The Core more like "the lore" I think it will be fine without all that stuff laid out explicitly.
Yeah, sure. Just like it'd be perfectly fine to ignore this and just use Curse of Strahd for your Ravenloft adventures. But if your going to make a full blown campaign setting, I'd rather you make one as good or better than the previous setting. Sounds like this isn't even going to try to live up to the quality of the 3rd edition setting, and that's just sad.
I would say intricate factional dynamics predicated on lore just isn't a 5e thing, so the fact that the domains are distinct from each other and _could_ overlap but are not designed in a way that insists so isn't all that surprising. I mean 5e products touch on prior lore but doesn't really rely on it too much. I think manageable worlds for new players will always be the driver. Do long time adherents of some settings miss some continuity (though I think this is in continuity with 4e if I read that post right)? Sure, but I doubt there will be any hard and fast reason a player couldn't have their domains more contiguous than they're mapped, or not mapped in the hardcover.
So a few things. First, Ravenloft was never used per se in 4th edition- somewhere along the line they decided to merge Ravenloft into the ShadowFell, and they showcased a few original domains here and there as a result. Also, and here's the thing I keep coming back to- what your calling 'intricate factional dynamics built on lore' is what I call a campaign setting. This is a book purpose built to present the world (or continent or whatever) and give you a decent understanding of the challenges and forces facing that world that a group of daring adventurers might which to become embroiled in. I'd also argue that you can easily keep the Core and the Clusters and the general rules of the world and keep the world perfectly manageable for new players (honestly, I feel like you aren't giving new players enough credit in that regard). They want to update the campaign setting. Great. I see no reason they couldn't do so without removing some of the best features of the older editions. It all increasingly feels like using a chainsaw to perform the operation of a scalpel.
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Yeah, sure. Just like it'd be perfectly fine to ignore this and just use Curse of Strahd for your Ravenloft adventures. But if your going to make a full blown campaign setting, I'd rather you make one as good or better than the previous setting. Sounds like this isn't even going to try to live up to the quality of the 3rd edition setting, and that's just sad.
So a few things. First, Ravenloft was never used per se in 4th edition- somewhere along the line they decided to merge Ravenloft into the ShadowFell, and they showcased a few original domains here and there as a result. Also, and here's the thing I keep coming back to- what your calling 'intricate factional dynamics built on lore' is what I call a campaign setting. This is a book purpose built to present the world (or continent or whatever) and give you a decent understanding of the challenges and forces facing that world that a group of daring adventurers might which to become embroiled in. I'd also argue that you can easily keep the Core and the Clusters and the general rules of the world and keep the world perfectly manageable for new players (honestly, I feel like you aren't giving new players enough credit in that regard). They want to update the campaign setting. Great. I see no reason they couldn't do so without removing some of the best features of the older editions. It all increasingly feels like using a chainsaw to perform the operation of a scalpel.