D&D 5E Two more Classic Settings to go

[UngainlyTitan]

The thing is a rpg has to use the marvel/dc setting idea that the published game is earth prime or earth 616. Your home game is earth 31843 or Oerth 573783. And some people get their panties in a bunch because the eberron or Oerth they are playing in is being run by a DM that deviates or ignores some canon. God forbid he create his own subclass. Who does he think he is. Matt Mercer. You better have a certification to do that.

I kina approve of this message. It is best to move away from the idea of canon. I really like that current practise is to present lore from a view point of some in universe character. That creates the idea of ambiguity and bias in the lore. Which is good and gives DMS more room to breath and not feel the weight of canon.

In my games, lore does not exist until and unless you have interreacted with it as a character.

 

[Sithlord]

Yes, true, although that is the perspective of WotC (Marvel). From the perspective of an individual DM, their world may be the only world, or the only version of that world.

Not necessarily. Some people love to travel to other universes. Although not someone else’s campaign.

 

[Mercurius]

Not necessarily. Some people love to travel to other universes. Although not someone else’s campaign.

I know, but that's my point. Every DM is the "over god" of their own campaign and can decide the nature of the multiverse - if there is even a multiverse - no matter what WotC, Perkins, or Crawford say. In other words, canon is optional in home games.

As an aside, if I were to include the Forgotten Realms and other classic settings in my multiverse, I would do my best to stay true to the original creator's vision. So "my" Realms would be the closest I could come to Ed Greenwood's Realms. Similarly with Eberron and Keith Baker, Greyhawk and Gary Gygax, Krynn and Weis and Hickman. Meaning, a lot of later canon would go poof. Why? Well, in most cases, I just like the original flavor of the setting as the creator intended it. It is sort of like preferring a James Brown song performed by the Godfather to a cover band performing a James Brown song.

 

[Parmandur]

It's weird for me to get upset about the canonical cosmology. RPGs are not passive media like books or movies. When I ran my campaigns, each is set in a separate multi-verse. You can't cross between, say, my Greyhawk campaign and my FR one. It's not canonical, but it's fine for my players and me. The official version is different and that's no problem for me.

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

 

[Orius]

I personally think the biggest problem Planescape had in that way was it kept trying to simultaneously be the line for the multiverse and for the Sigil campaign setting.

A solid division between those as products, with the result that (for example) Sigil's factions are something that almost nobody in Dis or the City of Brass gives a thought to any more than anybody in Buenos Aires or Baghdad really cares about New York City city council races, is all that's really needed. Sigil can think of itself as the center of the multiverse, and even have a halfway-plausible claim as the portal-town to everywhere, without a Manual of the Planes sharing the covers of or being written from the same perspective as a City of Doors Campaign Setting.

That's because Sigil was intentionally designed as a home base for planewalking campaigns. That was seen as a weakness in the earlier Spelljammer stuff, that there was no home base for the PCs. I suppose anything WotC might do with Planescape might not focus on Sigil as heavily, giving DMs more options.

Okay? I'm not talking about the planar travel but, rather, the treatment of the people of Eberron as uninformed.

Like others already said, that's sort of a reflection of how Planescape itself was set up. The idea was that people on the Material Plane were ignorant of how the planes really worked, and had a lot of misconceptions. They often thought their own little worlds were the center of the universe, their gods were telling them half truths and propaganda, and the most knowledgeable wizards and sages often had incomplete and inaccurate information. As the Planescape line went on though, the designers showed that planars could be pretty uninformed too and arrogant as well.

In any case, that predates Eberron. And WotC's 3e core material on the planes just referenced Greyhawk for the most part, with the Realms and Eberron having their own unique cosmologies. The Realms were most certainly connected to Planescape in 2e, but WotC never really did any sort of explicit connections between Planescape and Eberron, presumably to let DMs connect them however they wanted if they wanted too. My own assumption would be that a portal could very well connect Eberron to Sigil, and natives of Eberron would be among the primes who more easily adapted to be he planes.

 

[Marandahir]

I'm still uncertain about Planescape. One reason WotC cancelled it back in the 90s was because they felt planar adventures should be part of core and not spun off into their own setting. During 3e, there was some amount of core material on the planes that built on Planescape. Even if they do go with Planescape, it's not likely to be presented as a separate setting but something connected directly to core. That shouldn't be a problem even with the Realms being the default now, since Toril was one of the more important worlds on the Material Plane in Planescape.

Though it's also possible a Planescape product could talk about ties to various Magic settings, given how planewalking is a thing in M:tG. That would make me laugh too, as TSR in its last days tried suing WotC over the terminology of planewalking. A M:tG/Planescape crossover would be a hilarious distant finale to that.

Calling it now: Planescape + M:tG Planes + Spelljammer release = "Manual of Planeswalking"

 

[see]

That's because Sigil was intentionally designed as a home base for planewalking campaigns.

More precisely, it's because they decided to put all the information on the planes under the same brand as their new City of Doors campaign setting, at which point the logic is that you tie all that setting material together.

What they should have done (and what any revivial of the "Planescape" brand in any way should do) was to treat the home base for planewalking campaigns as a setting-in-itself, while information on the planes themselves are sold as universal D&D material without any setting branding. As soon as they were under the same brand, you got people playing other campaigns writing off the planes as something that belonged to "Planescape", and you got Sigil-centrism in all the planar stuff.

It would have been perfectly possible to design a Sigil-centric "Planescape Campaign Setting" as the home base for planewalking campaigns without, for example, giving the Harmonium any significant power in Arcadia. All they would have had to do is not treat the universal planar material as the same product line as the Sigil material. Nothing of the many focusing-on-Sigil products would have had to have been changed in the slightest, while the material on Arcadia could have ignored Sigil politics just as completely as it ignored Waterdeep or the Free City of Greyhawk politics.

 

[Orius]

That was 2e TSR for you. Too much spun off into separate campaign settings.

 

[Marandahir]

That was 2e TSR for you. Too much spun off into separate campaign settings.

I mean, that problem predated 2e too. Many veteran players remember a day when Greyhawk and Blackmoor were part of a single campaign setting, before Blackmoor had to keep spinning off and jumping worlds (even joining Mystara for a time).

 

[Sithlord]

I mean, that problem predated 2e too. Many veteran players remember a day when Greyhawk and Blackmoor were part of a single campaign setting, before Blackmoor had to keep spinning off and jumping worlds (even joining Mystara for a time).

Wait. it’s still at mystara isn’t it?