Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

[Prak]

Yeah, I'm getting more ideas as I read through the gazetteer. I'm thinking about having Iuz be the one who sends the heroes to sabotage the SB efforts, in a bid to get the power for himself. Hell, maybe Iuz is playing both sides.

I'm also thinking about having Iuz work with a human sorcerer who is secretly Vashar and is just getting close to the demigod to kill him, destroy the methodology of divine ascension, and then kill the PCs after he betrays Iuz and helps them kill him.

[hyzmarca]

I sort of like the Savage Coast as a concept, in that it's basically a 16th century colonial settign with Magic!Africa, Magic!Australia, and Magic!South America shoved up against each other, and being invaded by Not!Portugese, Not!Spanish, and Not!French.

The default assumption that the PCs are basically Conquistadors serves to make murder-hobing very uncomfortable for anyone with the slightest bit of historical awareness. Plus, teleporting draconic Australian aborigines. And flintlocks that don't exist anywhere else on the planet for some unexplained reason. The long past magic!nuclear war is just icing on the cake.

Of course, the roll for random mutant powers thing is overly complicated and problematic, in that you roll for random mutant powers and they aren't particularly well balanced.

[talozin]

I beg you to read Gygax's pulp fiction oeuvre, as you are thinking very much along the same lines. I don't think I can actually post links to copyrighted material here, but if you Google the titles and the name of the author and a three-letter abbreviation for a certain portable document format, you shouldn't have any problems finding them. On Amazon, I mean.

[Neurosis]

I feel...generally amicable to most D&D settings. No major hostility, no rabid fannishness either.

Let's see...Forgotten Realms seems pretty cool to me, but I'm not especially versed in it. I understand mainly from the Gaming Den that there's a lot of wanking to the awesomeness of canon sues like Elminster and Drizz't, but that hasn't biased me against the setting. It seems like there's also some pretty cool stuff there like the Red Wizards of Thay. All in all, most of my Forgotten Realms experience has been in videogames, and even that has been very limited.

A year or two ago I started running the Age of Worms campaign path for my girlfriend; it's currently on hiatus. Initially, it wasn't set anywhere in particular, but as it advanced a bit, I chose to set it in Greyhawk. We didn't get far from the city of Greyhawk itself, so I never saw any of the racist parts of the setting. Overall it seemed alright, but not too different from just playing D&D that was not set "anywhere in particular".

I really, really like Eberron, having done a bit of GMing there and familiarizing myself with the setting while it was. All in all, the setting was so magepunk/steampunk that it didn't feel like D&D at all. I remember I wound up hacking "Action Points" so they worked a bit more like Edge in Shadowrun and less like some D20 Modern bullshit that may or may not turn around bad luck, depending on...more luck. Oddly for me, though, the drawback of Eberron's unique setting is that it doesn't really scratch the D&D itch for me. When I get in the mood for D&D, Eberron is not what I want.

I just started running a Dragonlance campaign (again, for my girlfriend). I'd had the 3E Dragonlance campaign setting sitting on my shelf for about a year, having bought it in one of those "three for 10 dollars" book sales at last year's GenCon or Origins. It was a beautiful book on the outside, so I was thinking about reading it for months (until 2014 I knew basically nothing about Dragonlance, although I think about 20 years ago when I was a kid my mom got a Dragonlance boardgame at a tag sale) and a couple weeks ago I finally did. For some reason I started reading the book obsessively trying to get a feel for the setting, and started running a campaign set not long afterwards. (It's set during the War of the Lance and we're starting with the Dragons of Despair adventure, written 30 years ago today, which someone thoughtfully converted to 3E, but I haven't used many of the canon characters and I imagine I'll divert from the canon storyline soon enough.)

I'm not sure why I like Dragonlance so much, although I do. It's really not what's typically up my alley, as I tend to prefer things a bit more grimdark, with more moral relativism and less "epic yet simplistic struggle of good versus evil". But for whatever reason, I find Dragonlance so charming that I'm captivated by it, even though it's exactly the kind of cheesiness I'd have scoffed at as a teenager. I've been thinking for a while now about asking the Den how it feels about Dragonlance in general.

I know basically nothing about any of the other D&D settings mentioned in the OP. I think I happen to own some incidental Dark Suns stuff, but I've never done anything with it.

[fbmf]

I beg you to read Gygax's pulp fiction oeuvre, as you are thinking very much along the same lines. I don't think I can actually post links to copyrighted material here, but if you Google the titles and the name of the author and a three-letter abbreviation for a certain portable document format, you shouldn't have any problems finding them. On Amazon, I mean.

Perhaps you have heard of the Private Messaging function we have here on tgdmb.com...

Game On,
fbmf

[K]

I've had conversations with Frank about how I think Spelljammer and Planescape would make a beautiful baby. Cut the bad physics out of Spelljammer and the bad philosophy out of Planescape and you could really get some awesome adventures in wild locales.

[Cyberzombie]

I like Eberron and the original Dragonlance. Basically the settings without the giant unbeatable uber NPCs, where the PCs actually have some shot of changing the world. I like Eberron where the Lord of Blades, a deity, is actually some mid-level warforged. I like that the Dragonlance dragon highlords aren't placed way, way above the level of the PCs. They're beatable villains, not giant immutable pillars of the setting. There are a few archmagi, but they're rare.

I hate immutable worlds. It's what I don't like about FR, Dark Sun or Planescape. In FR/DS, there's just too many high level NPCs, and the entire world is about telling you how much you suck and how you'll never be as badass as Elminster or one of the sorcerer kings. So you can reach 15th level and still seen as some dude's apprentice, because everyone in the world that means anything is a total badass. Even a 20th level character is a minor player in those worlds.

Planescape is even worse. While it isn't bad for a monster-of-the-week style because it lets you come up with all kinds of acid-trip settings, it goes a step beyond FR in that not only can't you affect the setting, there is no world to even affect. In PS, you're playing an MMO with instances. Nobody really cares what you achieve because you're doing it on some stretch of an infinite plane in an infinite multiverse to try to win an endless war. So basically you run around grinding levels, because that's really the only thing that changes. Try to do anything in Sigil, the only place that really matters in the setting... the Lady of Pain nukes you. Naturally if you go to any of the famous locales in the planes (aka the locales people care about) you can expect Dispater or Asmodeus to kick your ass if you try to change anything. Planescape is a giant railroad. Not bad if you just want a hack and slash game, but terrible for anything else.

[virgil]

Planescape is a giant railroad. Not bad if you just want a hack and slash game, but terrible for anything else.

Or you can establish a trade route and change the face of Athas by hooking them up with metal and water, while making yourself filthy rich. Or you can conquer entire demiplanes. Or you can just fvcking accept that there's always someone bigger than you somewhere; people don't ignore Shadowrun because players can't take on a megacorp, you don't quit D&D because you can't become the god your cleric worships.

Planescape expects you to start at level 1 like any other D&D campaign, and the vast majority of such campaigns don't last long enough for you to worry about what the upper echelon is like. Planescape is not any more of a railroad than D&D itself, because the rules throughout the settings do not satisfactorily handle so much as kingdom management, let alone interplanar conquest. There is not a single D&D setting that permits you to conquer it in its entirety, and they cover areas of land smaller than a continent; if you want to be big and important in the setting you are guaranteed to need to svck DM cock for some part of the setting to bend for it to happen, and Planescape is just as bad as the others.

[Starmaker]

I hate immutable worlds. It's what I don't like about FR, Dark Sun or Planescape.

Dark Sun had their iconics kill a sorcerer-king. By the time of Lynn Abbey's novels, there are more dead kings than live ones. So this is in fact something that you can absolutely do.

[Cyberzombie]

Planescape is a giant railroad. Not bad if you just want a hack and slash game, but terrible for anything else.

Or you can establish a trade route and change the face of Athas by hooking them up with metal and water, while making yourself filthy rich.

The problem is that that has nothing to do with Planescape. That's a Dark Sun game with plane travel. Planescape is Sigil plus the outer and inner planes.

Planescape expects you to start at level 1 like any other D&D campaign, and the vast majority of such campaigns don't last long enough for you to worry about what the upper echelon is like. Planescape is not any more of a railroad than D&D itself, because the rules throughout the settings do not satisfactorily handle so much as kingdom management, let alone interplanar conquest. There is not a single D&D setting that permits you to conquer it in its entirety, and they cover areas of land smaller than a continent; if you want to be big and important in the setting you are guaranteed to need to svck DM cock for some part of the setting to bend for it to happen, and Planescape is just as bad as the others.

The problem with Planescape is that you seriously can't be important in planescape. In Forgotten Realms, at the very least maybe you level grind up to epic PCs and take out the Shades and the Red Wizards. It'll take you a long time to get that high, but eventually you can become important in the world.

With Planescape, you're traveling to Sigil, which is run by the Lady of Pain, and you're traveling to the planes which are run by gods. In either case, you're going to be able to do jack and shit. It's no coincidence that your very first sentence in your post had to do with going to Athas, because the best way to accomplish anything in Planescape is to get the hell out of Planescape and go to some other setting.

[virgil]

It's no coincidence that your very first sentence in your post had to do with going to Athas, because the best way to accomplish anything in Planescape is to get the hell out of Planescape and go to some other setting.

Oh yes, how dare a game about planar travel require you to travel to other planes in your quest to be important.

[codeGlaze]

The problem with Planescape is that you seriously can't be important in planescape.

Pretty sure merchant lords and guild leaders are considered important people.
Just because you're not running Sigil doesn't mean you can't be an important person.
* Creating a new faction that eventually overshadows the others in Sigil?
* Being the general of an inter-planar mercenary corps is pretty important.
* Ruling a demi-plane

It seems as though important to you is being the overlord of the main area of any particular setting. Or at least that's how it has come across so far.

[Koumei]

Just because you're not running Sigil doesn't mean you can't be an important person.
* Creating a new faction that eventually overshadows the others in Sigil?

Sure, the other two are good, but they seriously involve saying "Fuck the core piece of the setting, we're going into the People's Republic of Outerplania and doing stuff that has nothing to do with Planescape other than using a door to get to another plane!"

That first one I quoted, however, isn't meaningful. Note that there are between two and five different groups that claim to have some control over laws (or the enforcement thereof) in Planescape, and not one of them is correct. Any facet of council or government, on any level, is the Lady and the dabus. If you join or make a faction and declare yourself Superking, then basically you're president of the anime club. Well done, you get the keys to the storage room.

You don't need to have the power of a Student Council, but at least something like a board of directors for a vaguely relevant company, or being a mayor of a town, seriously. At least when you play a Cleric, you get to go from Morningbringer to Morninglord to Morningglory to Morningwood and have some amount of power and actually become notable in the world.

[codeGlaze]

I hate immutable worlds. It's what I don't like about FR, Dark Sun or Planescape.

Dark Sun had their iconics kill a sorcerer-king. By the time of Lynn Abbey's novels, there are more dead kings than live ones. So this is in fact something that you can absolutely do.

Are the Dark Sun novels worth reading?

You don't need to have the power of a Student Council, but at least something like a board of directors for a vaguely relevant company, or being a mayor of a town, seriously. At least when you play a Cleric, you get to go from Morningbringer to Morninglord to Morningglory to Morningwood and have some amount of power and actually become notable in the world.

Right, I was trying to point out that there are things that people do and can do. Because, really, PCs live in a bubble. If your GM doesn't make you feel important in your own bubble, that's bad. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

Also, if you're the head of a marauding band of mercenaries hiring yourselves out across the planes... >_> isn't that pretty much what setting about-and-for the planes is ostensibly for? (meaning : to allow shenanigans of that sort)

[Cyberzombie]

The problem with Planescape is that you seriously can't be important in planescape.

Pretty sure merchant lords and guild leaders are considered important people.
Just because you're not running Sigil doesn't mean you can't be an important person.
* Creating a new faction that eventually overshadows the others in Sigil?
* Being the general of an inter-planar mercenary corps is pretty important.
* Ruling a demi-plane

Yeah, you can form your own guild with you and your and friends and whatever. You can rule your own little instance plane that the DM invented and nobody cares about. It just all feels very MMORPG to me.

Personally I'd prefer to be in Eberron where you have actual threats to worry about, as opposed to just being a grain of sand in an infinite sandbox.

[virgil]

Personally I'd prefer to be in Eberron where you have actual threats to worry about, as opposed to just being a grain of sand in an infinite sandbox.

There are at least fourteen other planes, and I'm dead certain you can't even overthrow Argonnessen, let alone Xoriat. There are more than a dozen worlds; you are still a grain of sand. You are as likely to begin a new Day of Mourning as you are to remove all fiends' ability to teleport throughout the planes or shift entire layers, only possible with the DM holding your hand in any case.

[silva]

Im a big fan of Planescape, but Cyberzombie has a point. The setting was always was stronger conceptually than in execution. And this principle holds true for almost every facet of it, change-proneness included - as an example its said Sigil changes all the time, but then youre presented to a fully detailed city map with all spots set in stone like any other normal city (one wonders what exactly is constantly changing).

Thats why I think the setting fares better as a mine for ideas than by being followed strictly/canonicaly. If I were to play it today, I would use only the core box and fill in the blanks ourselves.

[malak]

Are the Dark Sun novels worth reading?

Well, it's far from real literature. But if you like other D&D novels and similar fantasy trash, it should entertain you well. Not as good as the haunted lands trilogy, but better than most other D&D books.

[MfA]

Eberron is a bit too obviously designed to tick boxes to win a contest. On the other hand I really like one of those boxes is being suited to epic campaigns (defacto no gods, adventurers are speciul and canon potential opponents are mid level except for optional ones locked away).

Keith Baker's insistence to not advance the timeline also shows an uncharacteristic amount of restraint ... he is probably going to get overruled on this unfortunately.

[Starmaker]

Dark Sun had their iconics kill a sorcerer-king. By the time of Lynn Abbey's novels, there are more dead kings than live ones. So this is in fact something that you can absolutely do.

Are the Dark Sun novels worth reading?

Only Lynn Abbey's stuff, and the canon parts are still pointlessly grimdumb. (Also, everyone behaves like an anime schoolgirl.) They are good enough that I actually cared about the characters in the books instead of detachedly raging at the author, which is a rare enough occurrence that I can recall every time it happened this millennium. Other books are pretty much at the Marauders of the Dune Sea level of quality.

[Username17]

On Planescape, the basic promise of Planescape is pretty good. You have dimensional portals that allow you to have episodic adventures in far off corners of the multiverse at low level. Then you come back to a cosmopolitan city and do political intrigue their with an enforced peace that allows you to have council disagreements with demons and angels and all sorts of star wars aliens from all over the D&D multiverse.

Except... it doesn't actually deliver on that.

What you actually get is a set of factions that don't make any sense, where most of them don't have a coherent ideology and many of them made it impossible to have adventures. It's a game that's supposed to be about philosophies and politics, but the political factions were actually made up in a month without any care or attention to actual philosophical or political theory. On top of that, they added a big penis NPC that shat all over the entire supposed political sphere by being an unstoppable iron handed dictator that rules by decree and murders people for lulz if they try to change the setting at all.

The official Planescape timeline only manages to stagger on for two years before they end up just burning it all down and kicking out all the factions. They half-assed the politics so badly in the beginning that by 3rd edition they just gave up and tabula rassaed the whole thing.

On Greyhawk: you could always do what Mike Mearls did with Greyhawk:

I'm running Temple of Elemental Evil in 4e. It's set in Greyhawk. I use the '83 boxed set as the basis for the campaign. I'm not a big fan of much that come after that, though I liked the City of Greyhawk boxed set. Of course, that said, I immediately set to rearranging things to me taste. Such as:

* The staggering majority of kingdoms in the setting are either evil (Iuz, Great Kingdom, the Scarlett Brotherhood, a few others) or unaligned (almost everyone else). Veluna and Furyondy are the only "good" realms, and even they are far from absolutely good.

* I gutted whole swathes of kingdoms, mainly to keep my campaign focused and to make things more manageable. In most cases, I rearranged places to serve as vassal states or portions of larger nations. The big conflict (as I see it) is between the three biggest evil realms and the good/unaligned realms caught in the middle.

* Tieflings hail primarily from the Horned Society (that's their homeland, IMC) and from the legions of the Great Kingdom. They are feared and reviled outside of those places.

* Dragonborn hail from Hepmonaland. They form many legions of the Scarlet Brotherhood's army. Adventurers are explorers who have ventured north in search of treasure and fame among their people.

* Celene is a kingdom of the Eladrin. One thing I liked about Celene from the post-'83 GH material is the idea that the kingdom shuts its borders and severs its alliances, so I kept that. The eladrin are seen as cowards and betrayers by the good guy lands. Whether Celene shut its borders to deal with some crisis in the Feywild or simply to avoid the armies of Iuz and the Great Kingdom, none can say.

* Ket is a magocracy focused on reclaiming the might of the Baklunish Empire. The mage-lords are content to wait behind the Yatil Mountains, waiting for their neighbors to grind themselves into exhaustion before launching a campaign of conquest.

* Keoland holds similar aspirations for a new Suel Imperium, with the assembled knights and petty lords marching forth to conquer.

* The Free City of Greyhawk has long stood as an independent bastion under the protection of the archmage Zagyg. Zagyg has recently disappeared, and both Iuz and the Great Kingdom now toy with the idea of conquering the city. For now, it remains a true free city, a center of trade and diplomacy.

There's a lot more, and I might have some details wrong, but that's it.

No, I have no idea why you would do any of that. But that is how Mike Mearls rolls.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Isn't Spelljammer+Planescape= MAGIC: THE GATHERING ?

Really, M:tG's blocks are already oozing with flavor.

[Prak]

On Greyhawk: you could always do what Mike Mearls did with Greyhawk:

I'm running Temple of Elemental Evil in 4e. It's set in Greyhawk. I use the '83 boxed set as the basis for the campaign. I'm not a big fan of much that come after that, though I liked the City of Greyhawk boxed set. Of course, that said, I immediately set to rearranging things to me taste. Such as:

* The staggering majority of kingdoms in the setting are either evil (Iuz, Great Kingdom, the Scarlett Brotherhood, a few others) or unaligned (almost everyone else). Veluna and Furyondy are the only "good" realms, and even they are far from absolutely good.

* I gutted whole swathes of kingdoms, mainly to keep my campaign focused and to make things more manageable. In most cases, I rearranged places to serve as vassal states or portions of larger nations. The big conflict (as I see it) is between the three biggest evil realms and the good/unaligned realms caught in the middle.

* Tieflings hail primarily from the Horned Society (that's their homeland, IMC) and from the legions of the Great Kingdom. They are feared and reviled outside of those places.

* Dragonborn hail from Hepmonaland. They form many legions of the Scarlet Brotherhood's army. Adventurers are explorers who have ventured north in search of treasure and fame among their people.

* Celene is a kingdom of the Eladrin. One thing I liked about Celene from the post-'83 GH material is the idea that the kingdom shuts its borders and severs its alliances, so I kept that. The eladrin are seen as cowards and betrayers by the good guy lands. Whether Celene shut its borders to deal with some crisis in the Feywild or simply to avoid the armies of Iuz and the Great Kingdom, none can say.

* Ket is a magocracy focused on reclaiming the might of the Baklunish Empire. The mage-lords are content to wait behind the Yatil Mountains, waiting for their neighbors to grind themselves into exhaustion before launching a campaign of conquest.

* Keoland holds similar aspirations for a new Suel Imperium, with the assembled knights and petty lords marching forth to conquer.

* The Free City of Greyhawk has long stood as an independent bastion under the protection of the archmage Zagyg. Zagyg has recently disappeared, and both Iuz and the Great Kingdom now toy with the idea of conquering the city. For now, it remains a true free city, a center of trade and diplomacy.

There's a lot more, and I might have some details wrong, but that's it.

No, I have no idea why you would do any of that. But that is how Mike Mearls rolls.

-Username17

Yeah, that... perplexes me. Starting with "why the fuck would he run 4e?" and moving on to "he... wrote material after '83..." and then... ugh. That's dumb.

Mostly I'm just thinking about making the Suel not quite so racial supremacist and jumping the timeline ahead so that Robilar and all of those other characters from Gary's game are dead.

[zugschef]

What you actually get is a set of factions that don't make any sense, where most of them don't have a coherent ideology and many of them made it impossible to have adventures. It's a game that's supposed to be about philosophies and politics, but the political factions were actually made up in a month without any care or attention to actual philosophical or political theory. On top of that, they added a big penis NPC that shat all over the entire supposed political sphere by being an unstoppable iron handed dictator that rules by decree and murders people for lulz if they try to change the setting at all.

The funny part is how it all seems to work in Planescape:Torment. What did they do differently?

[Starmaker]

The funny part is how it all seems to work in Planescape:Torment. What did they do differently?

POV. In PS:T, you see individual characters and tiny parts of the setting. It's compatible with PS:TTRPG, but things might work however else you like them to. PS:T writers never required you to do creative work, speculation and extrapolation. You're never actually faced with the question, "now that I have this [insert faction] character, what might he or she want to do?" Even your PC's motivation is set.