Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

[silva]

Conceivably I could make up something from the bits and pieces dropped by Tome, but, as I said, I'm lazy.

Ever since the idea document that was [Tome] it's always given me the idea that more and more DM's should seriously run their campaigns in the Planes. There's these pre-written worlds that are fantastical in nature, and can still have all the low level crap that most DM's are fond of. So it can be less work than a homebrew, and likely far more interesting as well. Though I suppose the idea documents are just that, and lack the info that setting books have with their politics and junk? Otherwise, I suggest using some plane that's been mentioned in Tome, and sounds interesting (Brass City I've always wanted to do some adventures/campaign in).

Dont the Planescape base box works more or less like this ? Only a brief description of the setting elements (including the planes) clean of all that junk thats get developed in the sourcebooks ? I mean, if one only takes the base box and fill in the blanks as needed, it wouldnt give much work I think.

[Fuchs]

Honestly, it's even easier than that. Yes, there are certain offenders like Halaster and Elminster. But if you read the setting books, every guildhouse or anime club has a small statblock for the leader, who is typically something like Wizard 15/Archmage 10/Seeker of the Past 5. So they just populated the whole world with these epic characters who never actually do anything. So here's the trick: don't read the stat blocks (or indeed, large parts of any of the books), and just go "Okay, so the leader of this thing is like seventh level I guess, that puts him decently on the chain of command for something like this" when it crops up.

We do that in our FR campaign.

[talozin]

If you want to run a high-concept game, run it in whichever setting fits the high concept best. This will usually be Birthright, Dark Sun, Eberron, Planescape, Ravenloft, Rokugan, or Spelljammer. It may also include some of the Mystara material (e.g., Glantri).

If you want to run a generic game, run either Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, depending on whether you want a low-powered campaign (Greyhawk) or a high-powered campaign (FR). Yes, Greyhawk's power level has been upped in recent years, but a substantial amount of Greyhawk material was written in the context of the world's most powerful character being around level 18. Level 18 in Forgotten Realms just about qualifies you to be the Mayor of the equivalent of Hackensack NJ.

Blackmoor is more a historical artifact than a workable campaign setting. There's like four published D&D modules in Blackmoor and there is nothing in them that couldn't be run in Greyhawk or FR with the serial numbers rubbed off. The major antagonists in Blackmoor practically are the Red Wizard faction that worships Kossuth.

Dragonlance is morally repugnant on a number of levels, but even ignoring that, it's only any use if you want to railroad the shit out of people.

Lankhmar will confuse the shit out of your players unless they're already Fritz Leiber fans or don't know anything about D&D at all. If the former is the case you certainly shouldn't be asking us what setting to use.

Most of Mystara is seriously Generico McFantasyland. Don't bother with it unless you want one of the high-concept games (Glantri, Alphatia, Ierendi, etc.) that aren't better-handled by another setting.

I don't see the point in using Warcraft at all, it's nearly as generic as Mystara. As with Lankhmar, if your players are already huge fans of the IP, why not make use of that?

[Ice9]

Can any setting where existence of level 10+ adventurers is unexplained (much less the influence of top tier magic) count as good? I mean, why are there ever plagues and hunger in most settings, when clerics exist?

I think the idea of Eberron is that there aren't level 10+ adventurers, besides eventually the PCs. They all died in the war and/or never existed to begin with.

Which can be good if you want the PCs to be doing important shit at single-digit levels without rather questionable "exactly balance of power" excuses. It does mean that when the PCs hit the low-mid teens, they can go around conquering everything if they're so inclined, which is not necessarily a problem. High level is so disfunctional that it's probably better to burn the setting down before the PCs even get there.

That said, it does have some inexplicable exceptions to that principle, like the random 20th level Transmuter that hangs around in Droam, not taking over everything because ... reasons.

[Prak]

I just rattled off a list of settings I knew of. I later realized I forgot Scarred Lands, but just from what I've seen of it owning the Creature Collections and Relics of Rituals it's shitty and poorly balanced and written (not surprising given that it was White Wolf's foray with the OGL).

I'm leaning towards Greyhawk or FR. I started looking through the FRCS book and realized that the Elminster stats on page 7 were the grey haired balls of Ed Greenwood's dick bouncing on your chin. The very first content you see in the book after the table of contents is an in character letter from Elminster presenting the book as a quasi-in character document. If I do run the Occupy Faerun campaign that's slowly percolating in the back of my mind, I'm going to establish that Elminster seriously delivers this pretentious letter to every person who decides to be an adventurer in game.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I run Golarion a lot, but in some ways it's kind of terrible. Still, it's really easy to look stuff up and you can change story genres just by hopping a border. And some of the adventure modules are pretty good, which is nice when I'm not feeling creative.

[shadzar]

birthright = bloodlines...everybody's a damn royal something or othr descended from...yeah not good idea if you want any sort of reseource management or cooperation since everyone will be trying to displace a current ruling power with themselves...

blackmoor: as OD&D i wouldnt try it any way outside of it unless you got the modern version, but from what i recall it was kind of bland and grimm meets other fairy tales with a bit of aliens thrown in. talk about your hodge-podge

dark sun: this is for people wanting a specific flavor. good or bad is subjective depending on if you like the flavor

dragonlance: anything after 1st edition setting is probably crap since Weis started developing some other game system for it. 1st edition fails in many ways with its oddities much like eBerron. the moons are cute in theory, but playing out the 3 wizards, the knights. can be a pain to keep up with. good setting for novels, poorly thought out for a D&D setting. has some fun elements when you remove the crap like the moons and the knight orders so you dont have to needlessly track trivial crap that you wont use unless trying to play a railroad of the novels.

eBerron: just crap. ties for worst setting, but it at least IS a setting compared to what it ties with.

FR: the all worlds...has a lot of flavor and rich in resources, jsut don't get carried away thinking the setting is the novels, and remember you can use what you want and don't have to use what you don't want. also many people get confused thinking the NPCs make the setting rather than seeing them as set pieces.

Greyhawk: its Earth had D&D happened to us. like Middle Earth is a time before now in LotR, Greyhawk is just a divergence of causality. had Merlin and Avalon won over modern day religions and the "old ways" continued we would be living in Greyhawk.

Kalamar: isn't this HAckmaster? the sort of LAppon version of AD&D?

Lankhmar: based on the novel series of the same name. don't know anything about either.

Mystara: the Known World. just a place to put everything for BD&D into. supposedly a true generic D&D world.

Hollow World: think Journey to the Center of the Earth. pretty much this is Jules Verne meets Land Before Time where dinosaurs still remain.

Savage Coast: this has Red Steel as part of it right? Red Steel has some sort of mutation via radiation that gives freaky powers and... its jsut weird, like trying to create the Fantastic Four with Gamma Radiation but in D&D.

Plabescape: another tied for worst, and it isnt even a setting, just a clusterfuck to try to join all other settings together.

Ravenloft: not sure how i ever felt about this as a setting. probably should have been a general expansion to let you play through some vast undead world or to give more life to places on other worlds that are inhabited by undead. having to go through the mists and get trapped is a bit odd and silly.

Rokugon: what the fuck is this? are you just throwing in anime character names and calling them D&D settings?

Spelljammer: (see Planescape) oh look, lets try to make Buck Rogers more appealing without using the name Buck Rogers to piss off the CEO who couldnt find a way to force people to love Buck Rogers! Hippos in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Warcrft: oh you didn't list Everquest another crossover type product. to be a D&D setting it should be made for D&D, not using any edition of D&D for some rules to take onto some other game entity. You might as well call WHFB a D&D setting....

[silva]

Plabescape: another tied for worst, and it isnt even a setting, just a clusterfuck to try to join all other settings together.

Planescape is much more than a "try to join all settings together". I would go as far to say that Sigil, the philosophical factions, and the power of belief concept, are much more important and archetypal to the setting´s essence than trying to glue worlds together. Ie: one could avoid prime material worlds [AKA the other official settings] alltogether and still have a perfect Planescape campaign. In fact, this is the suggested default mode of play.

[Prak]

I just had a thought connecting The Weave to the hair style, a weave. I might have to run Forgotten Realms just so I can rewrite Mystra and Shar as "sassy black women" whose hair dos are magic.

[Scrivener]

I actually like Birthright.

It's a shame that so much was focused on the nation building minigame.

As Koumei said, it is fucking metal. The premise the gods all died in a wicked metal battle and mother fuckers got super powers from hanging around in god blood showers. Goblinoids aren't just roving packs of retards raping everyone, they are real people, with real people rights, they just tend to have poor grooming habits and celebrating a birthday is done by declaring war on some peasants. Dragons basically don't exist.

The villains sell this though, instead of "big bad guy X" you go to Latveria and fuck up Dr. Doom. All of the villains are unique creatures who gargled up tons of dead god blood, or highlandered it from other people and now are like the platonic form evil. You don't question why they haven't been stopped, because they have a country with trade deals, and strategic partners (I'm allied with captain evil bumpyface because no one will ever risk an attack by him), and an economy that works better than most out of the box D&D.

That being said the art is pretty awful with few exceptions, the rules are all 2nd ed so balance is replaced with "everyone gets to roll on this table, and if you get a 1 you can suck harder than anyone else" and there is way too much "use this BS to run a province".

[Prak]

Makes me think of Scarred Lands, then.

Scarred Lands was White Wolf jumping on the Open Game License band wagon with an imprint called Sword and Sorcery Games, or something along those lines. The back history of the world posited a war between the gods and titans, where the titans lost badly. Druids and arcane casters are purely people who follow titans, and there's an entire sea of titan blood called, appropriately enough, the blood sea. The titan Kaduum's heart was thrown into the sea, and, what with him being a titan, continued to bleed. It's full of mutated sea life and monsters.

The art ranges from "aesthetically, artistically sketchy" to "five year old scribbling on a page, but with actual art lessons under his belt."

It has some interesting concepts, but it's designed terribly, and if I were to run it I'd have to excise large portions of classes and rewrite them.

[NineInchNall]

I vote for not-FR and not-Greyhawk. They're too generic, full of too many completely interchangeable nation states. I want my choice of campaign setting to matter. I want a game in setting X to be noticeably different from a game in setting Y. Every time I've played in a Forgotten Realms game, the only thing that's differentiated it from a game in any other setting was the name on my patron deity line. There would be no way for an observer to watch the game being played and know that we were in Faerun.

[Prak]

In my experience, the same can be said of DM designed settings, at least with my group. Hence why I'm leaning towards them--they're generic enough that I don't need to do a huge info dump on my players, just say "take a look at [Book X] to get some idea of what is where. There are extra feats based on your character's region in [Book Y]. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to figure out the answer, and failing that, try to come up with something that sounds right." And then if I want to drop in something I think is cool, well, they're generic D&D worlds, so who cares?

[K]

I think the anti-Forgotten Realms memes don't hold any water.

Of course, there are lots of statted high-level NPCs. How the fuck are you supposed to run high-level campaigns without them?

Of course, there are lots of basically interchangable nations. There is a lot of fucking content for FR and any overview is going to be shallow.

Of course, there are bizarre magic cataclysms all the time. If DnD adventures happen in a setting and that setting persists, your setting is going to look like that.

That being said, any FR novel where Eliminister appears needs to be cut from the canon with a Flaming Vorpal Sword.

[hogarth]

Of course, there are lots of statted high-level NPCs. How the fuck are you supposed to run high-level campaigns without them?

The problem is not having high-level NPCs in the campaign world, it's having high-level NPCs as neighbours. Eberron at least divided the world into geographically disparate low-level, mid-level and high-level areas.

[K]

Of course, there are lots of statted high-level NPCs. How the fuck are you supposed to run high-level campaigns without them?

The problem is not having high-level NPCs in the campaign world, it's having high-level NPCs as neighbours. Eberron at least divided the world into geographically disparate low-level, mid-level and high-level areas.

I think that one of the big failures of DnD has been in describing what the setting is supposed to look like at certain power levels.

I mean, if they implicitly said, "yeh, a high level mage could kill that manticore much faster and easier than you, but he hasn't heard about it and wouldn't even get out of bed for manticore money", then the various settings would make more sense.

The thing where players assume that a high-level character in the general area is fighting cataclysmic battles and plots, but also has time to save all the kittens stuck in any tree in the nation, is just inane. People seriously need to realize that heroes could be having an insane adventure in the house next to you with epic-level enemies and no one is going to hear about it.

I also think Hollywood has corrupted people into thinking that every adventure needs to involve saving the world or else it doesn't matter.

[deaddmwalking]

Forgotten Realms suffers from the 'Superman' problem. There's always someone who should jump in to save the world who is both powerful and altruistic. Constantly explaining why they're too busy makes them look selfish, idiotic, or both. And if they're trying to 'raise a new batch of heroes' it's pretty irresponsible to allow them to get slaughtered.

Either the demigods running around know your success is a foregone conclusion (in which case there is no dramatic tension) or if they're as near omnipotent and not addressing a world destroying plot (which they're not if you're doing it) and don't bail you out and/or take care of it after you fail, they're huge dicks.

[NineInchNall]

Of course, there are lots of basically interchangable nations. There is a lot of fucking content for FR and any overview is going to be shallow.

A shallow overview of a lot of fucking content does not entail lots of basically interchangeable nations. That's just a non sequitur. You could totally have a shallow overview of a lot of fucking content for just a few not interchangeable nations.

[shadzar]

Forgotten Realms suffers from the 'Superman' problem. There's always someone who should jump in to save the world who is both powerful and altruistic. Constantly explaining why they're too busy makes them look selfish, idiotic, or both.

or you consider dialing the clock back to before there was Elmister and the other mortals NPCs that are so big, and play forward form there in FR then you don't have to explain why they arent doing everything and you continue to write the history of YOUR Realms, through play.

[Prak]

Or you center your campaign on taking Elminster and his ilk down. The problem with that idea, though, is that in Occupy D&D the only real way to unseat the 1% is to become the new 1%.

[shadzar]

Cyric did it, Raistlin did it.. why can;t the PCs do it?

[Prak]

Didn't they do it by becoming big powerful characters? That's my point. Sure you can unseat the big disproportionately powerful assholes at the top, but you do it by becoming a big disproportionately powerful asshole.

[hogarth]

The problem is not having high-level NPCs in the campaign world, it's having high-level NPCs as neighbours. Eberron at least divided the world into geographically disparate low-level, mid-level and high-level areas.

I mean, if they implicitly said, "yeh, a high level mage could kill that manticore much faster and easier than you, but he hasn't heard about it and wouldn't even get out of bed for manticore money", then the various settings would make more sense.

Again -- if some super-bad-ass is your neighbour, it's hard to claim that you heard about trouble in the neighbourhood and he didn't. Of course, you could always go with "he heard about it and he doesn't give a shit", but why would anyone want to live around bad-ass people (who presumably have bad-ass enemies who might hunt them down) when they don't give a shit about the people around them?

[deaddmwalking]

For the same reasons we expect 'gold-economy' heroes to defend 'turnip-economy' dirt-farmers, we'd expect wish-economy heroes to step in to assist gold-economy heroes and civilizations.

In the event that high-level heroes actually MOVE ON, it could make sense that they're not around to deal with piddling problems, but if they're still living in Anytown, Fantasyworld, there should be an expectation that they deal with problems that affect his neighborhood.

Now, if the Paladin is leading an invasion against the Nine-Hells and is defending his beach-head from near-limitless hordes, it makes sense that he isn't around to deal with the manticore. But if the near-limitless hordes of hell are assaulting the material plane every week, the scale of the PCs taking on a manticore is WAY overshadowed.

It'd be like if you stopped a purse-snatcher at the same time and place that someone stopped a group of terrorists from taking out the White House. Yeah, you deserve some accolades, but seriously, what you did was small potatoes compared to the REAL action happening a stone throw away.

[Prak]

So I started reading through the Greyhawk Gazeteer. When it started describing the various human ethnicities, I fully expected clear parallels to real world cultures. I don't know if the Baklunish, Flan and Oeridian aren't direct analogues, or I just didn't pick up on it, but the Olman are offensively stereotypical african tribesmen, and the Rhennee are basically river gypsies.

Greeeaatt....