D&D 5E WotC: 5 D&D Settings In Development?

WotC's Ray Winninger spoke a little about some upcoming D&D settings -- two classic settings are coming in 2022 in formats we haven't seen before, and two brand new (not Magic: the Gathering) settings are also in development, as well as return to a setting they've already covered in 5E. He does note, however, that of the last three, there's a chance of one or more not making it to release, as they develop more than they use.

Two classic settings? What could they be?​

So that's:

• 2 classic settings in 2022 (in a brand new format)
• 2 brand new settings
• 1 returning setting

So the big questions -- what are the two classic settings, and what do they mean by a format we haven't seen before? Winninger has clarified on Twitter that "Each of these products is pursuing a different format you've never seen before. And neither is "digital only;" these are new print formats."

As I've mentioned on a couple of occasions, there are two more products that revive "classic" settings in production right now.

The manuscript for the first, overseen by [Chris Perkins], is nearly complete. Work on the second, led by [F. Wesley Schneider] with an assist from [Ari Levitch], is just ramping up in earnest. Both are targeting 2022 and formats you've never seen before.

In addition to these two titles, we have two brand new [D&D] settings in early development, as well as a return to a setting we've already covered. (No, these are not M:tG worlds.)

As I mentioned in the dev blog, we develop more material than we publish, so it's possible one or more of these last three won't reach production. But as of right now, they're all looking great.

Of course the phrase "two more products that revive 'classic' settings" could be interpreted in different ways. It might not be two individual setting books.

 

[grimslade]

I was strictly responding to the idea that this was fans pulling the Planejammer idea out of their posteriors. Whether or not we see a combined book, Planejammer ships exist in 5E.

And they are very cool.

 

[DerekSTheRed]

With all the Dragon UA stuff, Council of Wyrms seems more likely than usual. I would love an updated Greyhawk Gazetteer and if you it gets tied in with Organized Play you could even call it a Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.

 

[OblivionDrive]

I've got the Complete books, all the Planescape and all the Dark Sun books from that list on my shelf right now and I reckon they still hold up, and I'm sure others would speak up for the Mystara and Ravenloft books. Admittedly, there was an awful lot of junk, but, as others have said, there was also too much good/great/fantastic stuff - I tried my darnedest at the time, but with so many lines, even hard-core fans couldn't afford to buy everything. And putting out so much stuff, especially some on buy-back contracts, TSR needed everyone to buy pretty much all of it to make any kind of profit.

I bought a total of I think 10 items off that list back in the day. It was all of the Planescape stuff, the Ravenloft box set and a couple of other things. And this was back when my income from my job was almost literally all disposable and all I did was buy comics, music and RPG books. Woof. Those were the days.

But yeah, they were also competing with White Wolf for my gaming dollar back then too. It was just impossible to buy everything, even if you wanted it.

 

[OblivionDrive]

So for dark sun... There are a lot of people who like the absolute murder death kill of it. The more difficult enemies, the brutal conditions of the environment, Even the player character churn. I actually never played it that way.

Oh I still had players start off at higher levels and use the dark sun stat generation method, but I wasn't as brutal with the setting as DMs are supposed to be.

I was very brutal with the environment, I would buy bags of those little glass beads that you put in the bottom of a fish tank and hand them out to people to physically represent their water.

And every day that they adventured I would take multiple tokens from them to show them how close they were getting to being out of water at any given time. I would even have enemies specifically trying to take their water rather than kill them. With the idea that the desert would kill them as long as they didn't have water.

Mostly this wound up leading to a tense game of survival. And there were occasionally times where party in fighting occurred because some player was hiding their water tokens in order to make sure the rest of the party didn't know how much water they had. Like they had five water tokens visible and two or three that were under their elbow or hidden behind a bag of chips.

It created a very different environment from standard dungeons and dragons at the time. Both in player character interaction, and in the sort of stories I felt more free to tell. Where most of the NPCs were either hostile or outright afraid of the player characters. Even though the players were often good people, or neutral people at worst, it helped to foster a sense of distrust.

Which made all sorts of political intrigues and narrative flourishes into something more powerful than they otherwise might have been.

And I will always love the setting because of that.

I just never did the heavily one-sided battle smush that some people loved to do with that system. My characters and players were still heroic, it was just heroic in a very different setting in a very different style. More Conan the Barbarian less Galahad.

That’s actually an amazing idea. I absolutely love it. Gonna steal that for a hypothetical future where in person games actually happen again and 5e DS is real and not just perpetual board speculation fodder.

 

[teitan]

The nautiloid ship performs Plane Shift in the trailer.

Meh ok?

 

[FriendlyFiend]

I never did understand the appeal of Dark Sun or Planescape. Not to say it shouldn't appeal, merely I never could understand the absolute devotion a lot of fans had (and still have) for them.

Dark Sun - Originally (2e), you had to come to the table with two fully made characters (usually played one at a time) that had to start at 3rd level to even have a chance of at least short-term survival, and expect one or both to die at some point...seriously. That told me enough to stop reading and never bother with it.

Planescape - A setting so bizarre and weird it's not really meant to be understood by the mortal mind...yet it attempts to be understood. Just...too weird for me lol (but, this one I get having appeal far more than Dark Sun, as Planescape could offer a means to go from one setting to another...mostly...I think...or was that Spelljammer?...whatever lol).

If any fan of Planescape and/or Dark Sun would be interested in offering what appeals so deeply about those settings, feel free to DM me, as I'm certainly curious (not in a condescending way, I really would love to hear what people love about them so much).

I can completely understand not going for Planescape, but for me it was and is the best thing in (A)D&D. I'd been playing since the mid-80s and started out murder-hobo-ing my way through levelled dungeons in Basic and Expert D&D, back at the time where it was hilarious to stumble upon a LOMITS/LOLITS (Little Old Man/Woman In Tennis Shoes) wandering around the room next door to Orcus's, then watched myself and the game mature with things like Saltmarsh, The Desert of Desolation series, Ravenloft &c. Planescape, though, took things to a new level - switching emphasis from combat to clashing beliefs, putting even low-level characters in contact with high-level powers, opening up exploration of all the places that D&D promised - the Happy Hunting Grounds, the City of Brass, the cogs of Mechanus. Plus it had Sigil, still for me the most exciting non-homebrew city in the game that I've read, and the machinations of the factions. Plus the production values, for the most part, were fabulous and there was all the DiTerlizzi art I could ever want.

 

[Sketchpad]

I'm still hoping for a Star Frontiers or Gamma World book for 5e.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The nautiloid ship performs Plane Shift in the trailer.

Not just once either. Repeatedly. It's literally one of the main functions it clearly has. And in lore they're literally designed to travel to the Astral Sea and to other worlds via that.

Fair enough. I would call that a Spelljammer ship using Planar magic, sense Planesfhit existed in OG Spelljammer, too.

That's not exactly true, though. Nautiloids exist even when Spelljammer doesn't, and they don't sail the phlogiston, they sail the Astral Sea. Like Tieflings from Planescape, they're a piece of lore that escaped the original setting and is now simply it's own thing.

I see no reason to see why mixing them would make sense.

The issue is twofold:

1) Spelljammer has a crap setting. I'm sorry, but it is. It's crap. The Rock of Bral is nice, the races are nice, but aside from that? It's pretty bad. Crystals spheres are dumb and feel like something from a 1970s prog rock album in a really bad way. The phlogiston feels like the bad kind of steampunk. It all also doesn't particularly "play nice" with existing settings. It would generally let you move away from the more dubious bits of Spelljammer towards something more accessible/playable.

2) Planescape has a couple of issues that Spelljammer could solve - first of all, Planescape is kind of bound to the Great Wheel, which isn't a universal - whereas the Astral Sea kind of is - so you could fit Planescape into a lot more settings if you went that way. Secondly, there wasn't a great sense of exploring or the like in Planescape, and spelljammers could really enable that whilst still keeping Sigil at a home base and so on. It would also allow you to get away from some bad decision late in Planescape history.

Bestiary-wise there's no real issue. The monsters/NPC races worth keeping potentially fit well into both settings.

It's perfectly possible they won't combine them. Indeed I think it's more likely that they won't. If they don't however, I expect Spelljammer either won't come out (99% of the reason people think it will is the Illithid Nautiloid, but as I've pointed out, those exist even outside of Spelljammer, and go on the Astral Sea, and the one in BG3 is clearly operating that way), or will be drastically rebooted in a way that makes VRGtR look like a carbon copy of the 1990 boxed set by comparison. Probably getting rid of crystal spheres and any specific linkage to any specific setting, and instead having a setting of its own.

 

[Don Durito]

I'd agree, that as a setting Spelljammer isn't much. I'm not sure there's any real great fondness for the setting as a setting. I think it's more the concept that people love.

That could actually give a lot of scope to reinvent Spelljammer completely though. I'm not sure there'd be the same outrage if they completedly redefined the rock of Bral, or the elven navy, or the Scro, and removed them entirely, as there would be if they messed with key aspects of Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Planescape.

Spelljamer could easly take the ancient war between Tieflings and Dragonborn from 4e, make it interstellar and swallow it whole.

 

[Danzauker]

Spelljammer as a miniature combat game using the X-Wing rules.