Quote from: Scrivener of Doom;1118942Quick questions for the Ravnica fans: Does the book come with a map of the world or city? If not, and I ask because my quick glimpse through did not reveal one, how do you get a feel for the layout of the place?

There is an expansion with maps and descriptions of the city's ten districts.

Actually Ravinca could be an interesting place to go in a Planescape setting - a Plane with its own sub-planes. Maybe some PC/NPC come from there. I don't see, however, how it alone can support a meaningful campaign.

Quote from: Reckall;1119277There is an expansion with maps and descriptions of the city's ten districts.

Actually Ravinca could be an interesting place to go in a Planescape setting - a Plane with its own sub-planes. Maybe some PC/NPC come from there. I don't see, however, how it alone can support a meaningful campaign.

Thanks - I will check that out.

To swing this thread back around to Forgotten Realms, Why choose FR?:

Every world needs that killer combo City Dungeon and the Realms has a great one.  The combination of Water Deep and Under Mountain together with a side serving of Skull Port is the best I have seen produced for DnD (honourable mention to Ptolus Monte Cook's City By The Spire).  You can really run any sort of campaign in Water Deep or just use it as a base to adventure from or even just rip off all of those quirky NPCs to use in your own mega city.

What about the bad guys?  Well the Realms has that covered as well.  Why have a Dungeon under your city when you can just build your city in a dungeon.  Menzoberanzan is a shining jewel in the Underdark filled with thousands of homicidal Dark Elves, the homeland of everyones favourite Drizzt and a fantastic map to cover your wall with.  Its the perfect place to run that Evil campaign that you always wanted or to threaten those high level PCs that run roughshod over everything else.  Dont settle for second rans like Zhentrim Keep or Luskan.

FR is also home to some of the most "fridge horror" elements, cosmic Mary Sues and the most boring and uninspired design choices you could imagine.

If the Forgotten Realms setting were a painting, it would be an earth-toned portrait of Rey "Skywalker" painted over an older portrait of some sort of necrophiliac tentacle rape scene.

Quote from: Chris24601;1119447FR is also home to some of the most "fridge horror" elements, cosmic Mary Sues and the most boring and uninspired design choices you could imagine.

If the Forgotten Realms setting were a painting, it would be an earth-toned portrait of Rey "Skywalker" painted over an older portrait of some sort of necrophiliac tentacle rape scene.

...what?

The thing I hate most about FR -- besides the fact it's a bloated, overly recotconned mess with world ending disasters happening every year or two -- is how it's perceived by normies as being a generic medieval fantasy setting when it certainly isn't one.

The Realms is a Generic medieval fantasy setting but it is not medieval Europe with magic.  Maybe that is where the confusion lies.

Quote from: TJS;1116989If by 'better' you mean more suitable for default D&D then sure.

Dark Sun really does need it's own system.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1117002And the point of Dark Sun isn't Dessert Survival 24/7--that's just a feature of the world.

Dark Sun and Dragonlance both do something really fun in the process of outlining a campaign world. Dragonlance was a pioneering product. It was the first Adventure Path, and it introduced a new campaign world at the same time that it created a campaign through a series of modules. That's a lot to do at once, but it did a pretty great job of it, from my then-teenage-and-new-to-RPGs perspective. It really wasn't a campaign setting as we know them now, i.e., an encyclopedia and almanac of an imagined setting; instead it revealed just enough of this new setting to let the DM run the campaign. And not just any setting, but one that messed around with a whole Hell of a lot of standard D&D, effectively giving the game a makeover and making D&D fresh to even veteran players. No orcs here - we've got draconians. In fact, we've got dragons as celestials, near the center of a draconic cosmology. We've got steel pieces instead of gold, a map that is quite the departure from your typical FRPG map (to this day, I might add), a medieval post-apocalyptic setting (still fairly innovative), a tweaked magic system driven by the world's three moons, dragonarmies, a well-developed cosmology/religion, the most thematic series of dungeons you're ever gonna see, awesome isometric maps, kewl artifacts like the crystal staff, the discs of Mormon, amulets of faith, etc. Oh, and a mission of re-discovering the Ancient True Faith (Mormonism! ) that still seems pretty bold to me, by D&D standards, all these years later.

And absolutely gorgeous art throughout, to boot.

That's a lot to pack into an AP. Okay, so, the plot was rail-roady. And reading the novels killed all the fun. And decoupling the pregens from their archetypal roles wasn't explained until like the fourth iteration.

It was D&D, but D&D with a well-executed makeover. I'm still impressed with it, all these years later. I'd love to see what Dragonlance did as the model for Adventure Paths; give us a vaguely-sketched-in world and a made-over D&D, along with the campaign.

(All of this is obviously in reference to the original, War of the Lance product line. I pretty much hated everything else they ever published for Dragonlance, novels included)

Dark Sun was similar, in that it did a lot of tinkering with standard D&D rules and tropes.

I'd also love to see WotC give Dragonlance a 5e makeover, if I could trust them to just re-use the original art and stay true to the original aesthetics, only commissioning new art if it can work alongside the old seamlessly. Because the WotL could be a truly great AP, if released as a hardcover with all the writing and design wrinkles ironed out.

Quote from: Shasarak;1120192The Realms is a Generic medieval fantasy setting but it is not medieval Europe with magic.  Maybe that is where the confusion lies.

To a large extent, yes, but I'd argue it's only medieval insofar as most of the technology is a mishmash of medieval and early modern. Very little else really has medieval verisimilitude.

Quote from: areallifetrex;1120331To a large extent, yes, but I'd argue it's only medieval insofar as most of the technology is a mishmash of medieval and early modern. Very little else really has medieval verisimilitude.

I would suggest that problem lies with the items available on the DnD equipment list.

all that i retain from my once massive FR collection are the two 2e undermountain box sets, the maps from ruins of zhentil keep box set, and the maps from the netheril boxed set.

I actually quite like the Realms in their original version, particularly including some of what Greenwood said about how they were meant to be before they were somewhat sanitized by Williams-era TSR.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1120735I actually quite like the Realms in their original version, particularly including some of what Greenwood said about how they were meant to be before they were somewhat sanitized by Williams-era TSR.

yeah i liked the dead 3, great villains with heavy player recognition respect, and i really liked the first incarnation of cyric, they should've left well enough alone. if your god of death/dead would seem out of place hanging out in dracula's castle i want no part of it. kelemvor was the natty light of death gods. fuck him right to death with a pineapple.

Essentially, everything that was done with the realms subsequent to its original release tended toward making it worse.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1120888Essentially, everything that was done with the realms subsequent to its original release tended toward making it worse.

As much as I like to hate on FR, I have to admit that this is the main reason I hate FR. It has been arbitrarily revised and superficially redefined in haphazard ways so many times that it's lost all semblance of self-identity, consistency or even consequentiality. Every edition there's some new world changing event that kinda, sorta changes the Realms, but not really, cuz it's only an excuse to introduce some new game convention (like class changes, or new races that arbitrarily HAVE to exist in every D&D world), which somehow necessitates retconning the world's entire backstory and killing half the gods, while most of the cities and geographic regions stay mostly the same (safe minor changes). And every time FR loses a bit of its soul and becomes this misshapen corporatized perversion of what it used to be.