And yet TSR produced all these original settings that WotC is going back to the well for. So MANY settings that TSR originally choked the sales of them all because customers could only buy and play limited numbers of them at any one time.
TSR also faced insolvency and was bought out by WotC (on the strength of Magic: the Gathering monies; this was before Pokémon Cards were a thing in the West). One could say the glut of competing
Original settings (many of which overlapped in tone or niche or purpose) was a big part of why 2E failed financially in the mid-90s.
A being could also suggest that 3E and 3.5E collapse over a glut of content that only built on the Core Rulebooks and thus often stepped on each others toes, were incompatible with each other, or were so compatible with each other that they BROKE the game. Some beings would call that a feature, not a bug. But financially, it was an impetus for a 4E reboot.
In 4E, we had 4 Settings: PoLand/Nentir Vale/
Nerath/CoN/World Axis/Core Assumed Generalized Setting;
The Forgotten Realms (retrofitted into World Axis and crossed over with Abeir in order to attempt a reboot and incorporate parallel concepts to
Nerath and
Eberron);
Eberron (also retrofitted into World Axis, though one could say World Axis was to begin with an elaboration on
Eberron's 3 Dragon Forebears); and
Dark Sun (also retrofitted to 4E World Axis concepts like the Shadowfell replacing the Grey, Dragonborn and Goliaths replacing Dray and Half-Giants respectively, Templars changing from being a type of evil Arcane Cleric to being a Warlock pact, and the inclusion of Eladrin and Tieflings much like FR and Eberron did).
Dragonlance was mentioned briefly, and showed up too, albeit only in one issue of
Dragon magazine and only in the very last year of the Edition.
Planescape and
Spelljammer and
Ravenloft were all in the game to some extent but were merged into and modified to form aspects of the World Axis cosmology (mechanical elements of their core gameplay ideas did show up eventually in
Dragon, such as
Planescape faction-based Heroic Themes in August 2012's
Dragon #414).
Gamma World came back in a big way for its 7th Edition, and could almost be called a 5th setting if it wasn't it's own ruleset that was just mutually compatible and built on the framework of 4E. And
Greyhawk, of course, was eliminated from the 4E so that
Nerath could mine the best bits of it for its own assumed setting and leave the parts the devs didn't like on the chopping block (also has the benefit of not needing the endorsement of the Gygaxes since the best bits are all classic adventure modules that WotC has remade time and time again). Same thing with
Mystara (Isle of Dread showed up in the Feywild in 4E). And finally, shudders,
Oriental Adventures showed up featuring Kara-Tur in
Dragon #404 and
Dungeon #195, October 2011. Mind you, I LOVE me some Asian-inspired fantasy stories and concepts; I'm shuddering at the continued use of that racist term by WotC in 20-sparking-11. And as with
Greyhawk,
Mystara,
Ravenloft,
Spelljammer, and
Planescape, this was set within one of the BIG FOUR settings instead of its own world, just a different corner of Faerûn (the oft-considered problematic and MAYBE FR-canon, maybe not
Al-Qadim setting showed up similarly, albeit limited to character options ONLY, within February 2012's
Player's Option: Heroes of the Elemental Chaos).
Acquisitions, Incorporated is sometimes considered its own micro-setting, running on the 4E engine since 2008 and appearing in May 2010's
Player's Strategy Guide for illustrative purposes before getting its own sourcebook for 5E in 2019. In 4E, Acq., Inc. appeared however as part of and set within the Nentir Vale of
Nerath, while in 5E they're suddenly in the
Forgotten Realms (eventually revealed that they've got multiversal offices in planes as far afield as
Ravnica, so it's sort of a cross-setting plug-and-play like
Planescape, Spelljammer,
Ravenloft,
Feywild, Radiant Citadel, etc).
One could say then, that 4E took the opposite extreme from 2E and 3E - it was attempting to be very slow and steady and methodical about what settings were added to the game, and what they brought that could only appear in that setting's verse, versus what could be incorprated instead into the generalized kitchen sinks of
Nerath or
The Forgotten Realms (or all of the above, as seen with the modifications made to all of their returning settings).
5E started out similarly slow and methodical for its first 4 years, focusing ONLY on
The Forgotten Realms, though acknowledging the other core worlds of
Greyhawk,
Dragonlance,
Eberron, and even
Nerath to an extent. But since 2018, 5E has been regularly churning out at least one new or returning setting every year. This is apparently based on customer data: we're drowning down the new settings like dwarves and elves playing tankard games at the local watering hole.
The big difference here is that outside of
Forgotten Realms, these settings are one-and-done. Yes, we had
Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft 4 years after
Curse of Strahd (and half a year after
Curse of Strahd Revamped). But
Curse of Strahd was a module and
Ravenloft is a special setting that functions as an extention of the Shadowfell and thus was incorprated at the time in 2016 into the ongoing
Forgotten Realms-based
Adventurer's League modules set around the Moonsea. It was only in 2020 and onwards that
Ravenloft got its own setting guide and eventually, it's own AL modules that are unlinked to FR (much like
Eberron's AL is). So in 5E, we now are getting a bunch of settings, but there's no official glut of products. WotC doesn't need to officially support these settings other than release a book and open it up to the DM's Guild. Yes, the DM's Guild products have the same issue of oft-mutual-incompatibility that 2E and 3E official products had. But none of these are "official" (though AL admin adventures and supplements and the old DM's Guild Adept program products were "semi-official"). So there isn't a GLUT of setting materials to self-compete. WotC doesn't have to maintain a line of
Eberron materials, because Keith Baker is doing that for them. It's actually surprising that WotC agreed to publish a second
Critical Role book, but because Matt Mercer and team did most of the dev work, and because these are essentially like
Ravenloft in reverse - a Setting Guide and an Adventure Module - it's not really that much off of their back. Besides, MOST of these setting books are now dedicating at least a third of the page count to an adventure. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually got a Keith Baker + WotC official
Eberron adventure module, but otherwise, it's really left there for the DM's Guild and Adventurer's League as a sandbox to play in as you will.
It's NOT the same situation as what sank TSR, by a long shot. There's a reason
Greyhawk wasn't unlocked for DM's Guild in Spring 2019 with
Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and a reason why we haven't seen
Nerath outside of a sample pantheon in the 2014 DMG. Kitchensink High Fantasy is the sandbox of the
Forgotten Realms. We'll see about
Dragonlance; I think the idea is to really emphasize the different magic rules in
Shadows of the Dragon Queen and also mass combat via
Warriors of Krynn. Those two concepts, depending on how all-in they go, could set it as far apart from
FR as
Eberron is. But they're ONLY doing
Dragonlance now, 8 years in, because rushing it and taking a half-sparked approach could have diluted the brand identity of
FR.
That's why I kinda doubt we'll see
Greyhawk in full - it's too kitchensink and lacks real-world synergy with an large established audience like
Dominaria might have given its return in the next
M:tG set. WE MIGHT see it as some folks have said, in 2024 as a special anniversary celebration commemorating the history of the game. I'd actually expect it more so in March 2025 - the 50th Anniversary of
Supplement I: Greyhawk. Or they might (my hope) reprint the 40th anniversary OD&D box set with Supplements I-IV instead, and then just open
Greyhawk to the Guild to play with fully as a thank you for the last 50 years. I DOUBT we'll get a specialized player's guide, but if anything for One D&D we might get a Gazatteer of the areas immediately around Castle Greyhawk as well as a who's-who of major Greyhawk characters (Mordenkainen, Bigby, Otto, Rary, Tenser, Leomund, Nystul, Drawmij, Otiluke, Bucknard, Robilar, Vecna, Tasha/Iggwilv, and Iuz; maybe also the iconic 3E charactersters like Tordek, Lidda, Mialee, Regdar, Jozan, Hennet, and Nebin). Actually, come to think of it, a Circle of Eight + Castle Greyhawk adventure module might be the way to go for an official
Greyhawk book.
My point really is that WotC are FULLY aware of what happened to TSR before they bought them, and are equally aware of the limitations of the cautious, few settings approach they took throughout 4E and the first half-decade of 5E. They'll figure it out.
When it comes to backwards compatibility, that's the thing: they'll need errata for any character lineages but really shouldn't need a new
Ravnica book or something. Loxodons, Vedalken, and Leonin appear in other M:tG settings; they could easily republish them in an upcoming One D&D M:tG setting book that includes them. Or they could release a pan-planar M:tG book akin to the little gazatteer I have here "Planes of the Multiverse" - publish any and all M:tG specific peoples in that, and then the setting books can focus on adventure modules and plane-specific mechanics. In fact, the glaring absense of Loxodons, Leonin, Owlins, etc from
MP:MotM suggests to me that such a book is in-coming eventually, probably waiting for the final changes to how lineages work in One D&D before republishing them.
