[D&D] Editions, Metacosmology and Setting
Grimcleaver:
I've been playing D&D over various editions pretty much since red box (though those were childhood memories, really). My fullest intereaction with the game has been since the black 2nd edition AD&D books. Back then it was easy. All the D&D settings, published and homebrew, existed together in an infinite shared world of crystal spheres and phlogiston (on the Prime Material end, see Spelljammer) and in a Great Wheel of connected elemental and heavenly realms (on the planar end, see Planescape). It was elegant and sparked the imagination, but it wreaked havok on tone and campaign themes--for example when the PCs in your Ravenloft campaign included a kender from Dragonlance, a thri-kreen from Dark Sun, and a goblinoid beastman from Mystara.
So third edition made a bold move: they separated the cosmologies and the planes, and pretty much decided that all the official books would deal with the Greyhawk setting, a much beloved but long neglected setting. Each other setting book, like Forgotten Realms or Eberron, would treat with their worlds as being complete self contained cosmologies cut off from the others spacially or cosmologically and devices like spelljamming ships were merely curiousities for getting from here to there within a certain setting's planes and prime material worlds, not for going from one to another. All fine, and very cool. But then things got weird. Books started showing up that had background information for races that had nothing to do with the core setting, gods and cities and organizations that didn't fit anywhere. Most of the adventures in fact, weren't set anywhere in the core setting with no ideas as to where they were intended to fit (because in fact, they weren't...you were just supposed to "stick them in wherever you want").
Cue 4e. One of its guiding principles was that it would have a Core World, but no set map or guideposts. It would be a vast pastiche of all that great material that had been created and orphaned back in 3rd edition, a jigsaw puzzle for each DM to put together as they saw fit, with a few shared vantage points--the lost empire of Nerath, the fallen kingdoms of Bael Terath and Arkhosia, but for the most part it was made of modules, classic, modern and homebrew. But once again there was a serpent in paradise. This time it was that this cool amorphous world began to forget its bounds, absorbing swaths of other settings into itself, duplicating places iconic to other settings--ones that did have maps--and led to some bizzarre duplications of people places and histories. So the Tomb of Horrors and Temple of Elemental Evil are in the 4e world? And Greyhawk? Is there even a Greyhawk anymore? Not only were those questions unanswered, but they came to be deemed invalid questions to be asking as the whole idea of static settings and cosmologies was starting to become passe.
Now the interesting thing here is that because 4e was so wildly different from earlier editions both in feel and in flavor, I found it played nicely alongside 3rd edition games--and in fact 2nd edition games, spawning for me a desire to finally go in and separate the various D&D, to put them each somewhere where they could be loved and be what they were meant to be. So that became my project--and as I update this post, my plan is to let you all in, piece by piece, on how my deconstructed, reconstituted D&D Metacosmology fits together. Hope you find it useful. Heck, maybe even useful enough to take out for a spin in your own games!
So I guess that's my mission statement anyway.
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: Grimcleaver on February 14, 2011, 10:39:43 AM
Books started showing up that had background information for races that had nothing to do with the core setting...
Hmm...rereading this it seems misleading. I didn't mean new races like Goliaths, so much as new backgrounds for existing races that didn't fit what was known about them--mostly stuff from the "Races of" series that created whole new gods, cultures and societies for humans, elves, dwarves, whatever that felt like they were from a whole new setting and didn't fit what came before. I guess that was the real rub.
Grimcleaver:
Step One: 2nd Edition (and earlier)
So going back to second edition I discovered something kind of amazing. Gary Gygax actually had envisioned an entire multiverse of his own back when he was the power behind D&D. Now mind you this was way before Forgotten Realms, or Dragonlance or anything. Old school. In his vision of things, each world was a thematically related variation off of our own world, where some legend, fact and fancy all interplayed in different ways. Greyhawk (Oerth) shared planar borders with other worlds such as Yarth, Uerth, Aerth, etc. A few of these made it into print under other publishers after Gygax left D&D behind. Learth is detailed in the Lejendary Adventures (yep, with a j) series, and Aerth is described in the Dangerous Journeys series. There's also signs as to what the cosmology might have been like in the old Deities and Demigods and the Cyclopedia and what planar adventures might have been like going through wormholes to worlds of pure air or fire. Interesting stuff. So what I wanted to do with 2nd edition is make it a shrine to D&D as it might have been, to take the original ideas of Gary Gygax and to try to peice them together like an archeologist. All the stuff that was added later on or absorbed into other settings (like Planescape or the 4e Core setting) I either try to gently rename to something appropriate or else remove and put where it belongs. The gods of the 2e world tend to be gods from real world history and mythology as well as gods from classical fantasy--the kind of fare you get in the Deities and Demigods book. I tend to run these games using all the Skills and Powers, mostly because I really love that system in all it's cumbersome glory.
Natespank:
Hey, cool idea
Can you clarify the mission statement though? Are you forging an edition-non-specific multiverse, or one for use with a specific edition? Is this similar to an encyclopedia or will it be in the form of a playable product? Or is it more of a history?
It seems a little sketchy to me to attempt to combine them all since they had such various unrelated creators. Gygax disliked 4e a lot, so his "vision" of what the world of D&D ought to be must strongly conflict with the current WotC group. The changed mechanics alters the nature of the worlds as well- no more 1 hit kills against level 1-3 characters (well, mostly none).
I'm not sure there's a need to neatly combine the settings like you suggest- except maybe as an interesting scholarly work :D That's something I'd like to go through. Gygax intrigues me.
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: Natespank on February 14, 2011, 09:33:37 PM
Hey, cool idea
Can you clarify the mission statement though? Are you forging an edition-non-specific multiverse, or one for use with a specific edition? Is this similar to an encyclopedia or will it be in the form of a playable product? Or is it more of a history?
It seems a little sketchy to me to attempt to combine them all since they had such various unrelated creators. Gygax disliked 4e a lot, so his "vision" of what the world of D&D ought to be must strongly conflict with the current WotC group. The changed mechanics alters the nature of the worlds as well- no more 1 hit kills against level 1-3 characters (well, mostly none).
I'm not sure there's a need to neatly combine the settings like you suggest- except maybe as an interesting scholarly work :D That's something I'd like to go through. Gygax intrigues me.
Quite the opposite. I found 4e so different from previous editions that I want to try and make each edition totally its own thing, to separate out all the IP between the various editions so each of them can be their own thing. The puzzle is what stuff to give to which edition. My hope is to have 2nd edition be the home for the original Gygaxian cosmology.
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