Critical Role Tell me the selling points of Tal'Dorei / Wildemount, without mentioning Critical Role, Matt Mercer, etc.

[Seramus]

The conflicts amount to "Generic Evil Empire," "Gods who want to destroy the world," and "Eldritch abominations that want to destroy the world."

Everything you love can be reduced to equally simplistic terms. It's okay to say a setting just doesn't resonate with you.

Remove the Critical Role name and it'd be forgotten.

No more or less than Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk would be forgotten if they were introduced for the first time today.

 

[zakael19]

I ran the Call of the Netherdeep campaign. As an adventure, it's not very good, but as a supplemental setting book it has good stuff in it, going into quite a high level of detail for several adventure locations.

The city gazetted in there is excellent. We set the campaign aside (it’s “get and complete a faction hook and then have 7 days to do???” Was silly) to do a player-led adventure off themes in there and it worked really well.

Wildmount is a really good setting book within 5.2014’s pub period, as somebody with 0 CR background I was easily able to see lots of fun things to weave into the Netherdeep game I ran for a bunch of CR fans who got to be delighted by references to stuff I didn’t get but also didn’t need to for it to work well.

 

[Necropolitan]

No more or less than Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk would be forgotten if they were introduced for the first time today.

No, the other settings caught on because of their quality and/or because they offered something new, not because they were attached to another property.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No it's not. It reduces the entire divine conflict to whether or not the world should exist.

No, it doesn’t.

The 'Betrayer Deities' all wanting to destroy the world and barely having any worshipers makes them boring.

That literally isn’t even accurate to the setting. The betrayers were on the side of the primordials against the primes, but for all sorts of reasons, and many of them were, again as I said before, in it for personal vendettas against one or more of the primes or humanity.

So please stop misrepresenting the setting. You don’t like it, fine. We all get it.

No it can't. Eberron does higher tech levels better, Forgotten Realms does gods better, etc.

It objectively can. There are settings that do those things better than either of those settings do, and FR does gods terribly. The divine elements of fr are the worst part of the setting. Utter garbage.

Now, did you misread what I wrote? Because I didn’t claim that Exandria does everything better than every setting, or that no setting does any one thing better than Exandria does it. I stated the objectively corrrct fact that any setting can be said to not do anything that no other setting does better. See the difference? Your response only makes sense if I said something completely diffeeent from what I said.

The conflicts amount to "Generic Evil Empire," "Gods who want to destroy the world," and "Eldritch abominations that want to destroy the world."

None of those are even true lol.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, the other settings caught on because of their quality and/or because they offered something new, not because they were attached to another property.

Dragonlance caught on because the novels resonated, and only because the novels were populated. I love DL but it isn’t all that inventive as a setting. It’s a cool world that was the setting of a beloved story, but if you just put out a setting guide today without those novels ever existing, no one would care.

FR is what it is because of decades of being print and center in D&D.

Eberron is maybe the the only D&D setting I could see claiming otherwise, but even it exists so much in conversation with and in inheritance of other settings and stories that it’s not gonna fly.

 

[zakael19]

The only reason I have any attachment to FR is because of my childhood nostalgia for BG 1 & 2, and the 4e Neverwinter Campaign Setting is one of the most actionable "run a campaign" books I've seen. Without that and WOTC pushing it in our faces thanks to decades of similar nostalgia, I wouldn't give it a second look. Half of that is having just so much history it feels stifling.

If I was looking for a random setting to grab today for 5e D&D, Exandria would be pretty high on my list - Wildemont in particular. It does what Eberron did with reimagining the species to be far more interesting, has good focused conflicts that you can easily toss player characters in the middle of, and as others have noted is generally built for modern TTRPG sensibilities.

Plus as many have noted, uses the best pantheon.

It's kind of a "takes all the best ideas from beloved settings and then adds a little special sauce on top" not unlike the game the same publishing house has put out.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't follow Critical Role, though I'm glad it exists and have nothing against it or its fans. I know nothing of the setting(s?) for it and the marketing fluff for the books isn't helping because most of it assumes you already know Critical Role. What is unique or interesting or especially well-done about the setting material? Would the answers mean anything to a non-follower of Critical Role?

As a bonus question, there's at least three setting books for it. Are any of them particularly better or worse than the others? I take it Wildemount is narrower in scope - does that help it or hurt it?

Okay so moving past people trashing on the setting with nothing to say…

The Wildemount book is very very good. I wish more setting books were set up like this book. The sections on each city is just wonderfully done.

The first Taldorei book is kinda weak imo, I’d skip it.

The setting has a wide range of very cool notions and elements, as has been discussed in this thread already. Has anyone mentioned Vasselheim? Or that one city in the north where dwarves and elves are? Lots of cool places.

And then you have the very good combination of ancient wonders and a world that is better to live in than the past, rather than just romanticizing the past,

I really like how it is a world with some advanced magical tech and mundane tech compared to most D&D, but it’s brand new. There’s like. Dozen airships in the world, but airships aren’t impossible to run without a special bloodline at the helms (love Eberron but this is my least favorite part of it), and firearms are less than 50 years old.

Another thing where I prefer it to Eberron is that it doesn’t take the IMO silly take that magic as tech would mean no tech advancement, rather than the two both developing and mixing.

Tbh I think if you read the Wildemeount or The second Taldorei book you’ll get why it’s a cool setting.