Two New Settings For D&D This Year

if it comes out this year i would agree with you. Possibly published by a third party company that has a good reputation (Green Ronin etc)

However if it’s coming next year I would stake all the money in my pockets that it will be a Curse of Strahd style book. Campaign with background and new monsters etc. Curse of Strahd was too successful not to repeat!

 

[Jester David]

It is better if the 5e canon makes Dark Sun officially unrelated to the Forgotten Realms multiverse supersetting, even if giving variant options to subsume it into supersetting, for example, transporting characters from Forgotten Realms into Dark Sun, and visaversa. An other variant, might suggest how to make certain Forgotten Realms options as having always been part of Dark Sun, even if exceedingly rare.

IIRC, Dark Sun was always part of the multiverse. In that the original boxed set stated that planar travel didn’t work, and that the world was cut off.
So you could travel in, but not out.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Eberron, sure -- though I'd agree with Yaarel that the official stance is more agnostic. A polytheistic religion is the most common one, but since the gods don't show up or respond to spells like commune themselves, and people can cast divine magic through faith in other things.

But Dark Sun is explicitly atheistic. There are people who worship various things as gods, but those things are canonically non-divine. The most common ones are the Sorcerer-Monarchs (who can channel elemental power to their servants, but are very much mortal themselves), but you also have clerics leading tribes worshiping such things as "The God of the Volcano". That "god" is just their misinterpretation of various elemental spirits, though.

Even if they are not real gods that is still polytheism.

 

[Parmandur]

I rearched the links with Athas in AD&D. Trying to use magic to travel between planes required a wizard to roll Intelligence or under on a d100. Failure meant the wizard was lost in the Grey and would start to have Consititution drained. So magic existed but it was very risky. The grey surrounded the material plane of Athas and isolated it. So in the Athas multiverse gods exist but just can’t reach followers in Athas without great difficulty. Also the crystal sphere of Athas is completely impenetrable to Spelljammers. (Described in Preservers and Defilers of Athas.)

Yes, so part of the same cosmos, just remote and usually hard to reach.

 

[Jester David]

I swear it on all my D&D products. I have no insight, tho I do wish I did. I’ve always been the kinda of person who enjoys logic puzzles and treasure hunts, and that’s what I think D&D has become. The devs intentionally let small things slip to keep fans guessing but this time they overstepped and let too much go.

And it isn’t just this time really, remember someone here figured out Tomb of Annihilation before the announcement because a Acquisitions Inc game and Drizzt Novel both mentioned Acererak, Chult and the Soul Monger months in advance. WotC has been leaving clues for a while now. All you have to do is pay attention and you’ll find the pieces of the puzzles.

The clues are there, but they’re not always aparent except in retrospect.

A heck of a lot of people guessed we’d be seeing a spring Planescape AP based on the UA, Dragon Talk topics, the presence of Modrons in Tomb of Annihilation, and the events in Dice, Camera, Action.
We have a lot of people making guesses. Some of them are bound to be right. And some of them are going to be wrong.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A lot of people's "guesses" are actually wishful thinking. If you filter those out, the guesswork is pretty accurate, no hindsight needed. I didn't WANT Waterdeep, but I'm not surprised to see it.

And I'm not saying I think the setting book is going to be "Planejammer" because that is what I most want (That would be Star Frontiers and Dark Sun). I'm saying that because it fits the pattern and makes business sense.

 

[Staffan]

I rearched the links with Athas in AD&D. Trying to use magic to travel between planes required a wizard to roll Intelligence or under on a d100. Failure meant the wizard was lost in the Grey and would start to have Consititution drained. So magic existed but it was very risky. The grey surrounded the material plane of Athas and isolated it. So in the Athas multiverse gods exist but just can’t reach followers in Athas without great difficulty. Also the crystal sphere of Athas is completely impenetrable to Spelljammers. (Described in Preservers and Defilers of Athas.)

IIRC, Dark Sun was always part of the multiverse. In that the original boxed set stated that planar travel didn’t work, and that the world was cut off.
So you could travel in, but not out.

Defilers & Preservers was one of the last books made for Dark Sun, and it had plenty of questionable stuff in it (such as wizards that don't draw power from plant life, but from planar sources). Before that book, there was nothing indicating that Dark Sun was cut off from the planes, and plenty to indicate that it was part of the multiverse.

There was also a note in one of the Spelljammer books (I think it was the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook) which said that Athas was not found on any known charts of the Flow, and that no-one had ever traveled there by spelljamming. But nothing before D&P about planar isolation.

 

[TheSword]

Defilers & Preservers was one of the last books made for Dark Sun, and it had plenty of questionable stuff in it (such as wizards that don't draw power from plant life, but from planar sources). Before that book, there was nothing indicating that Dark Sun was cut off from the planes, and plenty to indicate that it was part of the multiverse.

There was also a note in one of the Spelljammer books (I think it was the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook) which said that Athas was not found on any known charts of the Flow, and that no-one had ever traveled there by spelljamming. But nothing before D&P about planar isolation.

I don’t understand are you saying that Defilers and Preservers wasn’t a valid book? The whole range came out over 5 years for AD&D. The Grey and the Black were pretty well established in the lore - particularly the entrapment and blocking - Rikus is trapped in the grey, Rajaat was trapped in the black. The links with the inner planes and the remoteness of the outer planes all of these things were well established. The isolations seems to fit the setting extremely well so I really don’t understand your issues.

Back in 2nd edition, planescape wasn’t released until 1994 three years after Darksun so I’m not surprised that the planes weren’t a big deal in the Dark sun books. After Planescape there was a need to codify where Athas sat in the cosmology hence Preservers and Defilers coming out in 1996.

Regarding planar sources, Sadira drew her energy from the sun, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for necromancers to draw energy from the Grey.

I really like the mechanic in D&P where it is difficult but not impossible to travel out. It fits the theme, and allows for isolated exceptions. At the same time it prevents a portals to the elemental plane of water solving all the worlds problems. There has to be an explanation for why supremely powerful wizard/psionicists couldn’t do that. D&P gave us that answer.

Incidentally Defilers and Preservers was released before Mindlords, Psionic Artefacts, all the 3rd ed Paizo conversions stuff and the two 4th edition books, so it’s hardly the end of the range. There is a lot more life in Dark Sun in my opinion.

 

[Staffan]

I don’t understand are you saying that Defilers and Preservers wasn’t a valid book? The whole range came out over 5 years for AD&D.

I am saying that for the first four years of those five, there was no problem whatsoever with using planar travel in Dark Sun. Dragon Kings had an introduction to the cosmology, which was the same as the regular D&D cosmology. Travel to the outer and astral planes was de-emphasized, because that description was written in the context of high-level clerics having to attend to duties on the elemental planes, but there was nothing about planar travel being more difficult. You also had adventures featuring planar foes (even when the planes weren't the main focus of the adventure - IIRC there's a random nalfeshnee running around in Dragon's Crown), and in the revised Dark Sun boxed set baatezu, tanar'ri, and yugoloth was on a rather short list of monsters from the Monstrous Manual that were considered appropriate for a Dark Sun campaign. They were not listed in the original box, because at that time the Outer Planes MC Appendix hadn't been released so they weren't around.

The Grey and the Black were pretty well established in the lore - particularly the entrapment and blocking - Rikus is trapped in the grey, Rajaat was trapped in the black. The links with the inner planes and the remoteness of the outer planes all of these things were well established. The isolations seems to fit the setting extremely well so I really don’t understand your issues.

My issue is that I see a lot of people treating Athas's planar isolation as an integral part of the setting, when it wasn't established until fairly late in the original run, and at that time it was a retcon of what had gone before. I don't see it that way at all. Dark Sun should certainly not have trade routes established with Sigil or anything like that, but if some cleric wants to plane shift out of there there shouldn't be anything preventing that.

 

[Remathilis]

It is better if the 5e canon makes Dark Sun officially unrelated to the Forgotten Realms multiverse supersetting, even if giving variant options to subsume it into supersetting, for example, transporting characters from Forgotten Realms into Dark Sun, and visaversa. An other variant, might suggest how to make certain Forgotten Realms options as having always been part of Dark Sun, even if exceedingly rare.

I'll do you one better: Dark Sun should be made officially unrelated to Dungeons & Dragons and be its own stand-alone fantasy game that shares mechanical compatibility with 5e the same way Star Wars d20 shared compatibility with 3e. That way, its unshackled from ALL D&D assumptions and tropes and can really get wild and do things correctly. There would be no need to rely on a PHB that is more than half invalid in both mechanics and fluff, it could have its own rulebook that doesn't waste space on paladins, plate armor, gnomes, or other non-cannon entities. It can re-write classes to fit, such as non-caster bards or putting preserving and defiling right into the wizard class. It can re-work the spell lists as it needs to ("whose Melf?") and redo races to fit. On the DM side, a GM guide with appropriate monsters (no orcs, gold dragons, or frost giants here) and world info (proper planar layout, appropriate magical items) would help tremendously. If a DM WANTS to use such things in thier D&D games, the mechanics could convert over with a little work, but otherwise DS and D&D remain separate games with different assumptions and options.

I mean, otherwise Athas is just another D&D setting, abet with a post-apocalypse /desert world vibe, that needs to accommodate most of the mechanics and assumptions in the core rulebooks like every other official setting for D&D does...

 

[Parmandur]

The clues are there, but they’re not always aparent except in retrospect.

A heck of a lot of people guessed we’d be seeing a spring Planescape AP based on the UA, Dragon Talk topics, the presence of Modrons in Tomb of Annihilation, and the events in Dice, Camera, Action.
We have a lot of people making guesses. Some of them are bound to be right. And some of them are going to be wrong.

Sure, and some aren't guessing at all because they have inside knowledge.