Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6807666" data-attributes="member: 996">Greyhawk is copyrighted/trademarkable IP, so hardly generic.  'Iconic' might be a better way of expressing what you're getting at.  Greyhawk and Blackmoor were the first D&D settings, and much more was published for the former than the latter, so it's iconic.  But my point wasn't generic so much as genre.  Greyhawk, FR, Ebberon, Planescape and D&D in general, mechanically, skew towards the very high-magic end of the genre spectrum, and, thanks to 'Vancian' magic, deviate rather profoundly in the details of that magic, as well.  It's been said that D&D has defined its own self-referent genre.PoL, with its idea that the forces of good/civilization (even evilish civilizations) aren't broadly ascendant means none of the magocracies and theocracies implied by the primacy of magic.  In that sense, it dovetails with 4e's less magic-dominated system, but mostly the 4e system doesn't imply as much about the setting as other editions, since all those PC class rules aren't generally used for NPCs, could even easily apply only to the PCs, alone, so there's less of an implication about what sorts of characters wield the greatest power or how the setting otherwise 'must' be as a result of applying the rules to everyone/thing in the setting.Though it was really nothing more than an example.  You could drop the Nentir Vale on the Sword Coast somewhere and it wouldn't change that much, except for going from a 'point of light' in an otherwise hostile world, to a backwater in an otherwise cosmopolitan one. The vague histories of Arkhozia and Ba'al Taureth and the Primeval Conflict are, indeed, the kind of things you could just hash new proper nouns for and move on.  They're examples of archetypes, a Golden Age, a Decadent Period, and a creation myth of any sort could provide similar set dressing for a campaign.  It's just nice to have some proper nouns in common and familiar throughout the community.</blockquote>

Verification