I Want More Nentir Vale!

[SquareKnot]

I don't want books and books of info, just more of an idea of what the world looks like, with just enough info to get my imagination going as I fill in the blanks.

Release a larger map showing the world, and a few cryptic locations plotted out

Sounds like you're asking for a Nentir Vale, oh what's the word, right, a Nentir Vale ... gazetteer.

Sounds good to me.

 

[Dedekind]

Count me in.

But I'm vanilla all the way around. List of characters:

Dwarf fighter, elf ranger, eladrin wizard.

 

[Unwise]

As odd as it sounds, I disagree with the requests to expand the Nentir Vale's world, at least in part. What I like about the Vale is that it is self-containted. It can be placed in any world you like. You can play an entire campaign within it without every having to leave.

The vagueries about the rest of the world allow you to expand on it however you please. This also allows for an easy pick up campaign without having to read a huge amount of lore. I read two pages about the Vale and was ready to start DMing. If we add in information about the rest of the world, we will find we have to explain it all to PCs. They will want to travel outside the Vale. They will want to be from exotic areas that they expect the DM to know about.

As a compromise, I would be happy if they had an expanded world, but left any detailed reference to it out of any material published for the Nentir Vale. For instance in an adventure you meet an ambassador for "a sea fareing trade nation (like ABC, if you are playing in XYZ world)" without specific details a GM will later have to stick to.

 

[tuxgeo]

As odd as it sounds, I disagree with the requests to expand the Nentir Vale's world, at least in part. What I like about the Vale is that it is self-containted. It can be placed in any world you like. You can play an entire campaign within it without every having to leave.

As a compromise, I would be happy if they had an expanded world, but left any detailed reference to it out of any material published for the Nentir Vale. For instance in an adventure you meet an ambassador for "a sea fareing trade nation (like ABC, if you are playing in XYZ world)" without specific details a GM will later have to stick to.

Building on that: the Nentir Vale is a self-contained region, and is quite a lot of fun; so let's have lots of other self-contained regions in the same vein, with no specified geographic relation to one another, so they can be mixed-and-matched at the DM's whim.

Of course a river implies a river-mouth; but we could have several river-mouths, none of which need to be named "Nentir," but any of which could be used as the mouth of the Nentir in some people's campaigns. Some of the river-mouths could be estuaries or deltas like the Amazon or the Mississippi, while others could be steep, hilly bays like San Francisco or Seattle ("Deschutes Falls" at Tumwater, what?). Some river-mouths could feature a seasonally variable "bore" like the Severn, while others could have enormous religious significance like the Ganges.

We could have several deserts, several mountain-ranges, several desolate coasts, several archipelagos, several freeports, several muggy swamps, to give us variety to suit all tastes. Fanciful examples follow:

The Endless Steppes of Snarf!
The Pinnacles of Incorrigedes! (With the Foothills of Impassable.)
The Outback of TheyShootHorsesDon'tThey.

The Freeport of Pantacrumblo, where the unstable geology meets the ocean trench, and the land crumbles into the trench with every major earthquake -- reducing the high mountains to lower mountains, and forcing the population to shift the seaport roughly a dozen miles every fifty years. (Continual work for the civil engineers to rebuild the entire port and roadway system on an ongoing basis.)

The Lost Land of TooFarWest, where the Elves have been separated by vast oceans from the Silvan Elves for so many millennia that they still speak "Forlorn Elvish" instead of the more modern "Silvan Elvish." (No, wait; Tolkien already did that with Quenya. Nevermind.)

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

Unwise, I know what you are saying . Part of what makes the Vale neat is that it IS small enough to feel contained, and "understandable". One is not overwhelmed by it it's size nor complexity.

Yet ... I want some more.

If they were to 'expand' it a bit, you could simply ignore the expanded material and continue to plop the Vale in as you do now.

 

[Unwise]

Yes indeed, I am happy enough for them to produce a world, I just don't want them too. I don't want mango icecream, but am don't care if it gets made. Some Eberron and Forgotten Realms adventures and articles are quite specific to those realms, as long as the future products for Nentir Vale are not like that, it is fine.

All of my PCs in the game I DM are from far away lands. The two humans jumped through a portal chasing a known criminal (Kalarn from Keep on the Shadowfell), the two dwarves were having a bucks party, got black out drunk, briefly remember looking down on the world and falling and ended up in Nentir (I have decided they caught a lift with the mage from the Head in the Clouds Chaos Scar adventure, though they don't remember it). None of them know where they are and the people of Nentir are not well travelled enough to tell them the direction to their homelands.

Originally I tired to place this inside the Forgotten Realms world. The problem with that is that everyone wants to know where they are in relation to the world, they then ask about the surrounding kingdoms.

"Where do the elves live around here?" "Is the neighbouring kingdom friendly?" "If we are wanted, let's just go to that land over there until we can clear our names" "What gods are around, how was the world made?" All of these questions made me spend far more time having to read up on a world that I had no intention of placing adventures within.

In addition, my players don't want to read up on source material, I used a great link to a whole bunch of history about Nentir and the inhabitants and just gave them that. They knew the history of the place in about 2-3 pages.

I would like to see more adventures and settings similar to the Nentir Vale. What about an Island, with its own history, geography and maps? Then they could produce some adventures that could either be slotted into that island or the Nentir Vale, with minimal changes.

 

[DMZ2112]

I love the D&D4 core setting, from the Vale to the Elemental Chaos. I don't understand all of the decisions Wizards has made about D&D lore, but I like the vast majority of them. I really hope we see that Nentir gazetteer pop back up onto Wizards' calendar.

 

[malraux]

I love the D&D4 core setting, from the Vale to the Elemental Chaos. I don't understand all of the decisions Wizards has made about D&D lore, but I like the vast majority of them.

I'll second this. I just picked up Demonomicon a few says ago. The lore/creation myth at the start of it is more or less the background for my BSG themed campaign I plan to start soon.

I love the small stuff like Nentir Vale and the big stuff like Torog and the Underdark. It might not be the awesomest stuff out there, but its surprisingly similar to what I want to run a game.

 

[DMZ2112]

I'll second this. I just picked up Demonomicon a few says ago. The lore/creation myth at the start of it is more or less the background for my BSG themed campaign I plan to start soon.

I love the small stuff like Nentir Vale and the big stuff like Torog and the Underdark. It might not be the awesomest stuff out there, but its surprisingly similar to what I want to run a game.

The lore books are the only ones I still buy, because I run Pathfinder games in the D&D4 core setting, that's how pleased I am with it. It's almost like a return to the really old days, when the D&D universe was just a series of unconnected adventures, except now someone has connected them all.

So much great lore was generated in the AD&D2 era, but it was so disjointed and confused -- it was clear the developers of one setting were not necessarily on the same page (or even in the same book!) as the developers of another (cough, Planescape, cough, Spelljammer). I like the effort the new design team has put into reconciling everything. I find some of the new material to be lacking in comparison to the rehashed older material, but that's probably just my inner grognard grognarding.

Grognards will grognard.

 

[Nilbog]

Count me in for some Nentir Vale loving

I am due to start my campaign soon, and I'll be retrofitting 4e into the Earthdawn world, but sadly I don't have a lot of information on specific areas of Earthdawn ( I have a few splat books, but they deal with the major areas, place i want to avoid until later in the campaign)

So along comes Nentir vale and with a little tweeking I can fit it right into my setting, I feel it fits well (I've made a few adjustments to the flavour giving a more Mediterranean feel rather than the standard Medieval North European) and now i can easily use use a lot of the published adventures and chaos scar ones, which saves me a lot of time, as some i think are great adventures