New WotC Campaign Setting

[ssampier]

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So what sets FR apart from any other generic high fantasy setting? I don't mean to sound snarky, mind you, I'm really not very familiar at all with FR and I'm genuinely curious what your reason is for not considering it generic.

...

I am hardly a FR fanboi. I played the setting at length in my youth. I have virtually no exposure to it in 3.x, so this comes from my exposure in 1st and 2nd edition.

FR is not generic for the same sense that vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles and coconut toppings is not generic. FR has a variety of environments and places; the content is staggering. The power groups are influencial, but do not rule the day.

Furthermore, the juggernaunt of anti-generic is the influence of the gods and the powerful NPCs. I liken a FR book to a comic-book, rather than compare to the staples of fantasy (which Greyhawk draws from). Granted some would argue they are not needed, sure but then you have a world that's fairly generic.

 

[Cedric]

It occurred to me today what I wanted to see in a new Campaign Setting.

I would like a medium-magic fantasy campaign setting...where the "good" guys, are losing. Whole cities in ruin, countries fallen to evil humanoids, a nation of evil dragons, a wasteland of barbarian tribes...and a few very large, well defended bastions of hope.

A few rare places where the dream lives on. Making magic items would be fine, but buying them would be very difficult (limited resources). Tons of fallen cities to explore for lost artifacts. Travel is anything but automatic...with large teleportation gates linking distant cities, but traveling outside the city walls is risking death or worse.

All hope is NOT gone, but boy, is it ever flagging.

Baronies would be available to anyone strong enough to clean out and hold a piece of land...offering every adventurer the chance to become nobility.

Hmm...I think I just came up with my next homebrew setting.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

No reason why FR can't be as open as you want, either. In the campaign I run, I pretty much ignore anything/everything from the novels to make the world conform to my vision.

Except that, IME, FR fans throw a hissy fit if I say that Bob is the leader of Townsville, when it's completely clear from page 246 of the Chipendale supplement that Fred is the leader of Townsville, and furthermore, he's a half-ogre were-boar Sor5/Brd15/Wiz2/Bbn7.

FR canon plays hell with my allergies.

 

[buzz]

Hmm...I think I just came up with my next homebrew setting.

I think you just came up with FFG's Midnight.

 

[glass]

If not, then pick one from the Setting Search they did a few years ago, since they still have total rights to them. Choose one that lacks the High Levelness of the Forgotten Realms and the Magic-Tech of Eberron; I'm sure they were offered a good setting with something new as its catch. Use it.

IIRC, they have the rights to the top three (of which Eberron was No 1, obviously). They other reverted to their authors, and several have since been released as OGL or STL products (Dawnforge, for example).


glass.

 

[Klaus]

It occurred to me today what I wanted to see in a new Campaign Setting.

I would like a medium-magic fantasy campaign setting...where the "good" guys, are losing. Whole cities in ruin, countries fallen to evil humanoids, a nation of evil dragons, a wasteland of barbarian tribes...and a few very large, well defended bastions of hope.

A few rare places where the dream lives on. Making magic items would be fine, but buying them would be very difficult (limited resources). Tons of fallen cities to explore for lost artifacts. Travel is anything but automatic...with large teleportation gates linking distant cities, but traveling outside the city walls is risking death or worse.

All hope is NOT gone, but boy, is it ever flagging.

Baronies would be available to anyone strong enough to clean out and hold a piece of land...offering every adventurer the chance to become nobility.

Hmm...I think I just came up with my next homebrew setting.

This is pretty much the state of the Greyhawk setting if the PCs failed in the Vecna Lives! adventure. I liked it so much, I made those changes to my 2e home game...

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

It occurred to me today what I wanted to see in a new Campaign Setting.

I would like a medium-magic fantasy campaign setting...where the "good" guys, are losing. Whole cities in ruin, countries fallen to evil humanoids, a nation of evil dragons, a wasteland of barbarian tribes...and a few very large, well defended bastions of hope.

A few rare places where the dream lives on. Making magic items would be fine, but buying them would be very difficult (limited resources). Tons of fallen cities to explore for lost artifacts. Travel is anything but automatic...with large teleportation gates linking distant cities, but traveling outside the city walls is risking death or worse.

All hope is NOT gone, but boy, is it ever flagging.

Baronies would be available to anyone strong enough to clean out and hold a piece of land...offering every adventurer the chance to become nobility.

Hmm...I think I just came up with my next homebrew setting.

That's Midnight to a T. You may not want to use it wholesale, but if you're looking for a very dark campaign, that's the one.

 

[Cedric]

I think you just came up with FFG's Midnight.

Hah, nice...I've never even seen Midnight, but I come up with the idea either too late, or never do anything with it. This is like the story of my life.

In the mid-1980s I was dusting the living room and noted all of the dust on the TV screen. I thought to myself, wow, because of the electrical charge from the CRT, it collects a lot of dust.

You know I bet you could put these around the room and run air over them to "dust" the room. Then I just shrugged and let it go.

12 years later, Sharper Image starts making millions of $$ from the Ionic Breeze. *sighs*

At any rate, thanks for the advice, I'll check out Midnight. Though, at this point I'm developing a very clear idea of how I want my world to take shape, so I'm definitely going homebrew, but I can get ideas from Midnight.

Cedric

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I've played with FR people before. The canon is unassailable and unbelievable. With Greyhawk I can mess around with canon willy-nilly and nobody bats an eye. If I were to run FR and try to work my own material in, it would cause heads to explode.

Yeah, of course. Every single FR fan is like that. They actually call the setting Forgotten Reich.

Get a grip, seriously.

At any rate, thanks for the advice, I'll check out Midnight. Though, at this point I'm developing a very clear idea of how I want my world to take shape, so I'm definitely going homebrew, but I can get ideas from Midnight.

I see others told you about it already, so I can save my remarks. I can only recommend the setting. It's awesome:

The races are different from standard D&D, sometimes very different. Gnomes, for example, are hardly recognisable, as they are riverfaring traders (and also spies and smugglers, working against the Shadow's forces)

The magic system is different, too. The old classes with magical abilities are gone (yes, that means only barbarian fighter and rogue are around.), and instead we have the Channeler, who specialized on spellcasting (which is now open to every character - you can make a fighter with a bit of spellcasting - but the channelers are so much better at it).

For the background, imagine how Middle Earth would look if Sauron had won the Ring War and got his ring back. Fast forward 100 years. Elves and Dwarves are still putting up a fight, but they're slowly, but inevitably driven back. Humans are sold out and betrayed, ruled now by those very traitors who in turn answer to Izrador, halflings are enslaved. Only the gnomes, who seemingly sold out (but are secretly working against the Dark God) have a modicum of freedom.

The setting has several interesting twists, which elegantly explain some creatures and do away with several things taht would pose a problem to the setting flavour:

When Izrador was cast down from the heavens, he turned that defeat into a dark victory by closing off the other planes forever behind the Veil. Now nothing can get out of, or into, the material plane. Nothing. No prayers to the gods (or godly divine magic, which pretty much rules out resurrection and severely limits healing for those not praying to the one god that is available - Izrador), no wizard who wants to take a shortcut through the astral. No souls of the dead (so they return as the Fell, the undead.), no demons or other outsiders.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'll throw an idea into the pot.

Why not produce a book called Complete Worlds or something that contains an overview and 3.5 crunch for the most popular settings from the past - prestige classes, unique critters, an index of suitable monsters from the MMs, etc. A bit like the occassional Campaign Classic Dragon issues, but covering the more fundamental stuff.

They could include Planescape, Dark Sun, Al Quadim, etc. Heck, include Greyhawk too as a 3.5 update and everyone would be happy. Lay it out like Tome of Magic so the sections are colour coded. I liked that.

Add in a section about how to create your own gameworld (restricting classes to certain races, how magic works, etc) and something about world hopping, and you'll have a book I bet every single GM will want in their collection.

What you think?

I think that would have to be an enormous book unless each world was getting 16 pages, of which a quarter would be the single prestige class for each.