In a little under a month, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft will release, giving us an official 5th Edition campaign setting sourcebook for the Ravenloft setting. I vaguely recall folks at WotC saying that this year would see the release of three different classic D&D settings for 5th Edition, so I'm naturally speculating about them.
Ravenloft is actually one of the most unusual settings, with a pretty distinctive feel and arguably a different genre than general D&D. With its horror focus, along with its unusual supernatural setting, it's an exciting addition. Ravenloft is also the setting of what I think is generally the most popular adventure book in 5th Edition, Curse of Strahd.
D&D's relationship with the Forgotten Realms is kind of odd - while the world of Toril is just one of many in the Prime Material Plane, the game tends to focus on it, and specifically the continent of Faerun (and within that, the Sword Coast) as the central setting for D&D. I don't totally know the history of planes as they were developed for D&D, but people often refer to even such far-flung places as The Abyss as technically part of the Forgotten Realms setting, even though most settings do link to these same Outer Planes.
I actually don't know if it would make sense to get a Forgotten Realms sourcebook, then. Many of the adventure books have focused on notable areas of the Forgotten Realms, and books like Waterdeep Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and Candlekeep Mysteries have all spent a little time outlining the locations themselves - between those and Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, there's already a ton of information for the Forgotten Realms anyway.
Months ago, when we got the Gothic Subclasses and then the Gothic Lineages in Unearthed Arcana, I became fairly confident that we'd be getting a Ravenloft book, and wouldn't you know it: that's what's happening.
More recently (maybe overlapping?) we've gotten a set of Draconic subclasses as well as the recent UA involving variants on existing draconic races along with feats and spells tied to dragons.
I know very little about the Dragonlance setting, other than it's a world called Krynn, and there are these things called dragonlances that are really good at killing dragons. But I'm given to understand that some of the spells in that recent UA referred to specific people (or dragons) from Dragonlance, and that makes me feel fairly confident that a Dragonlance book could be the next one we're getting.
It also makes a fair amount of sense in terms of tone: Ravenloft is such an unusual, metaphysically strange setting that it would make sense to do a full 180 from that and give us a really classic fantasy setting.
So if two of three are Ravenloft and Dragonlance, what would the last one be?
Personally, between the Forgotten Realms, potentially Dragonlance, and the recently-canonized Exandria (man, it must be cool for Matt Mercer to see his homebrew setting become official) I think we're reasonably covered on traditional fantasy settings.
One option to expand into would be for more idiosyncratic settings. I love Eberron's pseudo-modern (or at least pseudo-20th-century) feel, though I think I'm unlikely to run a campaign set there given that my own homebrew setting has a fair number of overlapping ideas. The MTG crossover setting books are very high-concept - Ravnica's city-world and Theros' mythological approach to time and distance.
Personally, the setting I'd be most excited for is Planescape.
Now, Planescape books tend to focus a fair amount on the city of Sigil, which actually bears a resemblance to Ravnica (it's older, for those keeping score.) Sigil, like Ravnica, is a massive city, and it's also the home of several factions with radically different philosophies that all jockey for power.
But Planescape is not just Sigil - not only does it include the vast True Neutral plane of the Outlands, but technically it encompasses, well, all the planes. The Outer Planes, the Inner Planes, the Prime Material, etc. You could argue that every D&D game is a Planescape game, but that most of them just focus on one tiny corner of the setting.
Technically, you could argue the Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus was a bit of Planescape mixed with Forgotten Realms. But I think what I find really cool about Planescape is the way that the Outer Planes seem to operate independently of what's going on in the Prime Material Plane. And it's pretty much all surreal landscapes that are literally otherworldly.
Among other things, I think Planescape is a setting in which you could probably more easily build high-level adventures. While there shouldn't be anything preventing people from rolling up at level 1 (I sort of want to start players off at 1 in the Abyss, or have their first adventure be an escape from Carceri) I feel like the massive scope of Planescape would encourage people to play at high level, which is something that you don't tend to see much.
But let's examine some other options.
Greyhawk is another natural possibility. It's actually the first official setting for D&D, created by none other than Gary Gygax himself. Greyhawk (a world called Oerth, which I always assumed was pronounced just like "Earth," though supposedly it was intended to be like if you had a thick, old-timey Brooklyn accent, so more "oyth") is another prime material world, and is still based in a sort of High Medieval era like most fantasy. The main difference for Greyhawk is its tone - while Forgotten Realms tends to assume players will be heroes who want to fight back against the forces of evil that threaten the world, Greyhawk is a dark and gritty world where player characters are more expected to be in it for riches and glory. Your motivation to enter some deep dark dungeon in Greyhawk is primarily to get the treasure hidden within, not because there's some major threat to the world above.
Gygax, of course, was inspired by pre-Tolkien fantasy stories like Conan the Barbarian, where we weren't really rooting for the heroes because they were heroic, but more because they were just kind of badass and awesome.
To be honest, I think that this tone actually makes the alignment system make more sense - in a classically heroic game, it's really hard to fit evil-aligned characters into a party. But if the party is an alliance of convenience among a group of sell-swords and treasure-hunters, there's a bit more room for evil characters and good ones to cooperate. The good-aligned paladin might think that the evil rogue is a blight on the world, but the paladin's got to get that sacred relic for their quest, and will accept the help for now.
5th Edition has visited Greyhawk in the anthology Ghosts of Saltmarsh, though Saltmarsh itself (a Greyhawk location) doesn't necessarily play a role in any of the individual adventures.
Now, let's talk Spelljammer.
Spelljammer is a perennial request from D&D fans, but it's also arguably the weirdest thing that D&D has ever come out with. A pseudo-science-fantasy setting, Spelljammer does take place on the Material Plane, but it imagines each of the existing D&D settings to function as planets within their own "crystal spheres." Crystal spheres are a medieval theory about the nature of the cosmos, explaining the stars and planets as bodies moving within concentric spheres. In Spelljammer, each of these spheres bound one of the game's material plane settings along with other locations (such as moons and other planets,) but using a spelljammer-type ship, you can visit other spheres and their worlds.
While it keeps things rooted in medievalism and not any kind of modern conception of physics, the general vibe of spelljammer is a bit more of that kind of science-fantasy space opera. Furthermore, it's the most explicitly comedic setting, with a lot of really out-there and silly concepts (such as the fact that gnomish space ships all use Giant Space Hamsters running on wheels as their primary power source.)
Spelljammer was not a success back in the late 80s and early 90s, when it was introduced. It's a decidedly out-there concept. But I think that with the far broader popularity of science fiction and fantasy, audiences might be more willing to take the weird journey that is Spelljammer.
Personally, I've always loved mixing the chocolate of sci-fi with the peanut butter of fantasy, and so I'd be really happy for Spelljammer to be a thing. But we'll see if they have any really strong concepts to introduce with it.
One of the settings I remember hearing a lot about back in the day was Dark Sun. Dark Sun is a sort of post-apocalyptic setting in a desert world. There a few defining elements: one is the rarity of metal, forcing most people to get along with weapons made of materials like bone. An other is that arcane magic seems to be destroying the world, and the powerful hoard that kind of magic, ruling with an iron fist. The third is that psionics are a big part of the setting, which is something 5th Edition has only started to explore (there are three subclasses in Tasha's that are built around it.)
There are other D&D settings, of course, but just as my own neophyte self, I don't know that I really have much of a sense of, say, Birthright or Mystara.
Personally, I'm not really that interested in the more mundane settings (mundane being, of course, relative given that we're talking about fantasy worlds.) I'm all in for the surreal weirdness of Planescape or Spelljammer.
I will say, though, that if we're looking at Unearthed Arcana as hints for what might be coming (which is what I'm basing my guess that Dragonlance is coming next) I think we should pay attention to the "Folk of the Feywild" playable race options. The Feywild has generally not been treated as a campaign setting in and of itself, at least in 5th Edition, but I wonder if we could get some sort of sourcebook for a part of the Feywild, much as the Demiplane of Dread from Ravenloft is technically a part of the Shadowfell. (4th Edition, which introduced the Shadowfell, did have a full campaign setting book for it, though my sense is that WotC is really more interested in Ravenloft as a setting than the broader Shadowfell.)
We're apparently getting a fair number of 5E books this year, with Candlekeep Mysteries already out and Van Richten's coming soon. I wonder when we'll hear about what comes next.
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