D&D 5E How do you hope WotC treats the upcoming classic settings?

[Stormonu]

When I say "Underdarkish" I mean "Vast underground tunnel networks and collapsed caves".

Not "Menzoberranzan"

Though I definitely understand your trepidation. The Underground area should be just as barren and terrible as the rest of the planet, housing only horror and death in darkness.

And yeah, I was thinking of having it in/under the Black Spine mountains be just the thing. A depressing hole in the ground full of slave labor and cruel overlords who force those unfortunate enough to be their victims to dig and search and scrape for the Gith's way home, trapped in the mountains by a collapse, the location lost to time...

Play up a sort of Caste Society wherein the "Original Gith" are still powerful and immortal with metal weapons, while the everyday gith are corrupted by the wasteland and magic, as well as possible issues with inbreeding or crossbreeding with only partially-compatible species (Since the Gith are aliens)...

Could do a whole Valusians thing with the gith in that version of the setting. In the Hyborian setting their society broke down when the dinosaurs came and while they tried to infiltrate human society to control it, repeatedly, the serpentfolk wound up slowly degrading themselves by interbreeding with humans, inbreeding themselves, and generally losing all that they once were. In Conan Exiles you actually kill one of the last "True" Serpentfolk called "The Degenerate" because even he is actually a twisted mockery of what the Serpentfolk once were.

Definitely wouldn't want them working with other Sorcerer-Kings or having an "Advanced Society" with plenty of food 'cause it kinda goes against the core conceit of the world being royally screwed up and a handful of wealthy people controlling almost all the power and arable land. Especially not with letting people go, either.

And then, once the portal is found, you can grab that dusty copy of the Black Spine Mountains off the shelf and run it in 5e!

(Though I was kinda going at it without Nibenay being the driving force to unleash the "True Gith" on the world)

I could go for a Morlock take on Athas's underdark - for me, like the Morlocks depicted in the 2002 Time Machine. Heck, the "uber-morlock" was psionic, wasn't he?

 

[GuyBoy]

The thing about Greyhawk is that the only thing that's really interesting today is that it's a perfect representation of early 80's DnD'isms. So how do you update something like that to the modern edition? If you try to keep things as unchanged as possible you end up with a setting that doesn't fit the game it's made for, but if you try to adapt everything to the latest edition then you get a setting that's mostly bland and boring.

The problem with your argument is that it starts with a “statement of fact”, which is actually just a personal opinion. The argument therefore applies to you just fine, but has no tenability to anyone who doesn’t agree with your starting opinion.
I think Greyhawk is a fascinating setting, with huge playability AND includes so many aspects of D&D’s history which can resonate today and celebrate the big anniversary. It also includes a number which need to be updated; hence my view that an updated Greyhawk is totally appropriate as a 50th Anniversary setting.
I don’t expect you to agree because your start view is very different, but, heh, that’s why we have forums.

 

[Stormonu]

The thing about Greyhawk is that the only thing that's really interesting today is that it's a perfect representation of early 80's DnD'isms. So how do you update something like that to the modern edition? If you try to keep things as unchanged as possible you end up with a setting that doesn't fit the game it's made for, but if you try to adapt everything to the latest edition then you get a setting that's mostly bland and boring.

Forgotten Realms is a bit more Reniassance-era (1500's to 1600's) campaign world, where Greyhawk is more Dark Age/Middle Age (1200-1400's). Lower instances of available magic (most of it's magic has been "lost") and a bit "dirtier" or "grittier", with the various countries on the edge of starting big wars. FR is well explored - Greyhawk is filled with abandoned ruins and uninhabited areas. In FR, NPCs are available to help everywhere and are powerful. In Greyhawk, you're on your own - but rarely the biggest fish in the pond.

 

[Hussar]

It's generally DMs who buy setting books, not players. So I don't think many sales would be lost to players who won't buy a setting without gnomes, since they wouldn't buy it even if it had gnomes.

OTOH, if the DM says, "Hey, what about a new campaign in Setting X? " and the players say they're not interested because the race palate is too restricted, then, well, the DM doesn't buy that book.

And, frankly, I'm not sure that the old saw about only DM's buy books holds much water anymore considering the unbelievable sales of pretty much any D&D book. When the modules are hitting double digits on Amazon, there's an awful lot of DM's out there.

 

[Hussar]

And the Twins, and Raists whole arc through both trilogies, and Sturm, and the Elves racism, and the whole background of the gods absence, the whole basis of the setting.

Could you shift the tone and market for kids? Absolutely. GW has books for kids now...

Should they? I don't think so.

What do you mean "shift"? Dragonlance was ALWAYS very, very definitively YA fiction. It's in the same wheelhouse as Harry Potter. What adult themes are there in Dragonlance? There's no swearing, there's no drug or alcohol abuse, the morality is extremely simplistic, the language in the books is straight up 5th grade English. There's nothing adult at all about DL.

 

[Hussar]

I have to ask, as a classic Ravenloft fan from the fan from the 90's, what did you actually like about it that is still there now? Huge swaths of the setting havery either been erased or changed in large ways, and its literary foundations exemplify the problematic elements so many people have a problem with now. Do you just like horror roleplaying in general, or were you fond of the "weekend in hell" style from before it was a setting? I legit dont get it.

I wasn't a Ravenloft fan - I did play the first module way, way back, but, that was about it. The 5e Ravenloft module was just that good. That's the gold standard for how to write horror in D&D.

 

[Hussar]

The thing about Greyhawk is that the only thing that's really interesting today is that it's a perfect representation of early 80's DnD'isms. So how do you update something like that to the modern edition? If you try to keep things as unchanged as possible you end up with a setting that doesn't fit the game it's made for, but if you try to adapt everything to the latest edition then you get a setting that's mostly bland and boring.

Umm, you do realize that there is a whole AP in Greyhawk for 5e right? Saltmarsh is pretty popular as an AP. Did pretty darn well and appears to be pretty well supported both on Reddit and in DM's Guild. Looking over on Amazon, it appears to be one of the most popular modules for 5e, still beating out newer releases like Icewind Dale.

Again, considering there is a pretty strong, healthy community for 5e Greyhawk that is producing rather a lot of product, I'm not sure you can really claim that.

 

[Aldarc]

I like the 4e take on it--Kalak is dead and Tyr is a troubled free city (so the grimdark isn't quite so relentless), but the sillier stuff from the metaplot hasn't happened.

4e had a pretty good take on Dark Sun considering how it completely removed all the Divine power source classes from the setting, including the Cleric. No need to shoehorn Clerics into the setting with Elemental gods. The Primal classes - e.g., Druid, Shaman, Warden, etc. - were IMHO more appropriate for the setting's tones and themes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I wasn't a Ravenloft fan - I did play the first module way, way back, but, that was about it. The 5e Ravenloft module was just that good. That's the gold standard for how to write horror in D&D.

See, this is why I responded directly. Faolyn said she was a fan of the original setting, but to me what was updated ruined the best parts of the setting so I was curious what about the old setting she liked (as she is a fan of the new stuff). If you just like the new stuff, I pretty much know where you stand already.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I am not the target audience for setting books, since I always make my own settings.

So to get me to buy a setting book, I think WotC would have to do what they are doing with Strixhaven:

Introduce a new mode of play.

For Strixhaven, the conceit of playing students in a magic academy is so different than base D&D that it actually makes me want to buy the book!

So if they focused Darksun on Survival, or Dragonlance on "novelistic, character-focused play," or Spelljammer as Exploration, it would get me interested.

To quote some posters, if it's just Forgotten Realms in a funny hat, I can do that on my own!