Seriously, Who Makes Blank Hex-Grid Paper?

I've had more time to read through the DMG. The first section is entitled Master of Worlds, and it contains the first two chapters.

The first chapter, "A World of Your Own" is filled with world-building and campaign building advice. It includes discussions of things like Deep Immersion Role-playing v. Kick in the Door play styles, different flavors of fantasy (such as heroic fantasy or dark fantasy, and even includes bits on things like mystery games or games focused on war), and advice on structuring an over-arching campaign structure. It's a lot of broad strokes stuff.

Most interesting, it has a section on mapping your world using hex paper. The advice has you make multiple maps with an expanding scale if you're doing a bottom-up design (make the starting area first then build the world as the PCs travel there, basically). It's pretty decent advice, but read the title of the post. I know I could probably look it up, but if you know a place already, feel free to post it in the comments. If I ever have spare cash, I might even buy some of that hex-grid paper.

The second chapter is "Creating a Multiverse," which talks about building the various planes that make up a D&D world's cosmology. It then discusses the planes that make up the basic D&D cosmology, including the Shadowfell, the Feywild, the Elemental Planes, the Ethereal and Astral, and the various basic outer planes listed in the PHB appendices. It also talks about the Outlands and Sigil, because Sigil is awesome. It has plenty of optional rules to make planar travel more hazardous/interesting. Some of the rules seem to hearken back to older editions and include fun things like alignment changes.

Between these two chapters, pretty much all of the previously extent D&D settings have gotten some mention and even example time. This includes the Dawn War (the default setting for 4e), Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Mystara, Dragonlance, Eberron, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Planescape. Even the shorter lived ones like Birthright and Spelljammer got a mention. I'm more familiar with Spelljammer, which was D&D IN SPACE! From what I learned Birthright was D&D with superpowers. It remains to be seen if any of these get a full write up and future releases. So far, the only one signs point to definite is the Forgotten Realms. The two preview adventures (Murder in Baldur's Gate and Legacy of the Crystal Shard) and the first two adventure releases (The Tyranny of Dragons line) used the Forgotten Realms, and it dominates the example lists in the core books.

As a fan of the Forgotten Realms, I'm all for it. Though I do enjoy Eberron's more steam punk feel and have run a fun Dark Sun campaign in the past. I enjoyed the chronicles novels for Dragonlance, but never got to play that setting. I did play some third edition Ravenloft, both the OGL version done by White Wolf and the updated version of the Castle Ravenloft module. Of course, Planescape material (the Outlands, Sigil, and the Blood Wars) has migrated into core products anyway. So if anyone at Wizards is reading this, see if you can fit as many of those as possible into the schedule. And maybe some of the others, too.

Well, I will keep reading the DMG and post more about it.