You know, to this day I have never bought anything Forgotten Realms related. I know. Blasphemy. Unthinkable. I understand that it's WotC's prime-selling setting, and that thousands of people are personally invested in it and whether or not something called a "spell plague" should have taken place.... or something. But it has never interested me. To me it's the American Idol (I make deliberate transatlantic allowances there - I really mean X Factor, never having seen the former) of settings: a bland kitchen sink with no coherent theme or flavour. I really don't get why anyone cares about it. I do recognise that the majority of D&D players do care about it; some passionately so (like I care about Doctor Who, I guess - he's a friggin' Time Lord and Elminster wouldn't stand a chance: he laughs at your 3E Time Stop exploit) but I do not share that passion. Or even a slight percentage of that interest.
I may run the biggest independent D&D site on the internet - I dare say the biggest tabletop RPG news site on the internet - and I may have been playing D&D since I was 11 years old. I'm thirty-bloody-seven now. Married. Grown up. And I've played D&D all that time. That's a good 26 years. But I still couldn't tell you the first thing about the Forgotten Realms; it just never interested me. Sure, I know there's a ninja drow called Drizzt and Gandalf is called Elminster and he's, like, über and stuff. And some wizards are red and there's an Arabian bit. That's about it, though. I don't really know what this spell plague malarky is about. I'm not sure I want to.
Did I mention I ran the biggest independent RPG news site in the world? Yet I haven't the faintest clue about the biggest mine of WotC's intellectual property. I bet you'd fire me now if you could.
My intro was Dragonlance. Then I researched back to Greyhawk. Now they had flavour. There was a theme there. Mordenkainen, Bigby, and Tenser fired my imagination in a way that no Forgotten Realms character ever did. Who's the guy in Waterdeep or somewhere who appends his name with "the black"?
And Dragonlance - that fired up my teenage mind. I started with the novels. The Chronicles and then the Legends. There was a coherent story, and the characters worked for me. OK, reading them back at age of 37 - they're not great literature. George RR Martin and Scott Lynch are much better. But they did -to me - have a magic that the plethora of D&D books since has lacked. I'm not even sure I can pinpoint it, except that I imagine that it worked because it originally limited itself to stories about a select group of characters. Then it blew it. It followed the Forgotten Realms trajectory of introducing more and more and more until the original excitement became minor and mundane. But if I could jump in a TARDIS and cut Dragonlance off after the end of the Legends, it would remain fairly perfect in my nostalgic mind (as long as I didn't have to re-read them as an adult). Y'know, before the epic story was trivialised by ever escalating events 3 weeks later, and Darth "Vader" Soth was Anakinized with a wimpy personality. Boba Fett was cool till the prequels came along, guys. Now he's nothing.
I hear that the Forgotten Realms will be supported early in the 5E cycle. Again. Whoopy doo. Isn't it always? I was waiting for Greyhawk or Dragonlance I'm just getting FR again, which never interested me in the first place. Like I said, never bought a single FR branded gaming product, never will. I know little about it, and don't intend to. I admit I read The Crystal Shard trilogy (good, OK, awful) and the Menzoberranzan trilogy (good, awful, awful) and I may have gotten a chapter or so into a book about a cleric, but it never grabbed me.
If you like it, that's fine. I don't. Clearly most people do, otherwise it wouldn't be the primary setting over and over again. I accept that I'm atypical in this and that my lack of reverence for said commercial construct will give rise to ire and rage on the intranets. That's OK.
So, where are we? I don't like FR, and I recognise that DL only works in its initial storylines before it becomes FR-lite (though I'd argue that it's 25 years, and in that time a couple of potential customer generations who never read DL may get a thrill playing through it). So I'm left with Greyhawk.
Greyhawk as the default setting? Bring back the Circle of Eight? Do you remember those maps? The names? They had something. They really did. I don't understand why Elminster has taken Mordenkainen's place. Does he have any core rule spells named after him? No. Is it Elminster's Disjunction? No, we have Bigby, Rory, Tenser, and crew. Maybe everyone knows too much about Elminster; didn't he star in a book where he was a girl once or something? I never read it. But he's far from mysterious. There's no room for your imagination there.
In my opinion, Greyhawk should be the default setting in the new iteration of D&D. Especially if "retro' is the theme as it seems to be. It's sufficiently vague and undetailed enough to allow DMs to insert things without complication, while retaining an overall sense of coherent mtstery. Plus there should be an official adventure path, and that should be the Dragonlance one (yes, an adventure path can exist in its own setting; that enhances it - EN Publishing knows this, and Hickman and Weiss knew it 25 years ago). Us veterans will buy it out of nostalgia. The kids will have never heard of either, so those lucky buggers will get to experience the mystery of GReyhawk and the excitement of Dragonlance for the first time. Kinda like if I could rewatch all of nu-Who fresh, I would. But I can't, and I'm envious of those who have that in their future. FR? Give it a friggin' rest. It's boring!
I may run the biggest independent D&D site on the internet - I dare say the biggest tabletop RPG news site on the internet - and I may have been playing D&D since I was 11 years old. I'm thirty-bloody-seven now. Married. Grown up. And I've played D&D all that time. That's a good 26 years. But I still couldn't tell you the first thing about the Forgotten Realms; it just never interested me. Sure, I know there's a ninja drow called Drizzt and Gandalf is called Elminster and he's, like, über and stuff. And some wizards are red and there's an Arabian bit. That's about it, though. I don't really know what this spell plague malarky is about. I'm not sure I want to.
Did I mention I ran the biggest independent RPG news site in the world? Yet I haven't the faintest clue about the biggest mine of WotC's intellectual property. I bet you'd fire me now if you could.
My intro was Dragonlance. Then I researched back to Greyhawk. Now they had flavour. There was a theme there. Mordenkainen, Bigby, and Tenser fired my imagination in a way that no Forgotten Realms character ever did. Who's the guy in Waterdeep or somewhere who appends his name with "the black"?
And Dragonlance - that fired up my teenage mind. I started with the novels. The Chronicles and then the Legends. There was a coherent story, and the characters worked for me. OK, reading them back at age of 37 - they're not great literature. George RR Martin and Scott Lynch are much better. But they did -to me - have a magic that the plethora of D&D books since has lacked. I'm not even sure I can pinpoint it, except that I imagine that it worked because it originally limited itself to stories about a select group of characters. Then it blew it. It followed the Forgotten Realms trajectory of introducing more and more and more until the original excitement became minor and mundane. But if I could jump in a TARDIS and cut Dragonlance off after the end of the Legends, it would remain fairly perfect in my nostalgic mind (as long as I didn't have to re-read them as an adult). Y'know, before the epic story was trivialised by ever escalating events 3 weeks later, and Darth "Vader" Soth was Anakinized with a wimpy personality. Boba Fett was cool till the prequels came along, guys. Now he's nothing.
I hear that the Forgotten Realms will be supported early in the 5E cycle. Again. Whoopy doo. Isn't it always? I was waiting for Greyhawk or Dragonlance I'm just getting FR again, which never interested me in the first place. Like I said, never bought a single FR branded gaming product, never will. I know little about it, and don't intend to. I admit I read The Crystal Shard trilogy (good, OK, awful) and the Menzoberranzan trilogy (good, awful, awful) and I may have gotten a chapter or so into a book about a cleric, but it never grabbed me.
If you like it, that's fine. I don't. Clearly most people do, otherwise it wouldn't be the primary setting over and over again. I accept that I'm atypical in this and that my lack of reverence for said commercial construct will give rise to ire and rage on the intranets. That's OK.
So, where are we? I don't like FR, and I recognise that DL only works in its initial storylines before it becomes FR-lite (though I'd argue that it's 25 years, and in that time a couple of potential customer generations who never read DL may get a thrill playing through it). So I'm left with Greyhawk.
Greyhawk as the default setting? Bring back the Circle of Eight? Do you remember those maps? The names? They had something. They really did. I don't understand why Elminster has taken Mordenkainen's place. Does he have any core rule spells named after him? No. Is it Elminster's Disjunction? No, we have Bigby, Rory, Tenser, and crew. Maybe everyone knows too much about Elminster; didn't he star in a book where he was a girl once or something? I never read it. But he's far from mysterious. There's no room for your imagination there.
In my opinion, Greyhawk should be the default setting in the new iteration of D&D. Especially if "retro' is the theme as it seems to be. It's sufficiently vague and undetailed enough to allow DMs to insert things without complication, while retaining an overall sense of coherent mtstery. Plus there should be an official adventure path, and that should be the Dragonlance one (yes, an adventure path can exist in its own setting; that enhances it - EN Publishing knows this, and Hickman and Weiss knew it 25 years ago). Us veterans will buy it out of nostalgia. The kids will have never heard of either, so those lucky buggers will get to experience the mystery of GReyhawk and the excitement of Dragonlance for the first time. Kinda like if I could rewatch all of nu-Who fresh, I would. But I can't, and I'm envious of those who have that in their future. FR? Give it a friggin' rest. It's boring!
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