[UPDATED] RAGE OF DEMONS! New D&D Storyline Features Drizzt, Underdark, & Demon Lords!

Jeff Albertson · May 9, 2015

Mephista said:
irregardless

Just so you know, that is not a word.

Mercule · May 9, 2015

the Jester said:
Interesting. I take it that PotA is on the "more generic, less FR" side of the line (at least as you perceive it)? Would you say that there are any FR elements that are vital enough to the adventure that it's hard to scrub 'em out?

Considerably more generic. Not quite so much as Phandelver, but I'm ascribing that to it simply being bigger and that a "campaign in a box" needs a bit of flavor. After reading through the whole thing once, and the "home base" a few times, I haven't found anything that can't be separated.

Several Realms-specific organizations (Harpers, Zhentarim, Order of the Gauntlet, etc.) are called out and have agents in the area. So far, I see no reason why any of them couldn't be either ignored or converted to "local thieves' guild", "random order of knights errant", etc. That's the big concern, though, isn't it? Missing a single sentence somewhere that the key to moving forward depends on some sort of tie between two NPCs or the PCs having to belong to any of the groups or something similar.

Over all, though, it seems like you could just pull it out and use it as a starting place for a brand new campaign setting, like most of us did way back when. The biggest-scale map measures about 250 x 370 miles. If my math and Wikipedia are correct, is just shy of the size of the UK (92,500 sq. mi. vs 94,060 sq. mi). That's pretty darn big, but it's a frontier with the population density (and governance) of South Dakota, circa 1870. Actually, the area is only a little bigger than SD. If you annexed about 50 miles of N. Dakota and turned the whole thing 90 degrees, it'd be about right, including climate and terrain. The spacing of the towns is probably about right, too.

That size, of course, may be a negative to inserting it into an existing setting. Even Eberron, which is generally considered pretty vast and underpopulated, struggles to fit it in the suggested locations, while retaining scale. For a Greyhawk reference, it's roughly the size of the entire kingdom of Veluna. I'm actually looking at redrawing the map, entirely, and combining a couple of the outlying towns that have little info about them. I've heard there may be a misprint on the map scale, but I have nothing to confirm it against.

While both Waterdeep and Neverwinter are mentioned, it's vague enough that they may as well have said "There're a couple of big cities within a seriously inconvenient, but not-absurd ride." That's about the level of intrusion of most things. I'm not entirely sure what to do with the "Stone Bridge", which is a fairly unique landmark that I wouldn't want to export to another setting. It's not directly important to the adventure, but it does impact travel in the area and makes some of the back-road discovery unlikely. Maybe just replacing it with a washed out bridge or treacherous fjord would be enough, though.

Short form: It's reasonably easy to scrub. The two biggest issues are 1) double-checking whether the specific organizations are important and 2) the shear size of the map, even though specific places aren't important. Hope that helps. Who knows; maybe that even helps some of the folks saying "the Realms are generic" to see why it isn't so simple.

Parmandur · May 9, 2015

Appendix C is somewhat revealing; for Dragonlance, it replaces the Harpers with "Benevolent locals." The factions are flavorful hooks, bit easily altered.

Selvarin · May 11, 2015

Just ignore the Drizzt bit and create a character that's just iconic for your setting and more interesting. (Yes, throwing Drizzt in there was calculated and 'hammy', so get rid of the pork.)

As far as somewhat more interesting believable characters, I'd just as soon 'port Aral Kingslayer (a non-FR holy mage/assassin type from the Fallen Blades series by Kelly McCullough) and replace Drizzt. He does have a 'whiff of Drizzt' in him--those insipid vocal inner doubts that get boring/annoying, etc.--but he isn't iconic drow ranger. Come to think of it, Aral is the perfect middle ground between Drizzt and Artemis...

Unlike assassins in most D&D worlds, Aral has a shadow familiar named Triss who aids him in gliding between buildings, hiding, advantage against crits, etc., but it comes at a price: HP and spells can be drained when Triss is hurt. So it has a few drawbacks as well.

It may not be a FR fix but then again...the Realms connect to various places.

HonorBoundSamurai632 · May 12, 2015

Mercule said:
What I'd like to see:
Year One: Support the Realms. Set the "Starter Set" in the Realms and do another AP or two there. Release a Campaign Setting or just a Gazetteer to put all the setting material in one spot. The Realms is the biggest seller, so it makes sense.

Year Two: Support Eberron (the #2 AFAIK). Set an AP there and release another Gazetteer or hardcover. If the Realms is that big of a machine, then make the autumn AP (assuming two a year is going to be standard) set in the Realms.

Year Three: Move on to Ravenloft (no clue what the #3 setting is). Release an AP and a setting book. Go ahead and use the autumn AP to support the Realms.

Year Four+: Rinse and repeat through at least a couple more settings (Greyhawk & Dark Sun would be my picks, YMMV). Continue as long as these publications pay for themselves.

Long term: Publish one AP per year in whatever the top dog setting is. Use the alternate AP to support one of the others.

That is how you build the D&D brand, rather than the Forgotten Realms brand.

THIS is the best idea I have ever read for updating all the D&D campaigns!! I would probably put aside money from every paycheck just to get each and every single book if WoTC did this. I love it!! This would be awesome!!

Trickster Spirit · May 12, 2015

Mercule said:
What I'd like to see:
Year One: Support the Realms. Set the "Starter Set" in the Realms and do another AP or two there. Release a Campaign Setting or just a Gazetteer to put all the setting material in one spot. The Realms is the biggest seller, so it makes sense.

Year Two: Support Eberron (the #2 AFAIK). Set an AP there and release another Gazetteer or hardcover. If the Realms is that big of a machine, then make the autumn AP (assuming two a year is going to be standard) set in the Realms.

Year Three: Move on to Ravenloft (no clue what the #3 setting is). Release an AP and a setting book. Go ahead and use the autumn AP to support the Realms.

Year Four+: Rinse and repeat through at least a couple more settings (Greyhawk & Dark Sun would be my picks, YMMV). Continue as long as these publications pay for themselves.

Long term: Publish one AP per year in whatever the top dog setting is. Use the alternate AP to support one of the others.

Would you be happy with this plan if the time scale were doubled? I.e. instead of Forgotten Realms in Year 1, Eberron in Year 2, etc. etc., it's Forgotten Realms for Years 1-2, Eberron for Years 2-3, and so on.

Because "Year 1" technically ends in July with the anniversary of the Starter Set's release, and we know that Out of the Abyss will be "officially" set in the Forgotten Realms (but likely be easily portable to any setting's Underdark). So they're not on track to hit your annual changeover, but it's possible that you're describing the exact model they're looking to go with, just slightly off on the timing of it.

What if it were tripled, but they overlapped setting releases? I.e. in Year 3 they continued to release Forgotten Realms APs and capped it off with a big FRCS book, but also started releasing Eberron (or Greyhawk, or Ravenloft, or what-have-you) APs concurrently that year as well?

Mercule · May 12, 2015

Trickster Spirit said:
Would you be happy with this plan if the time scale were doubled? I.e. instead of Forgotten Realms in Year 1, Eberron in Year 2, etc. etc., it's Forgotten Realms for Years 1-2, Eberron for Years 2-3, and so on.

Because "Year 1" technically ends in July with the anniversary of the Starter Set's release, and we know that Out of the Abyss will be "officially" set in the Forgotten Realms (but likely be easily portable to any setting's Underdark). So they're not on track to hit your annual changeover, but it's possible that you're describing the exact model they're looking to go with, just slightly off on the timing of it.

What if it were tripled, but they overlapped setting releases? I.e. in Year 3 they continued to release Forgotten Realms APs and capped it off with a big FRCS book, but also started releasing Eberron (or Greyhawk, or Ravenloft, or what-have-you) APs concurrently that year as well?

You have a really good point about the year starting in July. However you want to slice it, I'm assuming two APs per year with one of them being not FR. Even though I said "autumn", it was semi-arbitrary because I was counting the alternate setting as being the marquee with the Realms support as less important to the discussion. I'm also not too partial to whether the setting guide comes first or last in a cycle; I can see an argument both ways.

The first paragraph you cut has an acknowledgement that they could be doing what I was suggesting, just more slowly. If that's two years of the Realms, then Eberron gets marquee treatment for a couple years, and so on, it wouldn't be bad -- assuming Eberron really does get half the attention or better. The point of FR getting the "autumn" release, though was that it would get one support AP for each cycle, while everything else (the other AP, a setting book) would be focused on something else. That means that Eberron would get 3 out of the 4 APs for that cycle. The next cycle, Greyhawk would get 3 APs and a setting book, while FR got 1.

If, as so many folks have asserted in this thread, those three settings are all reasonably "generic" and anything written for one is easy to port, there should be no objection to that. Eberron gets one AP that really hits things like the Dragonmarked houses and/or the Mournland hard. It gets released between two APs that are set in the Realms. The next year, two generally vanilla APs are set in Eberron, but they have conversion guides akin to PotA. The next release is a full Greyhawk AP, then a Realms AP, then 2 more, vanilla APs set in Greyhawk.

One of the big reason why there's heartburn among fans of other settings (or foes of the Realms, if you prefer) is that what's been said about other settings has been somewhere between "yeah, someday" and "don't hold your breath". Having some idea on scope would be nice. While the Eberron doc that Mearls put together was a nice bone, I sure hope that's not all we get for support. Even "We expect to stay with Forgotten Realms for 5 years," would have been better than "foreseeable future", or whatever the wording was.

A three-year cycle would please me less, but it'd be something, especially if there was overlap. Assuming Eberron is second, I think five to six years is a long time to ask fans of the #3 setting to wait to get any real love. And 7-9 years for #4? Ouch. Based on history, that's practically the same thing as saying "not this edition". Realistically, I get that some settings just don't have the existing fan base to justify publishing much, if anything, and don't look like they have anything that would cause a new fan base to develop. I just have a hard time believing the Realms is the only thing that does have the fan base. If that's the case, then I'd still like to see several "settingless" adventures published so that it's clear D&D and Forgotten Realms aren't synonymous. If the Realms are a bigger brand than even D&D, then either find a way to extract the FR brand from D&D and sell D&D or let third parties give them a try. Keith Baker has said (IIRC) that he'd be up for taking a shot at a 5E conversion of Eberron.

I'd be fine, even well-disposed, towards an overlapping schedule, especially if it allowed for settings beyond FR to receive ongoing support. I like the annual cycle is because I know there are some settings that don't have enough interest to support more than one book. One of the things that excited me about the annual cycle was that I realized that I'd play almost any setting for a single AP, but anything more than that feels too "locked in"; that's one of the reasons why I didn't buy most of the 2E settings.

If we could get a third AP each year, it would make overlapping grand, as you'd be able to have two APs dedicated to money makers, with one of those being tightly coupled and flavorful. The third could be for one-off products. I wouldn't think you'd need the third slot for a couple years, though, unless people are really going through two APs in a year.

Trickster Spirit · May 13, 2015

Mercule said:
One of the big reason why there's heartburn among fans of other settings (or foes of the Realms, if you prefer) is that what's been said about other settings has been somewhere between "yeah, someday" and "don't hold your breath". Having some idea on scope would be nice. While the Eberron doc that Mearls put together was a nice bone, I sure hope that's not all we get for support. Even "We expect to stay with Forgotten Realms for 5 years," would have been better than "foreseeable future", or whatever the wording was.

A three-year cycle would please me less, but it'd be something, especially if there was overlap. Assuming Eberron is second, I think five to six years is a long time to ask fans of the #3 setting to wait to get any real love. And 7-9 years for #4? Ouch. Based on history, that's practically the same thing as saying "not this edition".

On the other hand, if WotC's intention is for 5E to last twice or thrice as long as previous editions, that could be the reason they're not rushing to put out material for multiple settings at once - it could be that 5E will see exactly the same amount of setting products as the last two editions, just over a longer timeframe.

It would make sense that if they spaced out their releases more, two things would happen: A) peoples wallets would have time to recover between products, and B) people's appetite for another D&D setting product would recover as well. Sure, we hardcore fans will always want more, more, more, but I bet you that they're seeing a larger percentage of the player base buy each release just because they've not saturated the market with other releases. If you're at a restaurant, sure it's great at first if they keep bringing out more food for you to try, but eventually you're going to get full, even if you're a gourmand who loves all of the dishes. Wizards might just be giving everyone time to digest between courses.

Of course, some folks are getting hungry and threatening to go to another restaurant. Time will tell if Wizards is misjudging the window of time it takes to "digest" but I'd expect they've nailed the amount of time the average player waits between purchases. We're all probably outliers as we're big enough fans to go out of our way talking about D&D in our spare time on online forums.

Right now it's APs they're limiting themselves to, but the same logic would apply to campaign settings and player's option books. They might come out with plenty of those over the lifetime of the edition, but if they're planning a 20 year edition instead of a 4 year edition, we'll see 5x the amount of time between those books as we all originally expected.

Mercule said:
If we could get a third AP each year, it would make overlapping grand, as you'd be able to have two APs dedicated to money makers, with one of those being tightly coupled and flavorful. The third could be for one-off products. I wouldn't think you'd need the third slot for a couple years, though, unless people are really going through two APs in a year.

I think we may eventually get a third AP after another year or two, as I think it's less about people going through two or more APs in a year, and more about having a library of campaigns for newcomers and time-crunched DMs to jump into. I think the prep-time requirements are one of the hobby's weakest points, and that the APs are their solution to that. TTRPGs have so many advantages over video games and other forms of entertainment but the one area they'll never compete in is ease of use. APs at least minimize the work a DM has to put in to get a campaign off the ground. I'm fairly positive the casual audience is an order of magnitude or two larger than the hardcore fanbase, so it's likely smartest for them to focus on making it easy for them to remain in the hobby as customers / brand ambassadors.

(I also think somewhat paradoxically that prep-work can also be one of the hobby's greatest strengths, as a skilled DM can tailor make a campaign that evolves with the players' choices and is 1000x more interesting than a canned AP could ever be.)

Mercule · May 13, 2015

Trickster Spirit said:
On the other hand, if WotC's intention is for 5E to last twice or thrice as long as previous editions, that could be the reason they're not rushing to put out material for multiple settings at once - it could be that 5E will see exactly the same amount of setting products as the last two editions, just over a longer timeframe.

It would make sense that if they spaced out their releases more, two things would happen: A) peoples wallets would have time to recover between products, and B) people's appetite for another D&D setting product would recover as well. Sure, we hardcore fans will always want more, more, more, but I bet you that they're seeing a larger percentage of the player base buy each release just because they've not saturated the market with other releases. If you're at a restaurant, sure it's great at first if they keep bringing out more food for you to try, but eventually you're going to get full, even if you're a gourmand who loves all of the dishes. Wizards might just be giving everyone time to digest between courses.

Of course, some folks are getting hungry and threatening to go to another restaurant. Time will tell if Wizards is misjudging the window of time it takes to "digest" but I'd expect they've nailed the amount of time the average player waits between purchases. We're all probably outliers as we're big enough fans to go out of our way talking about D&D in our spare time on online forums.

Right now it's APs they're limiting themselves to, but the same logic would apply to campaign settings and player's option books. They might come out with plenty of those over the lifetime of the edition, but if they're planning a 20 year edition instead of a 4 year edition, we'll see 5x the amount of time between those books as we all originally expected.

I agree with the general thoughts behind most of the above. As I've said, though, my problems are two-fold: 1) I don't want any setting to become synonymous with the D&D brand, 2) I especially don't like FR being the only supported setting.

While I'm partial to Eberron being the second supported setting, the truth is that it would make me almost as happy for them to publish a module for Ravenloft, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, or Dark Sun. That holds true even if they then ignored everything not FR for two years. The ideal is first class support for a non-Realms setting, but the real critical piece, IMO, is to clearly telegraph that FR does not have a publication monopoly at WotC.

My two AP per year schedule speaks to me, personally. It also seems to make other "anti-Realms" folks happy. I think it strikes a balance between supporting their "money maker" and giving other brands some love and a chance to grow. Some variation on that theme would be a lot more "hobby-friendly" than the current model, IMO. Regardless, Realms exclusivity seems like it'd be a self-perpetuating policy: The Realms gets the love because it's the most recognized brand; because it gets all the love, no one recognizes other brands.

The (fairly small) conspiracy theorist in me suspects that the "selling of 5E to Hasbro" that Mearls did included selling FR as a transmedia brand. So, Hasbro green-lit 5E, specifically as a nostalgia system that feels "old school" and is gives a sense of continuity for video games, etc. FR gets published because it can make some money. The design/development team would like to support other settings, in some form, but Hasbro wants to maximize their ROI so the direction is to stick with the Realms. The D&D team is hoping to show enough competency with FR that they can make a case for doing the same with another setting brand, as well. They don't know how long that'll take (or, probably, what the measure of success actually is), so they have to play it coy. In truth, Hasbro may well keep moving that measure out, because the TTRPG will always be seen as a token to make the video game and book business "authentic".

I think we may eventually get a third AP after another year or two, as I think it's less about people going through two or more APs in a year, and more about having a library of campaigns for newcomers and time-crunched DMs to jump into. I think the prep-time requirements are one of the hobby's weakest points, and that the APs are their solution to that. TTRPGs have so many advantages over video games and other forms of entertainment but the one area they'll never compete in is ease of use. APs at least minimize the work a DM has to put in to get a campaign off the ground. I'm fairly positive the casual audience is an order of magnitude or two larger than the hardcore fanbase, so it's likely smartest for them to focus on making it easy for them to remain in the hobby as customers / brand ambassadors.

(I also think somewhat paradoxically that prep-work can also be one of the hobby's greatest strengths, as a skilled DM can tailor make a campaign that evolves with the players' choices and is 1000x more interesting than a canned AP could ever be.)

I can agree with this, too. When I was younger, I spent dozens of hours, every week, doing prep work. I built an entire game world and advanced it with what the players did as part of the adventures I created. Now that I have a 40+ hour job, four kids, and volunteer time, I need the published adventures and appreciate the published settings. I also have appreciably more cash to throw at my hobby.

I'm in the demographic that would happily drop $500 a year on D&D goods, possibly more if it was really good stuff. I'd love to be able to throw money at WotC/Hasbro. I'm not so much interested in bashing or squashing FR (or anything else) as I am in letting Hasbro know how to take my money. Part of that is in being open about what's going to drive me to go elsewhere for a meal and not check for when they add pizza back onto the menu. If I knew what was up next, I might settle in and try FR again; tastes change.

IMO, 5E is the best version of D&D, to date. They did an amazing job. I'd really like to be able to continue to patronize them. Please stop using so much garlic, though.

mouselim · May 13, 2015

Oh man...

Corrosive said:
Where can I get hold of the critically acclaimed version of Tyranny of Dragons?

I'm totally with you on this...haha!!

[UPDATED] RAGE OF DEMONS! New D&D Storyline Features Drizzt, Underdark, & Demon Lords!

Jeff Albertson

Explorer

Mercule

Adventurer

Parmandur

Book-Friend

Selvarin

Explorer

HonorBoundSamurai632

First Post

Trickster Spirit

Explorer

Mercule

Adventurer

Trickster Spirit

Explorer

Mercule

Adventurer

mouselim

First Post

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