I think APs are a great way to explore other settings. Give us a Dark Sun one, with a mini gazetteer that is enough to run the adventure (then send us to DMs Guild for OOP resources or fan-made creations to fill in the gaps if we go off the rails). Do this with Eberron, and give us another one in Ravenloft too. Really, any of them I'd be happy to take a look at. I would vastly prefer this format to something like the Eberron book which had like 10 pages of adventure and then a bunch of stuff I don't need.
D&D 5E Time for Non Forgotten Realms Adventure Paths?
5e has been out 6 years. It's time for us to stop thinking of it as a "new edition" when at this time in previous releases we were at the following milestones:
4e: already done
3.x: 2 years from 4e
2e: AD&D revised editions, Player's Option books
There's been more than enough blandness for 5e. It's time to give us more crunch, player options, exciting campaign settings, etc., instead of just Sword Coast stuff and starter sets.
LuisCarlos17f
Legend
I don't talk about editions, but something like the phases of marvel cinematic universe. This time it will not first the books and after the movies and videogames, but the TTRPG books will be published when the multimedia projects were ready.
Sword of Spirit
Legend
I don't actually think many of them are very portable, and they haven't tried very hard recently. Princes of the Apocalypse was probably one of the easier ones, and they put an appendix in the back giving you advice on how to do so. But most of the other ones are closely tied to the geography and politics of the Forgotten Realms. Have any of the others even had an appendix for adapting to other settings?
NiClerigo
Adventurer
Tomb of Annihilation has short suggestions somewhere in the beginning on how to adapt the adventure to some other settings. It is not very detailed, but at least it's something
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I think all the WotC adventures (apart from CoS for obvious reasons) have suggestions of how to adapt them to other settings. It's generally pretty easy to do. But then I'm coming from 1st edition where most adventures where set in generic fantasyland and we just dropped them into our own worlds.
Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ
I so wish they would re-release that. I have (most of) the original, but it's not in the greatest condition and it's missing bits.
Mecheon
Sacabambaspis
Original mold's gone and the market won't support it in this day and age. However, they did do a crowdfunding for Jabba's Sail Barge, and another for a ridiculously huge Unicron, so given those both went well... Might have a chance at it if GI Joe ever goes beyond "Dead"
Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ
I'd love it they released a good Eberron AP instead of FR for once. That said, aside from one-offs here and there, I expect the APs to continue with the FR on the main. I would like them to at least move beyond the Sword Coast and its peripheries and instead explore other parts of the Realms (especially the parts that are less fantasy Europe-inspired).
humble minion
Legend
I guess the big problem with releasing big adventure books or APs in less-D&D-standard worlds is precisely that they're not FR and therefore less adaptable.
I could run CoS in Greyhawk or Exandria perfectly happily, and Eberron without too much difficulty. Princes of the Apocalypse, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Out of the Abyss are all pretty adaptable too. Change the names of the gods around, find an appropriate spot in the world for the action to happen, reskin a few NPCs as Warforged or whatever as appropriate and you're golden. Some of the big adventures (the Tiamat series) can have some hiccups due to the nature of Eberron dragons, for instance, but on the whole it can work.
What you don't get by doing this is actual setting feel though. If you're writing an eberron epic campaign from scratch, you're going to have stuff like the lightning rail, dragonmarks, warforged, artificers, etc prominent. Have the cool bits of the campaign front and centre. A converted FR adventure just isn't going to have any of this, without a fair bit of additional work, adding new plotlines, rewriting encounters, etc etc. But if you're doing that much work, why are you running a pre-written campaign anyway? The whole point it to cut out some of your prep time.
Conversely, if I write that epic Eberron (or Dark Sun, or Spelljammer...) AP, it's definitely going to include all the cool setting-specific stuff. But by it's nature, that makes it less adaptable. If my hardcover Dark Sun megaadventure is stuffed full of psionics and defiling magic and sorcerer-kings and widespread slavery - it could probably be a great DS campaign, but you'd NEVER hammer that square peg back into a FR- or GH or DL-shaped round hole. Which is why it won't happen. You can only really sell a DS adventure to DS players (though I guess Avernus is a quasi-planescape adventure and you could do a similarly structured adventure with Spelljammer) and with the small number of books getting released per year, I can't see WotC willingly making a product that's appeal to only a relatively nice audience.
(Hell, for really out-there worlds like Dark Sun, any adventure conversion is difficult either way. I started putting together a DS port of Rise of the Runelords once, and basically every encounter, most creatures and NPCs, and most adventure locations needed redesign. Goblins, aasimar, barghests, cults of evil gods, timbermills - all utterly non-DS and all front and centre from the very first book in the 6-book campaign. And it only got more difficult as it went. Isolated farms amid waving rows of grain? Scarecrows? Sea monsters in the town dam? Even the character motivations are messed up, so many bad guys worshipping evil gods. You end up throwing out more than you use.)
I could run CoS in Greyhawk or Exandria perfectly happily, and Eberron without too much difficulty. Princes of the Apocalypse, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Out of the Abyss are all pretty adaptable too. Change the names of the gods around, find an appropriate spot in the world for the action to happen, reskin a few NPCs as Warforged or whatever as appropriate and you're golden. Some of the big adventures (the Tiamat series) can have some hiccups due to the nature of Eberron dragons, for instance, but on the whole it can work.
What you don't get by doing this is actual setting feel though. If you're writing an eberron epic campaign from scratch, you're going to have stuff like the lightning rail, dragonmarks, warforged, artificers, etc prominent. Have the cool bits of the campaign front and centre. A converted FR adventure just isn't going to have any of this, without a fair bit of additional work, adding new plotlines, rewriting encounters, etc etc. But if you're doing that much work, why are you running a pre-written campaign anyway? The whole point it to cut out some of your prep time.
Conversely, if I write that epic Eberron (or Dark Sun, or Spelljammer...) AP, it's definitely going to include all the cool setting-specific stuff. But by it's nature, that makes it less adaptable. If my hardcover Dark Sun megaadventure is stuffed full of psionics and defiling magic and sorcerer-kings and widespread slavery - it could probably be a great DS campaign, but you'd NEVER hammer that square peg back into a FR- or GH or DL-shaped round hole. Which is why it won't happen. You can only really sell a DS adventure to DS players (though I guess Avernus is a quasi-planescape adventure and you could do a similarly structured adventure with Spelljammer) and with the small number of books getting released per year, I can't see WotC willingly making a product that's appeal to only a relatively nice audience.
(Hell, for really out-there worlds like Dark Sun, any adventure conversion is difficult either way. I started putting together a DS port of Rise of the Runelords once, and basically every encounter, most creatures and NPCs, and most adventure locations needed redesign. Goblins, aasimar, barghests, cults of evil gods, timbermills - all utterly non-DS and all front and centre from the very first book in the 6-book campaign. And it only got more difficult as it went. Isolated farms amid waving rows of grain? Scarecrows? Sea monsters in the town dam? Even the character motivations are messed up, so many bad guys worshipping evil gods. You end up throwing out more than you use.)
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