One of the most shocking announcements today with the first previews of Zendikar Rising is that next year we're going to be getting a Magic: the Gathering set that takes place in the Forgotten Realms, which has been the primary D&D setting (I think with the exception of 4th Edition) for the past thirty years or so.
While not all Magic settings are based around mechanics (Innistrad and Eldraine are both "top down" places, where the flavor and lore leads to the mechanics, rather than the other way around) most Magic worlds are pretty high-concept in order to translate into mechanical themes for the card game.
The Forgotten Realms (aka the planet Toril, and most often the continent of Faerun) are, on the other hand, a giant kitchen sink style of fantasy world, where nearly anything you can imagine can be found, because it's meant to serve for all sorts of D&D tones. In 5th Edition, every published adventure book with the exception of Curse of Strahd (which, to be fair, can start in the Forgotten Realms) and Ghosts of Saltmarsh (which is more of an anthology set in Greyhawk) is set in or at least starts in the Forgotten Realms (Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus starts in the famous FR city before sending you to the Nine Hells.)
Given that, though, it actually makes a lot of sense for them to use the Forgotten Realms for a Core Set-style card set. Core Sets generally don't have a story, and will often have cards set in multiple planes, though they frequently use this to allow for cards that depict things on Dominaria or Shandalar. Dominaria, of course, being the original MTG setting (though still younger than Forgotten Realms, which was first created in the 80s, I believe) has a bit too much history to have one specific mechanical identity (though the recent return there in the Dominaria set introduced the idea that all that complex history was its mechanical identity) and Shandalar was literally adopted as a common setting because of its generic-ness given how idiosyncratic Dominaria had gotten.
I'll confess that I'm not a huge fan of the Forgotten Realms specifically because it has this kind of broad catch-all sensibility (I don't dislike it, but I'm not going to get excited for a sourcebook for it like I would for something like Ravenloft, Eberron, or Planescape.)
Already, just dividing the existing Forgotten Realms setting into Magic's color identities is going to be an interesting exercise, and while I could imagine that some of Zendikar's RPG-like mechanics (like the new "party" system in Rising) could also make their way into this, I suspect that Forgotten Realms will wind up giving us basically our generic core set equivalent this year - which I believe is also what sets like Magic: Origins did in years past.
I also suspect they're not going to work too hard to fit the canons of MTG and D&D together - the cosmos of D&D (in official settings that aren't from Magic, I should say - your homebrew world has whatever cosmos you want it to have) is very clearly delineated, with other planes based on the various alignments, for instance. Planeswalkers, in a sense, exist there, but only in the sense that a powerful enough wizard could just cast the Plane Shift spell (and most "mundane" worlds are actually considered on the same plane - if you want to go from the Forgotten Realms to Greyhawk, normal spatial teleportation is all you need.)
Still, it'll be fun, and I'm excited to see if things like Gelatinous Cubes, Beholders, and Mind Flayers potentially show up in MTG.
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