What setting-specific materials should become generic?

[ferratus]

Well, Spelljammer, Ravenloft and Planescape has pretty much been done as much as you'd want to do them.

From FR, I'd take Mythals. Mythals are perfect for showing a very high-magic city, or for introducing quirky magical affects into terrain. Very good for both making the "high magic" feel of the feywild come alive, or to explain why certain rooms in the dungeon have certain magical terrain effects.

I'd use Birthright as the inspiration for mixing domain rulership, places of power, and some mass combat. I know not everyone wants to bother with that in every campaign, but it would be nice for those of us who want to play a different kind of game in the paragon or epic tier as a break from 30 levels of dungeon crawling. A single book would be good enough for me, similar to 3.5's "Power of Faerun" but not setting specific and more like Birthright.

Similarly if they were ever to do Dragonlance, I'd frame the rules set to be about riding dragons and rules on how to conduct a world-shaking war scenerio like the old 1e Battlesystem rules. Then I'd do a dragonlance-specific Adventure Path scenerio, either updating the old modules again, or running a new war scenerio. Another option is to update Dragonlance as a board game, similar to Castle Ravenloft (or Risk for that matter).

Dark Sun stands apart so much, I don't think I'd take much of anything from it for a Points of Light setting.

I would certainly encourage plundering anything and everything from Greyhawk, especially since so many of the classic dungeons and demon lords have already made their appearance.

Since we have Dragonborn, an updated Council of Wyrms sourcebook could be interesting, with rules on playing dragon wyrmlings, or Dragonborn seeking the transformation into a full dragon.

 

[Shroomy]

D&D has a long tradition of "genericizing" setting specific materials, I mean, look how much Greyhawk material has made it into just about every D&D setting, so I personally don't have much problems with it (and in 4e, they often include a sidebar giving a brief summary of the genericized material from its setting specific context).

 

[Klaus]

And yet shifters made the jump from Eberron to mainstream D&D. I guess the difference being that shifters at least appear to be part human. With them around, I doubt we'll see rakasta or lupins any time soon.

Truth be told, the mechanincs for the shifters work perfectly well for Rakasta and Lupins.

 

[Dragonhelm]

Truth be told, the mechanincs for the shifters work perfectly well for Rakasta and Lupins.

So shifters killed the rakasta and lupins and took their stuff?

I'm noticing more and more lately how elements can be reskinned to represent other things in-game. That's always been there, but I notice it more with 4th edition. Maybe it's because of character builder.

What's cool here is that if we want to use rakasta and lupins, we have an existing mechanic to make is possible. All we need is a little reskinning (pun not intended) with the fluff, and we're good.