To Mike Mearls: C'mon, bring back the whole D&D Multiverse!

[Dungeonosophy]

I'm glad that the 5E has, to a small but consistent degree, continued to mention the other D&D Worlds besides Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft. All the key worlds (Oerth, Mystara, and so forth) are mentioned in the DMG, and 5E adventures usually have placement notes for each world. Cool.

There is so much depth in the Oerth, Mystara, Krynn, and all the other worlds.

Yet I'm disappointed that the 5E team hasn't really tapped into those classic corners of the D&D Multiverse.

I suggest that Mike Mearls and the WotC Team amp up the unity of the D&D Multiverse.

In a similar way that the widespread appearance of Gates in Third Edition FR opened up the whole world (or at least Faerun) to dungeoneering within a single campaign arc (without having to travels for weeks and months to get to the next adventure site)...go ahead an open up all of the D&D Worlds, as if they were a single setting. I realize you don't want to split up the brand like TSR did, but just make the D&D Multiverse a single setting...with the same branding!

And unite it in practical ways. Continue to provide sample locations for placing adventures in any world, but also place alternate world gates all over the place (subject to DM's whim of course). (See the back appendix of the Classic D&D Gazetteers - they had a bunch of gates connecting Mystara to Toril to Oerth).

Make planewalking, spelljamming, and chronomancy three of the main campaign models from the start (alongside dungeoncrawling, of course). By including Chronomancy, DMs would be supported in having campaigns tromp throughout the history of the D&D worlds too (e.g. the Blackmoor era of Mystara and Greyhawk 2000). Highlight some trans-world organizations and factions which exist in all of the key D&D worlds. Open up time and space. It's all a single setting and brand.

Have some sort of cross-worlds "Crisis on Infinite Earths" story-event which definitely depicts all of the worlds as a single setting. Bring out the big writers...Salvatore, Weis and Hickman, all of them...and write some mega-epic "Dragonlance Chronicles"-style re-casting of the entire D&D Multiverse. Have Drizzt and Elminister team up with Tanis and Fizban, or something like that. Bring back the "Wizards Three" to the nth degree! C'mon...the D&D worlds are not that sacrosanct...they're all a gumbo mix of fantasy tropes anyway. I'm a Mystara enthusiast myself, but as long as its history, details, and continuity were acknowledged, I'd rather have it exist as an integral part of the D&D Multiverse, than retired on a shelf.

Don't leave anything out - give us Pelinore, Jakandor, Council of Wyrms, the generic world(s) of the D&D gamebooks, the Kingdom of Ghyr of the AD&D action figures, Karawenn (the land of some of the D&D First Quest novels), Thunder Rift (D&D Black Box setting), the Vale (D&D Fast Play setting), Ghostwalk, Mahasarpa (and James Wyatt's other settings such as Petroyeska which have been glimpsed in various DRAGON magazine articles), the d20 Modern and Alternity Campaign Models, Gamma World (which was re-branded as D&D in the recent boardgame), Historical Reference Earth, Masque of the Red Death, Boot Hill, Gangbusters, Nerath, Izmer (the world of the D&D Movie(s?)), Kolhapur (2e standalone South Asian mini-setting), the Land of Arir (1e standalone Arab mini-setting), the parallel Oerths (Uerth, Yarth, Aerth), the Sundered Empire, Aquaria, the Dream Lands of Symslyvch (the setting of the BECMI Hebrew-language adventures)...everything!...at least briefly touch on every WotC-owned TRPG IP.

Two sourcebooks would help shore up this Unified Setting:

Atlas of the D&D Multiverse - showing world maps for all of the D&D Worlds. And Spelljammer and Planar maps to and from them all.
Grand History of the D&D Multiverse - unifying the timelines of all the worlds.

If you're into naming the books after famous figures then call it "Tasslehoff's Atlas" and "Pluffet Smedger's Grand History" or whatever.

And then open up all those worlds to the DM's Guild. Then we'd be rolling.

-C'mon Mike...you can do it! You've gone half way by mentioning the other worlds...now go all the way and really make the D&D Multiverse a single setting!

 

[ccs]

I've got a better idea.

They should just release ALL of it - past rules editions, settings, source books, modules, etc onto the DMS GUILD. Then people could download whatever they please.
If anything proves particularly popular? THEN give it a 5e treatment.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The Multiverse still exists. However, WOTC are avoiding releasing content that only applies to a specific corner of it. The issue being, if they released, say, a Dragonlance sourcebook, then they immediately reduce the number of potential sales to only the subset of players who want to use Dragonlance. They want every book they release to be tempting for every player. Fragmentation of the market through numerous campaign settings was partially responsible for the great RPG crash.

 

[Raith5]

Too much man! I have to say that prefer these worlds to be firewalled (for want of a better term). Not only for splitting the fanbase/market reason but just making each world the main focus/stake of the story. I think the multiverse spanning is too much for most campaigns to handle or for the 5e system to handle, given the preference for low and middle level play in D&D. IF you want to go up in notch in stakes go somewhere totally new and hazardous, like the Abyss or Shadowfell, etc. So I would vote to make the multiverse an option rather than default.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Internet killed the metaplot. Now players don't spend money to get books with background and lore, because they can get it from wikis about videogames, movies or fantasy novels.

Maybe we will see a reboot of all the D&D multiverse, to try fix all the changes from later editions, for example the new races and classes. What happens if WotC wants a "Kara-Tur" for the world of Greyhawk? Or a new timeline for the future live-action movies of Dragolance.

 

[TDarien]

I've got a better idea.

They should just release ALL of it - past rules editions, settings, source books, modules, etc onto the DMS GUILD. Then people could download whatever they please.
If anything proves particularly popular? THEN give it a 5e treatment.

They've already done that. The great majority of the D&D back catalog is already available on the DMs guild.

 

[Jer]

They should just release ALL of it - past rules editions, settings, source books, modules, etc onto the DMS GUILD. Then people could download whatever they please.
If anything proves particularly popular? THEN give it a 5e treatment.

Most of it is already out there. What isn't out there is slowly being added to the site each month.

Now, what I'd like to see is Wizards open up these settings for other creators to be able to release adventures in them on DM's Guild. I honestly have all of the setting information I will ever need for, say, Mystara (my D&D gameworld of choice) - between the books I own and the fan created setting material available online, I don't really need new setting material for the world. (In fact at this point I'm inundated with setting material for Mystara and am more in the habit of trimming back the setting material I use to the minimal amount I need to run the game). But I would pay a bit for good adventures tied to the setting (rather than converting adventures to the setting).

Even moreso for Dark Sun, Planescape and Ravenloft adventures. I mean it's actually pretty easy to translate "generic D&D adventure" into Mystara - set it in Karameikos or Darokin and you're about 90% of the way there. But if I want to have a Dark Sun campaign there are very few adventures that translate over that easily (I mean, it can be done and I've done it, but it's certainly easier to move something like "Ghost Tower of Inverness" into Mystara than it is into Dark Sun).

 

[Irda Ranger]

No thanks.

What I've noticed is that I like campaign worlds as they're originally conceived by their initial creators. But I usually dislike what TSR/Wizards does to "update" them to new Editions. The only Edition reversion that I liked was the Time of Troubles update for FR. Everything since then for FR has made it worse; Fifth Age for Krynn was worse; the post-Prism Pentad Dark Sun was worse; etc. etc.

I had fun doing my own Dragonlance conversion to 5E and if Wizards published their own at this point I probably wouldn't use it.

 

[Morrus]

I like them separate. It makes each freer to do its own thing.

 

[jayoungr]

Actually, it looks to me like they're moving in that direction. Haven't we had some leaks about something Planes-related being in the works? And of course, we've already had Ravenloft.