D&D Settings you want back for 5e

So, apparently, WoTC has announced they intend to do two new setting books in 2018. But D&D has had a lot of settings. What ones do you wish would come back from the vast list of the past?

Myself, I really want Nentir Vale, Dark Sun, Eberron and Mystara - or at least Red Steel. Spelljammer would be nice, but I think we'd need more worlds to actually cross-over between before that'd be viable. Planescape... yeah, I suppose it might be good.

I think only one new setting book is coming, though we really just know that there's an 'accessory' book and two 256-page campaign hardcovers.

My guess is that it's going to be a Manual of the Planes sort of book, touching somewhat substantially on Sigil and Spelljammers in ways that set the stage but leave things open ended for GMs and DM's Guild authors.
And, assuming that is what the "Marathon" accessory is, the "Broadway" adventure will probably be based in Planescape as a hub with adventure hooks leading all over the place. I'm assuming that partly because Broadway is getting an accompanying dice set, and they would be able to make a Planescape themed dice set look pretty nice.

"Catacomb," after Xanathar's Guide brought him into more common lore knowledge is, presumably, going to be focused on Skullport and Undermountain.

Ah. Well, that may be what WoTC plans, but surely we can discuss what settings we'd like to see come back all the same?

I mean, who out there has even heard of Jakandor? Birthright? Mystara? Kingdoms of Kalamar? Ravenloft the Setting?

Planescape,Spelljammer,Mystara,Dragonlance,Dark sun,Eberron,and Greyhawk.

Nah, it's gonna be Forgotten Realms and Eberron. Grogs might look back fondly on Planescape and Spelljammer but the semi-normies that make up most of the audience want something familiar.

Link?

I hadn't really considered it, but I think I really want new settings more than rereleasing any of the old ones. Spelljammer would be nice since it hasn't been touched on for so long, and it's very different from the ones that have been though

We already GOT a Forgotten Realms setting book, in the SCAG, though. Unless they do something really shitty like sell us the 5e updates of Unapproachable East or Shining South (because Faerun has thri-kreen too!) and count *them* as "new"...

We won't be getting Eberron until Mystic and Artificer get another playtest push.

I know i'll never get it and it hurts.

In the realm of possibility i'd like Dark Sun.

Publicly at least. They do have NDA playtesters as well. I'm willing to bet that an Eberron book will have them both on proud display with all their setting specific races.

It's definitely Dark Sun but with the Starfinder release they might actually do Spelljammer if that was successful.

>the semi-normies that make up most of the audience want something familiar.
>Eberron is familiar
They'd roll Dragonlance if that was the angle, especially because they have a Dragonlance film in development.

i dont think wizards own the rights to spelljammer.

3e and 4e had Spelljammer references in them. I don't think they would reference something they don't own. Who would have the rights?

they are making a Dragonlance film?

the best setting is the one that everybody makes together as they play.

Nentir Vale and Mystara you can literally just use the stock character options and monsters and one of the old setting books for reference. You don't need a 5e-specific product. Dark Sun or Eberron would be nice though. If they do a good Dark Sun book I might actually be inspired to run 5e again.

not sure i remember some threads on Veeky Forums way back talking about why they don't revive it ( but its the internet let alone Veeky Forums so who knows in the info was true) somthing about someone else has rights to some aspect of it and retooling it would cost money that they are not 100% sure to make back.

Do you guys think the recent influx of normies would help or hurt the chances of them doing Spelljammer and Dark Sun? Because every night i pray for a Dark Sun setting so i dont have to home brew it like i did my Spelljamer one.

Yeah, but it's pretty early in development. The script (or at least the initial script they're toying with about now) was written by Joe Mangeniello and an old friend of his from Carnegie Mellon, and is an adaptation of the first Dragonlance novel.

Personally I don't think they'll be doing Dragonlance this far out from the buzz run-up for the movie, to be honest. D&D's been pretty big on (and good at) timing releases for impact this time around, it'd be odd to blow they're load on that potential hype train.

The fact they did Dark Sun for 4e implies they think it has 'normie appeal', and I think the chances of them doing at least one of the more well-known 'alternative' settings is relatively likely as they'd want to appeal to players who might not be that into the generic fantasy of every other product they've released so far, or those who might have grown tired of it. I'd say Dark Sun (which got a 4e release) and Eberron (which had tie-in video games and everything not too long ago) are more likely than Spelljammer or Planescape, but who knows.

Though maybe that's giving them too much credit and they'll just double down on Forgotten Realms, or some other generic setting that's barely distinguishable from it.

...

curse of strahd is the ravenloft setting book if you ignore the plot

If they do Dark Sun I hope they keep the 4e lore, that was a good update of the original boxed set, a lot better than the halfling biomancers explained in the books and revised setting.

Only for Barovia. There's more to the setting than that.

Kalamar is 3rd party property.
Anyway, I think Birthright or Ravenloft is most likely of the ones you mentioned. Ravenloft is known, especially since stradh and birthright atleast had ad space in the 2nd edition books.

SCAG only covers the most boring part of Faerun though, Unapproachable East and Shining South are far more interesting. Though of course that's really an argument against an FR book, because again the masses crave familiarity rather than quality.

I don't think anyone's played a Dragonlance campaign this century. Eberron at least is something the people playing 5e have heard of.

This is why I get sick and tired of them releasing a new take on the original Castle Ravenloft adventure in every edition; there's a setting beyond that born in 2e!

...Okay, Ravenloft has a shit-ton of problems inherent to it, but still, we don't have any other official dark/gothic fantasy setting in D&D so far.

Spelljammer won't be revived because very few people really want to play a game there. People like it because it's weird and gonzo but it's way too silly for modern gamers to actually play in.

Birthright
Ghostwalk
Some kind of new full-on Feywild setting

I doubt you actually PLAYED Spelljammer.

Essentially, it fails for the same reason any sailing-based setting does: The ship-to-ship combat rules are fucking dull, complicated, and often completely leave out a member of your party because they have to fucking pilot it.

Don't be fooled by the theme, or how good it sounds on paper. It's not fun, and without a serious overhaul of the ship rules, it will never be.

Interesting or not, they're still part of the Realms. We have more Realms shit than we need already in 5e.

4e dark sun was not bad at all. some of the most fun i had with 4e

How's Curse of Straud? is it like a campaign mixed with a setting book by chance?

There are not "a lot of" dnd settings that can come back to 5e

>Dragonlance
copyright hell
>Council of Wryms, Birthright, Mystara, Ghostwalk, Spelljammer
Too niche/unpopular for their sake, they are not going to take the risk
>Greyhawk-Points of Light-Eberron
5th ed FR already fills the "default setting" gap now

The remaninig options
>Ravenloft-Darksun
both have official materilas in 4th-5th editions and can be official setting again
>Planescape
can be linked with other settings, therefore might be revitalized, esspecially the "forgotten realms spesific" planes that were invented in 3rd ed FR were replaced with standard 2nd ed planes again in 5th edition

>Ghostwalk

Ghostwalk was interesting and fun, I really want to see them touch on that setting again. Same with Nentir Vale.

Nope, it's basically the classic Castle Ravenloft adventure with a lot more stuff to do in the villages surrounding the castle. At best, you can compare it to a miniature Barovia gazetteer; there's no information whatsoever on the greater Demiplane of Dread.

>the most boring part of Faerun
That's the part of the setting that the book and BG fans know and love. Presenting content for those people, with sidebars and indices for placing adventures and game elements in other settings, has been a winning formula for them so far.

ITT:
>mystara
>faerun
>dragonlance
>greyhawk

Literally what do you want from a setting book that you cant do already? These settings are all so generic that you can play them with 5e's character options and monsters with minimal homebrew, if any at all. What would a new setting book even contain that you cant get from just reading the old book and swapping out character and monster statlines? 5e is already designed to be fully compatible with this kind of setting. I can kind of empathise with people who wish 5e had chosen a less awful generic fantasy setting as its base than Forgotten Realms, but it's not exactly difficult to use the rules exactly as written to play a game set in Dragonlance or whatever.

FR is not designed for grognard neckbeards who would fall in love with an eastern sourcebook delving deep into Imaskari
relations with Thayan Zulkirs.

5th edition FR was designed for new players (people who never played d&d before) first and foremost. Sword Coast was a perfect place for that stuff. Mind you that is not even most of sword coast, I would say its from Icewind dale to Nashkel, not even Amn is included.
Western Heartlands was also considered to be a "beginner friendy" setting in 2nd-3rd eds but I think dalelands were too much for newbies.

Mystara, at least, has the Savage Coast, which is home to many races we don't have in D&D already and at least has a unique swashbuckling motif; lupins, aranea, diaboli, rakasta, and so forth.

Dragonlance is... okay, I don't like Dragonlance much at all. I'm not even sure draconians are worthwhile when we already have a dragonfolk race in the Dragonborn. All it really has to offer are draconians, themes of war, and really fucked up morality.

>So, apparently, WoTC has announced they intend to do two new setting books in 2018.
Holy shit, nice! But what might your sources be?

My guess on the order things are gonna go:
>Planar campaign book
Xanathar codified the Horizon Walker as official, and Tomb of Annihilation had Modrons and a gate key to Sigil. Planescape has an easy transition from a more standard fantasy setting to Sigil in the form of portals, just like Ravenloft has the mists.
>Another Forgotten Realms campaign book
They're probably going to have it somewhere exotic like Thay or Calimport. Wizards seems to be using campaigns as a way to detail the more exotic parts of the setting without putting together something as costly as an entire sourcebook
>Eberron sourcebook
Gives them time to polish the Artificer and Mystic. The codename of "Broadway" points me to Sharn, which is pretty heavily based on New York City, but that may be a stretch
>Greyhawk campaign book based on Slave Lords
They probably don't consider Greyhawk different enough from FR to justify a whole sourcebook. Slave Lords because it's the only part of TAGDQ they haven't expanded into a campaign book yet

Dark Sun and Planescape, for sure. Eberron would be nice, too.

Mystara is airships and cannons and guns and shit, not straight medieval fantasy.

Yep. Mystara was D&D's first Gonzo/Pulp Fantasy. Flying cities, magocracies, non-evil goblinoids, hollow world, all of that good stuff was first included here.

>Mystara was D&D's first Gonzo/Pulp Fantasy
I think OD&D's original/Outdoor Survival setting qualifies for that. It was basically the Herculoids out there.

>Dark Sun
>Majasarpa
>Nentir Vale
>Council of Wyrms

theres also
>Greyhawk
The rights to that setting would be too tied up with the Gygax estate
>Blackmoor
likewise but this time with the Arneson estate

I'm almost certain Wizards has the rights to Greyhawk, since it was the default setting in 3rd edition

This

I am so glad WotC has no rights to Spelljammer.

A group of people ported it over to 3.5 rulesets.

Nonsense.

Irrelevant. I'm talking about official books mentioning Spelljammer content. I don't see them doing that without owning the rights.

I really think a Planescape adventure would be the next big module to come out.
Perkins has been teasing us with glimpses of the denizens of Sigil and Sigil itself, and a mercykiller antagonist. Now he has modron march art on his Twitter.

If I'm honest, if I were forced to adhere to r5e's apparent rules for sourcebooks, this is what I wish WoTC would release:

Horizon Seeker's Guide: This would basically bring back Planescape and Spelljammer by putting the relevant details into one sourcebook. This would be a sourcebook for DMs who want to run "cosmic" campaigns, either metaphysical (planewalker) or literal (spelljammer). Add in rules for shaping your own cosmology and universe, notable locations from the Planes, and races from both setting - Gith, Bariaur, Rogue Modrons, Giff, Scro - and you've got a real hit package.

Well of Worlds: A complete guidebook to all of the big campaign settings of TSR. Throw in a basic summary, essential 5e mechanics (Inheritance rules for Birthright, Defiling rules/Defiler tradition for Dark Sun, etc) and the "greatest hits" races, and you'd have everything you need to officially update your setting to 5e.

Realm Shaper's Guide: A DM's sourcebook aimed at doing alternative forms of fantasy setting. Want to do an Oriental Adventures setting? A Weird Western? Sword & Sandals? Everything you need for the more unconventional D&D game.

Crown-Crushing Champions: Epic level characters are a D&D tradition. Basic had the Immortals rules, Advanced had... not sure, 3e had the Epic Level Handbook, 4e baked epic tier right into the core rules. It's time 5e got on the bandwagon.

Nentir Vale Gazetteer: A complete sourcebook for all lore relating to the "Nentir Vale/Points of Light" setting of 4e. Why is this its own thing? 1: It was actually supposed to come out for 4e, and was nearly ready to hit the printers, but they canceled it. 2: To circumvent all the grognards who'd refuse to buy Well of Worlds if it had Nentir Vale in it.

If they make a Dark Sun box set, I'd buy it.

I NEED Eberron. I will run a sweet ass campaign the moment the shit is legit.

What's currently stopping you from running campaigns in Eberron using the UAs?

5e doesn't run Eberron very well. It was made for 3rd edition and the low-magic flavor/rules of 5e don't work well.

5e doesn't really need an epic level book, it needs one for high level play.

Everything starts to drop off above level 10.

Just increase the prevalence of magic items and increase the magic item attainment limit. The good thing about 5e is that it's modular.

>Everything starts to drop off above level 10.

Explain

A competently made Artificer.

Playtest the UA artifice and give Wizards your feedback then. Actually help them out.

Goddamn autocorrect; artificer*.

Already did, both the 'I'm a wizard subclass' and the 'I'm my own class' versions.

Now we play the waiting game. Maybe there'll be more iterations.

it'll never happen but I'd love for them to bring back the Sundered Empire/God War setting from the WOTC version of Chainmail

Not him, but fewer monsters, CR gets wonkier, the PCs can do more but there's little to do against with them using the resources DMs have now. Higher levels, without good planning, become "the wizard/cleric/druid" solves it with a few spells.

Mercer, much as I dislike his players, had a really solid arc where the players pissed off a Rakshasha and had to go kill it in the Hells, after it disguised itself as a friend and raided their castle. That's how you do highlevel D&D, but it's mostly "go here and kill big thing"

Yeah, that'd be awesome. I'd love to try and pull together all of the canon lore for Sundered Empire and update it to 5e, but I'd need other anons on Veeky Forums to lend a hand with pulling that off.

Yeah, that's one of the problems of deliberately going back to 2e/3e style divides between martials and casters.

>Slave Lords because it's the only part of TAGDQ they haven't expanded into a campaign book yet
You know they'll just set it in FR like all the other bits.

>Yeah, that'd be awesome. I'd love to try and pull together all of the canon lore for Sundered Empire and update it to 5e, but I'd need other anons on Veeky Forums to lend a hand with pulling that off.
from what I remember there isn't all that much for it outside of what I posted, the other books for WOTC Chainmail have little to no fluff in them(at least from my recollection), and they only did like a couple articles for the setting in Dragon Magazine as well(can't remember which issues though), so what I posted is like 99% of it, well not counting the fact that technically the Sundered Empire is part of Greyhawk, just on a portion of it previously unexplored

Is there such a large discrepancy between the martials and casters at the higher levels?

Not in terms of combat power if the martials have magic weapons, but think of it this way: can a martial make earthquakes, shift the party from one plane to another, make clones of himself to become immortal? 'Course not.

They get BTFO in utility, even though barbarians and fighters are the gods of sustained damage in 5e. Honestly it's not bad, but there will be plenty of moments where spellcasters have the upper hand in terms of moving the plot along.

The Sundered Empire page on 14chan lists all of the Dragon magazine articles and what they contain.

High level casters get access to spells like Raise Dead, Teleport, Prismatic Spray, True Polymlolrph, Power Word Stun/Heal/Kill, Earthquake, Astral Projection, Gate and Wish.

High level martials get better at smacking stuff with their weapon.

I want Spelljammer mostly, it's not like they haven't been building up to it. Neogi? The squidship in Storm King's Thunnder?

I like the idea of Spelljammer, but... what are we actually supposed to do with it without any strange new worlds to visit? Spelljammer's primary hook was that it actively encouraged travel between the big settings of the time - Faerun, Krynn and Oerth - in contrast to Planescape. If it's got to stand on its own, what does it have?

>D&D Settings you want back for 5e

All of them. One of the upsides of D&D is that you have a million official settings to choose from, and you can even pick all of them at once by picking Planescape. Just fucking do them all.

Birthright

Because martials purely scale in 'You get better at your thing' (Your thing generally being 'Hitting things with things') while spellcasters constantly get new tiers of abilities (Some of which are upgrades to things you could do before but most are brand new things you can do). Martials scale mostly with depth, spellcasters scale with depth AND width.

4E was an entirely different team, with entirely different market assumptions. 4E tanked, they got canned, and 5E is a new team. So any inferred practices from 4E's time really aren't applicable to releases in this edition.

>What would a new setting book even contain that you cant get from just reading the old book

True, but you're missing the point. There aren't 100,000 copies of Greyhawk:From The Ashes available on ebay, or Amazon, or anywhere.

New books are for new players who can't get the old books. WOTC isn't marketing to grognards who already own all the Greyhawk/Dragonlance/Whatever books from 20 years ago.

Not to mention most people don't want to/don't have the time to convert old rules to new rules. They prefer to pay for a book and run with it, rather than spending hours pouring over and understanding old systems like AD&D to try and carefully balance it with 5E so that things don't break.

This is a good analysis. Seems likely.

"Marathon" I think is a reference to that old video game, Marathon 2: Durandal by bungie, which involved a lot of multi-planetary and time travel. So Planescape?

Planescape is my #1 choice, although I'm afraid they'll fuck it up like they did in 4E.

Greyhawk would be nice, for other people, since I already own almost everything related to it.

High-level casters are reality-warping gods, high-level martials are pretty good at hitting things with swords.

This is why Wizards are putting up pdfs for all that old shit.

Honestly, I think they should just make quick, under 50 page pdfs for those settings. I doubt hiring a reliable freelancer to do that would be particularly hard. Hell, in the case of Dragonlance, they already worked with the Hickmans on Curse of Strahd.

I'd go a step further and say that they should do a setting omnibus at some point (especially if they do Planescape next). 30-40 pages per setting, and have more setting highlight stuff on the official website. They already have free maps and short stories through Dragon+, which will lend itself to establishing new worlds. Albeit with slow coverage as it's monthly.

Maybe even have a free single-serving adventure for each setting through DM's Guild.

That would be the dream my friend. But l got remasters of the .hack games this year for ps4 (and maybe even more new games latter on) after praying for a decade they'd do something with the IP so I think my luck is out for the remainder of this year.

Maybe next year.

Elven bioships, Dwarven asteroid ships, the Unhuman Wars, Illithiids, Neogi, Beholders. Lizardmen. Weapon obsessed hippo people. Strange planetary shapes and systems.

They should double down on it being D&D in fantasy space. Not the pseudo-scifi of Starfinder. Go more Sword and Planet.

I would like a book detailing literally any part of the Forgotten Realms that isn't the Sword Coast, since those are the most interesting parts of the setting.

But hey, while I'm asking for unrealistic things, let's hope for Mystara, OG Greyhawk, and Dark Sun.

Did they ever give the world that Nentir Vale appeared in a proper name? I know Points of Light is one of the names mentioned. A entire map was released in one of the board games WoTC released.

Nope. They might have done if they'd gotten to release their planned Gazetteer series - the first was for the Nentir Vale region, and more were planned for the lands beyond the Nentir Vale. Alas, Essentials and then 5e killed that project in the cradle; the first Gazetteer was just bout ready to hit the printers, too!