Political Intrigue

Come on guys... no opinions on Birthright?

Thanks for the note. I pulled this from the www.birthright.net site: Birthright was originally set up by TSR for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition ruleset. It is now the property of Wizards of the Coast, who have let the fan community at www.birthright.net develop a Dungeons & Dragons Edition 3.5 version (commonly called the BRCS) with their blessing.

So is this a list of new races/classes/worlds or is Birthright supposed to be an entirely new game?

It is an old Campaign Setting like Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Eberron, Forgotten Realms, etc. I would be surprised if WotC chose to pick Birthright since it has given the setting to the community to develop. Also, here is a 5E conversion someone made already boldpueblo.com/downloads/5e/5e-birthright-conversion.pdf haven't had much experience with it myself, but pretty interesting how it was given to the people.

I'm no George R. R. Martin, so I'm not very good at adding deeper political intrigue to my game on my own. Does Birthright have rules for this?

Actually, I've heard quite a few people who have said they'd like Birthright to be brought back as another officially published D&D campaign setting, but I don't really know much about the setting itself. What does Birthright do that sets it apart from other campaign settings? What makes it unique? Why should I want to play it? I've heard some mentions of large-scale battles being a possible focus of a potential 5th Edition Birthright campaign setting, or perhaps kingdom management. Is that what Birthright does? Or is it just another vanilla world with different lore?

For example, the Dark Sun campaign setting is unique because it's a post-apocalyptic magic-less D&D setting with a heavy focus on psionics. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Eberron is an extremely magic-heavy campaign setting, including magepunk type technologies such as the lightning rail (trains that levitate over lightning-infused stones), airships held aloft by bound elementals, and the warforged, a race of sentient constructs. The Planescape campaign setting focuses on traveling to different planes of existence--including other D&D worlds--via portals, whereas the Spelljammer campaign setting allows travel between D&D worlds via D&D in space.

On the other hand, there are campaign settings like Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk that, other than lore and locations specific to their respective worlds, I'm not sure what any of them actually do differently. In my experience, they all seem to be pretty vanilla fantasy settings, albeit regular vanilla, french vanilla, vanilla bean and soft serve. Assign them as you will. Now, there's nothing wrong with plain vanilla. Plenty of people love it. Forgotten Realms is probably the most popular campaign setting of all, if TSR's and WotC's product lines are any indication. I just don't see anything other than the incredible depth and breadth of lore devoted to this world as distinguishing it from any other generic fantasy setting. Of course, the lore can make a setting pretty amazing, too.

So, why Birthright? Obviously it's a setting you're passionate about, so it must be a setting worth something. I don't really know anything about it, but I would like to.

From my experience, this is how I see them:

Greyhawk = regular vanilla
Forgotten Realms = french vanilla
Mystara = vanilla bean
Dragonlance = soft serve

These are completely arbitrary decisions, made in the heat of the moment. I'm not entirely set on the pairings for Mystara and Dragonlance, though. Only picked Mystara for vanilla bean because the two Capcom arcade games for D&D were set in Mystara, and Dragonlance seems the softest of the campaign settings to me. But the limit of my knowledge of Mystara starts with Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and ends with Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. My Greyhawk knowledge is limited to my time in the RPGA, with Living Greyhawk. Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance I'm pretty familiar with over several editions.

...Though it could derail the topic entirely if we start pairing vanillas (vanilli? vanillae? vanillasauruses?) with campaign settings, I'll hazard a return question: how would you order them?

An extra shot of what? Can't give vanilla any more vanilla...