Remathilis
Legend
Doesn't DCC have Aerth, which had a huge honking Box Set during the 3e era?
D&D 5E Settings played in D&D: cause or effect?
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
Doesn't DCC have Aerth, which had a huge honking Box Set during the 3e era?
Hussar
Legend
There's a flip side to all this as well that needs to be taken into consideration. Do these alternative settings actually NEED a full setting?
For example, they borrowed liberally from the Elemental Evil campaign to build Princes of Elemental Evil. Yes, it was a Greyhawk campaign, but, they filed off the serial numbers, gave it a new paint job and poof, now it's a Forgotten Realms campaign. And it works. It's been pretty well received. Those who want to port it back into Greyhawk can certainly do so, although, WotC isn't about to release a Greyhawk version of the SCAG to help you with that.
Take Ravenloft. Now, here's another setting that saw it's genesis in a module. And, I'd hazard a guess that most people are more familiar with the module than with the entire Domains of Dread thing. So, why not do the same thing as Princes? Take a chunk of the Sword Coast, some nice mountainous region without a lot of people, and poof, there's Barovia. It's not like you need this huge area - something like about a fifty mile radius circle around Castle Ravenloft would catch it. The Sword Coast region is BIG. Plunking down the geography would be easy.
So, now what do you need? Well, Sanity rules, Corruption rules, and a handful of specific monsters and some backgrounds. Again, a book the size of SCAG would easily cover this, or, heck, you could cover 90% of that in the Ravenloft module itself. Something along the lines of Return to Castle Ravenloft where you have randomisation mechanics to determine NPC goals and you're pretty much good to go.
Does a Ravenloft inspired AP need to have Lord Soth's Domain of Dread? Or any of the other ones? Are they actually integral to having a gothic horror experience? After all, isn't that what Ravenloft is about? Bringing Gothic Horror to D&D? Whether they do a kind of reboot and rebuild a new Castle Ravenloft style campaign, or maybe use the Sundering to say that the Ravenloft Domain got sucked into Forgotten Realms, it wouldn't be that hard to do either way.
That way you get to leverage the commercial popularity of Forgotten Realms and still bring something like Ravenloft to the fans. I'm looking at that poll on the Front Page of En World that says that there are as many people playing FR as homebrew, which jives with what Perkins was saying earlier. And FR is tripling the numbers of any other setting. You're never going to abandon that to chase those other numbers. It's just not going to happen. Far better to try to entice those other setting fans into FR by doing what FR has always done - steal liberally from every other setting. I mean, good grief, the most iconic FR elements are almost all stolen straight from other settings. Drow? Yup, Greyhawk. Waterdeep? Greyhawk city. Under mountain? Castle Greyhawk. Tieflings and Aasimar? Planescape. Kara-Tur? Oriental Adventures. On and on. FR has always been the Borg of D&D, assimilating whatever it could suck up.
It makes far more sense, to me, to try to hoover up support from other settings and fold them into Forgotten Realms than to try to chase those smaller groups and hope that enough FR fans will make up the difference.
For example, they borrowed liberally from the Elemental Evil campaign to build Princes of Elemental Evil. Yes, it was a Greyhawk campaign, but, they filed off the serial numbers, gave it a new paint job and poof, now it's a Forgotten Realms campaign. And it works. It's been pretty well received. Those who want to port it back into Greyhawk can certainly do so, although, WotC isn't about to release a Greyhawk version of the SCAG to help you with that.
Take Ravenloft. Now, here's another setting that saw it's genesis in a module. And, I'd hazard a guess that most people are more familiar with the module than with the entire Domains of Dread thing. So, why not do the same thing as Princes? Take a chunk of the Sword Coast, some nice mountainous region without a lot of people, and poof, there's Barovia. It's not like you need this huge area - something like about a fifty mile radius circle around Castle Ravenloft would catch it. The Sword Coast region is BIG. Plunking down the geography would be easy.
So, now what do you need? Well, Sanity rules, Corruption rules, and a handful of specific monsters and some backgrounds. Again, a book the size of SCAG would easily cover this, or, heck, you could cover 90% of that in the Ravenloft module itself. Something along the lines of Return to Castle Ravenloft where you have randomisation mechanics to determine NPC goals and you're pretty much good to go.
Does a Ravenloft inspired AP need to have Lord Soth's Domain of Dread? Or any of the other ones? Are they actually integral to having a gothic horror experience? After all, isn't that what Ravenloft is about? Bringing Gothic Horror to D&D? Whether they do a kind of reboot and rebuild a new Castle Ravenloft style campaign, or maybe use the Sundering to say that the Ravenloft Domain got sucked into Forgotten Realms, it wouldn't be that hard to do either way.
That way you get to leverage the commercial popularity of Forgotten Realms and still bring something like Ravenloft to the fans. I'm looking at that poll on the Front Page of En World that says that there are as many people playing FR as homebrew, which jives with what Perkins was saying earlier. And FR is tripling the numbers of any other setting. You're never going to abandon that to chase those other numbers. It's just not going to happen. Far better to try to entice those other setting fans into FR by doing what FR has always done - steal liberally from every other setting.
I mean, good grief, the most iconic FR elements are almost all stolen straight from other settings. Drow? Yup, Greyhawk. Waterdeep? Greyhawk city. Under mountain? Castle Greyhawk. Tieflings and Aasimar? Planescape. Kara-Tur? Oriental Adventures. On and on. FR has always been the Borg of D&D, assimilating whatever it could suck up. It makes far more sense, to me, to try to hoover up support from other settings and fold them into Forgotten Realms than to try to chase those smaller groups and hope that enough FR fans will make up the difference.
There's a flip side to all this as well that needs to be taken into consideration. Do these alternative settings actually NEED a full setting?
For example, they borrowed liberally from the Elemental Evil campaign to build Princes of Elemental Evil. Yes, it was a Greyhawk campaign, but, they filed off the serial numbers, gave it a new paint job and poof, now it's a Forgotten Realms campaign. And it works. It's been pretty well received. Those who want to port it back into Greyhawk can certainly do so, although, WotC isn't about to release a Greyhawk version of the SCAG to help you with that.
Take Ravenloft. Now, here's another setting that saw it's genesis in a module. And, I'd hazard a guess that most people are more familiar with the module than with the entire Domains of Dread thing. So, why not do the same thing as Princes? Take a chunk of the Sword Coast, some nice mountainous region without a lot of people, and poof, there's Barovia. It's not like you need this huge area - something like about a fifty mile radius circle around Castle Ravenloft would catch it. The Sword Coast region is BIG. Plunking down the geography would be easy.
So, now what do you need? Well, Sanity rules, Corruption rules, and a handful of specific monsters and some backgrounds. Again, a book the size of SCAG would easily cover this, or, heck, you could cover 90% of that in the Ravenloft module itself. Something along the lines of Return to Castle Ravenloft where you have randomisation mechanics to determine NPC goals and you're pretty much good to go.
Does a Ravenloft inspired AP need to have Lord Soth's Domain of Dread? Or any of the other ones? Are they actually integral to having a gothic horror experience? After all, isn't that what Ravenloft is about? Bringing Gothic Horror to D&D? Whether they do a kind of reboot and rebuild a new Castle Ravenloft style campaign, or maybe use the Sundering to say that the Ravenloft Domain got sucked into Forgotten Realms, it wouldn't be that hard to do either way.
That way you get to leverage the commercial popularity of Forgotten Realms and still bring something like Ravenloft to the fans. I'm looking at that poll on the Front Page of En World that says that there are as many people playing FR as homebrew, which jives with what Perkins was saying earlier. And FR is tripling the numbers of any other setting. You're never going to abandon that to chase those other numbers. It's just not going to happen. Far better to try to entice those other setting fans into FR by doing what FR has always done - steal liberally from every other setting.
It makes far more sense, to me, to try to hoover up support from other settings and fold them into Forgotten Realms than to try to chase those smaller groups and hope that enough FR fans will make up the difference.
That's an opinion. For me, and I'm sure, for a lot of others, rL isn't just about Barovia. Sure, that was the foundation an Strahd is the most iconic darklord and sure, you can just supplant it to FR if you want, but that won't be RL. Without the mists, the faiths, the Dark Powers, without the vistani, the wastly different realms with their different cultural levels, it's just won't be Ravenloft. And in a mere module you won't get these fundamental things, just a fraction of them.
A SCAG-type book (or pdf), on the other hand, with mechanical conversions and short guides to the different Realms would be okay. Basically anything that takes the heavy lifting of conversion from the GM's shoulder and gives a sound intro to new players. The remaining of the fluff is there in the old books, no need to reprint, if nothing world-changing happened.
Elemental evil is a whole different piece of cake, because in that case you take something general d&d fantasy from a general fantasy setting and supplant it to another general fantasy setting. Shoehorning everything into FR would destroy the meaning of these non-generiv fantasy settings.
Hussar
Legend
Oh, sure. I get that. And, of course, it's just my opinion.
OTOH, let's look at the things you listed (out of order):1. The Vistani - Now, I'm not a RL expert, but, aren't the Vistani basically a Romani type people? Is there any particular reason you can't have Vistani in Forgotten Realms? What about a nomadic, gypsy people makes them difficult to port to another setting?
2. The Mists - That's actually something quite easy to port into FR. You could have the new "Borovia" surrounded by a thick mist that has sprung up, shrouding a formerly quiet corner of the Sword Coast - heck, that could quite easily be the "hook" for the AP? What's behind that wall of mist? And, once inside, how come no one ever comes back?
3. The Faiths - Sorry, not sure on this one. I was unaware that Ravenloft had a specific pantheon. Which faiths are we talking about here?
4. The Powers - This one is also fairly easy. It's not like the Powers typically originated in Ravenloft anyway. They were drawn from all sorts of other places and "trapped" in Ravenloft. Again, there's nothing saying we can't do the same thing, but instead of a demi-plane, we simply have a geographic location in FR.
5. Different Realms - Ok, now this one, fair enough. I'll freely cop to my own ignorance here. I have very little idea of what the different realms looked like. OTOH, are different realms actually required for the experience? How much mechanical support is needed to recreate these realms?
See, I'm thinking that this sort of thing is a pretty decent compromise. There simply aren't enough fans of any other setting other than FR, to justify the cost of developing two or three books/products. It just won't sell enough. But, if you take the main elements from another setting and bring it into the Realms, then you leverage the popularity of the Realms and still give fans of these smaller settings something.
Sure, it would be great to have a bunch of RL stuff on the shelves. It's not going to happen. It just isn't. This way, at least setting fans get something.
Huntsman57
First Post
I played FR as the primary setting back in the golden age of campaign setting variety in 2E. The reason? Other settings were theme parks that I may have found entertaining as a change of pace, but no other setting felt as much like a fully fleshed out living world as Toril. I started out in Dragonlance with its epic good vs evil theme, had fun in Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Planescape...but whenever I wanted a vanilla fantasy world none felt as authentic as the Forgotten Realms.
It's been awhile since I've used accounting jargon, but there's a term (which of course I've forgottenwhere companies set minimum returns on investment. Something to do with "if I'm getting less than this, I should just put my money on the stock market and get a better return."
WotC could put $1M into producing Dark Sun (my fave non-FR setting...). And they could make $1M+1 in revenue, netting a profit of $1.
Or they could put that $1M into some bonds, and net $30k in profit.
If their bean counters don't see ENOUGH profit in a book, they won't create it, even if it might make them SOME profit.
It's why, in 3E, WotC let other companies take the majority of the risk. They partnered to make the setting core book (IIRC, Rokugan/Oriental Adventures and DragonLance?), then left the supplements (with much lower print runs and much lower profits) to be risked by the partners. They even let the adventures (MUCH lower print runs and MUCH lower profits) be made by dozens of third-party companies.
It's not hard - their own pie chart shows it - to see that FR isn't something most players are playing in. As such, producing FR setting material certainly isn't the most efficient way to earn profit, at least in the short term.
Steve Jackson Games with GURPS, for one. Many of the companies producing more than one RPG, as well. And if you're talking about particular rules sets, something to bear in mind is that there's several which have an OGL of some sort and several companies producing settings of their own - Traveller is the one that I know best in that respect.
Remathilis
Legend
Oh, sure. I get that. And, of course, it's just my opinion.
1. The Vistani - Now, I'm not a RL expert, but, aren't the Vistani basically a Romani type people? Is there any particular reason you can't have Vistani in Forgotten Realms? What about a nomadic, gypsy people makes them difficult to port to another setting?
The Vistani are more hugely important to Ravenloft for two reasons: 1.) They're the only ones who are aware of the nature of the demiplane and 2.) They have amazing powers of divination and cursing, far beyond what "known magic" can do. They hold a special place in Ravenloft as being basically uber-powered humans who are cunning enough to defy darklords and get away with it. Making them just another FR ethnic group absolutely shatters that mystique.
The Mists are another ubiquitous element: they transport you into, out of, and around Ravenloft. The spring up anywhere, can take you anywhere, and only seasoned travellers (or the Vistani) know how to use them to get to where THEY want to go. Additionally, the mists can help seal the borders in many domains.
Oddly, this is one of the easier parts to port: two of the bigger faiths in RL (The Lawgiver and Morninglord) and exports of FR anyway (Bane and Lathandar, the latter via Jandar Sunstar). A few others are other RW deities (Benelus, Osiris) or unique to a single domain (Zhakata) but the biggest loss would be the Church of Ezra, a Catholic church replacement complete with schisms and denominations rather than a single deity; not sure it would work in Faerun since part of its allure is its widespreadness...
Bzzzt! The Dark Powers were the ones who TRAPPED those creatures. They're the overseers of the domain, they are the ones who are the jailers. They made the pact with Strahd, cursed many a dark lord's ambition, tortured Soth and even imprisoned Vecna for a short while. Whenever a being does evil, it draws a chance the Dark Powers will notice and "reward" them with some boon tied with a curse; enough of such actions and the evil-doer risks transforming into a creature of the night or becoming his own minor domain lord. They also are the reason magic works funny in RL; enhancing necromancy, stopping ALL planar travel (even summons) and making divination unreliable. In short, they are powerful enough to mess with the powers of Gods and a major reason why Ravenloft IS Ravenloft.
Each realm has its own Dark Lord, and many are pretty much classic gothic horror monsters with serial numbers filed off. There are versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, Jeckyl/Hyde, a Voodoo zombie lord, a Vlad the Impaler, a ghost lord, the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, etc. Each gets its own domain which represents the setting (a vast desert, the mountains of Switzerland, a Caribbean Island, and lots of Eastern Europe). Domains can range from bronze age to renaissance tech as well.
I'd call it an IP theft more than a compromise; you're taking the barest wisp of the idea and slamming it into the Realms. There is an easier way...
Ravenloft, by its nature, is modular. That is, the Mists come in sweep you up, put you in some situation, and at the end of it release you. Its how the "Night of Horror" mode of RL play worked through most of 2e; the idea of RL as "full world" came much later. Go back to the Night or Horror model; sweep up some 1st level adventures, let them wander around a domain for 15 levels, return them when done. You can add all the variant rules needed in the Appendix (slimmed down a bit), no PC info (since their not natives) and in the end, you're not forcing Ravenloft's IP onto Faerun (disrupting both in the process).
(Planescape would be easily done this way as well; substitute "mists" with "portal" and "domain" with "Sigil")
TwoSix
Everyone's literal second-favorite poster
An entire country hidden by Mists? 5e is just like WoW!
Not to depart too much from your main point, but I'd debate that, at least anecdotally. I know a lot of people who only know Ravenloft from the campaign settings and the Van Richten's guide, and really only know there WAS a Ravenloft adventure because it mentions it in the campaign setting!
That would be The Minotaur -- and John Tynes had a lot to say about what its closing meant:
http://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/
(tl;dr: it wasn't just Hasbro, though the sale to Hasbro was the sign that the 'golden age' had finally come to an end)
--
Pauper
