D&D 5E Forgotten Realms: Rising from the Last Realms Shaking Event

[Coroc]

OotA's Underdark is the Swordcoasts Underdark. So that leaves just Tomb of Anniliation for Chult. So that is really just Swordcoast (including Underdark and Chult). And FR has more fans then all the other settings combined, by a large margin, 38% vs 5% with 55% Home Brewers cherry picking elements of FR and other setting to add to their own. Get a proper FR setting book out of the way, THEN move on.

oota is underdark, which is a landmark of FR at least fir me it is and has always been the feature which makes it different from other vanilla settings. No matter if ghk also had its underdark and prior to FR.
underdark in FR is much more prominent. To have that covered is super important, and Oota does that quite well. Might be that the oota area is underneath sword coast, still nothing more easy than moving it somewhere else below the earth.

 

[Hussar]

That's such a laughably narrow conception of what D&D is, and so thoroughly disproven by D&D's own history that it's just a real Picard face-palm moment here. If D&D was just or largely that, it would be a largely forgotten thing, superseded by CRPGs and MMORPGs. That you appear to rate the Nentir Vale (rich in atmosphere? Is this a joke?) above the great settings D&D has really says it all. You appear unaware of the deep and two-way connection between TT RPGs and fantasy writing, too, which is rather stunning.

Well, I'm not so sure. Let's a play a game. For every setting supplement, I'll name two dungeon crawls published by either WotC or TSR and we'll see who runs out first.

See, you have to remember that those 2e settings? No one bought them. Outside of a very small number, those settings were largely ignored by fans. Don't believe me? There was an editorial by Eric Mona back in the old Paizo Dungeon days talking about how the second they put a setting tag on a cover of a Dungeon magazine, the magazine would sell less than half of a generic mag.

There's a reason we aren't seeing those settings back in print. They were giant sinkholes of money that never really made a profit.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well, I'm not so sure. Let's a play a game. For every setting supplement, I'll name two dungeon crawls published by either WotC or TSR and we'll see who runs out first.

See, you have to remember that those 2e settings? No one bought them. Outside of a very small number, those settings were largely ignored by fans. Don't believe me? There was an editorial by Eric Mona back in the old Paizo Dungeon days talking about how the second they put a setting tag on a cover of a Dungeon magazine, the magazine would sell less than half of a generic mag.

There's a reason we aren't seeing those settings back in print. They were giant sinkholes of money that never really made a profit.

This is a myopic and revisionist view. None of the settings I listed sold particularly poorly. Erik Mona never worked on TSR Dragon, so frankly his post-2004 Paizo Dragon experience, from an era when all these settings except Eberron were OOP, is irrelevant. All of them matter to the D&D IP. Shocking numbers of people new to D&D with 5E know about Spelljammer and PS and are keen to see them, too.

Also what's with the weird strawman re dungeon crawls? Obviously they outnumber settings. No-one is disputing that and it has no bearing on anything. I suspect if you count all setting supplements (not just settings) it may be closer than you think, though.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The idea of fans burrowing into a work (or body of work), and extracting every possible thing they can out of it, is integral to the "nerd" experience, and has been since time immemorial.

I think the idea that D&D is a passtime for nerds is a thing of the past.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Canon never presents a problem in established settings unless you are running pre-gen adventure paths (and rarely then) or playing with players who are extremely familiar with the canon of the setting, which is generally rare. But books full of interesting ideas, great descriptions and takes you might not have considered are very valuable, in my experience, especially to DMs who are in the earlier stages of their learning.

Edit - Actually there is one place it can hurt, and that's when you get a setting update that is then used a lot, but relies on some really awful canon change, like Monte Cook's vandalism of Planescape. That means, at best, most of the new information for a setting is useless.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the idea that D&D is a passtime for nerds is a thing of the past.

That has more to do with how nerd has been redefined than anything else. My experience, particularly with players in their twenties is that stuff considered nerdy in ages past is considered normal now. Certainly people love diving into a setting just as much as ever. Arguably more so as if anything, the idea of reading setting material (often for TV shows or films or the like) for enjoyment's is actually more common now than in, say, 2000.

 

[Hussar]

Canon never presents a problem in established settings unless you are running pre-gen adventure paths (and rarely then) or playing with players who are extremely familiar with the canon of the setting, which is generally rare. But books full of interesting ideas, great descriptions and takes you might not have considered are very valuable, in my experience, especially to DMs who are in the earlier stages of their learning.

Edit - Actually there is one place it can hurt, and that's when you get a setting update that is then used a lot, but relies on some really awful canon change, like Monte Cook's vandalism of Planescape. That means, at best, most of the new information for a setting is useless.

Or you try to publish something that tries to inject new ideas into a setting and watch the canon police come out of the woodwork to endlessly bitch about the fact that you didn't follow the canon from some out of print article in Dragon magazine from twenty years ago.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Or you try to publish something that tries to inject new ideas into a setting and watch the canon police come out of the woodwork to endlessly bitch about the fact that you didn't follow the canon from some out of print article in Dragon magazine from twenty years ago.

I think that's not a real problem.