D&D 5E Revising Classic Settings

[Stormonu]

Dragonlance: I’m hoping we’ll see this rolled back to the War of the Lance with 5E stats, but I’d rather they not try to re-invision the original art nor make major changes to the story characters (such as background rewrites or gender flips). Mostly, that is a case of there’s been too much ink spilled to make those sort of changes stick.

Greyhawk: I’d love to see this in print again, but I feel it would be hard for the design team to differentiate it from FR, as they are already attempting to mash the two together in the likes of Saltmarsh and such.

Dark Sun: I didn’t catch the 4E version, and think this would be ripe for a 5E version, set back in the timeline to the original boxed set. To do it properly would require expanding the work they started on psionics to a large degree. As far as monsters, the most iconic can be included in the main book, and others appear over time or hopefully the DM’s guild would be opened up so that niche could be filled.

Birthright: I think there is potential for this campaign to be revived if they can get buy-in into the “ruling a realm” portion of the setting. There would have to be a lot of work done to get this to work for a “party”, and would need to move away from the dungeon crawl adventures of the typical D&D game to quests and heroic warfare that would require a lot of creative thinking and sample missions/adventures to get proper buy-in.

Planescape: Is another I‘d enjoy a return to, prior to the faction war. Lots of weird and pseudo-philosophical adventures to be had, but I‘m thinking with the attempts to bury alignment the designers won’t want to touch this with a 10 ft. pole, which is unfortunate.

Al-Qadim: I think this is another gem that could be resurrected that would be popular, especially if it was stripped from its relation to the Forgotten Realms and allowed to be its own thing, with its own unique races (and perhaps a home for genasi).

Kara-Tur: Honestly, I enjoy Rokugan better - but not with D&D rules. I’d love to see an Asiatic D&D campaign, but I think the old Karu-Tur would have to be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch, as well as divorced from the Forgotten Realms. Likely though, emotions may be too charged at the moment for bringing this land back at this time.

Jakandor: This would be a great campaign world to revisit, especially for tearing down the walls of Bad guys & Good guys, and civilized vs. barbaric. The design team could really cut lose here and develop some gray areas of philosophy, magic and martial aspects D&D has avoided delving into.

 

[The Glen]

well, what do the bickering faction think sells Greyhawk?

Grayhawk is the down and dirty fantasy setting. In Forgotten Realms you will bump into Epic Level characters when you go out and buy a cup of coffee. In Grayhawk most of the high-level characters are either Kings or Legends.

You're not going to have the same racial diversity. Teiflings in the Realms are very rare yet quite ubiquitous. There's at least one in every city and apparently are openly accepted. In Grayhawk seeing a dwarf walking down the street is a big deal.

Greyhawk Nations are famed for their inability to not get along. Famously they have multiple Nations that would be considered lawful good and they hate each other. It's grim and it's dirty. The Power Players are so out of the characters League they might as well be divine beings. This is low-level Game of Thrones, the world's gone to pot and all the players can do is hang on for the ride.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I would love to have a classic, full-size Darlene map that wasn't in two pieces, that's for sure. And the folio is so rules-light that it could easily be used with 5e. But how do you define a good Greyhawk, beyond just a product for us olds? I'm certainly glad I'd not be the one stuck in charge of figuring that out!

The weird thing is ... it doesn't really matter. Good is good.

Look, quality (almost) always wins people over. Think of any reboot. Or any movie in a franchise. Or any "re-imagining."

What matters is not the slavish devotion to the original- but rather the overall quality of the new product.

Aim for high quality, and the people will follow. Fan service (in this case, catering to us olds) should be a secondary consideration.

 

[AOieiosle]

Dark Sun:
Wizards already rebooted this setting in 4th Ed. They'd probs keep it the same as that. Set things just after the Tyr uprising.
This world would be hard to update because of the amount of monsters required and all the new races and defiling rules and obsidian weapons. It would be a very big book.
It might be easier to have a list of monster descriptions and the equivalent monster stat block you can use in its place. Instead of having a baazrag you use an ankheg but give it a new trait. That way you could have three or four monsters per page.

I don't believe Dark Sun will come back without a massive overhaul. It's a setting with slavery and exploitation at the core of civilized living.

 

[Staffan]

15 is definitely too many. People are only capable of maintaining 7 things in their head at once (it is why we count 7 colors in the rainbow, and have 7 numbers in a phone number).

I do agree though that the Xaositects and the Revolutionary League are good faction concepts and should stick around. I'd merge the two however, as the latter doesn't have a Factol and they overlap in many respects.

However, the Believers of the Source and the Sign of One merged (into the Mind's Eye), so they should keep that to bump it down to 13. Remove the Free League, they don't have a Factol and are boring (they barely consider themselves a faction). That's 12.

From there it gets a little trickier, but getting to 12 is pretty easy.

You could probably squeeze the Athar into the Mind's Eye faction as well, to get them into a general "the gods ain't that special" faction.

Another possibility would be to combine the Fraternity of Order, the Harmonium, and the Mercykillers into the "law" faction, with different branches.

you could dump them in of map areas as I do not believe we have a whole globe of athus even to day.

I was certain I had seen a very small globe map in some promotional material, but I can't recall it right now. The one thing I remember was that the Dead Lands shown on that globe was absolutely enormous. I could be confusing it with some type of fan material.

Thing is, the known regions of Athas aren't that big. The original map was somewhere around the size of Spain or Kenya, while the expanded one brought it up to about the size of Mexico or Saudi Arabia. To put that in perspective, that original Dark Sun map covers less area than one of the zoomed-in maps in the 2e Forgotten Realms boxed set, like the one that covers the Moonsea, Dalelands, Cormyr, Sembia, the Vast, and about half of Anauroch.

 

[Zardnaar]

I don't believe Dark Sun will come back without a massive overhaul. It's a setting with slavery and exploitation at the core of civilized living.

I tend to agree.

I'm fine with slavery in game personally at least from the villain's.

I don't see WotC doing it to any great extent.

If they do they might push the free the slaves angle but yeah.

 

[Mind of tempest]

You could probably squeeze the Athar into the Mind's Eye faction as well, to get them into a general "the gods ain't that special" faction.

Another possibility would be to combine the Fraternity of Order, the Harmonium, and the Mercykillers into the "law" faction, with different branches.


I was certain I had seen a very small globe map in some promotional material, but I can't recall it right now. The one thing I remember was that the Dead Lands shown on that globe was absolutely enormous. I could be confusing it with some type of fan material.

Thing is, the known regions of Athas aren't that big. The original map was somewhere around the size of Spain or Kenya, while the expanded one brought it up to about the size of Mexico or Saudi Arabia. To put that in perspective, that original Dark Sun map covers less area than one of the zoomed-in maps in the 2e Forgotten Realms boxed set, like the one that covers the Moonsea, Dalelands, Cormyr, Sembia, the Vast, and about half of Anauroch.

Athas will need a much bigger map as most of it is just sand-filled nothing needs more crazy stuff and half-filled in areas wear stuff get strange or worse if a worse can be formulated.

 

[Bitbrain]

I don't believe Dark Sun will come back without a massive overhaul. It's a setting with slavery and exploitation at the core of civilized living.

The expectation I always got from the original boxed set was that you would be fighting against that systemic slavery and exploitation.

In Dark Sun, the current status quo is the real enemy, and your job is to kill it one sorcerer-king and defiler at a time.

Honestly, I think it’s the one setting that DOESN’T need much in the way of a 5e cultural overhaul.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Why in the name of all that is holy would they need to do that?

Well... it's not 1984 anymore. You can't have a group of 12 heroes and only have three of them be women and all of them effectively white.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

I don't believe Dark Sun will come back without a massive overhaul. It's a setting with slavery and exploitation at the core of civilized living.

True. It would be hard to do Dark Sun without the slavery. It might need more of an overhaul than I thought. They might just skip it for that reason.