Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General DND SETTING RUNOFF POLL

As the other poll exceeds 70 votes, I am deciding to do a runoff of the top two. Which would you like to see Larian tackle next with this engine?

Setting Preference single choice
	Planescape: Esoteric and weird plane-hopping.
	Ravenloft: Gothic Horror inspired by its classics, with Strahd.
Votes accepted starting: 18/07/23 05:57 PM You must vote before you can view the results of this poll.

Farewell, Spelljammer, you will be missed.

I wanted to put spelljammer, as it was my #2, but I couldn’t justify putting my finger on the scale like that.

"Rabenhorst" !

Ravenloft, I love Vampires plus Strahd von Zarovich is the closest thing to Dracula in D&D.

I don't feel informed enough to answer. I'm familiar with Ravenloft, but don't know anything about Planescape other than it's apparently about traveling around the planes of existence, which seems kind of overly ambitious, doesn't it?

Anyway, I'm voting for Ravenloft because I know what it is, and I could see it being fun.

(Although another part of Forgotten Realms makes *a lot* more sense to me.)

Planescape would be closest to Larian's style and weird sense humor, so that's where my vote goes.

I'm no fan of the 5E version of Ravenloft, with all it's changes for the sake of "diversity". They should have left the old Darklords alone and just added a couple new domains with appropriate darklords.

Fascinating how close it is, but not enough people have voted.

Also what changes were made to Ravenloft for diversity?

I voted Planescape. Ravenloft has always felt closed-in and claustrophobic while Planescape literally opens up the entire multiverse.

They changed the gender of some Darklords and completely rewrote some of them. For example Falkovnia is now ruled by Vladeska Drakov (in 3.x Falkovnia's ruler was Vlad Drakov), another such change was made to Dementlieu and to a few other domains. It was, at least to me, all extremely heavy-handed and generally not explained with in-setting events. They also changed the Vistani a lot.

All in all, I prefer the 3.x version of the setting.

Let me guess, the Vistani are no longer gypsies that want to steal from you or curse you? xD

I vote Rifts.

Well... they are sort of gypsies in so far that they still travel and are mainly outcasts. But yeah, you're basically correct ... can't have a nasty cliché in a modern game after all.

The Vistani were kinda a racist caricature though...

It's a fictional game with a fictional world and a fictional story, worrying about real world issues withing a game makes no sense.

Nobody is going to play a game where everyone is happy and fair and just and there's no conflict and everybody is equal because it's not fun.

Slavery is bad, no one wants slavery to be a thing in the real world, but I have 0 problems having it on games, same for racism. Can't drow hate elves because it's not PC? come on xD

Friendly note, I think this might be slipping into "making work for the moderators" territory, and I'd hate to see this thread locked 😀

@Adgaroth:

Except it's not in-universe fantasy racism. That's not what I am talking about. The Vistani were based on a pejorative stereotype of the Romani people, stereotypes which ultimately contributed to the genocide of over 250,000 people during the Romani Holocaust. They were portrayed as inherently evil, shady, curse-dealing nomads. That's ripped straight from some of the most hateful stereotypes about Romani peoples.

My Vote Is Greyhawk!!!!

So what? Sure, they were based on clichés (like most of the cultures in Ravenloft) but they were thematically fitting and the VR Guide to Vistani gave them a lot of background.

Let's face it, many cultures in fantasy and D&D in particular are caricatures of real world cultures. There's nothing wrong with that, it makes it a lot easier for us to relate to them.

It's wrong when certain cultures are portrayed as necessarily more evil and shady than others, and when those kinds of stereotypes led to the actual slaughter of actual peoples, and when it's really obvious which culture the "evil" one is supposed to be.