D&D 5E Ed Greenwood & Alex Kammer Working On 'The Border Kingdoms'

Designer Alex Kammer has shared some information about a Forgotten Realms expansion he and FR-creator Ed Greenwood are working on. It will be Adventurer's League-legal, and detail a frontier corner of the Forgotten Realms.

"A little project that [Ed Greenwood] and I have been working on - a brand new Border Kingdoms source book and every bit of it Adventure's League legal. A brand new map by [Mike Schley], 11 new character backgrounds, tons of lore, a ridiculous amount of new art. Coming to the DMG soon!"

There's already a Border Kingdoms PDF on DMs Guild, by Ed Greenwood, but he says of this new one: "If you bought the earlier version, you have the place-lore tour, but not the new map, the character backgrounds, or the uberplots. So you have about 80 percent of it already."

The Border Kingdoms are a politically unstable area between the Shaar and the Lake of Steam, adjoining the Shining Sea to the west. It's a warm climate, grasslands, and often filled with conflict and border skirmishes.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

The Shadowfell (as the demiplane of Shadow) goes back to 1st edition.. The Raven Queen only goes back to 4th, so there have been several Shadowplane books without the Raven Queen in them.

Yet they detail Gloomwrought, a 4e-first.

 

[Marandahir]

Yet they detail Gloomwrought, a 4e-first.

Right. And other details are distinctly Shadowfell (which is not just the Plane of Shadow, but also the Demiplane of Dread sort of mashed into one).

Marc A, a creator of Ulraunt's Guide to the Planes, had this to say in the comments on DMsGuild:

We would have loved to include the Raven Queen.
Sadly, we can't include her because she is from a setting that isn't allowed on the dmsguild.
As for the Dread Domains, we chose some that we wanted to delve into, some well-known and some not so much.
We wanted them to feel very different thematically.
We actually do mention Ravenloft in the intro of Chapter 3, though detailing it felt unnecessary with Curse of Strahd being available.
Beyond that, we couldn't feasibly delve into every single Dread Domain.
As for creating full campaigns, we would love to do something like that. Unfortunately, we aren't really adventure writers.
We did, as you rightfully point out, however, try to give DMs as many tools as we could, to make it as easy as possible to create campaigns.
I would love to see somebody else publish an adventure that takes place in one or more of these Dread Domains though. That would be awesome!
There are, after all, tons of extraordinarily talented adventure writers here.

This is a bit of logical fallacy, since the book was published in January 2019, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes was published in May 2018, though I might guess that by the time they had read MToK they had already finished the setting write-ups for UGttP: Shadowfell and were just working on the mechanical kinks and proofing it for publishing. Such high quality DMs Guild products require a lot of time too!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yet they detail Gloomwrought, a 4e-first.

So what? My point was that it wasn't unprecedented to describe the Shadowfell without the Raven Queen - it has an existence independent of her. Whether or not they choose to include something else from 4e is irrelevant.

 

[Marandahir]

So what? My point was that it wasn't unprecedented to describe the Shadowfell without the Raven Queen - it has an existence independent of her. Whether or not they choose to include something else from 4e is irrelevant.

Shadowfell =/= Plane of Shadow. It fills the same story niche, but it also fills OTHER story niches. This isn't your 3e Forgotten Realms cosmology, just as it isn't your 4e one either.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Shadowfell =/= Plane of Shadow. It fills the same story niche, but it also fills OTHER story niches. This isn't your 3e Forgotten Realms cosmology, just as it isn't your 4e one either.

Sure it is, a rose by any other name...

But if you insist that they are different, then the Raven Queen certainly wasn't in the FR version at that time.

(NB Plane of Shadow was 1st edition, not 3rd).

 

[Marandahir]

Sure it is, a rose by any other name...

But if you insist that they are different, then the Raven Queen certainly wasn't in the FR version at that time.

(NB Plane of Shadow was 1st edition, not 3rd).

Plane of Shadow was in 3e Manual of the Planes, too. My point is that this is 5e, not any previous edition, and Ulraunt's was writing for 5e's plane, which features many things that are NOT in Plane of Shadow from earlier editions, and also features elements that are not in 4e's Shadowfell. This includes the mysterious elven entity known as the Raven Queen, whom existed in the 5e Shadowfell write-up by that point, with her Fortress of Memories and Shadar-kai elf servants, for a whole 8 months prior to Ulraunt's Guide's publication.

Note that this is a completely different story for the Raven Queen from the one in 4e's Shadowfell, and from the one in the Dawn War Pantheon in Dungeon Master's Guide and in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (where she rules from Letherna over a race of SM-practicing goth Shadow humanoids known as Shadar-kai and serves as the goddess of winter, death, and fate.

And this is all DESPITE Ulraunt's Guide including variant Shadar-kai that are based on the 4e version (with a sidebar that if you prefer the Fey Shadar-kai of 3e and 5e, use Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes).

 

[mh972]

The link to the older The Border Kingdoms PDF is broken now.. They must have taken it down

 

[Marandahir]

The link to the older The Border Kingdoms PDF is broken now.. They must have taken it down

EGADS! You're right. Glad I bought it earlier, though I will buy it again.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Sure it is, a rose by any other name...

But if you insist that they are different, then the Raven Queen certainly wasn't in the FR version at that time.

(NB Plane of Shadow was 1st edition, not 3rd).

Plane of Shadow is definitely 3e. In 1e and 2e it was a mere Demiplane.

 

[EthanSental]

Back up and can buy it in POD now....awesome!