You're in charge of D&D's setting! (here's the catch...)

[Ry]

Unless you're being sarcastic, that's extremely condescending -- not to mention flat out wrong.

an_idol_mind, meet Razz. Razz, meet an_idol_mind.

 

[Umbran]

... I'm not saying that the Hasbro big shot had a good idea. It was a catch.

Sometimes, the catch is enough to put a kibosh on the idea.

However, if I set aside the premise issues, and the answer that made you concede...

I still wouldn't take it. It amounts to asking one to play Dr. Frankenstein. On occasion, getting chocolate in the peanut butter is a good way to go, but I don't think there's synergy to be found, in those two settings.

Melding Eberron and Greyhawk, however, might yield something more interesting....

I will now go hide from the people throwing rotten fruit at me for that idea.

 

[xmanii]

Didn't TSR do a map once where Greyhawk and FR both existed on the same world?

Not sure about that, but I do remember the time Veggie Boy did that April Fool's joke about it. heheh

 

[Set]

I think merging the two settings would be a bad idea. FR benefits from *extreme* levels of detail, and is well suited to GMs who have little time and wads of disposable income. Greyhawk benefits from a certain amount of 'blurriness' that allows the GM more room to move, making it better suited to GMs who have time (or just the inclination) to fill in the blanks. Filling in all of the blanks in Greyhawk would take away some of it's specific utility, just as stripping out all of the dazzling detail in the Realms would.

As for the 'make it and we'll market it' approach, eh. It worked for Eberron, apparently. I don't recall a huge fan clamoring for a magic-punk setting with gnomish airships or lightning rails, but here it is, and there it sells. Good stuff will find a market, whether we knew we wanted it or not.

 

[GreatLemur]

"You can call me Sir, whippersnapper. Get rid of both of those settings. They are someone else's homebrewed setting.
What you need to do is give the kids a way to build their own homebrew."

Holy Christ, I agree with diaglo on something.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Make the two worlds a collectable card game, so collectors can create their own worlds using their favorites of each.

 

[GreatLemur]

Um, no way folks. Building your own homebrew takes wayyyyy too much time.

It's only good for those without responsibilities...like children. Or those without any life.

I was a teenager when I started D&D and I STILL didn't have time to fully flesh out my homebrew campaign...

See, it's the "fully flesh out" that has you going wrong, there. Obviously, those of us who aren't getting paid to do this stuff can't put the same work into it that the pros do. Fortunately, we don't need to. Unlike the pros, we only need to build what we'll actually use.

I think it's quite acceptable--and quite easy--to start with a the assumption of a "generic" world, or with a general concept outlined and written up for the players, and then flesh it out as you play. Somebody wants to play a Truenamer? Okay, now it's time to figure out where Truenamers fit in the campaign world. The player can help. If nobody's interested in playing a Gnome--and the DM doesn't have a need for them somewhere--then they probably don't exist.

No need to write a whole Forgotten Realms boxed set's worth of information. Just give yourself a place for things to happen, and give your players enough hooks and flavor to get them interested. Here, let me give it a go:

"The main country has kind of an Indian-style culture with a theologically-justified caste system, but really stern, Soviet brutalist architecture and a religion focused on ancestor worship instead of gods. All the PCs will be technically 'human', but you can use the mechanics for half-elves and half-orcs to represent distant fey and goblinoid heritage (but only in really low-caste characters), and ethnically they can be really varied and even weird (this is the center of a big empire, and the various castes are actually descended from families that cam from all over the continent). Look up Indian and generally south-Asian stuff for the general sound of your names. The whole culture is very low-arcane-magic, so no Bards or Wizards. Sorcerers are okay for those with fey blood, though. We can talk about non-core arcane classes, but don't get your hopes up. Clerics and other divine types use magic by chanelling the spirits of their ancestors, so there aren't any specific deities. Just come up with an ancestor and pick some domains based on his personality, occupation, legend, etc. We won't be using psionics, but I might have an idea for incarnum. Talk to me about that if you're interested. Outside the boundaries of civilization, there are tribes of savage fey and goblinoids (which are actually just two actual species, each coming in a variety of varied and chaotic forms), who fight each other openly and kind of harass the dominant humans. The biggest threat that you're aware of right now would be a rival human nation who's building an army of war automatons (they're much more into arcane magic than your people). They actually hate the fey and goblinoids more than you guys, though. Also, there's an extremely advanced and mysterious civilization of Locathah in the ocean east of your nation, but they pretty much keep to themselves, historically."

That's off the top of my head, and extremely sketchy and disorganized, but I could put together a reasonably well-developed writeup over a weekend, complete with placenames and a vague map. It'd be just a couple pages, but players ain't generally gonna want to read a whole textbook's work of background detail, anyway.

 

[Imaro]

I tell him scrap that...We do a revised Planescape with limited run "worldbooks" touching on different playstyles and genres with each worldbook. They will each be a single hardback, limited print run that are fully contained settings, and interlinked through the Planescape cosmology. Basically a revised 2e format. Expand Planescape as a base campaign and have a setting vote-off( like survivor or American Idol) to see which worlds get more support and which stay as a single book.
Once these stop selling, we release a book on designing your own worlds for Planescape, and our final worldbook is a fan created project where for a whole year fans get to vote on certain aspects of the world to create it. Once the final book is released we reset editions.

Yeah baby, Now that's a master plan

Of course I probably get kicked out the office at this point.

 

[TheYeti1775]

i think i remember that in a Dragon article.

Diaglo,
Do you remember which issue? I'll search tonight but if you can narrow it down to a range or even a year please do.

Yeti

 

[Gothmog]

Um, no way folks. Building your own homebrew takes wayyyyy too much time.

It's only good for those without responsibilities...like children. Or those without any life.

I was a teenager when I started D&D and I STILL didn't have time to fully flesh out my homebrew campaign what with homework, socializing with friends outside the geek's basement, video games that are 40+ hours to beat, and family crises', homebrew campaigns will NEVER be as great as those produced and published by the very makers of D&D. The professionals who're paid to do it and do it way better than I ever could or the majoirty of D&D gamers could ever do.

I finally gave up and realized that premade campaigns were the best route and tailor it to my own tastes. First I did Planescape, then Ravenloft, then I found my pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow...and it ended right on the Forgotten Realms. I really like Eberron, too, but I have no time to DM that setting. I'd love to play in it, though.

And you don't need a whole book to help someone make a homebrew game. The DMG, DMG2, and all splatbooks helps you do that. They give guidelines AND inspiration to do that.

So, yeah, screw homebrew. Premade is the way to go in this day and age.

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. Homebrew settings are the only way to go IMO. While publsihed settings are ok to mine for ideas, a homebrew setting the DM has created is that DMs world- he knows it inside and out, the nuances, cultures, politics, history, and metphysical events that shaped it. For me, trying to make a published setting feel alive to me is WAY more work than just making something from scratch, especially in the case of FR where you have players who are dogmatic about Realms canon. I've run and played in FR, Greyhawk, Al Quadim, and Dark Sun, and while each world has some cool elements, none of them ever came alive for me as a DM or player like a homebrew setting. DMs are much more enthusiastic about their own settings, and put a lot more thought into the events of a session than DMs who run premade settings IMO. Plus, I know when I run a published setting, I feel somewhat constrained by the previously published sourcebooks, wondering if this would fit here, or if that element matches the theme of the world and makes logical sense in it.

The only published settings I really feel are worth the effort are ones that take place in the real world or some variant of it (Kult, Call of Cthulhu, or Deadlands for example), a fantasy setting that offers something REALLY different (Iron Kingdoms or Warhammer FRP), or sci-fi settings that have a cool hook (Fading Suns, Dune). But for almost all fantasy I vastly prefer to homebrew to give the setting something different. So for my money I agree with Diaglo- give DMs a set of toolkits to use to homebrew their settings- something along of the lines of Magical Medieval Societies: Western Europe.