It's Dark Sun

[SSquirrel]

they could fill the role of the Templar along with 'evil Paladins' (good Paladins don't fit)...

From the 4E PHB: "Power Source: Divine. You are a divine warrior, a crusader
and protector of your faith."

Paladins are champions of a particular belief and thus can be found as good, neutral or evil. They made Paladins more like the Champion in Monte's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, which was an excellent move IMO. So yes, Paladins could exist in DS, you would just have to have their power source figured out. If there are no gods, what provides powers to Divine characters?

And what would a 'Realms changing disaster' look like in Dark Sun anyway? The Sorcerer Kings lay down sod? A Halfling population explosion? Elves invent running shoes?

This is just hilarious. Thank you.

If my powers and flavor and archetype depend on "otherworldly" influences, I'm going around channeling other planes in every adventure. Which does pretty much the opposite of signifying that Athas is isolated and functionally cut off from other planes. "Can't be that cut off! This bloke from beyond the stars who lives in a land of magic came through here just when I was a kid, gave me magical powers in exchange for my soul, and now loans them to me on a daily basis!"

See I guess I just don't see the Feywild and Shadowfell as other planes per se. More like they are parallel versions of the Prime Material plane that are hiding behind curtains. It is less that you are jumping to a different plane and more like you step sideways into an alternate version of the normal world where you move a bit faster than normal, dart across and re-appear over here. This isn't nearly the same as opening a portal and re-appearing in the Happy Hunting Grounds or the Abyss. Normal Athas/Shadowfell Athas/Feywild Athas are all intimately tied together and don't allow you to go anywhere else any more easily than Athas normally makes it. Wasn't the spelljammer story that Athas was surrounded by its own crystal shell and it was hard/impossible to penetrate?

If it's followed, it also means that the stranglehold "core compatability" has had on the rules might have been nearly abandoned by now. Huzzah! This would make me a very happy camper, since it would give 4e some real "take this in a new direction" possibility. It would be like telling DM's all over the world, through example: "You know, it's OK to say your world doesn't have dragonborn in it." It's something that after FR's RSE and Eberron's cosmology I would not have expected. It excites me that this is possible.

And they're absolutely right to practically prohibit it like this, to say "There's a reason we didn't put this in here. If you want to add it back in, knowing our reasons, that's fine. It could be a lot of fun. It's not going to cause any balance issues. But for our concerns, it's not in."

See I can see both sides of this issue. In 2E they were creating 8 jillion differentsettings and supporting every one of them with regular updates, adventures, sourcebooks etc. In that model having everything be different allowed for niches, but it also meant that niches usually produce less sales and you have to support everything somehow. Cut forward to 4E and the design now calls for a Player's Guide, a core book and maybe a few adventures and then you are done. You can afford a nichier product for an annual setting b/c there is less investment needed to produce the entire product line.

At the same time, I think the core of D&D is in much better shape in 4E than it was in 2E. Much more flexible and better design all around. So I think that just saying "well it wasn't in 2E so it shouldn't be in the 4E version" is a very knee jerk reaction and not very useful. If they look at things like the Feywild and Shadowfell and conclude that they don't fit in any way, shape or form and having them in just to have them would detract from the product, by all means don't include them. But if they look at them and find interesting things they can do with it and make it blend well with Athas, why would they not include it?

For the record, I am a big fan of the notion of the Feywild having already been "used up" as a primo source for defiling magic (possibly with isolated pokets of green still existing here and there, fiercely guarded by fey protectors), and thus existing in a much worse state than even Athas itself.

Not as sure what to do about the Shadowfell though.

The Shadowfell is Athas at night. The sun is never seen, only the moons. No sun means it is deathly cold, like a desert at night can be. The Feywild and Shadowfell have both been corrupted by the defiling magic that devastated the natural world. The Feywild may be a bit more verdant than Athas is now. Maybe it is even the world as it would have been had the defiling magic never come to be. The Eladrin may all have the ability to cross this area naturally, but it is a bittersweet gift to see the lush, verdant world that it could be only in passing, and then they return to the real world. Never able to stay in what is a comparative paradise.

Yeah a few different ideas there, but all possible. The decision the designers have to make is "Do all of these things add to the Dark Sun experience in a positive way?". If they do, use them. If not, discard them. Worst case scenario, their campaign setting sales for a year are a bit lower and they move on and go to a new setting next year, which they already plan on anyway.

 

[Thorkull]

Too many settings is bad, right?

Wow, way too many posts to read 'em all, sorry if this has been mentioned before.

Is anyone else concerned that WotC is doing to 4e what TSR did to 2e? Publishing a whole slew of settings and suffering from dilution of their customer base?

 

[SSquirrel]

No b/c they aren't continuing support on all of them. In 2E you had FR, Spelljammer, Planescape, DL, Red Steel, Ravenloft, etc etc and products coming out on a regular basis for all of them. If you only have 5 products for a line and then consider it complete, you don't have the ongoing support and throwing money at an increasinly niche product.

 

[Mort_Q]

Wow, way too many posts to read 'em all, sorry if this has been mentioned before.

Is anyone else concerned that WotC is doing to 4e what TSR did to 2e? Publishing a whole slew of settings and suffering from dilution of their customer base?

One setting a year isn't whole slew in my opinion, though I agree that they need to find a balance.

That said, I've always hated the realms... not sure why. I like much of Eberron, though I hate that they wanted it to have everything... like Drow.

Having a setting that is different it good.

 

[Scribble]

Wow, way too many posts to read 'em all, sorry if this has been mentioned before.

Is anyone else concerned that WotC is doing to 4e what TSR did to 2e? Publishing a whole slew of settings and suffering from dilution of their customer base?

The problem 2e ran into wasn't just that they had a lot of settings. It was that they had a lot of settings and each one had a product line which most often contained products that duplicated material in other settings.

Now they create multiple campaign worlds, but the bulk of the material for ALL campaign worlds is found in the "generic" product line.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Is anyone else concerned that WotC is doing to 4e what TSR did to 2e? Publishing a whole slew of settings and suffering from dilution of their customer base?

Nope. Multiple settings are a problem only if the company attempts to support them all, because then a huge part of their catalog is occupied by books that only a smaller and smaller niche of the market is going to want to buy.

But the "three books and out" model prevents that. At worst, it means that three of the year's books risk appealing to only a niche, rather than an ongoing series.

 

[catsclaw227]

I must admit that I am going to throw my hat in with KM here. Dark Sun should be different from the rest - FR was straight by the book (read core), Eberron sligthly less so (different gods, slightly altered cosmology), so here is the chance to do something completely different that can truely blow our minds.I really liked 4e Eberron Campaign Guide as a book and as a setting, but it is still too much like what I can make myself.

No more vanilla, I want Orange!

Do you mean.... ORANGE SHERBET? Yummy!

But, uh, yea. Toss me in with KM and his followers. I want a 4e DS that pushes the envelope in different ways, but not one that requires (or even assumes) that all the 4e-isms exist. I want to see new 4e DarkSun-isms.

 

[lvl20dm]

I love speculating, and I love Dark Sun (the first campaign setting I purchased) - here we go:
1) Discussion at the Con mentioned that Divine Characters would be discouraged (though not prohibited). My guess is that they might operate as servants of the Sorcerer-Kings. On the other hand, they might get their powers from the faith alone. Either way, it is interesting to see an entire power source de-emphasized. This indicates to me that they are more willing with Dark Sun to depart from the assumed setting of the core books.

2) They are moving the setting back to the original boxed set. This could mean that the history of the setting is substantially altered (no Cleansing Wars, no Blue Age/Green Age, no Halflings as the creator race, no Rajaat, etc.). Kalak would still be alive and ruling Tyr, assuming that the geography of the Tablelands is the same (though they ought to make it bigger - that place is very small). Many of the areas detailed in the revised box set could be altered or removed (Last Sea? Pterran cities? kreen empire?). On the other hand, they might adopt much of the background, and simply ignore the actions of Rikus & Co.

3)The flora & fauna of Athas was pretty unique - you could (and TSR did) fill two monster manuals with creatures for the setting. My guess is that MM3 might have more than few "Athasian" creatures. They could even make suggestions on re-skinning certain creatures from the previous MM's. I expect that Giants will be more like the elemental 4e incarnations, though obviously more savage (and hopefully still strolling around the Silt Sea). Athas was unique in that (at first at least) it only had 1 dragon - it will be interesting to see if that approach is maintained. The MM's spend lots of space on Dragons and we are fast seeing the approach of the second Draconomicon. They could make transformed defilers more common, make Chromatics and Metallics a created race of servants, or something even stranger.

4) Finding a place for the many races of 4e could be challenging. Dragonborn would be either creations of the Sorc-Kings or could simply be Dray (if they keep Dregoth around or not). Tieflings could be the scions of a cursed City-State. Eladrin could have a Persian or Arabian feel - the Feywild could be just as blighted as Athas, perhaps more so. Gnomes could be extemely reclusive cave-dwellers only rarely seen by the more common races.
Ultimately, they might give many of the races an Athasian "make-over" - Elves, Halflings, and Dwarves all look quite different from their core counterparts, and the same might be true of Goliaths, Devas, and so forth. As an example, they might make Goliaths more elemental, framing them as a tribe of dwarves or humans that have become mystically bound to the mountains in which they dwell.

 

[Andor]

I still think the simplest thing to do with Eladrin is make them a subrace of Elves with a knack for psionic teleportation. It's DarkSun. Everyone is supposed to have a bit of psi. Man... It just now occurred to me that under 3e everyone in Athas would have access to psionic feat goodness. Yummm.....

 

[I'm A Banana]

My hat of KM no know limit.

A 4e Darksun has a different set of starting assumptions than a 2e Darksun, and the Feywild is one of them.

Doesn't have to be. If the divine power source -- more than four entire classes -- isn't part of the assumption, than I don't see why the Feywild is sacrosanct.

I think it takes more creativity to find a way to fit something like the Feywild to a setting than it takes to throw it out. You can simply say "Eladrin don't exist, period." Or you can figure out how Eladrin, forced to stop using their magic would adapt to the situation.

Two things.

Thing number one is that creativity is not very easily quantified, so whenever someone says "more" or "less" creative, I'm inclined to think of that more as meaning: "I like it more," or "I like it less." The quantity of creativity isn't what affects that like or dislike, since you can't accurately measure creativity, so I wonder what it is that does affect it.

Thing number two is that throwing out Eladrin makes room for something more native to the setting. There's a limited pagecount, and a limited brainspace to think of things, and the less time spent trying to shoehorn in legacy creatures, the more time can be spent giving me new awesome things.

The Eladrin, the Feywild, the Divine Power Source, the Far Realm...none of these things are such pure greatness and good that they need to be pervasive throughout everything WotC puts out for the next decade. It's like trying to use the same set of tools to build a birdhouse or build a rocket ship. Why not use tools that are suited to each task, rather than trying to hammer nails into steel? Why not use things that are part of the setting, naturally and organically, rather than forcing entirely superfluous material on it just because it happened to also be in the first Player's Handbook?

If you really like 'em and want to put 'em back -- if you really want to build that rocket ship with your hammer -- I don't think anyone should stop you. But I think, in general, the tools should be suited to the task: the game elements you use for a setting should be part of that setting, not part of some other setting and forced in just to pursue some abstract goal of perfect unification of all disparate elements.