Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Where Else to Delve with D&D 5E?

With an official Eberron book coming out in just a few months, Wizards of the Coast has started to push into settings that aren't in the Forgotten Realms.

Now, to be fair to Wizards, there were a couple adventure books that came out over the years that went elsewhere. Curse of Strahd was 5E's foray into the Ravenloft Setting. However, it was built far more as a stand-alone adventure rather than a full Ravenloft sourcebook. Other than generally advising players to make human characters and suggesting the Barovia is kind of locked away by the Mists, as well as introducing the Vistani (and, uh, maybe we could do some work on the Vistani to make them a little less like a lot of stereotypes of a historically oppressed real-world ethnicity,) it doesn't go into a lot of detail about how you might make your own Ravenloft campaigns in other domains of dread (though to be fair, Barovia is certainly the quintessential one.)

Last year we got Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, which as an old-school Magic player, I found very exciting. Ravnica worked I think very well as a new D&D setting because it's such a different kind of locale than any that had existed before (though I will say, reading about Sigil and its various factions does suggest some shared DNA.) GGtR is absolutely a sourcebook through and through, and it's the kind of book I'd really like to see more of.

Ghosts of Saltmarsh is technically the first 5E book set in the Greyhawk campaign setting, but a little more like Curse of Strahd, it focuses primarily on an out-of-the-way small town rather than giving you an overview of the world. That being said, Saltmarsh isn't quite a pure adventure book like its spiritual predecessor, Tales of the Yawning Portal, given the details on Saltmarsh itself and the extensive expansions to naval exploration and combat (including some formalized rules for vehicles.)

Eberron: Rising from the Last War appears to be a hybrid sourcebook and adventure book. I imagine the campaign detailed within is going to be more extensive than the one-shot Krenko's Way adventure in GGtR, but it also appears that there will be similar "sample building maps" like the various guild-associated adventure locations in the Ravnica book for things like airships and lightning rail trains. Eberron is apparently going to be over 300 pages, which means we should have room for both the big campaign and a lot of other useful stuff.

Given that Wizards' philosophy with 5E is fewer publications, but with a very solid quality floor, I imagine we aren't going to get a huge number of hardcover adventure books in any of these settings - indeed, I doubt we'll see any other big Ravnica books unless its popularity soars - and while I think a lot of people have enjoyed Ravnica as a setting, I don't think it has overtaken the Forgotten Realms or anything like that for D&D players.

But there are a lot of settings that would be very cool to see updated for 5E.

Now, to an extent, in a lot of cases you could just go and find old sourcebooks. I've been reading the 2E Planescape Campaign Setting book as a PDF, and while there are some mechanical aspects that are incomprehensible to me as someone not versed in 2nd Edition rules, the ideas within it of its various locations, people, factions, and kind of narrative planar mechanics are all stuff I could pretty easily adapt to 5E.

But stuff like monsters, spells, magic items, and special rules are things that a dedicated 5E sourcebook could provide. Hell, Backgrounds as a thing I think were not something in any previous editions, and while I do think for the most part they're really story prompts, the mechanics baked into them could give you some interesting things to play with in a different setting (Ravnica made background a pretty huge choice - though to be fair I think you could also use existing backgrounds and simply have a guild-affiliated character gain renown with their chosen guild.)

So what settings would be the most exciting for us to explore?

I'll confess here that most of my familiarity with these settings is through online research, and not any actual experience. But here's my take, trying to focus on the major settings. I'm going to leave out Eberron given that we're obviously about to get a big book for that.

Dragonlance: My sense of this is that it's the most classically Tolkien-esque fantasy world, with a strong sense that good is good and evil is evil, with knights in shining armor and all that. I think there's definitely room for that in D&D, but I also think there's not a ton that players would need to learn about it to run something set there.

Greyhawk: We've got Saltmarsh, and my sense of this one is that it's the cynical, muckier setting, but again not all that different in terms of its general medievalism.

Forgotten Realms: Naturally, we've got enough set here.

Dark Sun: With its post-apocalyptic vibe, I think you could definitely give us some new monsters and I'm curious about the lore. But I think the really exciting thing to add here would be psionics. Long ago they did an Unearthed Arcana for the Mystic Class, and while a player played one in a one-shot and it was absurdly overpowered, at least at level 1, an exploration of new types of magic would be a good impetus to also introduce this setting.

Ravenloft: Curse of Strahd gives us the tone and the general sense of how difficult it is to escape the Demiplanes of Dread, but I could also imagine having a more general sourcebook. I know someone preparing to run a Ravenloft campaign, and it seems like the old lore really makes it out to be its own kind of world with a map, but I'd like to see how that idea has evolved, given how Curse of Strahd suggests the demiplanes are really more kind of pocket dimensions all stuck somewhere in the Shadowfell (actually, I'd love some official stuff about the Shadowfell proper as well as the Feywild.)

Spelljammer: It might have a dumb name, but Spelljammer's science-fantasy stuff seems like it could be really fun. We've gotten elements of it like the Neogi and Giff in Volo's and Mordenkainen's, but mechanics for how a spelljammer ship works and the idea of all these other worlds even within familiar crystal spheres could give people a lot of material to work with.

Planescape: I'm going to be very curious to see to what extent Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus really fleshes out what it's like to be in the Outer Planes, but in 5E there's not a lot there to really get into what a plane-hopping campaign would be like. And Planescape's focus on the Outlands and Sigil already gives you a pretty sizable location for more "normal" adventures, even if the planar nature of the place means even normal stuff is going to be super-weird.

I know there are other settings like Birthright and Nentir Vale and such, but I know so very little about those that I can't really comment on them.

I think Wizards, with its quality-over-quantity ethos this edition, is probably not going to repeat itself too much. After Out of the Abyss I doubt we're going to get another big Underdark adventure.

As a homebrewer I really prefer when they come out with sourcebooks over adventure books, and it looks like with Saltmarsh and Eberron, they're kind of leaning toward melding adventure books with sourcebooks. From what it sounds like, the Eberron book is going to be the kind of book I hope to see them keep coming out with. But I also think that it's about time in the 5th Edition lifecycle for us to start getting the really weird stuff.

No comments:

Post a Comment