Wizards of the Coast publishes its new 5th edition books with the only requirement being that you have the three core rulebooks as prerequisites. But that hasn't stopped them from drawing some connections between said books when it's not mechanically imperative.
Consider, for example, the Carnival, a domain of dread within the Ravenloft setting. While it dates back to 2nd Edition, the Carnival got fleshed out a lot more in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, giving us a backstory about its leader (though not its darklord) Isolde and her flight from the Feywild and a deal made with a pair of Shadar-Kai to trade her fey carnival for their shadowfell one. And then, we got The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, which introduced the Witchlight Carnival - the very one that Isolde traded to the elves now going as Mr. Witch and Mr. Light.
One of the new concepts introduce in Fizban's is the idea that each individual dragon we encounter is actually a facet of a pre-existing singular dragon that existed on the long-lost "First World" (which was first mentioned in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything). Created by Bahamut and Tiamat (when the two of them were on better terms and Tiamat seemed to only have the one head,) the First World was the original world of the Prime Material Plane, but conflicts between dragons and the gods led to it, as well as Sardior, the first gem dragon and effectively Bahamut and Tiamat's first child, being shattered. The other worlds (or at least most of them) of the material plane are sort of echoes of that First World, and each dragon has echoes scattered across many worlds.
A dragon who connects with and potentially merges with all of its echoes becomes far more powerful, near god-like.
As such, the book has many adventure hooks and premises that involve travel between worlds of the material plane.
There has been plenty of precedent for interplanar travel in D&D. The Planescape setting concerns itself primarily with the Outer Planes, and going into the Feywild or the Shadowfell is not uncommon. But while in theory ordinary teleportation magic can take you from one world to another, I think it's pretty uncommon for campaigns to do so - usually, people bounce from their own world to the other planes and then back to their own world.
But Fizban's seems to encourage players to journey between these other worlds. Dragon lairs sometimes have portals to the lairs of a dragon's echo on another world, and a draconic questgiver might send adventurers to another world in order to deal with some issue their echo is experiencing. There's even a modified lair action in which two parties of adventurers fighting different echoes of a dragon on their respective worlds might get swapped to the other world in the middle of a fight.
Overall, I think this is basically just cool. I like the surreal quality of other planes, but a focus on traveling to other material plane worlds gives you the opportunity to either go more alien and original or to go subtle and play out different fantasy tropes. For instance, my homebrew setting has a continent-spanning empire, which makes for epic stakes, but also means that you're generally not going to encounter a ton of independent, warring kingdoms. But a campaign could take you to another world in which things are more provincial. A premise in the book I've mentioned before but I think is really cool is where a group of dragons open a permanent, massive gateway between two worlds, and the cultures of those worlds are now suddenly in contact. The two worlds have effectively just become one (something that the dragons looking to restore the First World would consider progress) and now both sides have to rethink their entire position - for better or worse.
However, the nerdy clue-hunter in me is not going to sit back and consider this just simply a cool thing this book brings up.
I think we're getting hints of things to come.
The most obvious meaning of these hints, and the one that I think is actually what they're going for, is Spelljammer, which is about 95% confirmed thanks to the recent Unearthed Arcana, Travelers of the Multiverse.
Spelljammer is primarily known as the space-based, science-fantasy (emphasis still on the fantasy side) setting for D&D, introduced in the late 80s. But beyond allowing you to have a fun Star War in your D&D campaign, it's also the primary setting used to link existing settings.
Spelljammer has outer-space like worlds that correspond to each of the famous D&D settings. The Forgotten Realms exist in Realmspace. Greyhawk exists in Greyspace. Dragonlance is in Krynnspace. These "spaces" are the crystal spheres that are linked through the "phlogiston" that exists beyond them. But a party with a spelljammer ship can take off from Waterdeep, fly off into the sky, travel along a current in the phlogiston, and emerge into a new inky black space before landing in the city of Greyhawk.
Given dragons' interest in connecting with their echoes, it seems to me that they would have a keen interest in spelljammers, eager to spend some considerable portion of their hoards on funding the construction of such ships in order to link up with their echoes - and hiring adventurers to do the legwork.
I mean, it writes itself, right? A spelljammer campaign could start with the party getting a group patron in the form of an ancient dragon who wants them to fly off to other worlds and make connections with their echoes on as many worlds as possible.
So, you know, this seems like another hint that we'll be getting a Spelljammer book sometime next year.
But I also think it's a great opportunity for DMs to have parties journey to other worlds. Indeed, I really want to run a campaign now in which the party goes to any homebrew worlds that the players have created for when they DM. I was fairly jealous of Matt Mercer playing in Exandria Unlimited, able to be a player in a campaign set in his own world. This would be a great excuse to allow other sometime DMs to have that experience.
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