[5E] Towards a new, better campaign setting.

[Lago PARANOIA]

One of my many disappointments with 4E was how they handled their campaign setting. That is, they didn't have one. Now while it would be excuseable if they announced one of their pre-existing campaign settings to be the official 4E setting, they didn't do that at ALL. This is not only lazy, but it hurts the IP. And it not only hurts the IP, but it moves less books because--stay with me because I know it's a hard concept--people buy more books related to your setting IF THEY'RE INTERESTED IN THE SETTING.

That said, the long absence of D&D having anything like a default campaign setting gives us an opportunity to create one from scratch. Now such an endeavor is way too hard for me to do in a reasonable amount of time what with college kicking my ass, I could at least spend a couple of hours coming up with a list of things I think a campaign setting should have. So bear with me people.


The new campaign setting should have an easy-to-grok history and geography.
People should be able to have an idea of where everything is and the biggest cities/points of attraction in then after 20 minutes of light study. To this end, I strongly recommend having elemental-themed countries. For example, you have Nys, the City of Snow; Swamp Fortress Yila; Mountainhome, etc.

You know that thing I just did with Nys and Yila? Yeah. You want to avoid that shit. If you drop more than 10-15 unique names for your setting, you're going to lose the non-fanboys. And as much as I know how people hate this concept, the campaign setting should seriously use more of the adjective-noun or BLANK, insert descriptive title here naming convention. No one forgets the name of the Fireflow or its War King Flarehammer after hearing about it, but if it was called something like Afanaely how many people would still remember it?


The new campaign setting should have an easy-to-grok pantheon of gods.
I recommend doing the God of War approach and using familiar names and a vaguely familiar idiom of previously existing gods. but bastardizing them to suit your purposes. I recommend having something like this, with also a few holdovers like Pelor and Lloth. Yes, there are more evil deities than good deities. Along with no neutral deities. That is intentional.

• Good Deities:
• Hades (he's actually the least dickish out of all of the Olympian gods; if you scrub away the Persephone thing he actually comes off as a pretty decent guy. So we do.)
• Inari (shapechanging god of fortune, knowledge, and technology)
• Anansi (trickster god of agriculture and the moon)
• Ameratsu (goddess of the sun, sister of Susanoo)
• Saraswati (goddess of wisdom and the arts)

• Evil Deities:
• Gaia (grudge against humanoids and technology, wants to destroy civilization and replace it with beasts and nature)
• Aphrodite (goddess of apathy, lust, vanity, hedonism, so-on)
• Ares (I don't even need to explain his inclusion)
• Dracula (undead monster mash guy like in Castlevania, he's the go-to guy for necromancy)
• Gruumsh (god of xenophobia, vengeance, and strife)
• Susanoo (violent trickster god of storms and sea, brother of Ameratsu)
• Thoth (god of magic, not evil but DEFINES 'stupid neutral')
• Tezcatlipoca (chief of the gods, god of night, rulership--read tyranny, and had a bunch of human sacrifices in his name. Also destroyed the world at least twice. Awesome. He's the head evil god, even though he's not supposed to be. Because it's really easy to paint him as a villain and he has a bunch of cool shit about him.)

Points of Light vs. Points of Darkness
Honestly, as much drubbing as Points of Lights have been getting, there's nothing fundamentally wrong about the concept. If you've played Skies of Arcadia, you know it can be extremely fucking cool to be the first people in decades to gain contact with another civilization and culture. It also creates the feeling of a menacing world with lots of things to see and do. The problem is that 4E gave this concept a bad name by implementing it really poorly. Instead of hyping up the adventure and tragedy of such a world, the PHB designers used it as an excuse as not to build a world. Most of it being unknown, you see. That... fucking SUCKS. I still say go with Points of Light because it's easier to stick on expansions like new races and new cities and new deities (vital for this type of game), but that doesn't mean that it should be an excuse to skimp on the effort required for the current game.


Alignment of the setting. Oh god.
The setting's base morality should not be black and white. Not that black and white is bad, it's just that it's really hard to do without coming off as patronizing or insulting. Also because it's been done to death. For fuck's sake, even Tolkein regretted doing such a thing. So the campaign setting should be black and grey (like WH40K), grey and grey (like Shadowrun), or grey and white (like TTGL). I recommend going with grey and white personally, so people can still feel good about playing white hats while also having some moral ambiguity in the setting.

As much as I hate to do it, we should bring back the 9-box alignment system. It's a sellout of the grossest calibur and I feel rather naughty suggesting that we go back to saying 'my character is Chaotic Good' with a straight face. That kind of thing gives grognards stiffies.


Fantasy has advanced from the shitty dung ages of LotR. Deal with it.
While D&D should still primarily be focused on swords and armor and horseback riding, a bit of steampunk wouldn't fucking kill you. People shouldn't get all wilty in the pants at seeing a gear attached to a crossbow. Here's a preliminary list of what I recommend:

• Warforged get integrated into the setting. Warforged are probably the only race that 3E came up with that people are actually excited over. And they help grease the LotR-fanboy wheels.
• Airships. People love flying and riding on things that fly, otherwise no one would've even picked up Pern or Dragonlance. People like airships even more than dragons though because you can store your shit on it and fly around with several people and put spinnerz on your airship.
• You have a steampunky city of some sort like Narshe or the like. In order to grease the grognard wheels, add something cool to it like fires burning in the middle of the street for no reason. Fuck, that was in FFV. Whatever, do something cool. You don't have to do this for every city, but there should be at least ONE.
• Have a fucking functioning train and rail line. People love trains, except for assholes. Make it all fantasy-like by making the locomotive a metal dragon's head and making it a double-decker train with wizards in funny monkey suits sitting on the top deck waiting for bandits to blast. But have a train.

The campaign setting should have organizations that are relevant to the PCs from the very start.
None of this shit like the Red Wizards of Thay where you only care about them aside from an indirect sense until level 8; certainly you can have some high-level only organizations, but they should be the exception rather than the rule. The Grey Guard should be hiring people who just got out of chargen. The Skulltaker Guild should be looking for new members or victims from the party after like their third adventure. Not all of them should be joinable, but they should be interacting with the campaign setting from the very start. You should have:

• A slaver's guild.
• An assassin/thief's guild.
• A science club. They do things like explore the world, make maps, and try to dissect ancient artifacts.
• Some Masonic/Skulls organization made of rich people. May be good all along, morally ambiguous, or outright evil.
• Guild of ex-paladins who tried to do the right thing but are jaded. They try to take in new warriors of faith and goodness and slowly open their eyes.
• Les Collaberators who are against the current government. Whether they are sympathetic or not is up to you.
• Some organization made up of bandits and deserters that harrass people.

The campaign setting should have several metaplots going for all major locations.
I recommend at least three, that way if the players aren't interested in one metaplot they can get interested in on another without derailing the campaign too much. For example, you have something like this:

• The Sahugin King Gygarus invaded Atlantis (which hasn't sunk into the sea yet) two years ago to expand his empire and improve his industry. The fighting was so brutal that even though the invaders were repelled the government of Atlantis collapsed due to the death of its leaders and a bankrupt treasury. Some, though certainly not all, of the indigineous sahugin betrayed their country and teamed up with Gygarus. This means that the non-Sahugin are pretty pissed. Gygarus would have mounted another attack, however...
• The god of storms Susanoo is super-pissed off at Atlantis, not for the city itself but at the sahugin living in there. When Gygarus initiated his coup the sahugin usurper murdered all of the descendents of his lover and also came very close towards wiping out Kua Toa and Sea Elves in the South Seas completely. He's been slowly turning the seas on the southern continent unsuitable for inhabitation and killing the ones that do escape to Atlantis with monsoons and shit. People have (rightly but unfairly) blamed a lot of the sahugin refugees for bringing misfortune to their city though they don't know WHY they are other than 'sahugin are bad luck'. If they knew the real reason they'd panick even more. Susanoo's also the cause of the rising sea level, which will completely flood the continent in 40 years unless he's stopped. Atlantis's second-biggest city is now partially underwater.
• Atlantis right now is like Somalia. There's seriously no government and the city/country is mostly carved up and operated by warlords. Most of the people who had the money to leave have while the getting was good; right now the piracy is so bad that it's simply not safe to leave the city in anything short of convoy. There are almost no services at all and other countries have to constantly send it food and aid or there would be mass starvation; fish and rice are Atlantis's greatest exports and they're STILL net importers. This would interest The Empire in moving in but things are so fucked up there right now that it would actually be less profitable to take over. Right now though the Assassin's and Slaver's Guilds are running rampant. What used to be the proud army of Atlantis is almost all gone except for a couple of divisions, the rest having fallen to banditry and petty mercenary work.
• The extreme turbulence caused by Susanoo wrecking peoples' shit with sea-stuff has not only almost completely destroyed the sahugin cities but has also unearthed ancient evil. Undead and monsters people haven't seen in centuries are popping up and are not only making Atlantis even more hellish but are also spreading to the shores of the other non-Atlantis countries.

There. That's four major plot hooks. Atlantis may or may not be fixable within the time scale, but people should definitely get the impression that the city is going to hell and that it might not get better anytime soon. Which leads us to the next thing...



The campaign setting should be 'living' in a major way.
This means that the campaign setting will be shaken up as the edition goes on. Someone will just not be able to pick up a Campaign Setting book five years and go 'oh, things are still the same?' unless they want to play it before things got shaken up.

No, the way it should happen is that at RPGA events they host a massive 'thing' where the organizers outline some metaplot such as 'Orcs have beseiged the city of Riva' and they run several games that involve this metaplot. They then take the average of all of these games and use them to formulate an outcome--for example, if most of the players assigned to the 'orc' tables won their sessions then the outcome of the siege was that the orcs won and Riva falls to their hands. The game from then on is like this shit really happened and if you're playing a 'canon' game you can go to Riva and notice how the orcs are forcing the humans to tear down the walls to the city.

[Sashi]

The main mistake 4E did with the "points of light" setting was in calling it a setting at all. 3E also had a "points of light" setting that was vaguely implied to be Greyhawk by the gods list and some of the spells, but never had a world map or anything and even included the Red Wizard in the DM. So when they published the dragon fanboy wank book they didn't have to say where on the map the secret dragon dong tower is. The literally just said "here is a bunch of dragon racial fanboy wanking that you can incorporate into your campaign setting as you wish" exactly like WotC tried to do with "points of light" but failed because they tried to call it a "campaign setting" instead of just "we are purposely not trying to link all this stuff".

Also your ideas sound eerily close to Eberron.

[Zinegata]

One of my many disappointments with 4E was how they handled their campaign setting. That is, they didn't have one.

It wasn't actually a terrible decision to not have an official campaign setting. The terrible decision was to not provide the tools to make a campaign setting - instead just giving people a very general concept that belongs in a web-based one short article rather than the DMG.

Because seriously, lots of people don't care about official campaign settings and make their own.

Again, quoting the headings to save space but I read the whole thing.

The new campaign setting should have an easy-to-grok history and geography.

You may want to just provide a sample kingdom, or maybe a sample region. Have just 5 kingdoms/cities. Each should be quite different enough to provide DMs with ideas. Have one kingdom be a frozen land to the north, another an Egypt-like desert. Five is a good number because if you have more than that, people start forgetting.

The new campaign setting should have an easy-to-grok pantheon of gods.

That's actually a pretty good idea, and I'm a fan of using existing pantheons.

I would just suggest that you focus more on Greek, Norse, and Egyptian pantheons, as these are the best-known. Western people tend to know Thor and Odin more than Amaterasu. And Thor is seriously the patron God of heroic adventurers anyway.

One other important thing to note is that Good vs Evil pantheons work best when there are rival Gods. Ares vs Athena for instance.

Points of Light vs. Points of Darkness

See my preamble above.

Alignment of the setting. Oh god.

Or just get rid of alignment altogether, or define if using negative energy really turns you evil, or you're simply using the general negative feelings of the universe to raise skeletons. Like what the Tome of Necromancy did.

Fantasy has advanced from the shitty dung ages of LotR. Deal with it.

Isn't this what Eberron is for?

The campaign setting should have organizations that are relevant to the PCs from the very start.

That's honestly probably a bit too much to keep track of, but following the five kingdoms model you can make each kindgom level-appropriate for a certain level of adventurers.

The campaign setting should have several metaplots going for all major locations.

See above regarding too much to keep track of. If you want to expand it to this level, you need an actual campaign book now.

The campaign setting should be 'living' in a major way.

See above. And pick a writer who actually knows how to write a plot instead of just writing godawful Drow slashfics.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It wasn't actually a terrible decision to not have an official campaign setting. The terrible decision was to not provide the tools to make a campaign setting - instead just giving people a very general concept that belongs in a web-based one short article rather than the DMG.

Because seriously, lots of people don't care about official campaign settings and make their own.

While I'll agree with you that many, probably even most (like 60%) DMs would want to use their own campaign setting even if you had something kickass like A:TLA or FFX or Dark Sun, there is a contingent of players who like the feeling of being able to play in a shared setting where someone else is doing the work for them.

Here are my three reasons why I don't think that campaign settings are more popular than they already are.

1) WotC diddles its cocks for too long putting out campaign settings. Seriously, there's no reason why the FRCS shouldn't be out within a month of the core books. Aside from the fact that interest for your edition drops off continually unless they get a popularity shot (which you can't predict), people who are interested in playing are reluctant to switch over once they have a few months under their belts with their homebrew setting.

2) Lack of immediately usable plot hooks. I own both the Eberron and FR 3E and 4E campaign guides. I also own the 3E Dragonlance campaign guide. Along with some loser fanboy settings like Dawnforge and Relics and Rituals. And I can all tell you that they have a simple, basic problem:

The lack of more than a couple--if they even bother to have them--introductory adventures that you can just pick up and play. This is actually a pretty serious barrier to entry. The DM has to do just as much work easing players into a new setting as if they did it from scratch, which sucks balls because the DM and probably the players needs to do extra work to have a Forgotten Realms adventure. That sucks. The campaign setting books should have about 30-40 pages of miniature one-shots covering the 'lower levels' (because that's where most people play to get new CS).

3) The prose for campaign settings flat-out suck. Aside from there being blatantly objectionable things to them like in Dragonlance, the fact of the matter is that the Big Four (FR, Eberron, Greyhawk, DL) all bland LotR clones. There are some minor differences to it, with Eberron straying the furthest, but the basic shit like craftdwarves and orc hordes and elven archers are there and don't even have a twist on them like, say, Final Fantasy.

When you think about other popular games (oWoD, Shadowrun, Exalted) the fanbase seems to on some level like the campaign setting. But even for the 900 lb. gorilla of D&D settings, Forgotten Realms, draws little more than a 'meh' from most D&D players. Now I understand that D&D is bigger than the other settings and needs to be more universal (and those games have their mechanics integrated into the backstory much more heavily), but I think that you could get a large portion of the D&D fanbase interested in the game if you put some effort into the setting.

See above regarding too much to keep track of. If you want to expand it to this level, you need an actual campaign book now.

They don't have to release new campaign books, at least not the hardcover ones. All they have to do is just release pamphlets of compiled major changes. Hell, they don't even need to print anything, they can just have it up on their website or wiki.

And yes, it requires extra work for the authors. Bully for them. For one the playerbase seriously does most of the work cataloging all that wank (hell, even Exalted has a wiki) and two it's their fucking job to keep the playerbase engaged what's going on.

[Username17]

When people are exposed to a setting, they want to play in it. Or they want to play in a similar world and use stuff from it. Or whatever. If people have more exposure to it, they want to use more of it. It's pretty much that simple.

So if you bring out a set of novels for a setting that people read, they will want more of your setting. If you bring out a card game, people will want more of your setting. If you make a computer game or TV show, or anything else, people will want more of your setting.

WotC has a very popular card game called Magic: the Gathering. And there are a lot of people who want to play in the worlds so described. It doesn't make any sense to not load up one of the card game worlds and use it for an official setting. Really all you need is three things:

• Tie-in fiction (they are already making this)
• Tie-in card game (they are already making this)
• Tie-in high quality teaser art (they are already making this)

Fuck, their "setting" for 4e is the Nentir Vale. It's literally just a single valley with a couple of small towns and a river in it. That's the whole setting. What the fuck? Where are the giant floating islands? The seas of fire? The fucking awesome fantasy shit? Right now, the current Magic sets are set in Mirrodin. Here is their actual promotional art:

What the fuck, man? That is D&D art, it just happens to be better looking and take place in more epic landscapes than anything in 4th edition. They could just put that shit in the basic books instead of the crap they are actually using, and put little captions on it explaining where the fuck that is in the Mirrodin Campaign World, and come out with some Mirrodin Campaign Setting books. Hell, the Mirrodin Campaign setting books could have some preview shit for their next Mirrodin card set (because they aren't all out yet). And then some people would buy the book who didn't even play D&D, but happened to want to follow the story of the Mirrodin block. Because you know what? The Mirrodin Besieged set seems to have some pretty cool shit in it too:

-Username17

[Zinegata]

When you think about other popular games (oWoD, Shadowrun, Exalted) the fanbase seems to on some level like the campaign setting. But even for the 900 lb. gorilla of D&D settings, Forgotten Realms, draws little more than a 'meh' from most D&D players. Now I understand that D&D is bigger than the other settings and needs to be more universal (and those games have their mechanics integrated into the backstory much more heavily), but I think that you could get a large portion of the D&D fanbase interested in the game if you put some effort into the setting.

I don't disagree that D&D should have detailed settings. My point of disagreement is whether or not it should be in the DMG, instead of its own standalone book.

It's true that games like Shadowrun sell partly because people like the Cyberpunk with magic fluff. The problem is, if this fluff is integral to the setting, you turn off people who don't like adding magic to Cyberpunk.

In the case of D&D, if you made Eberron the default setting, you'd turn off people who don't like Steampunk.

Hence, I think the core books need to focus on the tools to make your own campaign settings. Like giving sample kingdoms. The problem with 4E is, like Frank mentioned, all they gave was a pretty shitty little town that had nothing interesting happening in it.

Frank's correct that a setting needs to have a lot of support. A typical Magic set for instance, used to have at least 3 novels, about half a dozen wallpapers and promotional art pieces, and a ton of artwork to flesh out a setting. You probably can't fit that in the DMG - it's probably best to have an entirely seperate book.

Edit: And yeah, Magic has really pretty art that is also quite internally consistent, because they have an actual art department managing the whole thing. Take, for instance...

http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/mtg ... ler_lg.jpg

That is seriously the artwork for a basic forest in Magic - in this case it's a forest for the world of Ravnica (think magical Coruscant)

[Starmaker]

One of my many disappointments with 4E was how they handled their campaign setting. That is, they didn't have one.

It wasn't actually a terrible decision to not have an official campaign setting.
(...)
Because seriously, lots of people don't care about official campaign settings and make their own.

No. This is important for word-of-mouth advertising. See, thousands of jokes have been told and retold about how annoying people who insist to tell you about their character are, but telling short funny stories is the essence of today's communication. And to keep stories short, there has to be common ground: a default campaign setting, evocative classes, (in)famous organizations, well-known gods.

In 2002, when D&D has just appeared on the shelves of local hobby stores, I met a random dude and we spent the whole day sharing stories. The existence of a default pantheon helped a *LOT*. Both of us knew nothing about Greyhawk itself.

Have just 5 kingdoms/cities.

Five to seven is a good number, plus a number of "special zones": the Moil, Free Trade Cities, the papal state/wizard school/knight order*, Sigil, borderlands. The total number of "locations" should be 10 to 12.
*an organization concerned with being awesome, accepting all classes, with ambiguous goals.

The new campaign setting should have an easy-to-grok pantheon of gods.

(list of gods)
Along with no neutral deities. That is intentional.

Nonononononono. Fuck truth and justice, fuck education and cultural sensitivity, you should work with things people already know. Now, I'm not a good judge of popularity, but seeing as you don't have Thor there, you aren't one either.

On alignment.
When I just started playing (A)D&D, I wrote "teh best alignment evar" next to Neutral Good. In two years, I decided Good was lame and played CN exclusively (still played it as Neutral Good but emphasized how I'm doing things out of "my own personal volition" because I'm so free-spirited and independent and "fuck you, I won't save your dung heap because you ask me nicely, but I will go and kick some orc butt because I'm just feeling like it, with the possible side effect you your dung heap being safe until the next orc horde"). Like it or not, D&D is about Good vs. Evil, and your primary audience are kids who have been spoonfed the good&fluffy ethic and they hate it.

However, playing a follower of an evil god will be seen as a license to be a cockbag. In the context of injecting some truth and justice, I see your point, but as long as making a new edition of the most popular TTRPG is concerned, we need neutral gods.

And Thor is seriously the patron God of heroic adventurers anyway.

One other important thing to note is that Good vs Evil pantheons work best when there are rival Gods. Ares vs Athena for instance.

Yes x2.The reason for the conflict should be clearly stated, too.

Points of Light vs. Points of Darkness

A number of civilized kingdoms with points of darkness and a frontier with points of light.

Fantasy has advanced from the shitty dung ages of LotR. Deal with it.

Isn't this what Eberron is for?

Moving away from the dung ages also implies the world is sturdy enough to not break apart when PCs are tinkering with it, so you don't actually have to reset the state of affairs to square zero because the last party of PCs set up an airship going to and from Mount Doom. Eberron didn't go far enough and then veered off in an entirely wrong direction with its level limit.

The campaign setting should have organizations that are relevant to the PCs from the very start.

Yesssss.

That's honestly probably a bit too much to keep track of, but following the five kingdoms model you can make each kindgom level-appropriate for a certain level of adventurers.

The campaign setting should have several metaplots going for all major locations.

See above regarding too much to keep track of. If you want to expand it to this level, you need an actual campaign book now.

The writers keep track of it because it's their damn job. Players (and MCs) pick what they want and run with it. Players need to have enough hooks to create a character with motivation and stuff without consulting the MC. Space isn't a concern: 4e found space for "player types" bullshit, 5e can find enough for adventure and campaign seeds.

[Zinegata]

The campaign setting should have organizations that are relevant to the PCs from the very start.

Yesssss.

That's honestly probably a bit too much to keep track of, but following the five kingdoms model you can make each kindgom level-appropriate for a certain level of adventurers.

The campaign setting should have several metaplots going for all major locations.

See above regarding too much to keep track of. If you want to expand it to this level, you need an actual campaign book now.

The writers keep track of it because it's their damn job. Players (and MCs) pick what they want and run with it. Players need to have enough hooks to create a character with motivation and stuff without consulting the MC. Space isn't a concern: 4e found space for "player types" bullshit, 5e can find enough for adventure and campaign seeds.

Let me clarify: When I said "That's a bit too much to track", I refer to players, not the writers. Because one of Lago's best points is that lots of players often don't end up giving a shit to the stuff in the campaign book, because the names are forgettable.

I'm just saying that in addition to the name problem, the quantity is also an issue. Having too many Kingdoms in play causes people to stop caring because there are too many to keep track of.

Have just five kingdoms that the players can read about, and they're much more likely to remember them without having to consult the books (No more "Uh... what was the Kingdom with the mummies again?").

[Lago PARANOIA]

Nonononononono. Fuck truth and justice, fuck education and cultural sensitivity, you should work with things people already know. Now, I'm not a good judge of popularity, but seeing as you don't have Thor there, you aren't one either.

... then you'd have nothing but the Greek pantheon with maybe Odin, Freya/r, and Thor thrown in. That fucking sucks, not to mention the overlap. There's a reason why I tried to go easy on the 'well known' gods and that's because there's already a trillion western stories written about them. Susanoo is cooler than Thor. Tezcatlipoca is more badass than any other god could ever hope to be except for Odin. It wouldn't fucking kill the D&D fanbase to have this vague, token amount of diversity injected into their game. As long as you straight-up say that your pantheon is a monster mash rather than 'western civilization's greatest hits' it should go over well. For fuck's sake, most TTRPGer are used to a totally made-up pantheon, it won't be so bad for them to get a little diversity.

Also Thor's a little bitch, people only like him because of the unrelated Marvel Comics character.



That said, I do like your rival I'm sure that we could interject a few more 'good' gods into the mix and also set up some rivalries. There's no reason, for example, Hades would not be the sworn enemy of Dracula. Or Saraswati opposing Aphrodite. Or Ameratsu opposing Susanoo (that one's canon anyway). Or Anansi opposing Gaia.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Let me clarify: When I said "That's a bit too much to track", I refer to players, not the writers. Because one of Lago's best points is that lots of players often don't end up giving a shit to the stuff in the campaign book, because the names are forgettable.

I'm just saying that in addition to the name problem, the quantity is also an issue. Having too many Kingdoms in play causes people to stop caring because there are too many to keep track of.

I agree. To help with this, the new campaign setting should totally have Elemental Countries and the major cities should be sorted by this. When someone says 'I hail from a former nomad clan in Kefin' the reaction to the players should be 'ah, Kefin. Mental image is that of Tatooine/Agrabah. He's from the Fire Country and you know how people from there are like'.

For example, you should have a water country with snowy fields and Atlantis in it. Your Lightning country should have a technology city and an assortment of islands filled with fishermen, vikings, and pirates. Your Earth country should have Mountainhome and some elven hippie forest thing. Etc..

[Username17]

First of all: whether Thor is popular because of Marvel Comics or not doesn't matter. He is popular. Set is only popular because of his unrelated appearance in Conan stories, but he is popular. Yeah, there are some cool gods from Earth's various sundry pantheons, the actual Loviatar (Finnish pagan mother of disease) is kind of cool, but she's popular because Ed Greenwood turned her into a patroness of S&M sex games for no reason.

So yes, you want to throw in some gods who are potential crowd favorites: Hanuman, Tezcatlipoca, and Urd for example. But you also want known crowd favorites like Asmodeus, Llolth, and Ares. If you throw in like a dozen gods, you had fucking better have Set and Thor on that list.

Now, as for the elemental kingdoms: fuck you. Sure, you can have some elemental kingdoms, but there sure as fuck needs to be more than five kingdoms on the map. And it's perfectly OK for most of them to be basically given a picture like this one:

And have some really minimal description. Little more than "here be dragons" and you can fucking fill it in later. But it needs to be there. Even though the initial book will probably mostly talk about five kingdoms or so (let's face it: the Black Kingdom, the Blue Kingdom, the Red Kingdom, the Green Kingdom, and the White Kingdom), there will still be some part of the book given over to loosely sketching a bunch of other kingdoms so that players who want to be from "far away" and playing Samurai or some shit have a place to be from. Also so that you can sell more books later.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

All right, Frank, who would you put on the list? I suppose the best place to start would be to come up with popular ones and then pare the list down. Here's mine:

Set
Thor (ugh)
Anansi
Hanuman
Tezcatlipoca
Kali
Asmodeus
Dracula (WoD and Castlevania have transformed him into a deity anyway, no excuse)
Iblis
Freya
Aphrodite
Hephaestus
Loviatar (turn her into a combination S&M queen and Papa Nurgle)
Susanoo
Ares
Orcus (as a hodgepodge of himself and Mammon. Fuck Orcus's new look, we're going back to the 3E Orcus and crossing him over with Professor Ratigan)
Lloth
Pelor
Gaia
Tiamat
Zeus

[Lago PARANOIA]

Now, as for the elemental kingdoms: fuck you. Sure, you can have some elemental kingdoms, but there sure as fuck needs to be more than five kingdoms on the map.

Why?

That is waaaay too much geography for anyone to be interested in other than fanboys. And fanboys/authors can fill in the map with their own stuff as the edition goes on.

Like, seriously, think back to A:TLA. While the setting was sketched very broadly no one really cared because the authors could fill in gaps as time went along. No one even knew what Ba Sing Se was until the series was almost halfway over. Did anyone know anything about the setting's most famous library until then? No. All we knew is that there were three elemental countries and that the authors would fill in details as necessary.

Though I do agree with you that there should be some mystery to the setting. This should not be accomplished by having five major kingdoms and then going 'lol many more you know about'... this should be accomplished by making the default assumptions of the campaign setting having a geographical myopia on a land at a crossroads for more interesting places. The default campaign setting should assume that players more or less start at some intersection between the five kingdoms. That way it won't feel contrived when someone says that they're a Samurai from the Earth Kingdom but you also don't have the problem of people going 'Earth Kingdom? Where the fuck is that?'

[Username17]

Well, personally I'd go with three different gods that were loosely associated with each "color".

Black

• Llolth
• Set
• Loviatar

Blue

• Anansi
• Vulcan
• Wee Jas

Green

• Hanuman
• Terra
• Thor

Red

• Ares
• Tiamat
• Athena

White

• Tezcatlipoca
• Amaretsu
• Ganesh

It is super important that you have a sexy bitch goddess, a sexy man god, and a furry for every color. So it's not enough to have an awesome War God (Ares is better than kord by a fuck long shot), you also have to have a War Goddess who is wicked hot. That's where Athena steps in. But some people don't really want their gods to look like a human, so you always have to give them a non-human looking option.

Also, it's good to have gods split up into obvious rivalries. So Athena and Ares are brother and sister and constantly fight. Anansi and Llolth are both spiders who command the loyalty of different factions of elves and they fight. And so on. Obviously you don't have to make all the rivalries within color or within type. You could have Wee Jas be angry with Thor because Thor is a jerk and for no other reason. However, it's also important to stress that followers of any particular god can still work along side the followers of some other god so that you don't create AD&D style party rivalries that tear everything up.

Also, pretty quickly you bust out Gate to Phyrexia, that has among other things like seven or eight extra Black themed gods and goddesses. And that is going to include Asmodeus, Kali, Mictlan, Orcus, Pazzuzu, Balor, and maybe Yama or something.

-Username17

[Username17]

Why?

Because people want to come from "somewhere else" fairly frequently, and they don't want to be from "off the map" and they don't want to be from "some place I just now fucking made up off the top of my head." They want to be able to flip through the "other places to be from" section and find one whose short blurb and explanatory picture fit their concept and then roll with that.

Like it or not, you must have an area on your map where shit is "kinda sorta like Japan" just like you must have a place where things are kinda Vikingish, kinda Mongoly, sorta French, apparently African, vaguely Native American and so on. Because people will insist on playing a Samurai or a Viking or something and it is a shitty answer to say "I guess you came from a dimensional portal from some other world where that shit flies." The basics have to be at least passably covered with the list of "also appearing" countries.

You don't have to, and probably shouldn't, devote a long written section to all the crap that goes on in the vaguely Danish island chain where people have long beards and dragon boats. But there has to be one, and it has to have a picture. Because someone is going to want to play a Dwarven Viking, and the MC needs to be able to say "Uh... I guess you come from Surt, here's the page."

The Eberron thing was kind of on to something when they had The Five Kingdoms you actually cared about and then a long list of also-rans. They should have gone farther with that and made the other regions more culturally and geographically different, but that kind of failure of imagination is endemic to D&D writers it seems.

-Username17

[MfA]

Alignment of the setting. Oh god.
The setting's base morality should not be black and white. Not that black and white is bad, it's just that it's really hard to do without coming off as patronizing or insulting. Also because it's been done to death. For fuck's sake, even Tolkein regretted doing such a thing. So the campaign setting should be black and grey (like WH40K), grey and grey (like Shadowrun), or grey and white (like TTGL). I recommend going with grey and white personally, so people can still feel good about playing white hats while also having some moral ambiguity in the setting.

I don't see any ambiguity in TTGL ... Simon was absolutely right and Rossiu was absolutely wrong. There was white and people waiting to be made white by the example set by Simon (including the BBEG).

[Blasted]

I strongly prefer the 'colored' list of gods vs. the evil/good collection.
Just because it stops 'that one player' from constantly picking evil and insisting on backstabbing/murdering, etc. when inappropriate.

I think that this links into moral ambiguity, in that you have party/character options other than stock good/evil.

[Zinegata]

Why?

Because people want to come from "somewhere else" fairly frequently, and they don't want to be from "off the map" and they don't want to be from "some place I just now fucking made up off the top of my head." They want to be able to flip through the "other places to be from" section and find one whose short blurb and explanatory picture fit their concept and then roll with that.

With a full setting book, yes this is totally feasible. But if we're gonna talk about the DMG, we can just limit it to 5 Kingdoms and have the rest filed under "Buy the full campaign book". Or better yet, just have the short blurb and explanatory picture describe other possible campaign settings - not just other countries in the same setting.

Like it or not, you must have an area on your map where shit is "kinda sorta like Japan" just like you must have a place where things are kinda Vikingish, kinda Mongoly, sorta French, apparently African, vaguely Native American and so on. Because people will insist on playing a Samurai or a Viking or something and it is a shitty answer to say "I guess you came from a dimensional portal from some other world where that shit flies." The basics have to be at least passably covered with the list of "also appearing" countries.

I think it would be fairly easy to condense those concepts into just 5 Kingdoms. They don't need to be small kingdoms.

[MfA]

I strongly prefer the 'colored' list of gods vs. the evil/good collection.
Just because it stops 'that one player' from constantly picking evil and insisting on backstabbing/murdering, etc. when inappropriate.

I think that this links into moral ambiguity, in that you have party/character options other than stock good/evil.

Personally I think there are enough games for people who like that.

Personally I like the Paladin being able to say "kill one innocent to potentially save a million? Never!" with a 100% certainty that in the end it shifts the balance for good even if those million people die ... and be right about it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Personally I like the Paladin being able to say "kill one innocent to potentially save a million? Never!" with a 100% certainty that in the end it shifts the balance for good even if those million people die ... and be right about it.

I am literally struck speechless.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Personally I like the Paladin being able to say "kill one innocent to potentially save a million? Never!" with a 100% certainty that in the end it shifts the balance for good even if those million people die ... and be right about it.

I am literally struck speechless.

I'm pretty sure he means to have it both ways; i.e. the million won't die.

[MfA]

No, I'm serious ... there are worse things than a million people dying, and the Paladin committing evil acts would lead to them in the end ... in the final balance an evil act never leads to good, that's D&D to me. Sparkly blinding white vs. black, the end never justifies the means (of course it takes huge conviction to actually stick to such an absolute belief, but not everyone has to be a paladin).

Simon in TTGL takes it on blind faith that avoiding Spiral Nemesis (when in his heart he actually feels its inevitability) can not justify keeping humanity underground. Hell Lord Genome who commits evil in what he thought was a just cause slowly corrupts himself into full on evil ... how is there grey in this series again?

[Orca]

Isn't the big problem with 'The ends justify the means' that it's really hard to be sure of what ends you'll finally get, but you can be sure what means you're using? You may or may not end up saving millions, but if you kill an innocent you've definitely killed an innocent.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Isn't the big problem with 'The ends justify the means' that it's really hard to be sure of what ends you'll finally get, but you can be sure what means you're using? You may or may not end up saving millions, but if you kill an innocent you've definitely killed an innocent.

Yeah, the big problem with using your predicted ends to justify what you do to get there is that your prediction might be wrong. On the other hand, trying to codify atomic actions and assign them goodness values is also quite difficult.

In the specific example of the life of one versus the lives of millions in the D&D universe, though, consider this: A single casting of resurrection is significantly simpler and cheaper than a million. Once the paladin's actions have directly lead to the death of millions (even if accidentally), it's that paladin's obligation to get every single one of those individuals resurrected, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs her. Otherwise she wouldn't be a paladin.

[MfA]

That is the problem, but the question is whether trying to guess what the end will be and determining if it justifies the means will in the final balance lead to the best outcome if you are a good guesser? Or can you rely on absolute morality and know a decision based on that will in the final balance be the correct one?

In a non moral universe with moral ambiguity the former is correct (this is the real world). In a moral universe the latter is correct (this is D&D to me, a nice escapism from greyness).