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

[gyor]

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...")

Ravenloft is designed to plug into every setting, heck it's a connected to a bunch of D&D settings already. It even fits with MtG setting, I could see dumping Innistrad in the core and Amonkhet which is a very dystopian Egypt setting would be prefect in the Amber Wastes Cluster (a cluster of Egyptian themed Ravenloft Domains). Amonkhet is very horror/dark setting, most of the civilizations were wiped out, except 1 Valley/City, and outside of that one place it's all undead mummies and demons and deadly deserts and dangerous monsters with not even death being a release (planar/world curse that turns everyone into Undead).

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Ravenloft is designed to plug into every setting, heck it's a connected to a bunch of D&D settings already. It even fits with MtG setting, I could see dumping Innistrad in the core and Amonkhet which is a very dystopian Egypt setting would be prefect in the Amber Wastes Cluster (a cluster of Egyptian themed Ravenloft Domains). Amonkhet is very horror/dark setting, most of the civilizations were wiped out, except 1 Valley/City, and outside of that one place it's all undead mummies and demons and deadly deserts and dangerous monsters with not even death being a release (planar/world curse that turns everyone into Undead).

Though I wouldn't even bother with the Mists; to plug Ravenloft adventures into Midgard I'd just change some of the names to protect the innocent fit the setting and be good to go. I mean, you've already got vampires and werecreatures in abundance; a cursed gypsy-like people; dark fantasy Egypt; germanic and eastern European regions; Italian-ish regions... there isn't much that needs to be changed at all.

 

[gyor]

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.

I think Golaron was at least created by a large group of people, including Ed Greenwood, to basically be a replacement for the Forgotten Realms because Paizo which had gotten used to using FR when it ran Dragon and Dungeon Mags, couldn't use it anymore.

And I hate when settings like these get pegged as generic or kink sink. I mean the RW has far, far more cultures and communities and so on and no one called the Earth or settings set on Earth like WoD, CoD, Shadowrun, ect... kitchen sink settings. It really misses the essence of these settings.

 

[gyor]

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.

FR has wars, it's just that most of them are low level raids and stuff. I think that most FR has fewer wars at any given time because usually because when serious wars break out, they resolves fairly quickly and with a horrifying end.

The Crown Wars each ended with a day of mourning level disaster, and then that era ended with the supercontient wrecking first Sundering.

The War between the Gods and Promordials ended with Dendar eating the Sun and wiping out all life in a dark ice age (except the Gods and Primordials, until a new Sun was found or made.

The War between the Batrachi and the Giant Empire lead to a huge disaster that created the sea of fallen stars and wiped out most of the Batrachi civilization.

A war between Jhamdaath and the Elves lead to Jhamdaath getting drown in an act of genocide. Elves also locked away Calim and Memmon originally ending their war and causing a massive desert to apart in what became Calimshan.

There was a really weird Dwarven civil war were Dwarven factions used deep spawn to create functionally magical clone armies to fight each other. That civilization had a very sad end.

Then their was the first war between the Mulan and the Imaskari where the core provinces of Imaskar was were literally blasted into dust by Mulan Gods.

Then there was the Orcgate Wars when hordes of grey orcs were from another world which was an Orc Theocracy with crazy powerful divine magic went to war with the Mulan and even the Elves or who ever they could reach. This ended after Gods died and portals were shut down cutting off access to Theocratic Orc world, leaving entire tribes of Grey Orcs stranded in FR.

Even recently during the Sundering the Shade Empire got wiped off the material plane mostly, Unther went to war with Tymamther and it was thanks to an army of devils that Tymanther survived, and the Mulhorandi drove the Imaskari leadership into exile and took their homeland back.

So you see what most FR nations prefer to exist in peace outside of raids, in a high magic setting like FR, wars get out of hand very quickly.

There is a risk of mutually or potentially mutual destruction between nations in FR.

 

[Parmandur]

I think Golaron was at least created by a large group of people, including Ed Greenwood, to basically be a replacement for the Forgotten Realms because Paizo which had gotten used to using FR when it ran Dragon and Dungeon Mags, couldn't use it anymore.

And I hate when settings like these get pegged as generic or kink sink. I mean the RW has far, far more cultures and communities and so on and no one called the Earth or settings set on Earth like WoD, CoD, Shadowrun, ect... kitchen sink settings. It really misses the essence of these settings.

I don't mean generic to be insulting, by any means: but FR or Greyhawk are not "D&D, but with * difference". They are just D&D, anything goes.

 

[Voadam]

FR has wars, it's just that most of them are low level raids and stuff. I think that most FR has fewer wars at any given time because usually because when serious wars break out, they resolves fairly quickly and with a horrifying end.

You forgot Thay vs. Rashemon a couple times and the Horde devastation of Kara Tur and invasion of Western Faerun.

 

[Zardnaar]

You forgot Thay vs. Rashemon a couple times and the Horde devastation of Kara Tur and invasion of Western Faerun.

There's more. Crown wars lasted thousands of years.

 

[Parmandur]

FR has wars, it's just that most of them are low level raids and stuff. I think that most FR has fewer wars at any given time because usually because when serious wars break out, they resolves fairly quickly and with a horrifying end.

The Crown Wars each ended with a day of mourning level disaster, and then that era ended with the supercontient wrecking first Sundering.

The War between the Gods and Promordials ended with Dendar eating the Sun and wiping out all life in a dark ice age (except the Gods and Primordials, until a new Sun was found or made.

The War between the Batrachi and the Giant Empire lead to a huge disaster that created the sea of fallen stars and wiped out most of the Batrachi civilization.

A war between Jhamdaath and the Elves lead to Jhamdaath getting drown in an act of genocide. Elves also locked away Calim and Memmon originally ending their war and causing a massive desert to apart in what became Calimshan.

There was a really weird Dwarven civil war were Dwarven factions used deep spawn to create functionally magical clone armies to fight each other. That civilization had a very sad end.

Then their was the first war between the Mulan and the Imaskari where the core provinces of Imaskar was were literally blasted into dust by Mulan Gods.

Then there was the Orcgate Wars when hordes of grey orcs were from another world which was an Orc Theocracy with crazy powerful divine magic went to war with the Mulan and even the Elves or who ever they could reach. This ended after Gods died and portals were shut down cutting off access to Theocratic Orc world, leaving entire tribes of Grey Orcs stranded in FR.

Even recently during the Sundering the Shade Empire got wiped off the material plane mostly, Unther went to war with Tymamther and it was thanks to an army of devils that Tymanther survived, and the Mulhorandi drove the Imaskari leadership into exile and took their homeland back.

So you see what most FR nations prefer to exist in peace outside of raids, in a high magic setting like FR, wars get out of hand very quickly.

There is a risk of mutually or potentially mutual destruction between nations in FR.

I've always felt that the frozen state of Faerunian geopolitics is actually a subtly realistic bit of speculative worldbuilding. With all the Dragons, cabals of evil wizards, Goblinoid hordes, trolls, Liches, Giants, Centaurs, etc, etc etc...that all existing states are in a constant struggle for survival, hence all the steady work for adventurers and anlack of energy for opportunistic expansion. Also, lots of room between "Points of Light" where there literally be dragons.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm biased as Midgard my favorite. If I had to rate them.

1. Midgard
2. FR 3E and earlier
3. Golarion

FR and Golarion switch places from 4E onwards though. Golarion is better than 5E FR both 1E and 2E Golarion.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

I think Golaron was at least created by a large group of people, including Ed Greenwood, to basically be a replacement for the Forgotten Realms because Paizo which had gotten used to using FR when it ran Dragon and Dungeon Mags, couldn't use it anymore.

I thought the Paizo staff at least used Greyhawk almost exclusively? The various Dungeon Mag Adventure Paths are all set in Greyhawk, with online conversions for FR and Eberron.