight was at least at one point intended as their Feywild version of this same sort of half-setting. And it was after
Witchlight that the next two adventure paths were just straight up campaign settings.
Storm King's Thunder has a gazetteer chapter that takes up a good chunk of the book, and it directly supplements the
Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide by hooking in elements from that book into the events of its adventure. So I'd argue that it's also playing mini-setting role.
When it works, it's great. When it doesn't work, well, you get Strixhaven, which doesn't really function as a setting book or as a campaign.
Hey hey, I loved the Strixhaven campaign book!
The setting also had a full set of Magic Story chapters set on campus, and a full
Planeswalker's Guide to Strixhaven, in case you needed more material to build off of. We're going back there later this spring with
Secrets of Strixhaven, and there will certainly be a Planeswalker's Guide to Strixhaven, Edition 2.0 or whatnot reframing the setting after the cataclysmic Phyrexian Invasion of the Multiverse, and the subsequent opening of Omenpath portals between planes that anyone can traverse (no longer need to be a Planeswalker or be summoned through a planar gate to get to campus). Strixhaven always had been sort of a hub world setting like Ravnica because students came from all over the multiverse to study there. But the Omenpaths make that much more feasible rather than exclusive to those who had the means to planar travel.
Don't a lot of the Adventurers League seasons correspond with the big campaign book for the year?
If so, this would set up a payoff for the AL players at least.
They were, until 2021's Witchlight Carnival, when AL decided to retire their separate adventures documents and just run the main WotC campaign book, or a modified version of it with only parts in PDF form. Icewind Dale was the last season to have its own dedicated content, and even there it was only a handful of adventures.Tyranny of Dragons through Descent Into Avernus there were dozens of adventures for each WotC-campaign book season (plus a handful for Tales from the Yawning Portal as they didn't realise that was more of an anthology than a full season's worth of content to build off of).
The Moonsea was the living Forgotten Realms setting shaped by the Adventurer's League story. There are other Living FR areas – The Border Kingdoms basically are provisionally off-limits to allow Ed Greenwood & his friends to keep telling FR stories over there. The Moonshae Isles were in a similar boat with the Moonshae Regional Guide and adventure path on DM's Guild being semi-official, but as that path ended years ago the Moonshaes became open again for business in last year's two setting guides.
Oh, but I guess
Spelljammer Academy sort of counts as an AL tie-in to
Spelljammer. It's just… it was a temporary "claim this!" article available only to D&D Beyond and only if you didn't miss the window like I did. And it wasn't published by the AL, so I stand by my statements above!
