Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

[Fuchs]

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?

What if they hire people to take care of the people around them? People like lower level adventurers?

[shadzar]

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.

no, they did it by being protagonists in a story rather than being actual PCs controlled by real players and had the same one "running" the characters as was running everything else, called the author of the novels.

but the point is you can easily ignore FR lore and canon as it is YOUR game, not Greenwood's or Weis's/

you can remove the Harpers, Zhentarim, Elmister, Mystra's Chosen, all of them and still play in FR. Watedeep is stil there.

Guess what, Elmister doesn't really make an appearance in say Kara-tur, Maztica, Al-Qadim...and tere is plenty of space on the map left so that even if you DO pick a time where Elminster is a Chosen, you can jsut play on another continent of your own creation.

when YOU sit down to play ANY setting, you get to add or remove as much as you want from it, or merge it with another. replace Al-Qadim with Dark Sun if you want on the same world. throw Ravenloft in the frozen north. use whatever you want from ANY setting and leave out whatever you want.

---

now why do i not do this with Planscape, Spelljammer, eBerron?

i leave all of them out of everything because I don't like anything about them. D&D in Space, no thanks, and the Rock of Braal isnt much to adventure on for very long, might as well just have a homebrew world. Planescape...same thing not much really there when th concepts of everything about the planes is a deterrent. eBerron, just has nothing interesting to even bother using for play. none of them really fit what i want from the game, so i use what i want from them to play with, nothing; and leave out the parts of them i do not want, everything else (everything).

use the world, the peoples, the locations, but ignore any novel based NPC you want to with any setting, especially FR. Drizzt never existed on your world, unless you say he did.

[hogarth]

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?

What if they hire people to take care of the people around them? People like lower level adventurers?

Playing "lower level wage slaves who are menial employees of the Real Damn Heroes (tm)" is certainly one style of campaign, but not one that I would want to repeat over and over.

[TiaC]

Did shadzar just admit that his personal preferences are personal preferences rather than THE ONE TRUE WAY? That must be a first.

[K]

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?

What if they hire people to take care of the people around them? People like lower level adventurers?

Why hire?

Simply telling the right adventurers is enough.

[Fuchs]

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?

What if they hire people to take care of the people around them? People like lower level adventurers?

Why hire?

Simply telling the right adventurers is enough.

Sometimes the right adventurers are not around and you Need to make do with what you have - mercenaries.

With regards to playing "lower level wage slaves": The only way to avoid that is to have a world where the PCs are the only heroes around even when starting at Level 1. Otherwise there should be more powerful People around (which may even be teachers, mentors, or relatives of the PCs).

[deaddmwalking]

With regards to playing "lower level wage slaves": The only way to avoid that is to have a world where the PCs are the only heroes around even when starting at Level 1.

That's not true. There are other ways to avoid it.

First off, you can have higher level characters with 'real jobs'. It doesn't matter that the Captain of the Guard is a 5th-level character - he can't go clear out a Dungeon on his own because he has obligations as the Captain of the Guard. On the other hand, when it comes time to defend the city from attack, he damn well better be involved in defending the city since that's his job.

Powerful characters can exist and not be present, or have specific reasons they are limited in what they can do. But you have to create these reasons. If they're not good reasons, the high-level NPCs start to look like dicks.

Having the 'most powerful' characters 'move on' in some sense helps avoid the issue. There's not a lot of people that can issue a recall to Elminster when he's researching a new spell on an upper-plane, and those who can will want to make sure that the threat is something that really does need his time and attention - but the people that are restricting access to his time are then going to be seen as dicks.

You can also largely avoid the problem by not having altruistic high level characters. Superman catches shit all day for not saving the world, but if your high level characters are more Darth Vader or Doctor Doom, nobody cares that they're not using their power for the benefit of everyone else - that's not in their personality. You can hate Superman for not saving Fluffy from a tree - you don't ask Darth Vader for help because you worry he's just as likely to Force Choke Fluffy as to use Telekinesis to gently lift her to the ground.

[rasmuswagner]

Al-Qadim. Seriously. Get rid of the pussy-footing and add the words "prophet" and "Allah" back in the setting, and call the 3 different sects Sunni, Shia and...Sufi, I guess?. There are civilized countries and wilderness and islands full of talking animals.

[Fuchs]

Didn't Greenwood himself say his Chosen of Mystra were not quite sane anymore? One might not bother a man with such a reputation, and a "trespassers will be polymorphed" sign on his lawn with every problem.

[fectin]

Also, high level NPCs might just be dicks.

[talozin]

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....

Well, the Olman are more Mesoamerican than African, at least in concept, what with Camazotz the Bat-God and other Aztec-inspired elements. The African stereotypes are actually the Touv.

The Baklunish are pretty clearly Middle Easterners of some variety or another, probably Arabs -- what with having exclusively dark hair, living mostly in arid regions, and having deities with names like "Al'Akbar" and "Daoud" and countries with names like "Zeif" and "Tusmit". If you felt like it, you could probably make the case that the story of the war between the Baklunish Empire and the Suel Empire (who are blonde and blue-eyed Aryan supermen) is some sort of parable about nuclear war, since it ended with both of them essentially nuking each other and ruining both empires as a result.

Besides being a delicious dessert, the Flan are a rough Native American equivalent; they're the "original inhabitants" of the Flanaess, they got boned hard when the white man migrated in, and so on.

The Oeridians are probably meant to parallel the Celts or the Franks or some other early Western European cultural group. That they like plaids suggests that Gygax, knowing his sense of humor, was trying to make some kind of "joke" about Scotland.

Let's not even start on the abnormally short, bearded guys who lust for gold that are an inherent feature of the game. You know some Stormfront guy is probably running a game right now where Dwarves who talk in Yiddish accents are the villains.

[Prak]

Yeah, I was suspecting that Baklunish were middle eastern, but don't know a ton about middle eastern typical features, so wasn't sure (though I'd forgotten about the god names).

I think there's just a difference between "These guys are vaguely celts/scottish" and "yeah, these dark skinned guys had big civilizations, but war with other local civilizations and civil wars caused them to fall back into barbarism. They mostly wear primitive furs as coverings."

The Suel irritate me, but not because they're clearly northern european. They irritate me because their legacy in 3.5 (with stuff like the Suel Arcanamach in CArc) is frankly awesome, but their civilization comes off like Saturday Morning Cartoon Villains, and makes me have to reframe my description of Vashar because Vashar are basically only worse in that they're more individualistic and rape-happy (so I now have to describe them as Iron Age Comic Villains to differentiate).

Well, and Wastri is a Suel god...

[Prak]

now why do i not do this with Planscape, Spelljammer, eBerron?

i leave all of them out of everything because I don't like anything about them. D&D in Space, no thanks, and the Rock of Braal isnt much to adventure on for very long, might as well just have a homebrew world. Planescape...same thing not much really there when th concepts of everything about the planes is a deterrent. eBerron, just has nothing interesting to even bother using for play. none of them really fit what i want from the game, so i use what i want from them to play with, nothing; and leave out the parts of them i do not want, everything else (everything).

use the world, the peoples, the locations, but ignore any novel based NPC you want to with any setting, especially FR. Drizzt never existed on your world, unless you say he did.

I actually do rather like aspects of Eberron/Planescape/Spelljammer.

I like the warforged concept and the execution was not terrible. Shifters are cool in concept, but terrible in execution. Changelings could have been a lot more interesting if the concept had been handled better (why the fuck are you going to give a shapeshifter race "true" genders rather than making them agendered or combining masculine and feminine aspects as a baseline with gendered changelings being unusual?)
I also genuinely like the magepunk feel they were trying to go for with Eberron and might try to work some of that into whatever setting I go with.

While the factions of Planescape were poorly conceived, there are interesting stories one can tell in that setting, interesting locales that are made possible, and, like with the Suel legacy that pops up in 3.5, the Planescape legacy in 3.5 gives some interesting classes (which probably need redesigns, but still).

Spelljammer... I remember first reading about Spelljammer in Polyhedron--once it had been absorbed into Dungeon magazine and was the inverted back half of Dungeon mainly used for introducing new games using the d20 system--back in High School. Mind Flayer nautoloid and drow spider ships and elven space boats that looked like birds and dwarves from barren desert worlds were all really cool. It was fantasy with some of the things I like about sci-fi, like a logical extension of Eberron, but way before Eberron's time. Sure, there are some races which are weird/dumb, but the idea is genuinely really cool to me. Plus, as much as I hated High School, there's still a nostalgia factor for the gaming memories from that time.

[rasmuswagner]

I like the warforged concept and the execution was not terrible. Shifters are cool in concept, but terrible in execution. Changelings could have been a lot more interesting if the concept had been handled better (why the fuck are you going to give a shapeshifter race "true" genders rather than making them agendered or combining masculine and feminine aspects as a baseline with gendered changelings being unusual?)

Why did they give the god damn robots genders?

Did the same Jesus-fellating subhumans who wrote the BoED get their hang-ups all over Eberron too?

(I'm sure Shadzar would be happy to elaborate)

[Prak]

Because the most visible "fantasy" robots in western culture clearly have genders--transformers. Of course it's also because they're stuck in the idea that "no gender=masculine." So warforged are treated as masculine unless one specifically decides it feels feminine. I'd be far more interested in a warforged that sees gender as part of being sentient, but sees no reason to pick just one, and samples and experiments with aspects of both masculine and feminine identity.

I'm just really bugged by the fact that the first canonically, typically hermaphroditic, bisexual player race was given some bullshit about "in their true form they have a specific gender, but most people won't know what it is because they spend so much time in disguise."

[talozin]

I think there's just a difference between "These guys are vaguely celts/scottish" and "yeah, these dark skinned guys had big civilizations, but war with other local civilizations and civil wars caused them to fall back into barbarism. They mostly wear primitive furs as coverings."

To give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the many authors of Greyhawk, "big civilization that fell" is a thing that's happened basically everywhere in the setting and to every one of the various human cultures. The Suel Empire fell, the Baklunish Empire fell, the Flan empire of Sulm fell, the Oeridian Great Kingdom has already mostly fallen and is doing its best to go the rest of the way ... it's not like the Olman and the Touv are in any way unusual in having fallen from a peak of civilization. Nor is "barbarism" a fair way to describe the remnants of the Olman kingdom, or the various independent Touv city-states in south Hepmonaland. Yeah, there are Olman living in a state of barbarism, but one of the funny things about the setting is that there are degenerate Suel cannibal barbarians living right next to them in the jungle.

The Suel irritate me, but not because they're clearly northern european. They irritate me because their legacy in 3.5 (with stuff like the Suel Arcanamach in CArc) is frankly awesome, but their civilization comes off like Saturday Morning Cartoon Villains, and makes me have to reframe my description of Vashar because Vashar are basically only worse in that they're more individualistic and rape-happy (so I now have to describe them as Iron Age Comic Villains to differentiate).

The Suloise really got the shaft in the run up to 3.x and thereafter. Before that ... well, it was like how there are people of Scandanavian descent who are avid devotees of the whole Aryan Nations crap, but most people of Scandanavian descent couldn't give a crap one way or the other and are if anything kind of embarrassed by those guys. Somewhere along the line the Scarlet Brotherhood stopped being "an organization of Suel racial supremacist douchebags" and became "an organization of the Suel, who are racial supremacist douchebags."

[Prak]

No, seriously, the gazetteer says "barbarism":

The Olman originated on Hepmonaland, raising a number of city-states from the jungles of that land. Through centuries of warfare, they built an empire that spanned northern Hepmonaland and reached across the Densac Gulf to include the Amedio Jungle. Internal strife and wars with another human race, the dark Touv, caused them to abandon their old cities. Many Olman migrated to the Amedio, where they maintained their civilization for several more centuries. Ultimately, these cities also fell to the curses of civil war and supernatural upheaval, until most Olman reverted to barbarism.

Also

The Olman favor magic that damages many opponents in visibly graphic ways. They also choose divination spells that allow them to understand the world around them and perhaps comprehend the omens of their distant gods. Magic that protects or heals others is very rare.

I'm probably going to tweak the Suel a bit, because I can totally roll with "the logical extension of a civilization that embraced philosophies similar to what Anton LaVey publicly espoused, which happens to have some racial supremicist douchebags." I'll probably work to add some greyness to the whole "magical arms race" that was implied to have taken place between the Baklunish and Suel, as well.

[talozin]

No, seriously, the gazetteer says "barbarism":

The Olman originated on Hepmonaland, raising a number of city-states from the jungles of that land. Through centuries of warfare, they built an empire that spanned northern Hepmonaland and reached across the Densac Gulf to include the Amedio Jungle. Internal strife and wars with another human race, the dark Touv, caused them to abandon their old cities. Many Olman migrated to the Amedio, where they maintained their civilization for several more centuries. Ultimately, these cities also fell to the curses of civil war and supernatural upheaval, until most Olman reverted to barbarism.

God dammit, Greyhawk, stop living down to my expectations. Well, in "The Scarlet Brotherhood", which is the only supplement I know of that covers the Amedio Jungle and Hepmonaland in any depth (that's not saying much, it's a short book), there's a somewhat similar but not identical reading. They have the same deal about how the Olman empire began in northern Hepmonaland and spread over the Amedio Jungle and how war with the Touv eventually destroyed the original empire, but they're clear that there's still at least one functioning Olman city-state. Not that the book is especially nice to the Olman -- who are mostly caricatured as the Aztecs in Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" -- but at least they aren't presented wholly as barbarians. Also, the Suel are equally dickish if not more so. The African analogues seem to be the only people in the book who aren't presented as raving assholes, but maybe I misremembered and they're also into human sacrifice or something.

I'm probably going to tweak the Suel a bit, because I can totally roll with "the logical extension of a civilization that embraced philosophies similar to what Anton LaVey publicly espoused, which happens to have some racial supremicist douchebags." I'll probably work to add some greyness to the whole "magical arms race" that was implied to have taken place between the Baklunish and Suel, as well.

Information is sketchy, but I've always had the impression that the Baklunish Empire was no less fucked up than the Suel Imperium. The presentation of the Suel in some material seems to cast them in a role similar to that of Imperial Rome, which at least would make the Scarlet Brotherhood fit right in as the equivalent of the Third Reich. So you could maybe work with something where the Suel are Rome and the Baklunish are Parthia?

[Prak]

Yeah, something like that could work. I'm already starting to formulate an idea for a campaign where the Scarlet Brotherhood are seeking to recover the technique of the Invoked Devastation to purge all non-Suel blood from the land. I could see it as a three part artifact quest, where first they have to recover an omniscience artifact, then a selective targeting artifact, and finally a stone tablet the Invoked Devastation was inscribed upon, and they can finally have their best Magical Device Abusers start the ritual using the first two artifacts to tune the effect to just non-Suel blood--literally, with the idea that they can purge non-Suel heritage from mixed race people.

The majority of the population of Greyhawk would probably be pretty invested in the SB not pulling that off, and the PCs being sent could be explained as "the SB expeditions are still fairly minor. Even a group of inexperienced adventurers should be able to sabotage their efforts at the earliest stages." It provides big stakes, but allows a starting point where higher level characters seriously have more important shit to do. It allows a lot of Suel ruins delving, and possibly even exploration of Baklunish lands seeking traces of the Invoked Devastation. Hell, I could put the selective targeting artifact in a Olman ruin, explaining it as something that ancient olmans would use to protect their own people from the destructive magics they would let loose in battle.

[talozin]

I could see it as a three part artifact quest, where first they have to recover an omniscience artifact, then a selective targeting artifact, and finally a stone tablet the Invoked Devastation was inscribed upon, and they can finally have their best Magical Device Abusers start the ritual using the first two artifacts to tune the effect to just non-Suel blood--literally, with the idea that they can purge non-Suel heritage from mixed race people.

Okay, at this point you really need to go find copies of Gary Gygax's seminal fiction works, "Artifact of Evil" and "Sea of Death", which are about a party of adventurers searching for three parts of an ancient evil artifact, one of which is in the hands of the Scarlet Brotherhood and another of which is buried in a ruined Suel Imperium city under the Sea of Dust. True, the artifact they're chasing after doesn't do the stuff that yours proposes, but since they both effectively amount to "and then the campaign world ends" it's close enough, right?

[Prak]

but since they both effectively amount to "and then the campaign world ends" it's close enough, right?

You mean in that they're both mass destruction artifacts?

[Username17]

Greyhawk has a lot less stuff in it than GW's Old World or Forgotten Realms. As such, they don't fall quite into the same kind of racial stereotype traps. Since there are less ethnic groups, each ethnic group is an amalgam of several real world ethnicities. The Suel aren't just Norse, the way the Games Workshop Norse are.

-Username17

[talozin]

but since they both effectively amount to "and then the campaign world ends" it's close enough, right?

You mean in that they're both mass destruction artifacts?

Pretty much. They're Maguffins, they're artifacts that the heroes chase after to ensure that they are NEVER EVER USED. What happens when they actually are used almost doesn't matter, because that's the end of the campaign. The specifics are only important in terms of what masks the Bad Guys are wearing, so you can lift ideas freely.

[Prak]

Fair point. The Baklunish did seem to be a bit of a mix. The Rhennee are just blatantly gypsies.

Looking at the Scarlet Brotherhood writeup in LGG... they're not a serious threat in 3.5. They're primarily Monks, Assassins and Rogues, with monks at the top, and rogues at the bottom. So, despite being racial purists for a culture with a strong magical heritage, the guys at the top can basically be beaten by any wizard about five levels below them. Hell, they can be beaten by fifth level wizards with wands of fireball. Players will actually have tougher fights against the mooks than the masters.

Which is fucking hilarious.

[talozin]

Why not make the Scarlet Brotherhood into a blind for the actual threat? Make the real danger to the world be a Suloise wizard or council of wizards who don't like to bother with the annoying work of actually running civilization, so they created the Scarlet Brotherhood to serve the dual function of handling the crap they don't want to bother with, and flushing out potential threats by presenting an obvious target for enemies to hit. Make sure you add in some little touches to the Brotherhood writeup to give hints for clever players -- like, have it structured so that the Monks are ostensibly the highest ranking guys, but the Wizards get to be the Supreme Court and decide what the meaning of "is" actually is -- so despite being lower down in official rank, they're the ones who hold the real power, since the Scarlet Brotherhood is Lawful to a fault.