D&D 5E If WotC Did A New Setting Search

[amethal]

Add a zero, IIRC. In 2003 money, too.

Yes, I remember it as $100,000 as well.

Plus the glory, undying fame and lots of freelancing work for WotC, including the chance to write novels for them.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I'd go with tropes that always sell well:

• Shattered world: Think Zendikar, Skies of Arcadia, Baten Kaitos etc
• Sky Pirate: Flying ships are cool. Done.
• Science Fantasy: D&D is getting pretty far from wannabe medieval era. Mix cool medieval things with other anachonistic stuff.
• One world: Having the cool planar stuff only availabe at high level and forcing everything in the same cosmology with other published settings tend to get overwhelming. Instead every ''planes'' is an island in the skies that can be visited.
• Non-factual gods: Okay, some powerful beings can pretend to be divine, but the world has its share of faiths, sect, cults, philosophie. Clerics are best described ala Planescape: Philosopher with clubs!
• Reskin the classic monsters and make sure every specy has a place and a reason beside just ''existing''. Looking at you ''Gnomes in most settings''.
• No high level adventuring NPC.
• Theories, not facts. Nothing is certain and the players have to decide what they believe or not.

- NO MAGICAL TATTOOS; I swear to god. I'd pay a fortune for a D&D that does NOT offer me cheesy mechanical options for edgy magic tattou that does cool stuff. Every-damn-5e-kickstarter-has-them!

 

[Parmandur]

The exercise is difficult, because TSR worked so hard to cover every subgenre theybcoukd think of.

I would probsvly go with a Redwall/Narnia type talking animal Setting. It has been done by third parties, but not be OFFICIAL D&D so they don't count.

 

[R_J_K75]

NO MAGICAL TATTOOS; I swear to god. I'd pay a fortune for a D&D that does NOT offer me cheesy mechanical options for edgy magic tattou that does cool stuff. Every-damn-5e-kickstarter-has-them!

Otzi would like a word, his kept him preserved for 5.000 years...

But I find them annoying too, they were kind of cool when the Red Wizards had them originally but now everyone's grandmother has one. Just remember kids, nothing costs more than a cheap tattoo!!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If WotC decided to conduct a new Setting Search like the one that resulted in Eberron (the best D&D Setting, IMO) now for 2024 5E, what sort of settings do you think would make the top 3? By "sort of" I mean aesthetics, subgenre, tone, influences, etc...

Separately but related: what would you pitch?

Iomandra.

Next question?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would probably just put forth Chris Perkins's homebrew Iomandra and the Dragon Sea setting from 4e, since it basically involves island-hopping in a world ruled by dragons (and dragonborn). It would also probably be one of the best shots for getting the implied setting of the Nentir Vale back.

Ooh, hadn't considered that. Perhaps Nentir Vale is part of one of the larger islands, and the fall of its empire shattered what was once an effective peace? E.g. a country not directly ruled by any dragons meant all the dragons had to "play the game" on essentially the same footing.

Would be fun to re-cast the Arkhosia/Bael Turath war in those lights. Instead of Arkhosia falling to artificial drought and desertification, perhaps the Turathi held in reserve a great and terrible weapon, to be used only as a last resort...and when they did, it shattered the continent of Arkhosia into a bazillion islands and the magical blowback from such a devastating assault destroyed what remained of Bael Turath too.

Dragons, lairing in such defensible places as they are wont to do, thus weathered the storm nearly unscathed, and many awoke from their slumbers to find mortals begging for draconic leadership...or at least that's the way they tell it today.

Nerath (given the name similarity) might have been the furthest colony from Bael Turath, spared both the fiend-blood and the worst of the Great Maelstrom. Something like Númenor's cadet branch of the royal house founding a colony in Middle-Earth and thus being able to escape the destruction of Númenor.

 

[Aldarc]

Ooh, hadn't considered that. Perhaps Nentir Vale is part of one of the larger islands, and the fall of its empire shattered what was once an effective peace? E.g. a country not directly ruled by any dragons meant all the dragons had to "play the game" on essentially the same footing.

Would be fun to re-cast the Arkhosia/Bael Turath war in those lights. Instead of Arkhosia falling to artificial drought and desertification, perhaps the Turathi held in reserve a great and terrible weapon, to be used only as a last resort...and when they did, it shattered the continent of Arkhosia into a bazillion islands and the magical blowback from such a devastating assault destroyed what remained of Bael Turath too.

Dragons, lairing in such defensible places as they are wont to do, thus weathered the storm nearly unscathed, and many awoke from their slumbers to find mortals begging for draconic leadership...or at least that's the way they tell it today.

Nerath (given the name similarity) might have been the furthest colony from Bael Turath, spared both the fiend-blood and the worst of the Great Maelstrom. Something like Númenor's cadet branch of the royal house founding a colony in Middle-Earth and thus being able to escape the destruction of Númenor.

If you read the lore for Iomandra, a lot of it uses the implied setting of 4e including elements of the Nentir Vale/Nerath setting. Look at the map for Iomandra. It includes Arkhosia and archipelagos such as Bael Turath and Bael Nerath.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you read the lore for Iomandra, a lot of it uses the implied setting of 4e including elements of the Nentir Vale/Nerath setting. Look at the map for Iomandra. It includes Arkhosia and archipelagos such as Bael Turath and Bael Nerath.

Sadly I was never able to get much than a tiny taste of the Iomandra lore, wasn't able to track down any good sources in years past. I'm guessing this has changed with time?

 

[Aldarc]

Sadly I was never able to get much than a tiny taste of the Iomandra lore, wasn't able to track down any good sources in years past. I'm guessing this has changed with time?

Check my link in my earlier post, which you quoted. It's a ~30 page setting fan made primer.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Did Saladin Ahmed ever end up writing more Arab-adjacent fantasy after Throne of the Cresecent Moon?

Just short stories as far as I know.

First of course is that WtC very very clearly don't like doing settings.

The clearly…do…though? What?

Even when they do a setting product these days, it's generally an adventure in disguise.

what was Van Richtens, then?

But even if we accept your premise, it ignores the fact that a setting book that also contains an adventure is still a setting book. It can be both. That just tells us, at most, that they are more likely to go in a direction that has a clear big adventure seed, and give a fairly overview style description of most of the setting. Which is great.

With 5.5 coming soon, a new product could well be the First Setting Of The Edition,

Oh interesting when did they announce that?

They'll want it to use standard D&D rules by default, so there goes your no-resurrection setting concept too, and they're very clearly allergic to major new subsystems, so no tech-based setting for instance.

Have they made any setting books without new or expanded-from-the-dmg subsystems, if 5e? Maybe Ravnica counts since the guilds have very little mechanical backing…what else?

I would probably just put forth Chris Perkins's homebrew Iomandra and the Dragon Sea setting from 4e, since it basically involves island-hopping in a world ruled by dragons (and dragonborn). It would also probably be one of the best shots for getting the implied setting of the Nentir Vale back.

IMO a setting with somewhat broader themes than that would be better.

I’d be all for a new setting that uses ideas from there and from Nentir Vale lore in general, but I just don’t really see the appeal of the world rules by dragons thing.