Warner Brothers close to greenlighting FORGOTTEN REALMS movie

Warner Brothers are reportedly close to greenlighting the Forgotten Realms/Dungeons and Dragons movie they've been developing recently.

Warner Brothers secured a deal last year with Sweetpea Entertainment and Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast (who were in litigation over the Dungeons and Dragons film rights) to end a legal dispute and start work on a film set in the Forgotten Realms world. There were indications that Warner Brothers wanted to fast-track the movie, seeing a ready-made opportunity to develop a shared universe akin to the Marvel or DC movies.

Producer Roy Lee confirmed that the long-term plan is to develop films based on several of the Dungeons and Dragons worlds, not just stay in the Forgotten Realms. Other D&D worlds they may consider visiting include the blasted, post-apocalyptic Dark Sun; the epic, dragon-centric Dragonlance; the cosmic, bizarre Planescape; and the old-skool, traditional Greyhawk. Other candidates may include the steampunk Eberron, the horror-tinged Ravenloft or the Game of Thrones-esqe (but note it predated the books) Birthright.

David Leslie Johnson has written the script, which according to Lee is aiming for Guardians of the Galaxy, more light-hearted tone than other fantasy movies. Lee also confirmed that the film will feature the Yawning Portal Inn, which means that the great, iconic city of Waterdeep will feature in the movie.

It sounds like Warner Brothers are keen to move on with the project, especially given the substantial amount of money they spent on sorting out the legal mess and bringing the warring parties together. However, the one fly in the ointment may be the WarCraft movie, which is released on 10 June. If the movie does badly, it may force other studios to reconsider their fantasy options. However, it is not believed that the D&D movie will have as large a budget as WarCraft or will be so dependent on elaborate effects.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 5th Edition revealed

Wizards of the Coast have confirmed that a 5th Edition of the popular Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game is in development. No release date has been set, but the game will have a lengthy development period in which fan feedback will be welcomed.


The 4th Edition of the game was released in 2008, itself only five years after the previous version of the game (3.5E, a revision of the 3rd Edition originally released in 2000), so this is a fast turn-around for a game that spent almost a dozen years between the first two editions, and almost the same between the second and third. Normally fans would be up in arms over this, accusing Wizards of the Coast and their parent company, Hasbro, of trying to fleece them. However, a grim resignation seems to have met the news. 4th Edition, to put it mildly, was not a universally-acclaimed success.

Previous editions of the game had built upon what had come before: 2nd Edition was a streamlined version of 1st Edition, with new rules brought in to clarify spotty parts of the rules (most infamously, THAC0, a system designed to make it easier to work out what you need to roll to hit a monster with a weapon). 3rd Edition appeared a more radical shake-up, but in fact many of its features and rules were originally roadtested in the 'Player's Option' rulebooks released towards the end of 2E's lifespan (and others were extremely popular and common house rules). 4th Edition was a much more revolutionary game, in which perceived imbalances between classes were controversially bulldozed out of the way by making the classes comparable in power, just doing things slightly differently. It was loved by those who had been complaining about the game being 'unbalanced' on forums for years and loathed by those who felt it threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Initially, 4th Edition seemed to do well, shifting impressive numbers of copies of its core rulebooks and hitting a second print run before publication. However, controversy greeted its approach to expansions. Rather than release optional rulebooks (aside from a few of the 'usual suspects' which appear every time a new edition is released), Wizards of the Coast opted to release a single campaign setting every year and annual updates to the core rulebooks. Other rules would be added via the D&D Insider, a subscription-based website featuring exclusive content. Whilst sales of the core rulebooks were good, sales of the expansions and subscriptions to the Insider seemed to fall below expectations. In addition, the goodwill of a large number of fans who liked the 4th Edition rules was squandered when the Forgotten Realms campaign setting was destroyed and turned into a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, moving the timeline on 100 years and throwing out most of the established canon (including killing virtually every single character of note apart from Drizzt, Elminster and Erevis Cale).


All of this could perhaps have been borne if 4E didn't have a unique problem not faced by any previous edition: a credible rival product. In 2000 Wizards of the Coast released the Open Gaming Licence, allowing other companies to release products compatible with the 3rd Edition rules, even entirely new games using the same rulebooks. Though 4E used a different (and vastly more commercially restrictive) version of the licence, nothing legally prevented another company from simply publishing its own game using the 3rd Edition rules. Paizo Publishing did exactly that, releasing the Pathfinder roleplaying game in 2009 after a public and open development process lasting well over a year (meaning people were playing Pathfinder months before 4E's launch). Unlike 4E's revolutionary approach, Pathfinder opted for more modest improvements to resolve 3E's outstanding issues and was a huge success.

Neither company has released sales figures, but by all indications Pathfinder's performance for Paizo (a small company) has been spectacular, whilst D&D 4E's performance for Hasbro (a massive, international corporation) has been disappointing following the initial success of the first three core rulebooks. The signs that things were not going well at Wizards of the Coast came when a number of key game designers were made redundant several months after 4E's launch. Wizards' original plan to release a campaign setting every year also seemed to come off the rails. After the controversial Forgotten Realms setting in 2008 and the much more warmly-received Eberron and Dark Sun settings in 2009 and 2010, plans for a 2011 setting were dropped (despite rumours and hints that an updated Dragonlance setting was in the planning stages). The D&D Essentials sub-game was released in 2010, designed to appeal to new players, but seemed to make little impact.

Rumours of a 5th Edition being in-development started early in 2011 and gathered pace throughout the year, given credence by the suspension or cancellation of previously-announced products and rumours of other projects behind the scenes being dropped. The biggest clue came late in the year when Monte Cook, a respected game designer who'd played a key development role on 3rd Edition, was re-hired by Wizards of the Coast and was strongly rumoured to be working on a new edition of the game.

The question now is what direction will 5th Edition take? Whilst it would be pleasingly simplistic to conclude that 4E was a gross failure and a dead end, and simply roll back to 3.5E and develop things from there, this would probably be a mistake. 4E has sold well enough and has enough fans that doing something to alienate them - the current, active D&D fanbase - would be an error. In addition to that, those who prefer the 3.5E approach still have Pathfinder, and would not be guaranteed to return to a 5th Edition of D&D that took that approach anyway (Wizards of the Coast having squandered a lot of goodwill throughout the years). The only viable approach would appear to be trying something new that is not so directly tied to previous editions of the game, to create something that will appeal to both 3E and 4E fans. This seems insurmountable - the two games are based on radically different design philosophies with regards to balance - but the only solution to the problem.

It'll be interesting to see how this process unfolds. I suspect we won't see the new game released until late 2013 at the earliest.

The Worlds of D&D: Dark Sun

The original Dark Sun logo, used from 1991-1995.

The History of Dark Sun

In 1990, with the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings doing good business for the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game and the newly-released 2nd Edition of the game doing well, TSR decided to create a new campaign setting for the game. With the 'generic' medieval fantasy fans well-catered-for, it was decided that this new setting would be considerably more original and would introduce new ideas and concepts whilst doing away with some of the more established ideas of the game.

1st Edition Dark Sun campaign setting, released in 1991.

To work on the new setting, TSR assigned designer Tim Brown and writer Troy Denning to brainstorm ideas with editor Mary Kirchoff, whilst AD&D artist Gerald Brom worked out a visual identity for the world. The idea of a post-apocalyptic society soon came up, a place where in the distant past the heroes hadn't managed to stop the evil dark lord and as a result the world was ravaged and destroyed. This was the genesis of Athas, the planet that became the home of the Dark Sun setting.

The first Dark Sun campaign setting was launched in October 1991 and immediately attracted a lot of attention for its highly unusual variant rules. Not only was the world a ravaged desert planet more akin to Dune than any other D&D world, it also saw a huge number of basic conceptual differences. The gods were either dead or sealed away from the world, so clerics instead worshipped elemental forces. Wizardly magic had become corrupted, so anyone trying to use it became a 'defiler', drawing energy away from his surroundings and making the land dead and lifeless and inflicting pain on living creatures. A small group of wizards known as 'preservers' worked instead to restore the world to its former glory, but were often mistaken for defilers and shunned or attacked. Far more common than magic was psionics, a new concept for the D&D game, which allowed players to use powers such as telepathy and telekinesis.

Troy Denning's Prism Pentad series kicked off the Dark Sun line of novels.

Changes were made to the core D&D races (who in fact were originally not to be featured at all, humans aside, until TSR insisted on it). The elves, largely removed from their more typical forest homelands, are less friendly and more surly. Halflings are savage cannibals and tend to dominate the few areas of woodland that are left. Rarer races in other settings such as the half-giants and thri-kreen are far more dominant in Dark Sun than many of the 'classic' races. New races such as the tarek and mul (half-dwarves) also appeared. Great emphasis was also placed on basic survival, with players have to ration their food and water supplies with care, and with numerous tables outlining the dangers of travelling the vast deserts or the great Sea of Silt surrounding the inhabited lands.

Another difference was that whilst the main continents and even some other landmasses for most of the other settings had been pretty thoroughly explored, the central region of Athas, the Tablelands, was actually pretty small, only a couple of hundred miles across, and the rest of the world was left a blank slate for DMs to detail or ignore as they saw fit. The explored lands were also pretty grim, with the nine major cities of the Tablelands controlled by evil sorcerer-kings and slavery endemic in the culture.

The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King is a solid novel, but later regarded as non-canon.

Like the other settings, Dark Sun was also driven by a series of novels, kicking off with the Prism Pentad by Troy Denning, which saw a major slave uprising successfully liberate the city-state of Tyr. Other novels included the excellent Rise and Fall of a Dragon King by Lynn Abbey, which was an exploration of the world from the point-of-view of one of the evil sorcerer-kings themselves. However, in contrast to the 200+ novels available for both Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, only thirteen novels were ever published for the setting, and with some material in the later books clashing with the gaming materials only The Prism Pentad was eventually declared canon.

Over the next two to three years a number of expansions were released for the game, although compared to the likes of Forgotten Realms, this number was relatively modest. However, by late 1995 the setting had become big enough to warrant a make-over, and the second edition Dark Sun campaign setting was released late in that year. This second edition expanded the coverage of the settled lands of Athas to include more lands to the north and rolled the timeline forwards by ten years. Unfortunately, fan reaction was largely negative because the setting's dark and gritty feel was scaled back and a number of core concepts, such as the evil sorcerer-kings who dominated the lands, were removed. To a lot of fans, Dark Sun lost its edge and they either dropped it or simply ignored the developments in the second edition.

The 2nd Edition Dark Sun boxed set, released in 1995.

Unfortunately, Dark Sun, whilst a popular setting with its fanbase, never reached the sales of Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, and with TSR entering severe financial difficulties around 1996, the decision was made to drop the setting. The last TSR expansion for the game was released in late 1996.

Whilst this lack of development means that the setting was never as detailed as some others, it also meant that a lot more of the world was left up to the DM's creativity to flesh out. Dark Sun fans also found it a lot easier to collect together a 'complete' collection of Dark Sun materials, with only 23 gaming products and nine adventures to the line's name contrasted to the many hundreds for Forgotten Realms or dozens for Dragonlance.

Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR and a 3rd Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was launched in 2000. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk were resurrected and a new setting, Eberron, developed. Planescape was absorbed into the core of the game. Ravenloft and Dragonlance were licensed out to third-party companies to develop and less popular settings, such as Spelljammer and Mystara, were quietly dropped. However, Dark Sun remained in a rather odd state of limbo. Whilst not as popular as the 'big' settings, it was also not as obscure as the others and had a devoted fanbase. Eventually Dragon Magazine ran some articles on the setting and the fan group at Athas.org was given official permission to develop the setting for D&D 3rd Edition. Despite this, no further game products in the line were released.

The new Dark Sun campaign setting hardcover book, due for release in mid-2010.

However, in August 2009 Wizards of the Coast announced that Dark Sun would be resurrected in the summer of 2010 (fourteen years after the last 'proper' release of new material) as the third campaign setting for the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition game, which they hinted would ignore the less popular developments from the 1995 boxed set in favour of the grittier and more hardcore original setting, news that was welcomed by many fans.

Fanon world map of Athas, with the Tablelands located on the far eastern continent.

The World of Dark Sun

Thousands of years in the past, Athas was a green and verdant world until it was ravaged by a series of genocidal wars launched by the sorcerer Rajaat and his champions to wipe out all non-human races. In the magical conflicts that followed, the planet was stripped of most of its water and plant life, and many non-human races (including D&D mainstays such as orcs) were rendered extinct. Such was the effects of this cataclysm that Athas was sealed off from the rest of the multiverse, no gods were able to influence the world (though it remains unclear if Athas once had a traditional pantheon or not) and planar travel was made impossible. Rajaat's champions eventually rebelled against him, imprisoning him, and then ruled over the shattered remnants of the world through an uneasy compact.

The Tablelands of Athas, with the Tyr region in the centre along the mountain range.

The main setting for the Dark Sun campaign is an area called the Tablelands, a vast plateau extending for several hundred miles that is located several hundred feet above the surrounding lands: a vast savanna to the west, a dead wasteland to the south and the treacherous Sea of Silt to the east. The Tablelands are dominated by nine great city-states, the largest of which is Tyr, which typically acts as a home base for player-characters setting out to explore the world. Tyr is also in an uneasy state as its ruler was slain in a rebellion some years ago and the other cities are considering moving against it to restore the rule of the sorcerer-kings. Only their mutual distrust and lack of cooperation has prevented this from happening so far. In the meantime, the people of Tyr enjoy a relatively unusual level of freedom.

The world is parched and arid. There are very few open bodies of water left, and rainfall is all but unknown, certainly in the Tyr region. Metals are also incredibly rare. Ordinary metal weapons and armour have the status of major relics, whilst there are probably fewer than a dozen magical metal weapon or armour items on the entire planet. Armour and weapons are instead made of wood or obsidian, whilst ceramic disks serve as coins and currency. The lands are extremely dangerous, with even the relatively well-travelled regions around Tyr and the other big cities still prone to infestations of monsters, ravaging bands of savages and attacks by bandit groups. Due to the dangers of travel, trade is even more valuable and the opportunities for adventure are great. The world is also littered with the ruins of the ancient past, lost cities, abandoned temples to the elements and so on, and many secrets about the world remain to be discovered.


Evaluation

I quite like Dark Sun but regrettably never got round to playing it. The Mad Max/Fallout-esque vibe to the setting, mixed in with a bit of Dune, is great stuff, very different to the other, more traditional D&D settings. The idea of a post-magical apocalypse where the bad guy actually succeeded in blowing up the world is also compelling, something rarely explored in fiction (although Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy nods in this idea's direction), let alone gaming. Part of me does wish that the original idea to kick out all the elves, dwarves and traditional D&D races altogether had been followed through, but the changes to those races in this setting do work quite well.

It'll be interesting to see the setting's return as a 4th Edition game world. The psionic rules for both 2E and 3E were problematic and 4E's rules set-up does seem a much better fit for defiling, preserving and psionics. However, there are concerns that WotC will attempt to shoe-horn 4E's new races (the dragonborn and eladrin) and the basic classes (including the bard and paladin) into the setting where there is really no place for them. It'll certainly be intriguing to see how they handle these issues when the new book comes out in mid-2010.