5E Third Party Products

So I recently wanted to go and shop for 5E books to support my Low Fantasy Gaming book and...

While 5E is enormous, I am not seeing all that much stuff I can use.

Monster books are fantastic and give me options, and there is a handful of generic adventures. Then several companies are putting out previous OSR modules for the system (the OSR versions are better values), and there are a few setting books here and there. The market is dominated mainly by Wizards and these hybrid adventure plus rules expansion books.

There are the 5E adventures reincarnated books, and that is a solid series, but I am a little tired of nostalgia. Several OSR mega-dungeons have been converted to 5E, but the OSR versions will work with several games and stand the test of time. Once the cross-over OSR-5E books are out of consideration, my options are minimal.

Planar Vacations

Many 5E books are also not very useful because they assume the plane-hopping campaign that Wizards has been fond of since the D&D 4 days. I want adventures in one world, locations, and fun epic places. I do not want to diminish my campaign world by popping in and out of reality and heading off on planar vacations. This is a strange feeling that D&D 5E is not really suited well for realistic, generic, or simulation games - and the entire D&D genre has moved into the science-fantasy realm (with magic as science).

Everything feels thematically similar to Starfinder, with hundreds of "talking shape" lineages, planar/star travel is everyday and commonplace, clockwork, androids, and even the classes are more fantastical out-there than grounded in realism. Magical/robotic companions are everywhere. Technology has advanced (steampunk or magic-punk) to the point where every modern convenience has been simulated by proxy. It is beginning to feel like D&D 5E, Starfinder, and Pathfinder 2E are all the same game - not in rules, but in the setting and genre.

It is all science fantasy now.

Don't Stay Here Too Long...

I do not like the default D&D cosmology these days; I feel it has been massively overdone and turned into a garish theme park meant to sell you books. It used to be strange, dangerous, and mysterious - with sub-planes where nothing worked as you expected and insane infinite realities of monsters and strange architecture and environments. Nobody lived there because they couldn't, and it was never safe. Entire regions could disappear overnight or be lost forever, and gates would never return there.

These days? Fantastic and it feels mostly safe. People live out here! The planes used to be strange, impossible to travel to, and mysterious. These days they are overdeveloped and sprawl-filled suburbs full of 'lazy writer ideas' that would have worked better in a real campaign world, but, you know, it's the planes! Anything goes! Plane of clowns? Sure! Plane of bored typist stenographers? Sure! Plane of stand up comedy clubs? Why not?

The outer planes feel like a dollar store filled with disconnected junk.

My original ideas were more of a Lovecraftian interpretation, but it worked incredibly well. We had one plane, which was a mirror realm, and there were broken mirrors everywhere, and the PCs saw reflections of themselves everywhere. Then those reflections started to do different things than they were currently doing. Some of the reflections were being killed by traps or monsters. Others were stabbing their fellow party members in the back and going evil. Then they started to meet other versions of themselves who may say a few things, act strangely, and then disappear when they turned around. Then more strange things happened...

They never went back there.

And whenever they saw a mirror again back home, strange things could happen. Yes, the plane's magic was sticky (and they never knew this), and since this was "creation magic," it could never be detected, wished away, or dispelled.

If you stayed in the Beastlands too long, you started developing animal features, eventually turned into an animal, and then scampered off to play with your animal friends forever.

There was nowhere safe, and the planes changed you, killed you, or slowly drove you insane. The only escape was going home to the Prime Material Plane.

Steampunk is Industrialization

Even the over-use of Steampunk, a trope invented during the Industrial Revolution and presenting all industrialization and technology as good and never showing the dark sides, is another Westernization of the genre. Massive industry in low-tech worlds is wasteful, kills the environment, puts massive coal-burning factories and smokestacks in your cities, sets up these colonialist resource grabs and industrialized wars, creates extreme wealth stratification, and takes an innocent fantasy world and smears coal dust, blood, and oil all over the society. 

Not to mention the entire mess of "automation rights" - are robots seen as property or citizens?

Yeah, it gets messy.

And none of this technology is "green."

Yeah, real messy.

There are parts of this current genre I feel dip into extreme Westernization and turn D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2e into "Bad American Tourists: The Roleplaying Game."

Where is the Cool Stuff?

I am likely looking in the wrong places, or great generic "traditional fantasy" 5E content is tough to find. Perhaps those who write books want their books to "fit in" with the 5E cosmology, and at this point, with all of the enshrined character options and builds for a late-version game, I can see why. Back in the early days of 5E, the game did not really have an identity yet, and people could take it in exciting directions. 

These days, it feels all the same.

It is a strange feeling since many of the newer 5E books have leaned hard into the superpowered magic, Harry Potter, science fantasy, anything goes, steampunk, and anything goes genres. This zany world of magic has become the "default 5E setting" in a way, and many third-party books follow along to fit in.

I know, the cool stuff is all in the OSR, don't tell me the obvious. The OSR has a lot of niches and historical settings and lots of grounded, amazing thematic stuff. The default 5E and Pathfinder 2e (let's be fair) worlds constantly have to top and outdo each other with each new release, and they feel more and more outrageous and zany - just to get attention.