Forgotten Realms
This is a high fantasy setting where you’re going to see all the content (almost) from Wizards of the Coast coming out in. It’s your typical fantasy setting where Dwarves act like Dwarves and Elves act like Elves. This setting can be seen as a little bit vanilla in how standard it is, but it also makes it an amazing jumping off point for new players because it has a level of familiarity to it. The main cities in the Forgotten Realms are going to be Waterdeep and Baldur’s Gate.

Eberron
Eberron is a very different setting than your typical fantasy setting. Magic is basically used as technology in this world. And it isn’t just a world where you have your standard races that you can play, there are shifters, changlings, and monstrous races that you can play as well. What also makes this setting unique is that the setting and call the adventures are set after this great war has ended when a country wiped off the map do to some cataclysm, but it’s never stated what it is, so it leaves it open for players and DM’s to decide for their campaign. The setting is very pulp and noir in it’s feel.

Ravenloft
Another different sort of setting where it’s less your standard fantasy setting and more focused on a Victorian Gothic setting. It is also going to be focused on a lower level of magic. The land is ruled by a vampire, Strahd, that is basically locked into the cursed land and most adventures set in Ravenloft are going to be about finding out Strahd’s history and then dealing with him. In 5th Edition the Curse of Strahd adventure pulls players from the Forgotten Realms and sticks them into this setting that is different than the world that they know and they are stuck there until they can defeat Strahd, if they ever leave.

Dragonlance
One of the first, if not the first D&D setting, Dragonlance is going to be another epic fantasy setting. The world is greatly influenced by the deities and a lot of the stories revolve around the good deities fighting the evil deities or the return of dragons after centuries of absence. It’s going to be much more in the standard version of fantasy and another good jumping off world that you could use to introduce Dungeons and Dragons.

Grey Hawk
As compared to the epic fantasy settings, Grey Hawk is more of a sword and sorcery setting. It is going to be darker and more dangerous for your characters. Magic is going to be less common than some settings. Grey Hawk is more of a world that is on it’s way out and the adventures that you might be more about keeping the world going versus bringing the world into a new great place which some Epic Fantasy stories can focus on more so.

Spelljammer
Now, if you want something completely different. Spelljammer is kind of a setting, but it can hit up most settings as you have magically powered space ships. This is going to be a game where you want to hop between a lot of worlds, have grand space exploration sort of adventures, versus a more traditional traveling adventure like Lord of the Rings. It really isn’t something that they’d call it’s own setting anymore, but it’s something that you could easily focus on to move between the worlds in your own campaign.

Dark Sun
This used to be a great world, but now, magic has defiled and the land and use of magic can make it even worse. And there is a god-like Sorcerer King who is ruling and can you stay out of their wrath or will they crush you and your party as you try to survive the harsh lands. Dark Sun is going to be a lower magic game that is much more focused on the survival throughout the lands and avoiding the halflings who are jungle cannibals. There are some new races that you can play in this setting as well and one of the biggest types of magic is psionics.

Birthright
If you want to play that extremely epic nation level game, Birthright is going to be the setting of you. In Birthright every player is going to be connected to a nation and have some sort of royal blood. These campaigns are going to be more about that nation ruling, epic wars, versus that smaller adventuring party. Birthright is a setting you’re going to have to come up with or tweak combat for to make it done at a bigger scale.

Planescape
This setting wraps several planes of existence into a single setting. It also takes it out of the normal medieval fantasy setting and puts it into a more Victorian and pseudo-steam punk world. There is a city of Sigil which is the home base for the players and is generally where you are going to be sending them out to the other planes to have their adventures and then returning back to Sigil to resupply, recover, and get new adventures.

Now, that’s just the start of Dungeons and Dragons settings. There are new ones being created as well as old ones that might come back. Most of these settings don’t have official books for fifth edition, but if you find older world setting books, you’d be able to turn them into something that you can use in 5e.

Do you have a favorite setting or is there a setting that you’ve really wanted to play in?

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Are you ready for your first mission?

That’s the simple pitch of T.I.M.E. Stories, a board game in which you play as agents of this organization who are going back in time or across the multiverse to stop catastrophic events from happening. You start out as rookie agents, and you are given a mission to go back to an insane asylum in 1920s France. There is some event that is going to take place there, and you have to unravel the mystery and figure out how to stop it. Each character’s consciousness is placed into a receptacle — in this case, so as not to raise suspicions, the receptacles are some of the asylum’s patients. Now you are racing against the clock to solve the mystery and stop the time event from happening. The good news is that if your receptacle dies or you run out of time and have to be sent back to your own body, you can always jump back to the same spot in time and try again, but those trips aren’t cheap, and it will affect your overall score.

As you can imagine, there are some crazy things going on and twists and turns that you need to figure out over the course of the game. And if you’re like the team that we took in, there are going to be clues and puzzles that you just get stumped on. T.I.M.E. Stories reminds me some of the Unlock and Exit games, which are essentially escape rooms in a box. While those are focused on escaping most of the time, this game is focused on solving a mystery. And while Unlock and Exit are limited in their scope and storytelling, T.I.M.E. Stories can tell a story through multiple locations and the events that unfold. There are a few other unique things about T.I.M.E. Stories, the first being the game-saving system. We didn’t use this, but it is possible to save the game partway through playing so that you can pick it back up again later — this is made possible with the way the box has been created and laid out. The second thing is the multiple run system that you can employ if you run out of time or if all the characters die. This gives it more of a video game feel than with Unlock or Exit, because with those, you just go until you are done and then you are done with the game for good. With T.I.M.E. Stories, it would be possible to play multiple sessions with no problem.

Finally, one of the cool things I want to talk about is the scenario we played, the Asylum scenario. This is the one that comes in the base game, and it is meant to get you up to speed. It can still be tricky, however, so don’t take it lightly. There are also a lot more scenarios for the game out there to be purchased, and I’m excited to get some of them soon, because I’m ready to play again. These scenarios are all over the map, with some seemingly set in Ancient Egypt, a fantasy world, and the year 1992. This is one of the coolest aspects of the game to me, because the possibilities for scenarios is pretty limitless because of this. And the fact that it’s a board game, with a board, decks of cards, combats, challenges, etc., makes it feel more substantial and meaty than the Unlock and Exit games.

Let’s talk a little bit about your receptacle and the stats that you have to play around with, which are based on the scenario. In the Asylum (and all of this is outside-of-the-box stuff that you will know before you start playing, so these details aren’t spoilers), I was placed first into a cocaine addict and then a cannibal girl. Each character has special abilities, as well as some stats; for example, deftness, glibness, and strength(ness). You use strength to fight and probably break open stuff, glibness for all the talking (and sweet-talking) you do, and deftness for stealing things, rummaging around looking for clues, things of that nature. You roll dice with the hope of rolling as many blue stars, or successes, as possible, and of avoiding the red skulls, or failures/damage. If you are up against a dangerous foe, they can do damage to you — just a point at a time, but you don’t have many life points to start with. If the number of red skulls you roll combined with the number of red skull shields the enemy has is higher than your character’s defense number, your character will take a hit. This gives the game a logical way to have a character die, and there’s a good way for characters to come back, too — the dead character comes back in automatically after 7 more time units have been spent. This makes it so no one is sitting out of the game too long; that person can still take part in the discussion, as well.

Next, let’s talk about time units. I covered most of how the game works in the previous paragraph, but there is another key part to this game, and that is the time units. You spend time moving around the scenario’s map — in this case, you’re exploring the various rooms and grounds of the asylum. The group moves as one unit, which is maybe not an ideal part of the game, but it allows players to take each turn as a group so that everyone is involved, which is an ideal part of the game. These rooms are split into several cards — by spending one time unit, you can explore aroom, placing as many people at a location as you want, but you can only explore one card per pawn, and you determine where your pawn goes in the room. You might want to explore the same room multiple times, and each time you go to another part of the room, you have to spend another time unit. So that’s one way you have the clock counting down on you, but the other way is that when you move locations, you roll a die to see how much time you spend — it’s possible to get only a single time unit knocked off as you change rooms, but it’s also possible you’ll lose up to three. But that’s part of the stress of the game, and one of the strengths is that you have a timer that you can watch count down.

Finally, one thing I wanted to touch on is the multiple runs. I know I mentioned this before, but want to explain it more fully here. When we played, we had to play the scenario three times in a row to be able to beat it (a.k.a., we did poorly at the game). But the game is fast to reset between times playing, and once we failed the mission a second time, even though we’d been playing for a while, we wanted to finish it off. All in all, I think it took us about three hours to play through the scenario three times, which isn’t bad. In the future, I would be very tempted to split it up so that the third play doesn’t just happen immediately, because it did get a little bit long, as we already knew a lot of the story by that point. However, that did allow us to speed through some of the first part and just select a few things to do and a few to skip, until we realized that the things we’d skipped might be important as well. So if you have a gaming group that regularly gets together, with up to four people in said group, T.I.M.E. Stories scenarios could easily be played over multiple sessions.

This is a very good game. The pieces are nice, and the game itself if very aesthetically pleasing. I don’t really have any knock against the mechanics, as they make a lot of sense as to how they work. T.I.M.E. Stories also falls somewhere between roleplaying and a board game. If you wanted to, since you are inhabiting a receptacle in the game, you could pull a Jack Black from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and really get into character, acting like a person inhabiting the body of another person. I think most people would enjoy this game; however, I can see it having some adult themes at times, and I know with the most recent scenario, they did warn people about that. It is also a pretty intense game in a great way, but it could be too stressful for some people. Overall, though, I would recommend this game, and if you are turned off by the price of it and the expansions, see if you can find two groups who want to use the same copy of the game, and that will make the cost a whole lot more palatable.

Overall Grade: A
Casual Grade: B
Gamer Grade: B+

Have you had a chance to play T.I.M.E. Stories before? If so, how did you like the game? If not, does it seem like something that would interest you?

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