Favorite Official Campaign Setting?

[Libertad]

As in one published by either TSR or Wizards of the Coast. It could be a setting originally created by another person or franchise but if published through the aforementioned 2 companies it counts.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Do we have to have played in it to vote for it?

[Libertad]

Do we have to have played in it to vote for it?

Do you know how many gamers out there use sourcebooks primarily as bathroom reading material?

No, you don't need to play in it. A setting's quality exists independent of the GM.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

No. No I do not know that.

[Libertad]

I'd also never intentionally touch the book of a gamer who took said book into a bathroom stall, so this is another good reason why online tabletop's a godsend.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I learned to read playing the old AD&D computer games, and of all of them the two Dark Sun games and the Al-Qadim game were definitely my favorites. I... don't actually know a ton about what Dark Sun is actually like. I haven't read the novels, and I've only skimmed some 3rd and 4th edition books. But the picture I have of "Dark Sun" in my head is super cool. Likewise, The Genie's Curse gave me a lingering fondness for middle-eastern fantasy tropes even though I have a very tenuous idea what the "real" setting is actually about. And Neverwinter Nights / Baldur's Gate were neat.

Eberron... I know there have been some games set there, but none with a huge personal WOW factor. I do like the fact that the 5E version forces more accessible magic and interesting factions into the bland fantasy porridge of their take on the Forgotten Realms, and I HAVE read and enjoyed some Eberron novels.

I think I'll settle on Dark Sun in the end, both because it's the most distinct of the 3 settings I can think of offhand and because the themes of ecological ruin are more relevant to us today than ever before.

[Thaluikhain]

Spelljammer. Though, mostly from the really old video game of dubious quality. And the 6 book Cloakmaster series cycle of varying quality.

The idea is pretty cool, but getting it to work well seemed beyond them, the rules are disappointing if you stop to look at them too much.

[Libertad]

In light of someone mentioning Spelljammer, I also realize that I did not put Ravenloft on the list.

While I planned to put more settings on here, I got a response that I had too many poll choices and had to cut back a bit. I may make a new poll if there's interest or enough Ravenloft fans here to rectify this mistake.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I think I'll settle on Dark Sun in the end, both because it's the most distinct of the 3 settings I can think of offhand and because the themes of ecological ruin are more relevant to us today than ever before.

I settled on Dark Sun because Brom kicks fucking ass.

[Iduno]

I have heard Al-Qadim was better than expected.

[deaddmwalking]

I have heard Al-Qadim was better than expected.

I like it decently well (and I generally dislike the Forgotten Realms).

The setting is more or less explicitly based on 1001 Arabian Nights, which helps avoid a lot of the potential controversies with using historical peoples and persons. In the stories, there are at least dozens of kings and many far-off-kingdoms - the stories don't spend a lot of time trying to make it clear where a particular kingdom might be located, and it freely incorporates fantastic elements. Basically, it's a good literary basis for a D&D setting - unlike the LotR where the quest to destroy the one ring is the only really obvious adventure seed, an Arabian Nights setting lends itself to actual adventures.

Effectively, unlike many settings which tried to either be pseudo-medieval or a pastiche of LotR, the setting had liberty to be...fantastic. You don't have to answer the question of what happens when an adventurer returns with 13 metric tons of gold because Sinbad basically did exactly that.

[Libertad]

I've been thinking of doing an OSSR on al-Qadim someday, but all that Dragonlance talk sucked the life out of me and I'm still recovering from Wisdom drain. Even so, I don't regret a single bit of it; my sacrifice is for the greater good.

[MGuy]

My favorite is Eberron or more accurately with what Eberron describes itself as and is supposed to be. Practical magitech, kind of agnostic setting, some different takes on old races, etc etc. There are a lot of bits here and there that I like. I wish that it went further. Fantasy gundams and/or transformers would be nice. So something leaning toward Iron Kingdoms/Dragonmech which I like as well.

I probably like Ravnica but I don't know what they did with it in d20. The only time I ever played MAGIC was during the first Ravnica bloc and I remember being fascinated by it at the time though my memory is very faded.

[tussock]

So Greyhawk is best for historical interest, like the fact Gygax did not think it possible to publish Castle Greyhawk because his megadungeon was way too fucking big for an actual book. Almost everything about it tells you stuff about why the game got like it did. Because of Living Greyhawk, there's endless information about everyone in it, and as PCs you can just take the place over, and you're totally expected to.

Forgotten Realms had some books people liked I guess, because the book guy wrote the world for his books, so it suits particular stories about people who already exist and are not your characters and obviously fucking sucks because of that. But, also, you can just have a massively detailed world everyone has read heaps of fucking backstory on and try to wedge your campaign into the things they already know about, which meh.

Eberron feels like something I wanna like but I keep not liking it. It's vaguely socially progressive for it's time, which is nice, but I dunno, there's just not a hook that I care about, in the whole thing. Nice art, nice world, nick that for somewhere interesting. Yeah sure, lightning rail trails, playable Golems, but why here? "There was a war that has ended and now everyone just gets along" just isn't a good base to play D&D off.

Dragonlance was some books that someone thought you could pull another Realms out of, but it turns out the Realms guy did the world first so that works in some ways for an RPG and doing it the other way is much worse. Sure, the early stories are based on a D&D game, but not this one. None of this helps anything like any of those stories. It's like the game of the book of the story of the game, and translate English into German into French into Russian into English and you get Dragonlance. It's not good for playing.

Planescape is completely fucking amazing. Holy shit. Like, they took the absolute dumpster fire of alignments and half alignments and the great wheel cosmology and the seventeen types of fiends that all kill you instantly and eat your soul and made it a whole thing with gate cities and how you could move around safely sometimes and so it was still all infinite and crazy dangerous but had limited little plot hooks everywhere that let you explore it in relative safety for simple quests and stuff, and connects every other world (that isn't dark sun). It's just genius. And the art is brilliant, totally makes it. That you can chat with Balors in the quest-giver city, like, it wasn't that long after the satanic panic and they just fucking aced that. Literally supports everything you could want to do, though the supplied political factions were sort of ass and they scrapped that later.

Mystara has Shadow Elves and so should all of these other places. Went a whole different direction with monsters and stuff than AD&D, and they're just weirder, which is nice. Like, cat people riding war tigers, and dog people riding horses and gnomes riding blimps. One of their books is for doing WWI style dogfighting airplanes with the faerie folk, just up the road from the roman orgies place the humans hang out. Crazy kitchen sink bullshit, and had playable Orcs and stuff way, way before anyone else. None of it makes sense, but it's glorious about it. Big gonzo energy.

I get they wanted to do another low-level world where the PCs become a big fucking deal just by getting to like 14th level (and for some reason also not reprint Greyhawk) and Birthright is that. The map is so tiny, has no one on it, and they tried to fit like 12 books in it before they went bankrupt. Red Steel stuck all of it on a minor peninsular in Mystara with extra stuff in one book and that was more than it deserved.

The whole Dark Sun thing was, like, they banned clerics which was good, they nerfed wizards which was not the worst either, and everyone started at 3rd level which was fine it turns out, and you rolled up multiple characters and had to keep a stable to fit in quickly when they died which is solid stuff in 2nd edition, and then they also let you play a ST 22 Giant who could disintegrate things with his mind at level 3 beside the poor asshole who didn't roll good stats and had the power to feel light for a few minutes a day that would never even come up, it was just a total clusterfuck. So, yeah, as a world beyond that unique cluster of mechanical fuckery that let you dream about turning into a seriously powerful dragon, it's a huge grind of sand full of giant insects and no one cares.

Ravnica pfft.

Council of Wyrms is not a world. It just isn't. Like, their mechanics for hanging out with dragons didn't work like regular PCs, so they had to say it was a different world, but it's not, it's just for playing dragon PCs in 2nd edition. Which, don't bother, people fapped to darksun dragons, not to this crap.

--

Ravenloft was pretty stupid, it was a module where they had a pocket dimension adventure and the competitor was selling lots of product with the boss of that module in it, so this is if you just shit out 100 different pocket dimensions with vilian of the week in them and hope it sells too. It has some cool stuff in it, but most of that is from the first fucking module and the rest of it never really did that any more and so the whole thing is paint-by-numbers page-filler. Huge potential, actually full of stink.

The Al Quadim thing, is interesting. Obviously from before the war on Islam. But the classes and monsters are quite radical, they changed a whole lot of rules, the "kits" are completely just whole new classes. It's got like unlimited spellcasting and robot hordes and undead PCs and you can just play all that and it actually works pretty damn well. It's genuinely amazing that someone did something this radical with 2nd edition AD&D and it works probably better than the core rules, and it suits the stories and the themes of the world. Like, the classic 1001 nights stories naturally arise out of the class functions and stuff. Very good at what it tried to do. There's, um, the adventures that arise are kinda minor bullshit though, because that's 1001 nights. It's technically solid, but all melodrama.

--

Like, it depends. Star Wars was a pretty cool world for 3e, they actually did something interesting with the mechanics. Lots of the rest of it never did. I voted Planescape because it actually made all of AD&D of the time work, and the mechanics it bought in facilitated everything you could possibly want to do with it, even though parts of it was bad.

[DrPraetor]

I never understood why Dark Sun didn't get official support in 3rd edition (other than a principled commitment to making thri-kreen and half-ogres unplayable.)

As a setting it's aged well, and it successfully navigates a lot of the wandering mercenary murderhobo tropes.

[souran]

Greyhawk is a perfectly serviceable world for a default D&D setting, except that the world has not had any real traction in almost 40 years. 3rd edition making it the pseudo default didn't really work because FR had supplanted the setting so thoroughly in the 90s. Additionally, for the amount of shit the Eleminster gets he is a much better Gandalf stand in that Mordenkainen and his dumb as shit "preserve the balance" bullshit.

The forgotten realms is another perfectly suitable standard setting for a game with as broad a focus as D&D. People give it shit becuase it has memorable NPCs. NPCs only steal the show if the DM is a cockwad. The 5e version of the setting is actually probably the best becuase they narrowed the gigantic map down to focus on an area that is thematic without inlcuding so much shit that people stop caring. Infact, if they could find some way to add Cormyr, Rashamen, and Thay to sword coast the setting would be just about perfect. It would have all the elements of FR that people give 2 shits about.

I do not know how Tussock got Ebberron so wrong. The setting is explictly a 1920s/1930s situtation where the last war ended because everybody got scared shitless of being killed by the growing number of magic super weapons and all the factions feel like they would have won with just one more offensive/year/breakthrough. There are like 3 or 4 states/groups ready to take the fantasy nazi's role and start a Last War II. The biggest issue with Eberron is lack of support. Mostly because I think that that wizards is concerned that Ebberon will be divisive because of the magitech and tonal shift.

Dragonlance is the original "adventure path" the whole setting exists to be a backdrop for a series of adventures. Tussock is again wrong as the DL modules were published before the books. The biggest issue with DL is that while the war of the lance campaign is interesting, everything that is not the war of the lance campaign is unbelievably stupid. Like a lot of media it turns out that churning out sequals and further stories just cheapens the whole thing.

Planescape is easily the worst and stupidest setting for D&D. The great wheel has always been the worst part of D&D and planescape doubles down it. The setting would be lost to fucking history if sliders had not come out within 12 months of it being published. Alternate theory, the setting only survives because of planescape torment which has the best writing but the worst everything else of the isometric pause-and-play D&D games of the late 90s.

Dark Sun is a setting that was never going to be highly supported. It is to esoteric. The setting is the sort of thing that D&D should keep on tap as a 2nd or 3rd setting. I think it would also help to make it more "sword and sandal" and make the tech level be about that of the Roman empire or late Hellenistic era.

[erik]

Greyhawk is a perfectly serviceable world for a default D&D setting, except that the world has not had any real traction in almost 40 years.

Nevermind that before it got canned by WotC, in 2007 for GenCon going by events Greyhawk was the most played setting, or ttprg at all, full stop.

I say this because in my recollection when I was doing events at GenCon Living Greyhawk was by far the post popular of RPGs. Not even close to 2nd place.

There were easily tens of thousands of players all playing that setting that year worldwide. There was nothing for them to *buy* from WotC but that doesn't translate into it having no traction. So I'll grant that it has not had any real traction for almost 12 years, but cannot get to 40 years without some seriously weird rounding error.

Shitcanning a huge player run organization to make way for 4e is another in the long list of reasons why Pathfinder crushed 4th edition. It opened the way for Pathfinder Society which has 75,000 players and I suspect is a smaller wedge of the pie than Living Greyhawk had. I've had a hard time finding good numbers on players for LG (10's of thousands to 100's of thousands), but I'm pretty sure it was bigger than Pathfinder's analog.

[Blicero]

tussock's description of Eberron is impressively bad. There's a lot you can criticize about the setting, and you can make reasonable arguments about whether or not it's particularly suited to the d20 paradigm, but

"There was a war that has ended and now everyone just gets along" just isn't a good base to play D&D off.

is not accurate about Eberron-as-presented, and, as souran suggests, it's not accurate about societies in general.

[Emerald]

Planescape is easily the worst and stupidest setting for D&D. The great wheel has always been the worst part of D&D and planescape doubles down it. The setting would be lost to fucking history if sliders had not come out within 12 months of it being published. Alternate theory, the setting only survives because of planescape torment which has the best writing but the worst everything else of the isometric pause-and-play D&D games of the late 90s.

As a counterpoint, Planescape is the only setting that has a premise for high-level play that doesn't either (A1) change the play experience dramatically from the low-level experience so people who liked the low-level play might not like the high-level play or vice versa or (A2) render the setting unrecognizable as soon as high-level PCs or enemies start throwing their weight around and either (B1) assume the PCs are the only high-level people around and so have to bend over backward to come up with comparable villains and not have the setting bend around the high-level party or (B2) assume a basically static Cold War setup among all the high-level threats where you can't really accomplish anything meaningful.

Greyhawk is B2 (the Circle of Eight says no high-level adventuring for you, gotta preserve the Balance!).

Forgotten Realms is B2 (the Chosen are countering the Red Wizards are countering the Hathrans are countering [...], so anything you do will have a half-dozen factions jumping in to screw with you).

Eberron is either A2 plus B1 in Khorvaire (basically all the powerful NPCs died during the Last War, so there's a big power vacuum and anything the PCs do would change the setting quite a bit) or A1 plus B2 outside of Khorvaire (going up against the dragons, quori, daelkyr, rakshasa rajahs, etc. openly in an outright war is very different from pulp adventure, and all those big bads are basically impossible to take out permanently so making progress is near impossible).

Dragonlance is either A2 (do a different spin on the setting a la the alternate Krynns in Legends of the Twins, and you make the setting unrecognizable) or B1 (use the canon setting, and the number of high-level people in any given era can be counted on one hand, so I hope you like killing ancient dragons...again).

Mystara is A1 (becoming an Immortal is awesome, but means an end to standard adventuring or domain management).

Birthright is either B1 (there are a handful of bloodline scions around, so the PCs and their nation can stomp all over things) or B2 plus A2 (there are a ton of bloodline scions around, so magic levels go up across the board to society-changing levels and PCs are just one regency among many).

Dark Sun is either B2 plus A2 (if you try to deal with the Sorcerer Kings, you're going up against setting fixtures that are very hard to topple [the Prism Pentad aside] and you're left with a gaping hole in the setting if you succeed) or A1 (if you ignore the Sorcerer Kings and go the Dragon or Avangion route, you're not doing wilderness survival + stick it to the Man adventures anymore).

Council of Wyms is A1 (playing draconic servants or wyrmlings at low levels vs. full-on dragons at high levels is a big leap), and sounds like B2 (a deadlock between great wyrms of every alignment) but I haven't played it myself so I couldn't say for sure.

Ravenloft is A1 and A2 (if you beat the Dark Lords, you've changed a bunch and there's nothing to do).


So if you want to go on high-level adventures (or, more likely, you want to start a campaign that might theoretically progress to high-level adventures but has a good chance of dying out first) you're left with Planescape, where you start off having planar adventures in cool places and end up having planar adventures in cool places, high-level material is plentiful and the lore is fleshed out so things don't fall apart as soon as someone stabs a demon prince in the face, and while the setting is currently balanced between Good/Evil/Law/Chaos/Neutrality the whole underlying theme of the setting is mortal belief and actions being able to shape reality so you're supposed to try to do gonzo things that break the deadlock like corrupt a layer of Celestia to evil or pause the Blood War.

Granted, there's a lot of dumb material in the Planescape books that you'd want to tweak to use it, but that applies to every setting out there, so stuff like "Planescape going on about the Balance between Good and Evil being a good thing is stupid" and "there's nothing to do on the Inner Planes" are hardly dealbreakers if "Greyhawk and Krynn going on about the Balance between Good and Evil being a good thing is stupid" and "there's nothing to do in the wilds of Athas or half of the nations on Toril" don't turn you off those settings just as much.

[zeruslord]

3rd edition making it the pseudo default didn't really work because FR had supplanted the setting so thoroughly in the 90s.

As somebody who started with 3e and never read any of the Forgotten Realms stuff, I think the bigger issue is that there was never a one page overview of Greyhawk in a 3e non-setting book. The gods in the PHB were from Greyhawk, but IIRC that list only connected them to races and each other. A few prestige classes from the class splatbooks reference kingdoms and history from Greyhawk, but they didn't have any names I could actually pick out as being Greyhawk specific. The Knight Protectors of the Great Kingdom, Knights of the Watch, and the Order of the Chalice are all Greyhawk things, but I had assumed the names were genericized and never tried to find out where they were from.

Council of Wyms is A1 (playing draconic servants or wyrmlings at low levels vs. full-on dragons at high levels is a big leap), and sounds like B2 (a deadlock between great wyrms of every alignment) but I haven't played it myself so I couldn't say for sure.

My understanding was that the typical setup was troupe play, where each player has a dragon character and one or more servant-tier characters, which moves A1's incompatibility issue to the beginning of the campaign rather than having it crop up after months of play.

[Blicero]

3rd edition making it the pseudo default didn't really work because FR had supplanted the setting so thoroughly in the 90s.

As somebody who started with 3e and never read any of the Forgotten Realms stuff, I think the bigger issue is that there was never a one page overview of Greyhawk in a 3e non-setting book. The gods in the PHB were from Greyhawk, but IIRC that list only connected them to races and each other. A few prestige classes from the class splatbooks reference kingdoms and history from Greyhawk, but they didn't have any names I could actually pick out as being Greyhawk specific. The Knight Protectors of the Great Kingdom, Knights of the Watch, and the Order of the Chalice are all Greyhawk things, but I had assumed the names were genericized and never tried to find out where they were from.

As someone who started with 3e, I actually found their core book treatment of Greyhawk -- where aspects of it like "the rain of colorless fire" or "the duchy or urnst" -- super compelling and mysterious. There was clearly history and weight behind them, but the books never revealed it. I liked taking the names, making up my own backstories for them, and putting them in my games. (As I learned more about the official Greyhawk, it invariably disappointed me.) If you wanted a book with lots and lots of detail, there was always the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I think that Greyhawk would be a lot better if it embraced the “magic post apocalypse future” instead of making it a “secret” of the setting. Think more like Thundarr the Barbarian or Masters of the Universe instead of Gygax’s shitty Dying Earth/Conan/LotR crossover fic. (Seriously, did anyone other than Gygax give a shit about Jack Vance?) So there would just be ray guns and robots and spaceships as well as sword and sorcery stuff; the stuff from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (I think that’s the crashed spaceship adventure) would be a setting element instead of a single adventure. As is it’s kind of bland and 3.x being vague about it was probably for the better because whatever you made up to fill in the blanks was going to be better than the actual setting.

Most of the settings introduced in 2e (notable exception: Mystara) were interesting conceptually, the best probably being Dark Sun. Eberron has some interesting ideas but like those suffers from poor execution. I don’t give a shit about FR or Dragonlance (other than Draconians being a better humanoid dragon race than Dragonborn, and making playable Minotaurs. But the latter is easily ported into better settings since most D&D settings have Minotaurs.)

[Blicero]

(Seriously, did anyone other than Gygax give a shit about Jack Vance?)

In a word, yes?

More seriously, I would consider Vance to be one of the better prose stylists the fantasy genre has produced. Any list of fantasy classics that doesn't include Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga is seriously lacking. I am by no means alone in this sentiment, either; quick googling offers:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/jvprofile.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/maga ... nce-t.html
https://martyhalpern.blogspot.com/2009/ ... vance.html
https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/03 ... world.html
You can more reasonably claim that Gygax's fondness for Vance probably exercised disproportionate influence on why he's still remembered today, but to claim that Gygax is solely responsible is patently absurd.

[Darth Rabbitt]

In a word, yes?

More seriously, I would consider Vance to be one of the better prose stylists the fantasy genre has produced. Any list of fantasy classics that doesn't include Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga is seriously lacking.

My bad. I’ll retract my jab at Vance, then, and perhaps take a look at more of his work when I have the time.

You can more reasonably claim that Gygax's fondness for Vance probably exercised disproportionate influence on why he's still remembered today

I do stand by this, though.

[tussock]

I do not know how Tussock got Ebberron so wrong. The setting is explictly a 1920s/1930s situtation where the last war ended because everybody got scared shitless of being killed by the growing number of magic super weapons and all the factions feel like they would have won with just one more offensive/year/breakthrough.

That's not how WWI ended. Trains and blimps exist from 1860 to 2020 so far. "Super weapons" is literally a 1980's cliche, and a thing Nazi apologists like to say about the Nazis (but really, there's only so much you can do with constant material shortages). WWI ended because the Germans ran out of nitrogen, and then it was discovered you can just make Nitrogen whenever you want and so WWII started. WWII ended because Germany's productive capacity was bombed to shit and the Russian and US capacity was not.

I get the robots represent PTSD, but like, they just shot all the people with PTSD in WWI. The spectre of society full of mentally traumatized young men only suited to war trying to fit in to peaceful work is fucking Vietnam, like Rambo, yeah. Again, a 1980's trope. WWI vets were all dying from mustard gas injuries for years or hidden away from society with amputated limbs. WWII vets just got really fucking drunk down the RSA all the time.

Like, it's Shawn Connery era James Bond movies and stuff, late era cold war. It's even got 80's style hidden world mysticism in it. It's still not fucking interesting because the default condition is still how shit just got calmed down and anyone starting anything is a fucking problem, everywhere in the world, right now, so at best the PCs are a reactionary violent secret police force, rather than proper heroic protagonists.

Which, you know, every example I saw of play, was someone's secretly disturbing the peace, and the PCs are gunna investigate to find out who that is and then beat them to death. Dirty Harry. So many 80's cliches.

Hell, it's the inverse of Greyhawk, where the PCs are the proletariat of the militant space communists looking to take over the state and advance society but instead fail in the horrible trap filled capitalist dungeons full of religious extremists. Paranoia understood which side "the party" was on when it reskinned that.

--

And yeah, the Realms sort of works when you're playing in the Harpers, because the Harpers are already doing heroic stuff all the time and having Elminster as your boss makes any sense at all and you might meet Drizzt while he's busy with other shit and you can say hi. It's just that everything else you can do with it is awful.

Birthright ends, if you want to do a dungeon bash for the local noble, and after a few levels you kill the end boss and maybe do some kingdom stuff after but probably don't bother, that is the entire campaign world, that's all there is and you finished it, you cleared out the monsters and now there are no more monsters, you literally won. It's the anthesis of the Realms, where you never achieve anything without radically departing from the published works.

Dark Sun worked with a time line, you were supposed to get tough and go kill the Dragon of Tyr, and the world accepted the PCs had done that later and he was dead in the update and his place was ruled by people that looked a lot like a PC party. After the book that allowed PC dragon transformation and druids to regrow the wild, well, the world timeline got young dragons vying for power and druids regrowing the wild and how those things drove new conflict now the original Dragon was dead. Nothing in the Realms is like that, the events that changed things are centuries old and the modules produce almost no effect on anything, other than to suggest changes made centuries ago might be being undone!

Greyhawk literally has empty places on the map for the PCs to rule, a lot of it is largely undeveloped in case you want to tell you own story in that part. The shady overlords are explicitly ex-PCs and your PCs are literally asked to join them as peers so they can retire and leave you to it in the main module series. It's hugely sandboxy which is a problem for people who don't like that, but at least it naturally responds to the PCs being PCs.