D&D 5E What does Midgard do that Forgotten Realms and Wildemount don't?

Doesn't the world also have some kind of fantasy Africa?
Yes. The Midgard Southlands is one of my favorite settings, or sub-settings. It has an Egypt analogue, a more sub-Saharan analogue, wasp people, plant people, and pirates.

Unfortunately, the Southlands stand-alone sourcebook is currently Pathfinder-only, but the fluff from it is still usable, and they do have a 5E Heroes of the Southlands for player options. Many of the Southlands monsters appear in the Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex.
 

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Midgard has the best world map.

Seriously.

Midgard Map
For those who don't know, this was done by Anna Meyer who got the Midgard gig because of her outstanding fan work doing new maps for Greyhawk: ghmaps.net.
That map is pretty fantastic.

Are the lines supposed to be major roads, trading routes, or political boundaries. I thought they were roads at first but then they head off into the seas.
 


Are the lines supposed to be major roads, trading routes, or political boundaries. I thought they were roads at first but then they head off into the seas.

As Zardnaar said... Leylines.

Which in Midgard are:
1. Channels of powerful magic that spellcasters can learn to tap into to augment their casting
2. Magic roads, which can reduce a journey of days or weeks to hours. However, while they once made a reliable "highway system" through the world, they were corrupted centuries ago. Think of the "Ways" from Wheel of Time - same idea.
3. A gateway to the Shadow Realm. The Shadow Realm is the "inbetween" of Midgard, that separates the Midgard-face of the flat world from the hard-to-reach Summerlands (where the Elves retreated to). This, of course, is where the Shadow Fey rule... along with worse things. Like a rogue nation of Imperial Ghouls.
 

2. Magic roads, which can reduce a journey of days or weeks to hours. However, while they once made a reliable "highway system" through the world, they were corrupted centuries ago. Think of the "Ways" from Wheel of Time - same idea.

I love that idea. It remembers me of the Paths of the Wyck in Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade, which is one of my favorite RPGs. Thanks for all the input, and keep it coming, please! I'm finding that maybe Midgard is even more to my taste than I expected.
 

I don't really agree that Golarion/FR/Midgard are "similar" per se. They represent three pretty different approaches to the same general idea, for my money, and Mystara represents a 4th.

The FR is very distinctive in it's own weird way, a messy, mystical, kind of cobweb-y setting full of unlikely well-meaning people, with a distinct lack of international conflict and war, and a lot of slightly LARP-y/ren-faire places in it, as well as a gigantic, endless pantheon which is weirdly the most real-seeming thing about the setting. There's stuff derived from real-world cultures, but it tends to be extremely superficial, like what hats they wear, rather than how they behave. It has a depth of content that certainly none of the others is close to, going back into the 1980s. There are multiple entire other settings inside it.

Midgard is a 1990s setting which resembles a specific type of '80s and '90s setting, which is to say the ones where most of the places are lightly based on Europe, Africa, the Near East and so on, with some fantasy nations scattered in-between. It has quite a lot more attitude than the FR, and a very distinct cosmology and being a two-sided "flat world" is kind of a big deal, too. It's generally a lot grimmer and darker than the FR, like it slid towards Warhammer, almost.

Golarion is a deeply 2000s setting, which is built pretty much entirely for and around adventuring, full of over-the-top, ultra-stereotyped places for adventurers to come from, and extremely dangerous places for them to go. It's extremely functional, top to bottom. There's little sense of it being "lived in" unlike the FR or Midgard, and geopolitics make no sense, but that's something they do all share (unlike Eberron). If you want a setting that feels real, it's not the way to go, but if you want one that's easy to understand and where everything is pretty clear, and there's room for gunslingers next to medieval knights, it's a good one.

Mystara is a peculiar setting. It's incredibly diverse. Really everything is somewhere in Mystara, in a neat little nation/kingdom situation right next to a totally different and unrelated nation/kingdom. It's like it was created by laying down hex tiles. You got irradiated elves, you got noble lion-men, you got native americans, you got germanic knights, and so on, all just sort of jammed together. Then you've got a whole region which is basically "the 1700s" for you to and mess around in (including guns). And you've got the whole hollow earth deal to boot. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and it's not quite as designed for practicality as Golarion, but it has a certain naive charm.

What these "generic" settings share, alongside Greyhawk or Exandria (less sure about Golarion, but I think it's the same):

Passion based in organic long-term play. Mystara grew out of the Kent State game, and Zeb Cook, Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick smuggled it into products from that game once they couldn't use Greyhawk for B/X material. Greenwood was working on the Forgotten Realms since the 60's! Baur was building Midgard for, what, 15 years just for his own game. Mercer made Exandria for his friends at home for years before he thought it would be A Thing. Wasn't Golarion someone's Homebrew...? Greyhawk was the culmination of years of wargaming and one of the Ur-Homegames by Gygax and company.

Hard to replicate that passion and work for a commercial product from scratch.
 

To follow-up on @Ruin Explorer's excellent post, while I enjoy all three of Midgard, FR, and Golarion, I agree that Midgard is the most internally coherent--it feels like an actual world built on thoughtful world-building, while the other two are very clearly made for gaming in a heapish sort of way. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but from the "worldbuilding-as-art" perspective, Midgard is in another league.

As a side note, I do really like that world map, but prefer the naturalistic watercolors of the original--I think done by the same person who did the Game of Thrones map folio:

1588382223627.png
 

Hard to replicate that passion and work for a commercial product from scratch.

You say that, but Taladas, Dark Sun and Planescape every bit of passion these do. Every bit. More I'd argue than Golarion (a strangely cold setting - I remember being really excited about and the old 2011 world book just leaving me really unimpressed, back in like 2013), possibly than the FR these days (though the FR 20 years ago and longer is a different matter). Two of those are by Zeb Cook (like Mystara) so that may be a "magic ingredient".

Do they have the same amount of widespread detail? No, though Dark Sun actually isn't that far off, and nor was Planescape after a few years (looking at my shelves I have a staggering number of Planescape books). Taladas has an incredible amount of depth for the relatively small page count, too. Relative originality, as well. I feel like it would be friends with Midgard.

What about Eberron? It's very hard I think to honestly claim Eberron has less passion than these, or that less work is being put into it. That's a commercial product designed from scratch.

So what settings are we really thinking of re: less passion/work from scratch? Or maybe you mean it's hard, but it can be done. Because clearly it has been done.

I mean, I can think of a couple of official commercial settings that don't, I guess. Spelljammer doesn't have anywhere near the same sort of passion/work, as these, and never looked like it would. Savage Coast for Mystara had neither, for my money (though it is a cute concept). They kind of seem like the exception, more than the rule, though.

This doesn't mean you're wrong. It probably is hard - it's probably part of why we see so few new settings, but I think history relates that it can be done, if there's any question.

I enjoy all three of Midgard, FR, and Golarion, I agree that Midgard is the most internally coherent--it feels like an actual world built on thoughtful world-building, while the other two are very clearly made for gaming.

I'd nuance this slightly and say that the FR isn't so much "made for gaming" in the way that Golarion very effectively is (I might have seemed kind of mean about Golarion, but I wouldn't object to running a game there, because it would be so easy to set things up for big drama and so on), as much as collection of "things Ed Greenwood" likes, some of which make it better for gaming, some of which make it much worse.
 
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You say that, but Taladas, Dark Sun and Planescape every bit of passion these do. Every bit. More I'd argue than Golarion (a strangely cold setting - I remember being really excited about and the old 2011 world book just leaving me really unimpressed, back in like 2013), possibly than the FR these days (though the FR 20 years ago and longer is a different matter). Two of those are by Zeb Cook (like Mystara) so that may be a "magic ingredient".

It's telling that my two favorite settings after Midgard are Planescape and Taladas, respectively. Ravenloft is up there, but not really as a setting as much as a collection of evocative adventures, stories and components - that actually plug into Midgard very well. (As Ed Greenwood commented about some of his non-FR writings that "mysteriously" filled in holes in the Realms, "it's almost as if someone had designed it that way...")
 

So what settings are we really thinking of re: less passion/work from scratch? Or maybe you mean it's hard, but it can be done. Because clearly it has been done.

I think this encapsulates what I meant, but I'd also add that I was speaking more to generic kitchen sink Settings: most of those you mention are high concept and pretty far out. Eberron is a very, very strong example of a commercial, made-to-order Setting, gotta say. Didn't care for it much when I was a teen, but it's grown on me
 

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