Quote from: Pierce InveraritySpellplague? Awesome. Dear WOTC: Take a leaf from GDW, don't throw a Virus into your setting.

Yup, good point.  Most Trav fans are still livid over that one.  There are other good examples too, some of them closer to home: most Greyhawk fans loved the idea of the Greyhawk Wars, most of them hated the fact that it changed Greyhawk into the "From the Ashes" setting.

Ditto with Mystara and the Wrath of the Immortals.

Now me personally, I liked Mystara both before and after WoTI; and I actually liked the Greyhawk of From the Ashes about a million times better than the old original idiotic greyhawk (in From the Ashes at least the setting had a fucking point! Great written boxed set too).  But then, I'm not a drooling fanboy.

RPGPundit

Wouldn´t the point be to wretch the FR from the clutches of canonistas and Drizzt-arians?

Quote from: RPGPunditYup, good point.  Most Trav fans are still livid over that one.  There are other good examples too, some of them closer to home: most Greyhawk fans loved the idea of the Greyhawk Wars, most of them hated the fact that it changed Greyhawk into the "From the Ashes" setting.

The Greyhawk Wars, as an idea, were something which you could argue was building in the setting from the get-go. I have my nice Gygax-authored Greyhawk set from the AD&D days (the big colourful box with the two books and the maps) and it's very clear that the setting is a huge powderkeg.

My problem with Wrath of the Immortals was that the post-WotI setting made the Hollow World very important, by tossing Alphatia down there but letting them retain their memories - so as the Gazetteers progressed, contact between the Known World and the Hollow World kept increasing by leaps and bounds. Not very good if you thought the Hollow World was a dumb idea in the first place. In my Mystara games it's a huge myth - a lie propagated by evil empires to cover up historical incidents of genocide. ("We didn't destroy that nation - the Gods spirited them away to live happily in the Hollow World forever! So stop looking for mass graves if you know what's good for you.")

Quote from: SettembriniWouldn´t the point be to wretch the FR from the clutches of canonistas and Drizzt-arians?

But canonistas buy hardbounds and Drizzt-arians buy novels!

Quote from: jrientsBut canonistas buy hardbounds and Drizzt-arians buy novels!

Which means we're probably looking at the worst of two worlds: a Realms with a thin Wilderlands-y veneer. To sex it up a bit and to introduce a couple of new Mary Sues.

Dear WOTC: It's not Wilderlands if it has ELmionster in it!!11!

PS: Pundy: no, not IMHO. I think the original Greyhawk box/gazetteer was just fine. No metaplot, just the potential for one if the GM is so inclined. I never even bothered to read Greyhawk Wars. Is that where they kill off Tenser? Ew.

This seems to describe the FR from the original boxed set and the Dragon articles(and I admit I haven't followed it much since  then).  Basically it's (the FR) a magical Canada which implies some areas of concentrated population but mostly just howling wilderness punctuated with a variety of odd settlements.  Shoehorning decades of marketing gimmicks into it seems to have hidden this.

Well, the population levels were significantly lower in the 3e book compared to the previous edition, so i guess they're continuing the trend.

Quote from: ligedogThis seems to describe the FR from the original boxed set and the Dragon articles(and I admit I haven't followed it much since  then).  Basically it's (the FR) a magical Canada which implies some areas of concentrated population but mostly just howling wilderness punctuated with a variety of odd settlements.  Shoehorning decades of marketing gimmicks into it seems to have hidden this.

That's the impression I got.  The original FR and Wilderlands are more common than not and both are just expressions of an extremely common theme in fantasy fiction.

Heck, it's really an extension of our own, real world, European Dark Ages.  Post-Rome Europe was very much a vast, scary wilderness with scattered bits of civilization.  And even in the more densely populated areas things were far more compact and concerns were very regional.  Most people walked everywhere.  The wealthy had horses, but peasants?  PUH-LEASE; besides they were too busy eking a living from their meager plots of land to travel much.  So even things over the next hill were viewed with suspicion.

What they're stating as the implied setting for 4e is only associable to the Wilderlands in that the Wilderlands shares the same, very common, roots.

Quote from: architect.zeroWhat they're stating as the implied setting for 4e is only associable to the Wilderlands in that the Wilderlands shares the same, very common, roots.

I agreed in terms of the setting's background. However I disagree in game terms.
What do I mean by "in game terms"?

Any RPG setting needs to support the DM in actual play. I contend that how the Wilderlands is presented allows a DM to run a setting more like "Points of Light" than the original Forgotten Realms or any other setting out there.

The reason is the how the Wilderlands is presented as a series of hex maps, with hundreds of locations keyed to each hex. With that type of material it is very easy for a DM to run a game where the players are doing what is described in "Points of Light". Wandering from place to place, encountering adventuring, etc.

This is opposed to how Greyhawk, the original Forgotten Realms and dozens of other settings where you get a gazetteer, an encyclopedia of sorts. A encyclopedia is nice, but you need to work as a DM to take that and make it useful for your game. It also does nothing to help you keep your setting consistent. (i.e. subsequent visit to locations build on what done there previously)

Why are these a problem? Because as people with limited amounts of time we take shortcuts in how we present a setting. And those shortcuts are antithetical to the style of play outlined in "Points of Light." We don't take detailed notes, we give glib answers to questions about a location, or we make stuff on the fly is that is repetitive and not very fun.

Having a setting presented as a series of locations by hex. Helps overcome these problems and allow the DM to be comfortable to let his players roam and have adventures conan-style or points of light style. This type of setting is found not in the Wilderlands but also with Traveller as well. AD&D has a more linear version of it in the D1,2,3 modules with the map of the underdark.

Now this is not a panacea by any means. It can be presented badly, the background is not really what you want to run. Harn is detailed a lot like the Wilderlands but you are not going to run a "Points of Light" game in there.

I think that if the new Forgotten Realms "Points of lights." setting is presented like every other setting then it will fall flat on its face like GDW's introduction of the Virus and other examples. I think if conveys its feel through how the referee uses it (like Wllderlands/Traveller hex setup, or Harn style) then it will be received more positively.

So the point implied in your first post is, essentially, "they're cribbing from Wilderlands of High Fantasy."

And now your point is, "Wilderlands of High Fantasy is better than this 'points of light' implied setting and/or new FR."

Well, I'll definitely argue against point one.  They're not copying Wilderlands in the slightest.  As I stated earlier, Wilderlands is an expression of the theme but so is FR as originally written.  So are many other settings in gaming and in fiction because the theme is derived from historical dark ages Europe, which was indeed this "points of light" thing.  Wilderlands is not unique in theme and I'm in no way surprised that there are clear parallels between it and the implied setting of 4e.  Heck, as far as I'm concerned, the implied setting in 4e is closer to the implied setting in 1e than anything.

Regardless... I cannot argue for or against the quality of the Wilderlands setting and its ability to reflect this style of gaming.  It might indeed be the best example of this type of game setting ever created.  That's great.

WoTC isn't filching from it for 4e's implied setting.  To imply it is ludicrous.

Quote from: RPGPunditDitto with Mystara and the Wrath of the Immortals.

Now me personally, I liked Mystara both before and after WoTI;

Me too, but in fairness to WotI it was at least a campaign change that the PCs in your campaign could shape. Some events in it you couldn't much change, but some you could.

What I think upset more Mystara fans was the conversion of the settign to second ed, and worse the use of it as a 'simplified' campaign setting.

Theres a lot to be said for leaving a campaign setting dead and not publishing any more.

You know what the whole "Points of Light" thing also sounds like? If you file off the fantasy influences, it reminds me a lot of classic (1st/2nd edition) Gamma World. That game also had a heavy emphasis on (glowing, radioactive) wilderness with the occasional settlement dotted about.

Its worth remembering that Blackmoor, the other "original D&D setting" besides Greyhawk, had a lot in common with the Wilderlands already, and was certainly this kind of setting.  So D&D can certainly claim to be "going back to roots" with this implied setting without any need to steal from the Wilderlands, which as has been correctly pointed out is only one (albeit really stellar) example of a rather common old-school theme.

RPGPundit

Glad to see D&D getting back to its roots (and to what made it interesting to folks like me in the first place). It's true the original FR box characterized it as a pretty barren, untamed place. That was pretty much in keeping with the sensibilities of the time--though I seem to remember its initially being marketed as a more barren and savage alternative to Greyhawk, e.g. Yeah, go figure.

It was the glut of novel-canon and setting-bloat in the 90s that ended up detailing every square millimeter of that world--above and below ground--so that the mystery was swept away in an attempt to cram the setting (and an endless stream of boxed sets) with as many countries and NPCs as physically possible. Meanwhile, metaplot concerns saw city-states coalescing into nation-states, etc., as the timeline moved forward, the good guys got gooder and the bad guys got neutered.

Can it be saved? Do we even care? Not sure, but this trend in D&D is encouraging. Can't say for sure that it'll win me back, but I do like what I'm seeing.

Don't get me wrong, I can't stand Drizzt...

but really, wasn't he just the heir to Gord as far as super-powerful world-breaking characters go?

-O