D&D 5E With the release of each new setting book, the SCAG looks worse and worse...

[gyor]

I'm not so sure TBH. Professional writers want to get paid, and if WotC wanted to commission a new FR campaign book then I refuse to believe they have nobody on staff or on retainer with sufficient love and enthusiasm for the Realms to take the job on. The vast amount of 5e FR material on DM Guild (including from respected pro writers) certainly argues there's still a lot of people out there who'd love to write the Realms.

It really seems a deliberate strategic choice at this point. FR is treated as the 'default' setting in campaign books (a bit like Greyhawk was in 3e), and gets a bit of fleshing out piece by piece in those, while new campaign books are largely those with a pre-existing built-in audience that WotC are trying to leverage - MtG players, the Critical Role audience, or Eberron players.

I think as WotC looks increasingly to other settings, the plan will change. Plus doing FR by piece meal isn't working when you've left the Swordcoast for another part of FR all of once in what 5 years?

It's way, way to slow.

I think the game plan at WotC has really changed, they have a huge pile of APs between official and Adventure League content, and for like years they wouldn't touch campaign setting books at all, now by June they will have published 3 in a row! Four total in a short span (and no Curse of Strahd doesn't count, it's an AP regional book at best, and the SCAG is also a regional book), so it makes sense that they would be more open to a 5e version of the FRCG now, plus once that is out they won't feel like they have to set so much stuff in FR.

And no the Forgotten Realms isn't the default setting, although it's an understandable mistake given how reluctant they've been to visit other settings until 2018, the D&D Multiverse is seen as the default setting.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'd be fine with another Realms sourcebook. The SCAG is what it is though, I'd rather have new material than updated old material.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm not so sure TBH. Professional writers want to get paid, and if WotC wanted to commission a new FR campaign book then I refuse to believe they have nobody on staff or on retainer with sufficient love and enthusiasm for the Realms to take the job on. The vast amount of 5e FR material on DM Guild (including from respected pro writers) certainly argues there's still a lot of people out there who'd love to write the Realms.

The first commandment you learn when training to be a professional writer is: THOU SHALT NOT PLAGERISE.

This means, whist people are willing to write for the FR, they are not willing to write WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN.

Which means they are left with these options:

1) A complete rewrite, blowing up the previous stuff, as per 4e. And we all know how popular that was.

2) Pick something to focus on in more depth that has been done previously, as seen in ToA (Chult), Waterdeep: Dragonheist, The Boarder Kingdoms etc.

3) Take a different approach, e.g. parody, as in Acquisitions Inc.

 

[jayoungr]

SCAG was an experiment. I think it helped WOTC figure out what they wanted to do, and what they didn't want to do.

I think it's still useful as a not-too-daunting introduction for a player or DM who's new to the Forgotten Realms to the location where most of the published FR campaigns take place.

 

[gyor]

I'd be fine with another Realms sourcebook. The SCAG is what it is though, I'd rather have new material than updated old material.

Agreed, I see no reason it should focus as much on the Swordcoast & it's local underdark, instead it should focus on the rest of Faerun, and if there is room the other continents and realmspace/cosmology.

There are so many cool regions to explore, the Shining South, the Cold Lands, the Lands of Intrigue, The Old Empires, The Unapproachable East, the Utter East, the Hordelands, the Western Heartlands, the Chult, the Moonsea, Halruua, more distant regions of the Underdark, Turmish, Chondath (if it returned), the Blade Kingdoms, the Lake of Steam, the Shaar, Sea of Fallen Stars, ect...

 

[humble minion]

The first commandment you learn when training to be a professional writer is: THOU SHALT NOT PLAGERISE.

This means, whist people are willing to write for the FR, they are not willing to write WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN.

Which means they are left with these options:

1) A complete rewrite, blowing up the previous stuff, as per 4e. And we all know how popular that was.

2) Pick something to focus on in more depth that has been done previously, as seen in ToA (Chult) Waterdeep: Dragonheist, The Boarder Kingdoms etc.

3) Take a different approach, e.g. parody, as in Acquisitions Inc.

The FR has been written many times. The Grey box, the 2e region guides and boxed sets, the 3e FRCS and regional books like Uttermost East,, the 4e setting book, and now the SCAG and the 5e mega-adventure books - hell, a lot of the regions covered in the SCAG have probably been covered something like 10 times - how many Waterdeep writeups have we had? This isn't plagiarisation.

If WotC chose, and if they didn't want to advance the FR timeline again, they could even choose to retire the SCAG and copy-paste parts of its contents into a bigger book that covered more of the realms in similar detail to that which the SCAG covered the Sword Coast. There's plenty of precedent in 5e for WotC re-using material in multiple books after all, as the class options in my SCAG remind me. Or they could start releasing complimentary 'Old Empires Adventurer's Guide', 'Heartlands Campaign Guide' books etc, but there's just so much generic FR stuff in SCAG (the gods, calendar, language etc) - do you reprint all that stuff in every region book?

 

[gyor]

The first commandment you learn when training to be a professional writer is: THOU SHALT NOT PLAGERISE.

This means, whist people are willing to write for the FR, they are not willing to write WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN.

Which means they are left with these options:

1) A complete rewrite, blowing up the previous stuff, as per 4e. And we all know how popular that was.

2) Pick something to focus on in more depth that has been done previously, as seen in ToA (Chult), Waterdeep: Dragonheist, The Boarder Kingdoms etc.

3) Take a different approach, e.g. parody, as in Acquisitions Inc.

What you discribe is not Plaguism, it's updating shared universe setting to a new time period, which will invovle fleshing out the details of a whole bunch of regions. The Sundering and other events have radically changed Faerun, Toril at least, Realmspace, and even the Planes themselves! That is a lot of new information, and even stuff that isn't changed much, but just rehashing things still isn't plagrism.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Just rehashing things still isn't plagrism.

Just rehashing things is not fun for a writer (and yes it is plagiarism. It's legal plagiarism, but rehashing is still plagiarism). And when a writer does not enjoy what they are doing it isn't going to be very good quality. Most of those earlier rehashes where done by amateurs. WotC staffers are far more professional now, which means they aren't going to be satisfied trotting out reheated left-overs. The reason Wildermont is so much better than SCAG is simple: Ownership. It's Matt Mercer writing about his own setting, so there is a real passion in the writing. You can tell from SCAG that the authors are going through the motions. Hence all the pointless 1st person stuff. It's just an attempt by the writers to stave off boredom.

 

[Maxperson]

SCAG doesn't have monsters, magic items, etc. in it, probably because pretty much every adventure book is by default in the Forgotten Realms. All of the extras in those books are a part of that setting already.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'll always be thankful for the SCAG because it gave us the Urban Bounty Hunter background, without which we wouldn't have a proper Batman! Ahem, I mean the Gloomstalker.