So Forgotten Realms takes place on Toril, Greyhawk on Oerth, Dragonlance on Krynn, etc.. I'm curious where some of the other, older and/or obscure dnd settings take place. Do those settings have seperate worlds all to themselves or are they subsettings of other dnd settings? I know the Mystara world has several subsettings, but what about these?
For example:
Council of Wyrms, Kingdoms of Kalamar, Jakandor, Ghostwalk, Pellinore, Nentir Vale (I think may also be refered to as Points of Light), or even the more recent Radiant Citadel
I've tried researching it myself with vague or mixed results. Are they under the umbrella of another campaign setting or are they seperate altogether in dnd lore? Does anybody know? Like if I were traveling via Spelljammer would they be seperate systems in the wildspace of the astral sea (or seperate crystal spheres in the phlogiston for pre 5th Spelljammer)?
So Forgotten Realms takes place on Toril, Greyhawk on Oerth, Dragonlance on Krynn, etc.. I'm curious where some of the other, older and/or obscure dnd settings take place. Do those settings have seperate worlds all to themselves or are they subsettings of other dnd settings? I know the Mystara world has several subsettings, but what about these?
For example:
Council of Wyrms, Kingdoms of Kalamar, Jakandor, Ghostwalk, Pellinore, Nentir Vale (I think may also be refered to as Points of Light), or even the more recent Radiant Citadel
Don't know most of them, but it's a safe assumption that they're designed as separate worlds. Unless a setting is specifically published as being part of a setting it's normally separate. (They stapled a bunch of originally-separate settings onto the Forgotten Realms IIRC, but that's not the usual way of things. There are also the weird settings that connect to other worlds -- Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft -- but they're still their own thing at heart, and don't require a specific other setting in order to be run.)
Nentir Vale certainly was -- it was supposed to be a minimal setting that people could run in without worrying about all the lore of extant settings.
IIRC, Radiant Citadel was designed so it could be attached to whatever world you're running in, but it also includes a number of new worlds of its own.
I've tried researching it myself with vague or mixed results. Are they under the umbrella of another campaign setting or are they seperate altogether in dnd lore? Does anybody know? Like if I were traveling via Spelljammer would they be seperate systems in the wildspace of the astral sea (or seperate crystal spheres in the phlogiston for pre 5th Spelljammer)?
The real answer is that they can be whatever you want. If you think two settings make sense as different parts of the same world, you can do it. If you want to carve off a chunk of the Forgotten Realms and make it its own thing, you can do that. IF you want to send your players to one by spelljammer, that's your decision.
There are also the weird settings that connect to other worlds -- Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft -- but they're still their own thing at heart, and don't require a specific other setting in order to be run.
IIRC, Radiant Citadel was designed so it could be attached to whatever world you're running in, but it also includes a number of new worlds of its own.
I would say the Radiant Citadel is in the same club as Planescape, Spelljammer and Ravenloft.
It is most similar to Planescape in that it is about an inhabited hub from which you can quickly reach other locations. The citadel proper is in the Deep Ethereal, while the connected locations could be part of any number of material planes / wildspace systems.
"Accurate" lore a hard thing to define. There is a lot of DnD lore that comes from official sources, but not everything can be "accurate" since they contradict each other.
You could consider only the 5e material canon, but then there is very little actual lore. In general, the wikis do a good enough job of it, and it is the easiest way to learn the lore. https://xender.vip/
Its basically the Marvel multiverse problem. What used to be individual worlds, with its own rules, gets dragged kicking and screaming into a multiverse scenario, that refuses to follow its own set of governing rules the moment its mildly inconvenient to the writer. Much like Warhammer, the current overarching multiverse "lore" is just a hodgepodge of retcons to try and sound like everything coexists, because at the time it sounded cool to have a multiverse. It also shares that caveat of "everything is canon"; as technically all homebrew settings exist somewhere in the multiverse, even if the books don't cover them. Another example is the Legend of Zelda "time line"...... the whole concept was a fever dream attempt to bridge together mostly isolated stories and settings, because the modern expectation became "Serialized, interconnected meta-universes".
Planescape, iirc, was really just a vehicle to allow cross overs and cameos. I mean theres even an honest to gods SciFi Laser rifle and crashed UFO in one of the early DnD adventures, as a one off joke. Spelljammer came later as an opportunity to have a fantasy/steampunk "Pirates in Space" setting, but needed 'land masses' to travel to. Neither is designed as a comprehensive bible to travel inside a cohesive multiverse; but rather are themselves settings designed to enable adventures that can send you through multiple other DnD settings in the process.
You have to keep a paradoxical mind set when trying to wrap your mind around this whole situation. Because its not a single cohesive setting, but multiple settings with a special side game where you hot glue stuff together for a radically different type of adventure. And depending on which book you're reading, the multiverse is arranged differently.
Incidentally, Pathfinder wanted to avoid this with Starfinder, but still make everything PC related cross compatible. So in that setting, its just one giant universe, and their main fantasy setting (Golarian) is in a different galaxy, far away from where all the Starfinder adventures happen, and in different points in time. Earth is also canon in Pathfinder, as theres an adventure where you are teleported to 1918 Russia and fight Rasputin. Yet Earth and Golarian are largely ignored by Starfinder, despite being in the same universe, because they knew it was a pain to try and make them accessible.
Hence the general advise here is "try not to think about it".
So Forgotten Realms takes place on Toril, Greyhawk on Oerth, Dragonlance on Krynn, etc.. I'm curious where some of the other, older and/or obscure dnd settings take place. Do those settings have seperate worlds all to themselves or are they subsettings of other dnd settings? I know the Mystara world has several subsettings, but what about these?
For example:
Council of Wyrms, Kingdoms of Kalamar, Jakandor, Ghostwalk, Pellinore, Nentir Vale (I think may also be refered to as Points of Light), or even the more recent Radiant Citadel
I've tried researching it myself with vague or mixed results. Are they under the umbrella of another campaign setting or are they seperate altogether in dnd lore? Does anybody know? Like if I were traveling via Spelljammer would they be seperate systems in the wildspace of the astral sea (or seperate crystal spheres in the phlogiston for pre 5th Spelljammer)?
Don't know most of them, but it's a safe assumption that they're designed as separate worlds. Unless a setting is specifically published as being part of a setting it's normally separate. (They stapled a bunch of originally-separate settings onto the Forgotten Realms IIRC, but that's not the usual way of things. There are also the weird settings that connect to other worlds -- Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft -- but they're still their own thing at heart, and don't require a specific other setting in order to be run.)
Nentir Vale certainly was -- it was supposed to be a minimal setting that people could run in without worrying about all the lore of extant settings.
IIRC, Radiant Citadel was designed so it could be attached to whatever world you're running in, but it also includes a number of new worlds of its own.
The real answer is that they can be whatever you want. If you think two settings make sense as different parts of the same world, you can do it. If you want to carve off a chunk of the Forgotten Realms and make it its own thing, you can do that. IF you want to send your players to one by spelljammer, that's your decision.
Expanded 5e Spelljammer Cosmology
"Accurate" lore a hard thing to define. There is a lot of DnD lore that comes from official sources, but not everything can be "accurate" since they contradict each other.
You could consider only the 5e material canon, but then there is very little actual lore. In general, the wikis do a good enough job of it, and it is the easiest way to learn the lore. https://xender.vip/
Wikipedia has a great page on all the settings, including "world names" to answer the core question.
It's a worthy deep dive
Its basically the Marvel multiverse problem. What used to be individual worlds, with its own rules, gets dragged kicking and screaming into a multiverse scenario, that refuses to follow its own set of governing rules the moment its mildly inconvenient to the writer. Much like Warhammer, the current overarching multiverse "lore" is just a hodgepodge of retcons to try and sound like everything coexists, because at the time it sounded cool to have a multiverse. It also shares that caveat of "everything is canon"; as technically all homebrew settings exist somewhere in the multiverse, even if the books don't cover them. Another example is the Legend of Zelda "time line"...... the whole concept was a fever dream attempt to bridge together mostly isolated stories and settings, because the modern expectation became "Serialized, interconnected meta-universes".
Planescape, iirc, was really just a vehicle to allow cross overs and cameos. I mean theres even an honest to gods SciFi Laser rifle and crashed UFO in one of the early DnD adventures, as a one off joke. Spelljammer came later as an opportunity to have a fantasy/steampunk "Pirates in Space" setting, but needed 'land masses' to travel to. Neither is designed as a comprehensive bible to travel inside a cohesive multiverse; but rather are themselves settings designed to enable adventures that can send you through multiple other DnD settings in the process.
You have to keep a paradoxical mind set when trying to wrap your mind around this whole situation. Because its not a single cohesive setting, but multiple settings with a special side game where you hot glue stuff together for a radically different type of adventure. And depending on which book you're reading, the multiverse is arranged differently.
Incidentally, Pathfinder wanted to avoid this with Starfinder, but still make everything PC related cross compatible. So in that setting, its just one giant universe, and their main fantasy setting (Golarian) is in a different galaxy, far away from where all the Starfinder adventures happen, and in different points in time. Earth is also canon in Pathfinder, as theres an adventure where you are teleported to 1918 Russia and fight Rasputin. Yet Earth and Golarian are largely ignored by Starfinder, despite being in the same universe, because they knew it was a pain to try and make them accessible.
Hence the general advise here is "try not to think about it".