When is a campaign setting no longer relevant?

[rounser]

Need I remind you of Murlynd again ?

Yes, I know he's got six-shooters. Still, a Greyhawk with one NPC with guns and a crashed spaceship hews a heck of a lot closer to mythology in the "lacking in jarring anachronisms" department than something like Eberron, which is apparently more relevant but I'd argue less resonant.

 

[Shemeska]

Not to mention the additions of an underworld of the dead, and a fairy world.

None of the cosmological setup for 4e is anything new to D&D. Those were already present in the Great Wheel, it's just that 4e's default selectively took bits and made a much bigger deal of them while eliminating or deemphasizing other things.

 

[catsclaw227]

None of the cosmological setup for 4e is anything new to D&D. Those were already present in the Great Wheel, it's just that 4e's default selectively took bits and made a much bigger deal of them while eliminating or deemphasizing other things.

In one sense you are right, but the way they did it made it almost a different plane or set-up entirely. You can't argue that the Great Wheel and the 4e cosmology are different.

It's like the difference between how I make salmon and the way that Fin's (a really nice seafood restaurant) prepares it. Salmon is salmon. And I can make it pretty good. But the cooks at Fin's can prepare it in many different ways, so that it is an entirely different meal. And in ways that can appeal to lots of different people.

 

[Desdichado]

Yes, I know he's got six-shooters. Still, a Greyhawk with one NPC with guns and a crashed spaceship hews a heck of a lot closer to mythology in the "lacking in jarring anachronisms" department than something like Eberron, which is apparently more relevant but I'd argue less resonant.

I don't know that I'd argue that either setting is relevent or resonant either one.

Certainly, I'd say Greyhawk has little "mythological resonance", but relevence is something best judged by marketing people, with marketing data, not folks on the internet who are trying to trump up their own personal tastes as some kind of maxim for fantasy fans as a whole.

 

[an_idol_mind]

D&D takes individual monsters of myth - Medusa, Pegasus, the minotaur, the hydra, the chimera, the sphinx - and turns them into races. Not quite sure why it does this, I would've thought in most cases one monster of a particular type would be enough for a campaign.

Personally I prefer individualised monsters as it makes them more interesting, and less of a known quantity to the PCs and world. Maybe that's too superhero-y.

Have you played Birthright? If not, you might want to take a look at that setting.

 

[Mallus]

None of the cosmological setup for 4e is anything new to D&D. Those were already present in the Great Wheel, it's just that 4e's default selectively took bits and made a much bigger deal of them while eliminating or deemphasizing other things.

The were present, but in a much different form. 4e places the Fey lands and the land of the dead nearby. They're places accessible to almost anyone (who's lucky or unlucky enough, as the case may be) in the mortal world.

That's very different from the Great Wheel cosmology, where the planes were remote, usually inhospitable, and accessible only to savants through endeavors that resembled Gnostic space programs.