Is Chris Perkins Working On A New D&D Setting?

Chris Perkins posted some tantalizing tidbits on Twitter last night… any thoughts on what it all means? He states that Forgotten Realms is not the default D&D setting, that he's working on something slated for 2016, and that there's non-Realms stuff in the works. It sounds like something related to an older setting. Could be good news for those hoping to see Eberron or some other setting brought back for 5th Edition!


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[Post promoted to article and edited by Morrus]

 

[pukunui]

[MENTION=98008]Unwise[/MENTION]: I hear ya! I thought it might be fun to run a campaign in a world suffering from an ice age (think Hellfrost), so I took the opportunity to try it out first by running the Legacy of the Crystal Shard adventure, which is set in Icewind Dale during an early winter. I'm glad I did, because I think I'll have had enough of ice and snow and all that come the end of it. I can't see myself wanting to run a long-term campaign in a setting where most of the world looks like Icewind Dale in the winter.

 

[Unwise]

[MENTION=54629]pukunui[/MENTION] I am glad I am not the only one who thinks that way. I was a player in a game just like what you described and it was the monsters and constant reliance on the ranger that killed it. It became hard for the DM to maintain the suspension of disbelief after this exchange:

DM "You see a huge bat..."
PC "Let me guess, is it a frost bat?"
DM "Umm....yeah"
<Later the same fight>
DM "Then a huge spider erupts from a crack in the wall..."
PC "Let me guess, is it an ice spider?"
DM "Umm...not necessarily...I mean, it is a bit icy...well, its legs are icicles..."
PC "I would say that is very icy indeed!"

The PCs decided to take their Ice-Sled, pulled by snowdogs, through the Frostwood, avoiding the frost-wolves and ice-wights, to Iceholme, the ice-castle of the ice-giant king, to ask him to lend the ice-mage the seed of winter so he could cure the Lord of Everfrost's wife, who had been turned to ice by an winter-witch for being cold-hearted.

We also had to gloss over the fact that the entire place survived on wild game, when there was nothing for the game to eat. The DM eventually said that the carribu were magical and ate ice. That did not help matters.

 

[pukunui]

Exactly! While some gimmicks are better than others, they're all best taken in small doses. "Generic" fantasy worlds allow for greater variety.

 

[Jester David]

Releasing in 2016.
Assuming it's a GenCon release we should find out the details in... a little over eighteen months.

 

[ceiling90]

Exactly! While some gimmicks are better than others, they're all best taken in small doses. "Generic" fantasy worlds allow for greater variety.

Generic may not be the word your looking for.

Expansive maybe, but not generic.

A world that is easily about as large as ours has a multitude of climates, cultures, and mysteries that would work well to encompass anything and everything, but it's an issue of scale for many DM's and players.

I think of it of this way - FR is actually a massive world, it's a kitchen sink world from the little lore that I've read of it concerning areas like Kara-tur, Mazteca, and Al Qadim, but the scope of many of the games and storytelling is centered on Faerun, the prototypical European-centric fantasy world. And since so much is centered on there (look at current area where the two main story lines are presented), it feels pretty generic - and pretty kitchen sink. There's always someway for so and so from some far off land to be a rarity and a unique snowflake to show up in Waterdeep or Neverwinter. But how would it be deep in Kara-tur or Mazteca, or Al Qadim? Would a Faerunian be more of a rarity, or would it have to be a game with Western Superiority complexes?

I'm not defending FR in anyway, but many campaign settings only feel so much either gimmick or generic because the scope is so small. Athas maybe a dry world, but so is Arrakis, but difference is the scope - Arrakis is only a planet within a much larger universe where other stories only have to touch on it, it is after all one of the key lynch pins in the universe of Dune. I think that a sufficient well built world (ie Universe) could embody everything and anything, but still keep each area significantly unique and different - after all, look at the world we live in for real.

 

[pukunui]

Generic may not be the word your looking for.

Expansive maybe, but not generic.

I was just using the same terminology that [MENTION=98008]Unwise[/MENTION] used. FR is a great example of a "generic" world. It's a kitchen sink, as you say, complete with all manner of pseudo-historical real world locations. You can have a campaign in FR that touches on all of these places and therefore has far more variety than a Dark Sun campaign could have.

 

[ceiling90]

I was just using the same terminology that @Unwise used. FR is a great example of a "generic" world. It's a kitchen sink, as you say, complete with all manner of pseudo-historical real world locations. You can have a campaign in FR that touches on all of these places and therefore has far more variety than a Dark Sun campaign could have.

I mean in respect to [MENTION=98008]Unwise[/MENTION], Generic worlds I feel are those that allow kitchen sink without any real variety - as in it's always a variation of the Classical (I probably shouldn't have used proto) European Centric fantasy - in which the Western Bias and Cultural Norm are implicit.

I have to wonder, that even in FR, in parts of the world where that bias and norm aren't implicit, do players and DM's do it anyway? I mean, let's say you take it to the Mazteca area of FR (Aztec), they would all have the same basics more or less - You'd have your Fighters, Rogues, Paladins, Clerics etc, but they'd be certainly different. Clerics, in true Aztec form, would probably want blood sacrifices for many of their rituals, and many of their spells would have very different spell components. Paladins would be a hell of a lot more harsh, maybe more leaning towards the Vengeance Oath than anything else. Quite frankly, many of what we (I want to say those with the classical European Fantasy bias) would think is vaguely evil is something that the Aztecs and the culture thrived on. They lived on War and Blood. They had a goddess that were chopped up and somehow still functional as the moon.

This still somehow allows for the "anything" choice, but it's markedly different from the basic "generic" world. Is that still "gimmicky"?

I know this is sort of derailing... But if this 2016 project is that Alice in Wonderland setting...

 

[Unwise]

I used "boring generic" to make it explicit that I know I am a crotchety old man I agree with what [MENTION=82284]ceiling90[/MENTION] is saying, though I would say that it is a very similar concept to expansive, but a little different in some of my personal experiences.

The Swordcoast and Nentir vale are generic areas. Pretty much stock standard fantasy. Nothing wrong with that. You can throw in an Arabic sea trader without breaking the world. A travelling Oriental diplomat will fit in just fine. Pretty much any plot and monster can be used seamlessly, even without extensive travel. It is generic and expansive, you can dip into gimmicks for a session or two, then move on.

I created a world where each area was very heavily and strictly tied to a mythos. So there was the Egyptian area, with mad sorcerer kings making necropolisis, the dragon emperor of China, the Celtic wilds, a transylvania area, a Norse area, a Spanish queen recruiting people to discover the Aztec area etc. This was a collection of 12 different gimmicks, as opposed to making an expansive generic world. Adventures, monsters and themes of one area did not translate well into another. Sure there were interactions between them, but the themes were strong enough and localized enough that it was not a generic world. In each area, I was restricted in what could logically happen there. This is unusual of course, but I could see a similar thing happen in any world where you put the themed areas outside of practical reach and don't use them as a splash of colour regularly enough.

Taking FR as an example. I would go out of my way to have their captain for a voyage on the Sword Coast be a guy from Kara-Tur with a Junk ship, just to remind them that the place exists. The guy that runs the local alchemist has a strange last name as comes from Al'Qadim. When staying as guests of the duke, there is a very touchy Samurai guarding the guest quarters next to them, not allowing them anywhere near it. Just occasional things to make the world feel smaller.

 

[NiClerigo]

If other settings are supported (and I hope they are, since I don't like the FR), I hope that they work on something for Eberron in 5e.

 

[Hand of Evil]

got to think it is something new, it would be good for any additional media ventures, online/games/movies.