Neverwinter, the Jewel of the North, no longer glitters and glistens with life, trade, activity and gold. Now it is a shattered city full of intrigue and danger and the new Neverwinter Campaign Setting is written to put you in control of your own version of Neverwinter instead of dictating the terms of your game. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting book is 223 pages of foundation on which to build your own story.
What Wizards of the Coast has done with the Neverwinter Campaign setting has given an excellent framework, an infrastructure if you will, for you to run a campaign there. While previous attempts at this have ended up reading like encyclopedia entries, the new Neverwinter Campaign setting reads more lika a CIA Worldbook entry for an area that is in flux with many factions stil lvying for control and trying to rebuild Neverwinter to their own advantage.
That intricate and delicate balance creates an excellent web that you can weave your own campaign into with ease. If you haven’t been following along, as I have since I’ve been out of D&D for a while, you will have a lot of reading to catch up on so that you know what has been going on in Neverwinter.
The Neverwinter Campaign setting provides you with a lot of that information, but it’s far from complete and so you will need to do some additional research to be a fully informed Dungeonmaster for a campaign there. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with things as far away as Thay, where not much seems to have changed, and as close as Mt Hotenow - the recently re-awakend volcano nearby.
On top of that, you are given dossiers on a wide range of people that you can use to populate your campaign. In things like the old Forgotten Realms books you were given the briefest of backgrounds and stats on potential NPCs and people of power. Now you are given a glimpse into their motivations and style of operation as well as 4e stats blocks which makes them much easier to utilize as tools in your campaign.
However, those characters are only easy to import into a 4e campaign and you will have to do a bit of work to get them into an earlier version. This is something that Wizards really needs to work on. In the book "Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons" the author states that there is no D&D version police and you are free to play in whatever version you and your group like most.
