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Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters

Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters is a 96-page softback that explains some of the behind the scenes thought processes of the Wizards of the Coast design team's work on D&D Fourth Edition (hereafter, 4e). There aren't "rules you can use" in this book; it's designed purely as a 4e preview and a kind of "DVD extra". (Well, a DVD extra you pay $19.95 for.)

Style

Well edited, good graphic design, some art pieces. Nothing that I'm going to frame, but up to pro quality standards.

Substance

First, you have to buy into the concept that you are getting a book that's nothing but designer thoughts during the earlier stages of putting 4e together. If you're looking for an RPG, then this is Substance 0 - Run Screaming. If you are looking for preview details of 4e, it's better; though there's little in it that hasn't been rehashed in the ENWorld forums, and you can probably get more up to date info on the Wizards site in their Design & Development column. Really, this is mainly useful for game design hobbyists to see behind the mask of the designers - how they did what they did and why they did it, in order to do good design yourself or to take 4e in the spirit it's intended.

I'll put in my two cents as to whether I think some of the decisions are sound, but won't dwell on the "D&D 4e: Threat or Menace?" question. There's many a message board for that.

Monsters

After a page and a half of intro, the first thing they talk about is how they took a look at the existing monsters. They used their new "roles" theory to divide them up into more functional areas (lurker, mastermind, artillery...) and evaluate the old monsters versus those. I worry a little that this will cause the monster mix to migrate towards only those super-specialized in one of their concept roles. They mention chopping the achaierai and delver straight off as goofy. Heavily occupied niches were trimmed, or in cases like humanoids (gnoll, orc, goblin, bugbear, etc.) they put more work into giving them different character so that a fight with a batch of orcs feels different from a fight with a batch of gnolls, which is a very welcome focus.

Also, and this segues into the worlds discussion, they embrace the addition of "flavor bits" - these aren't truly generic rules. Not that they've ever been in D&D; there was always a wide number of assumptions about the game world encoded into the game. Here they do the same, giving the example that elves originate in the Feywild, and that's a core rule thing not a setting specific thing.

James Wyatt talks about a revelation taken from the minis game (that phrase made my colon clench, but turns out it's OK) that the default party-on-one-monster paradigm should change to a group-on-group paradigm for the average encounter. I don't know that my D&D campaigns have suffered from this much, but that's fine to say. They do talk about balancing the roles with mixed groups of monsters, which is also fine but I hope is taken in moderation. Every monster entry will be two pages and they're sticking to "a monster per page," no splitting pages over monsters.

Some of their design decisions are ascribed to the later Monster Manuals - the roles and statting up different monster variants (orc archer, orc bloodrager, orc...). I'm a little concerned about that because I saw a good bit of blowback against the MMIV and MMV specifically for these reasons; being formulaic and wasting page space with "Oh, here's a vampire with fighter levels! Did you know you could do that?" "Yes, and thanks for charging me $1 for telling me something I already knew."

Worlds

Matthew Sernett talks about the key conceits they believe should underlie any D&D setting, including "the world is more fantastic," "the world is ancient," "the world is mysterious," "monsters exist all over," "creatures need a place in the world," "adventurers are exceptional," "magic is not everyday but it is natural," "good and evil mean more," "remote gods," "one sun one moon," "no forced race relations," "death matters differently [with level]," "fantastic locations," and "less evil fighting evil."

This is interesting in that they openly claim these are tenets, and I quote, that "should be true for anyone creating a D&D world." It's also interesting that they directly contravene most of the old, established campaign worlds - I can pull out at least 3 of each of these that are anti-Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Dark Sun... Anything but Eberron, and even that's debatable. As a logical result, they passed on all these for the default world of 4e and instead have a kind of metasetting they refer to as "points of light", which is kind of a metasetting of some bits of described locales in a big mix-n-match world up to the DM. Humans aren't in charge of the world, and places aren't divided up neatly into political lines. On the plus side, this is a boon to the people who want to buy a new adventure from some random company and just drop it in without worrying about how the included map fits into their world. On the minus side, they pretty much come out and say that they deliberately don't support settings whose concepts deviate from this. Real-world analogues are deliberately jettisoned - they don't want more historic polearms, they want new fantastic weapons. Interesting, in that one of the claims to D&D being "good" over time has been that it is educational and encourages research into history.

The next big change they talk about is in cosmology. For years, D&D has had what's known as the Great Wheel. Etheral leads to Elemental, Astral leads to Outer, including Arcadia, the Nine Hells, the Abyss, Mechanus, Arborea, and more. They have totally eliminated this in favor of a more dualsitic method.

The "world" (not prime material plane) is mirrored by the naughty Shadowfell (ethereal + plane of shadow) and more luvverly Feywild (faerie realm + arborea). "Beneath" the world is the Elemental Chaos and in that, the Abyss, home of demons. "Above" the world is the astral sea, leading to various islandlike divine realms like Celestia and the Nine Hells. And then there's the Far Realm, aka "Lovecraftland." These three areas are also targeted at the three levels of PC (heroic, paragon, epic).

So this is a fine design - it's interesting how much they are deliberately cutting off "all that has come before" in 4e, however.

Next Chris Sims talks more about the world. It's much more dualistic than before as well. Conflict between the "good guys" (PC races) is deliberately quelled. Non one would be unwelcome in any "point of light." Rough edges are OK, but all the "good guy" races get along and the "evil" forces don't fight each other in Blood Wars.

Bruce Cordell goes through a bunch of the "fallen empires" - sources of mucho ruins and new PC races. The ruined tiefline empire, ruined dragonborn empire, and the last human empire, Nerath. They are also deliberately trying to increase "shared experience" by adding iconic locations that peopel can remember, like the Tomb of Horrors or Castle Ravenloft, but as part of the generic setting. So all PCs might get to go to "Razortear" or "the Serpentus Rift." They even steal the Temple of Elemental Evil from Greyhawk.

Monsters, Again

Now they look into some specific monsters. Dragons are first, which are designed as a "solo" monster, which is a different beefed-up monster type specially designed to take on a whole party. (WoW fans may substitute "elite" here.) So dragons have loads of immediate reaction types of abilities. They've reduced the ability "laundry lists" so that even an experience dragon has like 5 things to do, but they try to make those more iconic. They pared down the metallic dragons (bye, brass, bronze and copper) and they're "not all good."

Giants get tied into a world-creation mythology explaining their dwarf enmity and servants of the titans roles as part of the game world. They're larger and more "weird" now - a mountain giant isn't a big person who lives in mountains, it's a huge vaguely humanoid mountain chunk.

Worlds, Again

Next various designers talk about each of the new world and planar elements.

The Underdark is there and largely unchanged. The new Feywild makes all fae more "dangerous" and similar to their roles in lore, not happy nature dudes but something to dread encountering. They all look much more inhuman - you don't want to bone the new dryad.

The Shadowfell, interestingly, is a stopping place for souls leaving the world. After that, souls mostly don't eve go to the gods' dominions but just go "away." The shadowfell is Ethereal, Plane of Shadow, and Negative Material rolled into one. Undead-a-riffic! They also make a big deal about the shadar-kai, which I've never known anyone to care about.

The elemental chaos is all the elemental planes brought together into, you know, chaos. Elementals, efreet and djinn, demons and slaadi hang out here. And the titans retired here.

One of the happy things they stress several times is that there's not a need for "bogus parallelism". Same elementals in the same sizes, four genie types tied to the four elements, etc.

Demons are more of a force for destruction now - not divine, and even demon lords are meant to be potential opponents for PCs. As a result, the succubus has become a devil - demons aren't into tempting and all that, they like to, in the immortal words of the Hulk, "Smash!" The neutral evil yugoloths, which were daemons back in the day, now are demons, albeit more mercenary and organized than your average demon.

The Astral Plane. "We kept it cause we had to keep the gods apart, but it's a boring place to go."

The gods. They've crafted a new core pantheon with gods that they thought were a good idea. Bahamut and Tiamat aren't "dragon gods" any more, they're core. Lolth, Moradin, Kord, Corellon, Pelor, Ioun, Asmodeus, Torog, the Raven Queen, and Bane are in. Hextor, Ares, Maglubiyet, and Chauntea are out.

Angels. They finally grew a pair and stopped with the archon/deva/eladrin nonsense and are calling them angels. Angels are just servants of the gods, so they're not all good. Evil gods may use demons and devils but they're outside that god's hierarchy.

Devils. These are now focused on tempting. Asmodeus is a full fledged god. Levistus is actually the archdevil mostly into scheming in the world.

The Far Realm. Yes, Lovecraftworld is now official. An interesting aside in here is that monster types and origins are separate - if something has two arms and legs it's "humanoid", but could be an aberrant humanoid from the Far Realm, or natural, fey, elemental... Anyway, mind flayers, aboleths, etc. come from the Far Realm now. (Heck, they did back in my 2e campaigns even.) I'm all about Lovecraftian elements, but I'm concerned that turning it into a defined "plane," the Far Realm, makes it too known a quantity and not any more mysterious or scary than any other plane. Prosaic and fitting into the cosmology, rather than a poorly known or understood thing that lies outside it.

They burn the last couple pages on reprinting blog posts and a bunch of random staff thoughts on various things related to this. Some are cool, some are blah.

Summary

Definitely interesting reading. The rules aren't the only things changing dramatically in 4e; arguably the "fluff" is being affected more than the "crunch." Not sure it's worth $20, but if you can pick it up secondhand and you're either planning to play 4e or are unsure and want to find out more about the changes and the game direction behind the changes, it's a helpful preview until 4e comes out.