D&D 5E Revisited Setting News: Its not the 2023 Classic setting, but rather for 2024

[darjr]

Eh, there is plenty of other horror out there, WotC doesn’t need to do that level of edgy.

My players really want to find and deal with that ghoul, mainly cause they are sure she’ll return anyway.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Yeah, and that's not say that 5e cant do horror.

The soon-to-released Dark Soul 5e will probably be more ''horror'' than most of WotC's releases if they can translate the feeling of mystery and crushing isolation from the videogames to paper.

There's also the Cthulhu Mythos book for 5e. Does it pretty well.

But yeah, I agree with the general assertion that 5e and D&D generally doesn't really do horror well because the whole game is predicated on killing monsters and taking their stuff. Viewed in that lens, what difference does it make what they encounter. It's a monster to be defeated or an environmental obstacle to be overcome.

 

[Marandahir]

The trouble with marketing to kids is adults almost always underestimate and infantilize them. The kids want to read the bloody and nasty stuff long before the adults think it’s appropriate. So an adult marketing something to a kid will often be thinking “younger teenager” but actually dumb it down way too much and end up targeting 6-10 year olds. You can see this quite clearly with the Satanic Panic and the horror comics scare in the '50s.

Relevant:
Return to Oz is a classic, perhaps because, as the Nostalgia Critic speaks to in his video, when he saw this as a kid, it was the first time he realised that maybe not all adults have his best interest in mind, and the movie doesn't talk down to him or try to hide the bad things from him. It's weird, creepy fantasy that treats kids like human beings who are living in this world. Dorothy isn't a Conan the Barbarian or Iron Man or Gandalf the Grey, like Frodo Baggins, she's a normal person, a child even, who is caught in very unnormal and dangerous and scary circumstances.

D&D needs to lean more into that. I think they can do so and approach a setting like Dark Sun with nuance without turning it into a machismo chainmail bikini Conan-esque fantasy and without encouraging and propping up racist ideas and slavery institutions. You can have everything out to kill you in a horrific world, and yet still steel yourself and press on in the face of adversity, even if you have very little power to fix the underlying problems of the world. It takes the power of friendship, and not a good deal of luck, but most of all, the courage to act even when doing so paints a target on your back or puts in you harms way. These are lifelong lessons that D&D teaches, and Dark Sun is a fantastic setting to teach them with, if the designers have the courage to wield the tropes and motifs of Dark Sun for good. And such a product can be good business too. That takes good marketing though, since I'm sure some grognards will still say "they changed it now it sucks" and some moral panickers will still say "EGADS! It's got demon dragons and is godless and teaches kids about slavery! It should be banned!" But there's a line they can walk and still make oodles of cash on it. I think this team can walk that line. They did a lot better with Van Richten's Guide, in my opinion. I think they'll do better with each product they release, too.

 

[Staffan]

To my understanding, FR has been far and away the most popular kitchensink fantasy setting since it was published in 1e though, rapidly outpacing its kitchensink "competitors" Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Mystara, and Dragonlance. So while Greyhawk was chosen in 3e to be the core setting because of its legacy on the game, Forgotten Realms has gotten by on popularity first and foremost.

My impression was that at least for 3.0, the plan was to have the core books lightly reference Greyhawk stuff to make it the "default" setting (as well as let the RPGA use it as a playground), but make Forgotten Realms the "premium" setting that gets lots of sourcebooks and rules addenda made for itself. You could see this in that the core 3.0 adventures often referenced Greyhawk geography, and some of the options in the 3.0 splatbooks were explicitly Greyhawk-based, although in most cases filing off the serial numbers wouldn't be too hard.

By 3.5, the connection to Greyhawk had become even more tenuous. You still had the core pantheon and the Great Wheel cosmology, but both sourcebooks (e.g. Tome of Battle) and adventures (e.g. Red Hand of Doom) were set in a sort of nebulous non-setting where most elements were given cool history and lore, but without explicitly connecting that lore to a particular setting.

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah, and that's not say that 5e cant do horror.

Almost any system can do horror. It's up to the company and how willing they are to try. WotC, not so much.

The soon-to-released Dark Soul 5e will probably be more ''horror'' than most of WotC's releases if they can translate the feeling of mystery and crushing isolation from the videogames to paper.

Here's to hoping. It's wild that other companies 5E games are more Ravenloft than the official Ravenloft.

 

[Azzy]

Right. Non-horror fans point to 5E Ravenloft and say "that's horror" while horror fans break their spine from doubling over laughing.

TBF, the same can be said of TSR-era Ravenloft. D&D just doesn't do horror well.

 

[teitan]

I love different settings. It's what got me excited about D&D in the first place back in 2nd ed. And WotC will publish other settings for 5e because people are clamoring for them. But they also have a brand they are heavily invested in, and modern sensibilities to live up to, and for those reasons I don't expect these new products to convey differences like the old ones did. They're going to want everything to pretty much look the same as base D&D, with all the same core options and values, and a mild flavoring of the setting in question. I have no belief that WotC will reconstruct the old settings faithfully. The only advantage to publishing them at all i can see is opening the settings up to the DMs Guild, where the fans can do it properly.

I would say Eberron, Theros, Ravnica, Wildemount, and Ravenloft are all different from each other in extremely significant ways and very different from FR.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

TBF, the same can be said of TSR-era Ravenloft. D&D just doesn't do horror well.

Horror usually depends on the protagonists being idiots. You can't force PCs to do the stupid things horror protagonists do.

 

[teitan]

He works on Magic now

Last I saw he oversees D&D in general as an overall brand and not just the game.

 

[teitan]

TBF, the same can be said of TSR-era Ravenloft. D&D just doesn't do horror well.

Yeah but it does Castlevania very well.