Let's go campaign world shopping for our de-colonized 5E game. Any of the old D&D campaign worlds or TSR campaign worlds because Wizards never really did much with them except ruin them. You look at the total of Wizard's contributions to the TSR campaign worlds, and honestly, the best work they did was compile information.
These days, the old TSR campaign worlds that could host billion-dollar film franchises are dead, abandoned, and ruined by some of the terrible decisions they made with 4E that continue to this day. And they discarded all their campaign worlds for one-shot, nebulous planar settings because companies treat canon like how vampires react to crosses these days.
We can't expect our writers to read decades of material just to write a book! That is why you are paying these writers the big money. That is why customers give you money. This 'enjoy your crumbs, peasants' attitude comes from Wall Street, they apply this logic to customers and creative staff, and it sucks. All middle management needs to do is blame the subsequent failure on politics, and they know the higher-ups and lap-dog fans will eat it up, the get out on social media and flog themselves, and they can try to stay there another year.
This is all the more reason to eliminate Wall Street gaming and support the indies. You don't have to leave 5E either; we have options supported by significant publishers with Level Up A5E and Tales of the Valiant. Make those your core books, and put the others in storage or, better yet, sell them off.
Just don't give money to Wall Street anymore. You hurt the causes you love.
Back in the day, we did the TSR worlds of Mystara, Greyhawk, and the Forgotten Realms. We started in Mystara, and it fell off in the late 1980s. Then we did Forgotten Realms (pre-novels) in the mid-1980s and eventually settled on Greyhawk during the 3e era. D&D 3 was a joke of high-level characters being superpowered jerks to us, so Greyhawk was a more dark comedy, like the series The Boys on Amazon.
Wizards' D&D has always been a power-gaming joke to us.
Our last serious D&D game was AD&D 2nd Edition with the Forgotten Realms. We never really played Wizards D&D seriously again until 4th Edition in the Nerrath non-setting, and that blew up in our faces. The 4E campaign world books blew up those worlds hard, and they all died there. After that, we toyed around with 2014 D&D 5E, but my player liked the ranger, the class sucked, and the game died. Then multiclassing became the new fad, and the game died harder under optimizer pressure.
So, all TSR campaign worlds are unsupported, and I don't want to give Wall Street my money anymore, so I am moving on from them. I will keep the fond memories of the TSR worlds I enjoyed and try to forget the Wizards' nightmare they turned into. Let's move on to our new game.
I was on the verge of adopting the excellent Midgard campaign setting, and this one is the most like the Forgotten Realms with the level of history, detail, maps, culture, and background information. If they made a hardcover a year, going more deeply into each kingdom, like the old Mystara gazetteers, I would buy the hell out of those.
I am not using this for A5E because this will be my Tales of the Valiant game world. Kobold Press is the next Paizo, and 5E will be their D&D 3.5, with ToV being the next 3.75 Edition.
Midgard is excellent, easily surpassing Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms these days, and those who write and maintain this fantastic piece of gaming wonder that feels like a throwback to the days when companies cared about their campaign worlds.
A thought-provoking sidebar here suggests you limit unique backgrounds and unique ancestries. I like this theory; it allows the few who choose a unique origin to shine. I am all for variety, but we can have plenty of diversity in human backgrounds - just look at Earth. I do not need dozens of anime creatures and strange cartoonish origins to reflect diversity in my games; I just need open minds.
I am saving this one for next time.
Theria is the game world published from the Dungeons & Randomness podcast, and you can pick this up from Amazon. It isn't as much of a campaign world as a setting light; the entire island the campaign world is on is an 800-mile-wide by 300-mile tall area, like the size of California and Nevada combined (maybe a little of Oregon and Mexico in there). For a compact campaign world, it is excellent, the art is good, and you get one major city per geographical area. If you include the other islands to the south, its land space is like a West Coast US-sized campaign.
It reminds me of the original Mystara campaign setting, which was minimal, compact, and diverse geographically and culturally. But the downside is it does not feel like an entire world, just a part of one.
Since not many places are detailed, you are free to fill in the gaps.
The backgrounds here are whatever you want, and they feel more of the standard 5E-style blend of cultures - though the severely limited geographic area doesn't give you much room for homelands and lost empires. I wonder if everyone emigrated here in a big, diverse group, like Australia.
The podcast switched rules systems last year (Cortex, which did not catch on) and recently went back to 5E for this setting, and I get it - breaking free of the juggernaut of 5E is hard. I support independent 5E versions because you can be a part of the larger community while keeping to principles and more player-friendly game distributions. Going back was likely a tough choice, but they need to obey their subscribers and views.
And this is also why I de-colonized from electronic character-creation tools. I can't use any of this with the campaign settings I own, so all the fantastic options and variety are locked out of my characters and campaigns. Electronic tools will kill roleplaying and turn it into a video game. Diversity and market equity are hurt when you use computerized character creation tools, and they, by design, support monopolies.
Some may like this type of setting, a more focused, more minor, limited-sandbox style area that doesn't have a lot of gigantic sprawling empires and endless swaths of hundreds of miles of unexplored land. For my needs, I want lots of exploration and survival, which Theria can do, but I want a bigger world than this.
Arcanis. Oh, how I want to love you.
This is a 400-page book where the campaign world starts on page 300, and it is just an overview. The rest is them re-writing all the core classes and the parts of 5E they want to change for flavor. This should have been its own CC version of 5E, and the campaign world book should have stood on its own. This would have been a fantastic campaign world had they not tried to rewrite most of 5E.
They rewrite all the base classes to fit the flavor of the world.
Are you kidding me?
They are a CC SRD away from being their own game. Why isn't this its own version of 5E?
That said, the Codex Geographica books are filling in the details, and we have two out now - the primary focus point and the bad guys of the setting, which feels sorely needed. These books highlight the First City setting, which seriously rivals Waterdeep as a detailed map of a gigantic city with people, places, and factions to explore. If I were voting for "best fantasy city in a 3rd party setting," this would be it.
I look forward to the future books, and this one has a lot of potential. I saved this book from a sell box and am glad I did.
The flavor of the world itself is late a Roman Empire-esque place with an empire in decline, mixed with the standard 5E tropes and villains. This is a fantastic campaign setting, on par with one of the TSR "total conversions" back in the day, closer to a Dark Sun or Birthright. The old pantheons of gods are being absorbed into more significant religions, with the good gods coming under a good-aligned and conservative female Pope-like figure. There are three sides: a good, neutral, and evil faction with the central gods aligned under them.
The background options here skew more towards humans, and in the historical sense of things, every race is its own "thing" with home cities and lands. A few cities are melting pots, but there are places where it is mostly one background. This is more a traditional setting with solid ties to the homelands of one kind or the other, without too many options for players to play as stuffed dolls or houseplants.
Those games can be fun and crazy, but I occasionally need a break from the Hanna-Barbera Wacky Races setting style. D&D 2024, Pathfinder 2, and Starfinder 2 are slowly turning into this comical, toon-style one-note game, and it is a turn-off for me when I want realism, drama, and depth.
You have a significant character death, and Wally the Cartoon alligator is rocking on his heels, biding his time, and waiting to make his next wisecrack. You get this in many groups, where you have the group's clown, and if the game gets too serious, they check out and retreat into their silly character. I did this once to a group and regret it. I like my comedians, but there is a time and a place, and they can ruin a serious game.
Gee, guys, guess this fight would be a lot easier if Adema, the cleric, hadn't died! Her body is sure heavy to drag around, huh? Maybe we should tell her to lay off the iron rations next time!
And half the players at the table instantly want to drop-kick his scaly ass into the next sphere of annihilation.
Oh, that happened to my character, too, and he deserved it.
If you buy in, Arcanis is a worthy campaign setting, but a hefty lift under a system like Level Up A5E to do all the conversions and translations. It would be easier with a Tales of the Valiant more streamlined base. Level Up has a lot of scaffolding to support old-school play, and it does better in campaigns where you don't need to do a lot of hacking to make things work.
Arcanis is one of those games that feels like it changes too much, and I would love to see an entirely new collection of magic and treasures and break away from 5E's SRD lists. If you go as far as they did, please go all the way! A great setting, full of promise and depth; it just feels like a lot of work to pull the entire thing apart and refocus on a new base system. It can be done, and I am sure it is incredible.
More next time with a few more settings as I continue my search.
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