Sadly, while I started with AD&D, I never played a whole lot, and then later got into 5e, so I missed like, ALL of D&D.
What other settings are popular? I know there's the Core Four: Mystara / Blackmoor; Oerth / Grayhawk; Krynn / Dragonlance; and Faerûn / the Forgotten Realms... each of which is generic fantasy that a new player couldn't tell the difference between.
Then there's the two psudo-settings: Spelljammer and Planescape. Spelljammer is an exploration based game that is D&D in Space; while Planescape is a social based game that is D&D goes to Philosophy School.
Then there are the three other popular settings: Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Eberron. Ravenloft takes your High Middle Ages and swaps it out for Gothic Horror / Post-Renaissance; and both Darksun and Eberron are Political Intrigue Games with a funky non-traditional fantasy focus Occultism / Magitech with a heavy bias for popular fiction (ala Dune / the 90's Anime Boom).
Are there any others that anyone is actually clamoring for? And if I got a description of one of the settings wrong, please let me know.
That's all the big ones I think. I would reckon that Dark Sun is kinda niche, but I don't really have any data to support that. There's also Theros for 5e, I don't know how many people are playing there but I don't hear about it.
And there are a lot of third party settings. I think the biggest one is probably Middle Earth, though whether that counts might be up for debate.
But I think it's still true that the majority of players are playing in homebrew settings. Though the Realms is pretty darn big these days.
While certainly not popular, Nentir Vale probably deserves an honourable mention. This was the setting for 4e’s core books - an attempt to produce a world that could easily be homebrewed in without all the decades worth of baggage in the form of Forgotten Reams, Greyhawk, etc.‘s history and lore.
Critical Role’s world of Exandria is also an extremely popular generic fantasy setting which has seen several official book releases by Wizards.
I might consider lumping “Magic: the Gathering” as a single campaign setting, even though it is three different planes - reportedly those books sold very well.
Heeeh. Man. The statement "Mystara, Oerth, Krynn, and Faerun are all interchangeable generic fantasy settings new players can't tell the difference between" is going to crank grognards all the way up. Mostly because it's true - if not for someone sitting down and explicitly laying out the differences between their favorite Generic Fantasy setting and all the others, a new player is just going to assume it's all D&D and go. I still have no idea what the differences between most of those are - the only one I have the remotest clue for is Krynn, and that's because I know from anecodtal accounts here on the boards that Krynn is supposed to be an explicitly low magic, Sword and Sorcery setting where the most infuriating technically-playable species in all of Dungeons and Dragons lives.
In fairness to the grognards, Exandria is much the same - it's a Generic Fantasy setting which is on the surface largely indistinguishable from the older settings. It's experiencing a surge these days because it's new, because it's backed by the most popular D&D streaming show by a country mile, and because Mercer and the rest of the people who've contributed to Exandria have an intrinsic understanding of the idea that the best TTRPG settings need lots and lots of empty/blurry space. Places where A DM can ask "what's here?" and the book says "who knows? We sure don't. But I bet you do, for your own game."
That blurriness, that space for the Inexplicable and Exciting to happen, is crucial for a TTRPG setting, and it's LONG been absent from Faerun. Faerun is mapped out down to the last twig and fallen acorn, every last little tiny thing's been accounted for, the world is stuffed full of Legendary Heroes who've saved all of Faerun a dozen times over each, and as a result there's no room for a DM to run a Faerunian game without throwing out half of what's been written before and pissing off grognards in the doing. Exandria doesn't have forty years of lore bloat getting in the DM's way, and so Exandria is really resonating with people. It's also why Eberron is so enduring and successful as a setting, even beyond its exotic appeal as something starkly different from Generic Fantasy - Keith Baker set out with the explicit goal of leaving huge stretches of the game world and many of the world's most crucial mysteries blurry and unsolved so the DM had oodles of space to play with in their own games.
Heh, it's also worth noting that Eberron is only 'Political Intrigue' if the DM and players both desperately want it to be. D&D-the-fundamental-system is bad at intrigue and Games of Thrones. Eberron can support it, and likely do so better than Faerun given the extensive information on various political webs given in the books, but the setting was built explicitly to cater to pulp and noir - i.e. high-flying swashbuckling Action Thriller adventure or gritty sepia-toned film-grainy personal dramas on a much smaller scale than War of Nations.
There was Oriental Adventures set in Kara-Tur, though I think that was supposed to be on the same planet as Forgotten Realms. And Maztica, which was meso-American, also on the same planet as forgotten realms.
There’s really niche stuff that was called D&D but which was almost an entirely different game. In particular I’m thinking of Birthright (mostly about kings and armies than adventuring parties) and Council of Wyrms, where the players were dragons, but it had nothing to do with the standard race/class/level system.
That blurriness, that space for the Inexplicable and Exciting to happen, is crucial for a TTRPG setting, and it's LONG been absent from Faerun.
This is one of my big hopes for the 2024 update - making the PHB, DMG, and MM all more generic and blurred. 4e did this really well, by basically saying “here is a pantheon, here are a couple city maps. Go out there and build your own version of Nentir Vale.” A lot of players were not super thrilled with that when the edition dropped - plenty of players who overly rely on the structure of established worlds were upset that they had to do a lot of homebrewing right out of the gate - but 5e has the advantage of already having years of content those folks could fall back on if the default was more agnostic. It would not be the quite the culture shock of “here’s a new edition with no content - figure out how to update your old content to a vastly different system if you do not want our generic setting.”
Wizards does seem to be moving in this direction, as evidenced by MMM’s making a more world-neutral beastiary. Granted, that has also gotten a significant amount of backlash, but that’s just inevitable when a certain segment of the population loves their perception of D&D more than they actually love D&D.
That blurriness, that space for the Inexplicable and Exciting to happen, is crucial for a TTRPG setting, and it's LONG been absent from Faerun. Faerun is mapped out down to the last twig and fallen acorn, every last little tiny thing's been accounted for, the world is stuffed full of Legendary Heroes who've saved all of Faerun a dozen times over each, and as a result there's no room for a DM to run a Faerunian game without throwing out half of what's been written before and pissing off grognards in the doing.
Faerun isn't quite as you describe it. I'll agree that it's a lot more defined than other settings, but it's got plenty of temporal and faction-based wiggle room. Yes, you'll find Durlag's Tower in the Woods of Sharp Teeth, and yes, it's the burial site of an ancient dwarf. But is it inhabited when you find it? Is the treasure still there? Has the tower been dismantled or destroyed?
I'll admit to feeling a bit constrained when I used it last. The self-imposed pressure to Get It Right is there, for sure. But my players weren't huge Realms nerds, so I was able to shift around a lot of stuff. I put Durlag's Tower in the Kryptgarden Forest instead, and nobody knew the difference. I altered other stuff that I'm sure at least one of them could recognize as different, but they're mature people who understand the necessity. I guess if your players are annoying, you'll probably get annoyed. ;)
The upside is that there's so, so much material to draw inspiration from. The reason I put the tower there was because I love the dragon who lives there.
Anyway, I would probably go for a less rigidly defined setting next time. But it's not like Faerun is unusable or anything.
Faerun is unusuable for a large swath of the new-to-5e players drawn in by the explosion in 'mainstream' D&D and live play shows. There's no accessible 5e lore worth speaking of for Faerun, which doesn't matter if everybody's in the same boat. But the moment a new player or three ends up in a group with a longtime diehard Faerun grognard, that grognard will absolutely ruin that game with an endless firehose of "umm actually, that's not how it goes in real Faerun..." There's been a dozen video games, a thousand novels, four entire previous editions of Forgotten Realms lore (discounting 4th, counting 3rd and 3.5 separately), and the Old Guard guys are going to be expecting any prospective new-to-5e player and/or DM to get absolutely every last single detail of all that old impossible to access lore down perfectly, or the game is Ruined Forever and that grognard will make sure the new guy never sits down at a D&D table again.
Is it really any wonder Exandria's taking off as much as it is? The only book you need to run an Exandria game is the one they sold for 5e a few years ago, and that book mentions in at least a dozen places that it's specifically making room for you to run the world the way you want to instead of demanding you adhere to forty years of back lore it completely refuses to explain to you.
Faerun is unusuable for a large swath of the new-to-5e players drawn in by the explosion in 'mainstream' D&D and live play shows. There's no accessible 5e lore worth speaking of for Faerun, which doesn't matter if everybody's in the same boat. But the moment a new player or three ends up in a group with a longtime diehard Faerun grognard, that grognard will absolutely ruin that game with an endless firehose of "umm actually, that's not how it goes in real Faerun..." There's been a dozen video games, a thousand novels, four entire previous editions of Forgotten Realms lore (discounting 4th, counting 3rd and 3.5 separately), and the Old Guard guys are going to be expecting any prospective new-to-5e player and/or DM to get absolutely every last single detail of all that old impossible to access lore down perfectly, or the game is Ruined Forever and that grognard will make sure the new guy never sits down at a D&D table again.
Is it really any wonder Exandria's taking off as much as it is? The only book you need to run an Exandria game is the one they sold for 5e a few years ago, and that book mentions in at least a dozen places that it's specifically making room for you to run the world the way you want to instead of demanding you adhere to forty years of back lore it completely refuses to explain to you.
This has been my experience with Forgotten Realms. There always seems to be that one person that has read all the novels and expects the DM has as well and that they will stick to the lore contained in them.
Calling Dark Sun political intrigue seems kind of like calling Mad Max: Fury Road a nice summer drive.
My understanding of Dark Sun (mind you, I've never really liked Dark Sun so I might not have the most accurate mental picture of it) is that it's a doomed, post-apocalyptic world where only the edgiest characters survive, there are no good guys, and something something slavery and cannibals.
Eberron is great for this as well. Keith Baker (the setting author) puts a disclaimer on pretty much everything that says "This is how I run it at my table. Your table is different than my table. Change whatever you need"
Calling Dark Sun political intrigue seems kind of like calling Mad Max: Fury Road a nice summer drive.
My understanding of Dark Sun (mind you, I've never really liked Dark Sun so I might not have the most accurate mental picture of it) is that it's a doomed, post-apocalyptic world where only the edgiest characters survive, there are no good guys, and something something slavery and cannibals.
Might be wrong, but I think the main cycle of adventures I think there's a sort of spartacus type uprising in which the PCs are instrumental. So I think while there are power struggles and power dynamics emphasized in the setting and adventure plot, I think you're right it's not what most players think of as "political" (with many imaginations defaulting with Game of Thrones "world as it is" presumptions of "realism").
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the moment a new player or three ends up in a group with a longtime diehard Faerun grognard, that grognard will absolutely ruin that game with an endless firehose of "umm actually, that's not how it goes in real Faerun..." There's been a dozen video games, a thousand novels, four entire previous editions of Forgotten Realms lore (discounting 4th, counting 3rd and 3.5 separately), and the Old Guard guys are going to be expecting any prospective new-to-5e player and/or DM to get absolutely every last single detail of all that old impossible to access lore down perfectly, or the game is Ruined Forever and that grognard will make sure the new guy never sits down at a D&D table again.
If that's been your experience, I'm sorry to hear it. The grognards I've seen have known that the setting itself is inconsistent. It's like Star Wars. It can't all be true, it contradicts itself. You have to just pick what you like from it.
Is it really any wonder Exandria's taking off as much as it is?
Is it doing well? I haven't heard anything about it since the last book launched.
the moment a new player or three ends up in a group with a longtime diehard Faerun grognard, that grognard will absolutely ruin that game with an endless firehose of "umm actually, that's not how it goes in real Faerun..." There's been a dozen video games, a thousand novels, four entire previous editions of Forgotten Realms lore (discounting 4th, counting 3rd and 3.5 separately), and the Old Guard guys are going to be expecting any prospective new-to-5e player and/or DM to get absolutely every last single detail of all that old impossible to access lore down perfectly, or the game is Ruined Forever and that grognard will make sure the new guy never sits down at a D&D table again.
If that's been your experience, I'm sorry to hear it. The grognards I've seen have known that the setting itself is inconsistent. It's like Star Wars. It can't all be true, it contradicts itself. You have to just pick what you like from it.
Is it really any wonder Exandria's taking off as much as it is?
Is it doing well? I haven't heard anything about it since the last book launched.
Reading between the lines of Wizards of the Coast’s shift away from Forgotten Realms, I think the gatekeeping is probably a bigger problem than you are giving it credit for. Despite what all the "anti-woke” (whatever that means) alarmists say, Wizards has been very conservative with 5e’s game design, really only making major changes when they see a substantial problem hampering accessibility of content. For an edition extremely rooted in Forgotten Realms from its inception to move away from Forgotten Realms and move toward more generic environments for core books, there almost certainly is internal Wizards data indicating the Forgotten Realms setting as a default decreases accessibility to the game generally.
I will also note, gatekeepers are not the only problem with overly bloated settings. Even if one manages to avoid the jerks, a novice to FR still is going to feel a bit worse if someone else at their table is constantly picking up on and amused by the references that the novice does not understand. It also is not fun for anyone when one player has meta knowledge the others do not - it makes those outside the know feel like they are missing someone and it takes away some of the joy of discovery from the person who already knows the world.
As for Exandria’s popularity, Critical Role consistently sells out of their self-published world building primers, and did well enough for Wizards to publish two official books set in Exandria. Wizards asking CR to do another book once again shows that the internal sales numbers were sufficiently high to justify a repeat arrangement. I think Yurei might be focusing a bit more on novelty as a driver of book sales, when the popularity of CR is likely the larger factor, but I do think that novelty plays a part in why CR was successful in the first place. Even if you are not a fan of CR (I personally think Mercer does some absolutely unacceptable things for a DM to do), the world itself is fresh, new, and clearly well thought out. The show likely owes a lot of its success to that world building, and the fact that viewers did not have to know anything about Exandria when watching (note how the campaigns all take place in new areas, so they stay fresh and accessible to brand new viewers).
Heh. I'm surprised no one has linked this survey yet. This poll is 7 years old, so it doesn't have newer settings on it (M:tG settings, Exandria, Domains of Delight, Radiant Citadel, etc), but it did contain information about the popularity of all pre-5e settings. This is how the popularity of D&D is ranked:
Most Popular: Homebrew
Most Popular Official Settings: Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Forgotten Realms (all equally popular)
Popular Official Settings: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer (all equally popular)
Not Popular Official Settings: Everything Else (Ghostwalk, Mystara, Council of Wyrms, Nentir Vale/Nerath, etc)
So, based on this survey, the 3 popular settings that we have not gotten updated to 5th edition yet (or haven't had an official product announced yet) are Dark Sun, Planescape, and Greyhawk. Everything else is just not popular and isn't likely to get updated to 5th edition (even though I would like an official Nentir Vale/Nerath setting book).
For an edition extremely rooted in Forgotten Realms from its inception to move away from Forgotten Realms and move toward more generic environments for core books, there almost certainly is internal Wizards data indicating the Forgotten Realms setting as a default decreases accessibility to the game generally.
That makes sense to me.
I will also note, gatekeepers are not the only problem with overly bloated settings. Even if one manages to avoid the jerks, a novice to FR still is going to feel a bit worse if someone else at their table is constantly picking up on and amused by the references that the novice does not understand.
True. And I'll say, I've been playing Edge of the Empire lately, and the times when the table decides to excitedly "um, actually" one another about Star Wars lore back and forth for five minutes or more? Worst parts of the experience, and it's not close. I assume they're having fun, but I'm not.
[Critical Role] viewers did not have to know anything about Exandria when watching (note how the campaigns all take place in new areas, so they stay fresh and accessible to brand new viewers).
Another pointed observation.
One thing I've noticed about the Forgotten Realms modules is that they really don't go deep into established material. Like, you might be dealing with Tiamat, but your path isn't taking you through All The Places Driz'zt Has Been or anything. When I played through BG:DiA, we only encountered one "known place" (a particular tavern) and it was something the DM added. And Baldur's Gate hardly even features in the adventure! ToA has Artus Cimber in it, but it never touches on the actual novel that involved that character, really. And I wish it had included the talking... Marmosets? I don't remember, lol. So like, if your Annoying Grognard (here capitalized, to differentiate from ordinary grognards) can just shut up for a minute, odds are very good that his insider knowledge won't matter at all, whether the DM is aware of said knowledge or not.
So really it's just about the experience of getting lore dumped against your will at the table. Which is fair, I just feel like these guys will find other things to dump about if it's not that. Like historical warfare or something. I dunno.
Like I said, I'm all for fuzzier settings. I've never played in one. It's always been either the Realms or total homebrew. I think all the fuzzy settings get less fuzzy as time goes on though. More material gets published, either to benefit from cross promotion, or just because the creators are inspired by it, and pretty soon you have something like Faerun.
For me personally, since Ravnica was published, i'm a diehard proponent to add MtGs Settings even more, even as a option to make it its base setting.
Now this would put many people in uproar, especially older D&D fans who went through many editions and each have their favorite setting. And that is the neat part of a MtG Settings, it is based around planes which are all unique to each other. Your Grayhawks and Mystaras, Dark Suns and Planescapes, can all easily fit on one of the uncountable planes MtG Setting would provide. And beyond that, they have a lot of planes that cover themes and tropes untouched, from cyberpunk asia, to apocalyptic machine hell to classic fairytales. All there in one spot.
And from a look at who does more worldbuilding currently in WotC, D&D or MtG, yeah, the MtG setting gets expanded every few months. So WotC would profit from ongoing worldbuilding they have to do anyway for MtG (which, be honest is more lucrative then D&D), and the D&D side would get more frequent setting updates, instead of once every 2 years.
I'm willing to say that even if one considers the M:tG deluge of half-random nonsense to be a fountain of awesome worldbuilding rather than a firehose of half-baked crap? Making the decision to turn D&D into M:tG - to turn all PCs into Planeswalkers, given them duel discs and a stack of land cards, sell new book content as "Bookster packs" where you might get one or two of the new class features for that subclass that released three months ago but which you still haven't collected all the features of yet so you can play it despite spending four hundred dollars on bookster packs - I would stop playing in this system pretty much on the spot. I'm not sure I can think of a single decision that would burn me on the property faster than turning it into just another M:tG gimmick. Just...no thank you, please and kindly.
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Sadly, while I started with AD&D, I never played a whole lot, and then later got into 5e, so I missed like, ALL of D&D.
What other settings are popular? I know there's the Core Four: Mystara / Blackmoor; Oerth / Grayhawk; Krynn / Dragonlance; and Faerûn / the Forgotten Realms... each of which is generic fantasy that a new player couldn't tell the difference between.
Then there's the two psudo-settings: Spelljammer and Planescape. Spelljammer is an exploration based game that is D&D in Space; while Planescape is a social based game that is D&D goes to Philosophy School.
Then there are the three other popular settings: Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Eberron. Ravenloft takes your High Middle Ages and swaps it out for Gothic Horror / Post-Renaissance; and both Darksun and Eberron are Political Intrigue Games with a funky non-traditional fantasy focus Occultism / Magitech with a heavy bias for popular fiction (ala Dune / the 90's Anime Boom).
Are there any others that anyone is actually clamoring for? And if I got a description of one of the settings wrong, please let me know.
That's all the big ones I think. I would reckon that Dark Sun is kinda niche, but I don't really have any data to support that. There's also Theros for 5e, I don't know how many people are playing there but I don't hear about it.
And there are a lot of third party settings. I think the biggest one is probably Middle Earth, though whether that counts might be up for debate.
But I think it's still true that the majority of players are playing in homebrew settings. Though the Realms is pretty darn big these days.
While certainly not popular, Nentir Vale probably deserves an honourable mention. This was the setting for 4e’s core books - an attempt to produce a world that could easily be homebrewed in without all the decades worth of baggage in the form of Forgotten Reams, Greyhawk, etc.‘s history and lore.
Critical Role’s world of Exandria is also an extremely popular generic fantasy setting which has seen several official book releases by Wizards.
I might consider lumping “Magic: the Gathering” as a single campaign setting, even though it is three different planes - reportedly those books sold very well.
How could I have forgotten Exandria?!
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Heeeh. Man. The statement "Mystara, Oerth, Krynn, and Faerun are all interchangeable generic fantasy settings new players can't tell the difference between" is going to crank grognards all the way up. Mostly because it's true - if not for someone sitting down and explicitly laying out the differences between their favorite Generic Fantasy setting and all the others, a new player is just going to assume it's all D&D and go. I still have no idea what the differences between most of those are - the only one I have the remotest clue for is Krynn, and that's because I know from anecodtal accounts here on the boards that Krynn is supposed to be an explicitly low magic, Sword and Sorcery setting where the most infuriating technically-playable species in all of Dungeons and Dragons lives.
In fairness to the grognards, Exandria is much the same - it's a Generic Fantasy setting which is on the surface largely indistinguishable from the older settings. It's experiencing a surge these days because it's new, because it's backed by the most popular D&D streaming show by a country mile, and because Mercer and the rest of the people who've contributed to Exandria have an intrinsic understanding of the idea that the best TTRPG settings need lots and lots of empty/blurry space. Places where A DM can ask "what's here?" and the book says "who knows? We sure don't. But I bet you do, for your own game."
That blurriness, that space for the Inexplicable and Exciting to happen, is crucial for a TTRPG setting, and it's LONG been absent from Faerun. Faerun is mapped out down to the last twig and fallen acorn, every last little tiny thing's been accounted for, the world is stuffed full of Legendary Heroes who've saved all of Faerun a dozen times over each, and as a result there's no room for a DM to run a Faerunian game without throwing out half of what's been written before and pissing off grognards in the doing. Exandria doesn't have forty years of lore bloat getting in the DM's way, and so Exandria is really resonating with people. It's also why Eberron is so enduring and successful as a setting, even beyond its exotic appeal as something starkly different from Generic Fantasy - Keith Baker set out with the explicit goal of leaving huge stretches of the game world and many of the world's most crucial mysteries blurry and unsolved so the DM had oodles of space to play with in their own games.
Heh, it's also worth noting that Eberron is only 'Political Intrigue' if the DM and players both desperately want it to be. D&D-the-fundamental-system is bad at intrigue and Games of Thrones. Eberron can support it, and likely do so better than Faerun given the extensive information on various political webs given in the books, but the setting was built explicitly to cater to pulp and noir - i.e. high-flying swashbuckling Action Thriller adventure or gritty sepia-toned film-grainy personal dramas on a much smaller scale than War of Nations.
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There was Oriental Adventures set in Kara-Tur, though I think that was supposed to be on the same planet as Forgotten Realms. And Maztica, which was meso-American, also on the same planet as forgotten realms.
There’s really niche stuff that was called D&D but which was almost an entirely different game. In particular I’m thinking of Birthright (mostly about kings and armies than adventuring parties) and Council of Wyrms, where the players were dragons, but it had nothing to do with the standard race/class/level system.
This is one of my big hopes for the 2024 update - making the PHB, DMG, and MM all more generic and blurred. 4e did this really well, by basically saying “here is a pantheon, here are a couple city maps. Go out there and build your own version of Nentir Vale.” A lot of players were not super thrilled with that when the edition dropped - plenty of players who
overlyrely on the structure of established worlds were upset that they had to do a lot of homebrewing right out of the gate - but 5e has the advantage of already having years of content those folks could fall back on if the default was more agnostic. It would not be the quite the culture shock of “here’s a new edition with no content - figure out how to update your old content to a vastly different system if you do not want our generic setting.”Wizards does seem to be moving in this direction, as evidenced by MMM’s making a more world-neutral beastiary. Granted, that has also gotten a significant amount of backlash, but that’s just inevitable when a certain segment of the population loves their perception of D&D more than they actually love D&D.
Faerun isn't quite as you describe it. I'll agree that it's a lot more defined than other settings, but it's got plenty of temporal and faction-based wiggle room. Yes, you'll find Durlag's Tower in the Woods of Sharp Teeth, and yes, it's the burial site of an ancient dwarf. But is it inhabited when you find it? Is the treasure still there? Has the tower been dismantled or destroyed?
I'll admit to feeling a bit constrained when I used it last. The self-imposed pressure to Get It Right is there, for sure. But my players weren't huge Realms nerds, so I was able to shift around a lot of stuff. I put Durlag's Tower in the Kryptgarden Forest instead, and nobody knew the difference. I altered other stuff that I'm sure at least one of them could recognize as different, but they're mature people who understand the necessity. I guess if your players are annoying, you'll probably get annoyed. ;)
The upside is that there's so, so much material to draw inspiration from. The reason I put the tower there was because I love the dragon who lives there.
Anyway, I would probably go for a less rigidly defined setting next time. But it's not like Faerun is unusable or anything.
Faerun is unusuable for a large swath of the new-to-5e players drawn in by the explosion in 'mainstream' D&D and live play shows. There's no accessible 5e lore worth speaking of for Faerun, which doesn't matter if everybody's in the same boat. But the moment a new player or three ends up in a group with a longtime diehard Faerun grognard, that grognard will absolutely ruin that game with an endless firehose of "umm actually, that's not how it goes in real Faerun..." There's been a dozen video games, a thousand novels, four entire previous editions of Forgotten Realms lore (discounting 4th, counting 3rd and 3.5 separately), and the Old Guard guys are going to be expecting any prospective new-to-5e player and/or DM to get absolutely every last single detail of all that old impossible to access lore down perfectly, or the game is Ruined Forever and that grognard will make sure the new guy never sits down at a D&D table again.
Is it really any wonder Exandria's taking off as much as it is? The only book you need to run an Exandria game is the one they sold for 5e a few years ago, and that book mentions in at least a dozen places that it's specifically making room for you to run the world the way you want to instead of demanding you adhere to forty years of back lore it completely refuses to explain to you.
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This has been my experience with Forgotten Realms. There always seems to be that one person that has read all the novels and expects the DM has as well and that they will stick to the lore contained in them.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Calling Dark Sun political intrigue seems kind of like calling Mad Max: Fury Road a nice summer drive.
My understanding of Dark Sun (mind you, I've never really liked Dark Sun so I might not have the most accurate mental picture of it) is that it's a doomed, post-apocalyptic world where only the edgiest characters survive, there are no good guys, and something something slavery and cannibals.
Eberron is great for this as well. Keith Baker (the setting author) puts a disclaimer on pretty much everything that says "This is how I run it at my table. Your table is different than my table. Change whatever you need"
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Might be wrong, but I think the main cycle of adventures I think there's a sort of spartacus type uprising in which the PCs are instrumental. So I think while there are power struggles and power dynamics emphasized in the setting and adventure plot, I think you're right it's not what most players think of as "political" (with many imaginations defaulting with Game of Thrones "world as it is" presumptions of "realism").
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If that's been your experience, I'm sorry to hear it. The grognards I've seen have known that the setting itself is inconsistent. It's like Star Wars. It can't all be true, it contradicts itself. You have to just pick what you like from it.
Is it doing well? I haven't heard anything about it since the last book launched.
Reading between the lines of Wizards of the Coast’s shift away from Forgotten Realms, I think the gatekeeping is probably a bigger problem than you are giving it credit for. Despite what all the "anti-woke” (whatever that means) alarmists say, Wizards has been very conservative with 5e’s game design, really only making major changes when they see a substantial problem hampering accessibility of content. For an edition extremely rooted in Forgotten Realms from its inception to move away from Forgotten Realms and move toward more generic environments for core books, there almost certainly is internal Wizards data indicating the Forgotten Realms setting as a default decreases accessibility to the game generally.
I will also note, gatekeepers are not the only problem with overly bloated settings. Even if one manages to avoid the jerks, a novice to FR still is going to feel a bit worse if someone else at their table is constantly picking up on and amused by the references that the novice does not understand. It also is not fun for anyone when one player has meta knowledge the others do not - it makes those outside the know feel like they are missing someone and it takes away some of the joy of discovery from the person who already knows the world.
As for Exandria’s popularity, Critical Role consistently sells out of their self-published world building primers, and did well enough for Wizards to publish two official books set in Exandria. Wizards asking CR to do another book once again shows that the internal sales numbers were sufficiently high to justify a repeat arrangement. I think Yurei might be focusing a bit more on novelty as a driver of book sales, when the popularity of CR is likely the larger factor, but I do think that novelty plays a part in why CR was successful in the first place. Even if you are not a fan of CR (I personally think Mercer does some absolutely unacceptable things for a DM to do), the world itself is fresh, new, and clearly well thought out. The show likely owes a lot of its success to that world building, and the fact that viewers did not have to know anything about Exandria when watching (note how the campaigns all take place in new areas, so they stay fresh and accessible to brand new viewers).
Heh. I'm surprised no one has linked this survey yet. This poll is 7 years old, so it doesn't have newer settings on it (M:tG settings, Exandria, Domains of Delight, Radiant Citadel, etc), but it did contain information about the popularity of all pre-5e settings. This is how the popularity of D&D is ranked:
Most Popular: Homebrew
Most Popular Official Settings: Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Forgotten Realms (all equally popular)
Popular Official Settings: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer (all equally popular)
Not Popular Official Settings: Everything Else (Ghostwalk, Mystara, Council of Wyrms, Nentir Vale/Nerath, etc)
So, based on this survey, the 3 popular settings that we have not gotten updated to 5th edition yet (or haven't had an official product announced yet) are Dark Sun, Planescape, and Greyhawk. Everything else is just not popular and isn't likely to get updated to 5th edition (even though I would like an official Nentir Vale/Nerath setting book).
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That makes sense to me.
True. And I'll say, I've been playing Edge of the Empire lately, and the times when the table decides to excitedly "um, actually" one another about Star Wars lore back and forth for five minutes or more? Worst parts of the experience, and it's not close. I assume they're having fun, but I'm not.
Another pointed observation.
One thing I've noticed about the Forgotten Realms modules is that they really don't go deep into established material. Like, you might be dealing with Tiamat, but your path isn't taking you through All The Places Driz'zt Has Been or anything. When I played through BG:DiA, we only encountered one "known place" (a particular tavern) and it was something the DM added. And Baldur's Gate hardly even features in the adventure! ToA has Artus Cimber in it, but it never touches on the actual novel that involved that character, really. And I wish it had included the talking... Marmosets? I don't remember, lol. So like, if your Annoying Grognard (here capitalized, to differentiate from ordinary grognards) can just shut up for a minute, odds are very good that his insider knowledge won't matter at all, whether the DM is aware of said knowledge or not.
So really it's just about the experience of getting lore dumped against your will at the table. Which is fair, I just feel like these guys will find other things to dump about if it's not that. Like historical warfare or something. I dunno.
Like I said, I'm all for fuzzier settings. I've never played in one. It's always been either the Realms or total homebrew. I think all the fuzzy settings get less fuzzy as time goes on though. More material gets published, either to benefit from cross promotion, or just because the creators are inspired by it, and pretty soon you have something like Faerun.
For me personally, since Ravnica was published, i'm a diehard proponent to add MtGs Settings even more, even as a option to make it its base setting.
Now this would put many people in uproar, especially older D&D fans who went through many editions and each have their favorite setting. And that is the neat part of a MtG Settings, it is based around planes which are all unique to each other. Your Grayhawks and Mystaras, Dark Suns and Planescapes, can all easily fit on one of the uncountable planes MtG Setting would provide. And beyond that, they have a lot of planes that cover themes and tropes untouched, from cyberpunk asia, to apocalyptic machine hell to classic fairytales. All there in one spot.
And from a look at who does more worldbuilding currently in WotC, D&D or MtG, yeah, the MtG setting gets expanded every few months. So WotC would profit from ongoing worldbuilding they have to do anyway for MtG (which, be honest is more lucrative then D&D), and the D&D side would get more frequent setting updates, instead of once every 2 years.
I'm willing to say that even if one considers the M:tG deluge of half-random nonsense to be a fountain of awesome worldbuilding rather than a firehose of half-baked crap? Making the decision to turn D&D into M:tG - to turn all PCs into Planeswalkers, given them duel discs and a stack of land cards, sell new book content as "Bookster packs" where you might get one or two of the new class features for that subclass that released three months ago but which you still haven't collected all the features of yet so you can play it despite spending four hundred dollars on bookster packs - I would stop playing in this system pretty much on the spot. I'm not sure I can think of a single decision that would burn me on the property faster than turning it into just another M:tG gimmick. Just...no thank you, please and kindly.
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