Favorite Official Campaign Setting?

[Orca]

The Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen into ammonia (which could then be converted into nitrates for explosives, fertiliser etc.) earned Fritz Haber the Nobel prize in 1918. In case any of you were wondering - Tussock is still wrong.

In Eberron there isn't a series of written adventures where you invade Droaam and set it to rights, and reigniting the Last War is generally agreed to be a bad thing even if it's inevitable in the long term. The pieces are there if you want to set one of those games up though. Yes, the default enemies are terrorists, organised crime, crazed cults and so forth. So?

[souran]

Tussuck says a bunch of things all of which are incorrect

Are you dense?

WWI ended when the Germans ran out of food. The British blockade was working. They were getting ready to fucking starve the country to keep soldiers fed. Additionally, most of the rest of the central powers had exhausted their populations and were not really capable of putting up effective resistance.

The only reason that the western allies didn't fucking roll over the germans in the west in 1918 (and continuing into 1919) is that except for the U.S. the western allies were equally exhausted. There are historical documents that tend to show that Britain sent 95% of the men born in Britain in 1894 to their death in WWI. Not, 95% of the men who served who were born in 1894, but 95% of the male population born in 1894. They killed an entire years worth of births. The addition of U.S. to the war inserted a participant that was willing to take 1914-1915 level losses again to the war and none of the other belligerents could afford that.

Also WWI is the first war defined by super weapons. Battleships, Tanks, flame weapons, machine guns, and most importantly GAS. The definitive event that ends "the last war" is the release of a mist that destroys an entire country. This is a metaphor for Gas weapons of the first world war. If you can't see it then it is no wonder you don't get Ebberon because the entire thing is supposed to be a pastiche of D&D with Indiana Jones and Sam Spade.

Eberon's last war ends when everybody is to exhausted to fight anymore without having settled the underling conflicts. Many of the nation states feel like they could have won with one last push or they were "stabbed in the back". These are literally concepts that Mussolini and Hitler used to come to power.

Even fucking calling it the "last war" is a call back to the first world war. The whole setting fucking screams 1920s/1930s pulp action/noir. The airships look less final fantasy and more like the hindenburg. One of the major setting features is a fucking TRAIN. Hell, if "We go to the tavern and get blasted" were not such a major part of role playing I assume that Thrane would have prohibition.

[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.

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.

I did living Greyhawk too. Nobody gave a shit about "Greyhawk" stuff. Most people who played living Greyhawk couldn't tell you about the "circle of eight", or the empire of Iuz. They didn't know that Vecna was a bad guy in the setting before he was a god in the PHB.

The issue is not that Greyhawk is not interesting, its that TSR basically tried to hide the setting starting in 1988 and then when Greyhawk was made the "default" setting for 3E it was not really supported. The only release the detailed the setting was the Living Greyhawk Gazeteer.

This is unfortunate because Greyhawk is in some ways a better default setting than the Realms. The Geography of Oerth works better. The deities are generally better (have better personalities) and a lot of the things that are of the idiosyncrasies of D&D are better integrated in Greyhawk than the realms.

They are both kitchen sink settings but the realms tends to feel like everything is being forced into the setting instead of them being natural outgrowth of the setting.

That said, TSR killed Greyhawk and WOTC didn't really embrace the setting. They published a Realms campaign setting and outsourced the Greyahwk book.

The Realms has been the default D&D setting since 1988 on purpose. It did supplant Greyhawk. This is not a statement about quality, it is a statement about past events.

[Thaluikhain]

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.

Hey, by strange coincidence I'm currently watching The Last Jedi and Luke just said "Every word of what you just said is wrong".

Apart from people (not specifically Nazi apologists, though) making weird claims about Nazi weapons, that applies here.

Germany was facing all sorts of shortages (not just food, but definitely food), and couldn't win the war before the US forces arrived, despite ending the Eastern front. Not a bad attempt, though, but they had nothing left, including morale and discipline.

WW2 was not solely caused by nitrogen. I've never seen anyone who had to say that before.

They didn't treat shellshock at all well, that doesn't mean they just murdered all the victims. Though, people got talking about it a lot later on, true.

And it's Sean Connery.

[Wiseman]

The only official settings I really care about are Dragonlance, Dark Sun, and Planescape.

[Emerald]

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!

Every edition advanced the FR timeline--1e to 2e is a 10-year jump (1358 to 1368 DR), and 2e to 3e is 4 years--and changed the setting with Realms Shaking Events, and if you're counting the Prism Pentad heroes taking out the Dragon of Tyr and the druids regrouping and starting to make a dent in the Athasian wastelands as significant setting changes, then the Time of Troubles rearranging the pantheon and the Zhentarim and Red Wizards changing significantly in power over the years definitely count. FR has seen more changes in 14 in-game years than most settings see over their entire production run.

The differences are just less noticeable if you're only looking at the setting splatbooks, because Dark Sun made a big deal about "Look, we had a novel series that changed the setting and advanced the metaplot! Here's everything that's different!" in the second round of books whereas FR has a metric shit ton of novels that change things all the time so the splatbooks don't call it out (and couldn't cover all the changes if they tried).

As for the modules, all of them assume by default that the heroes win so that the world continues to exist and fans' favorite countries aren't nuked off the map (cough cough Spellplague), but (A) most of them do have side effects beyond the module so it can actually make a difference whether you set your campaign before or after a given module happens and (B) most of them have suggestions on how the setting is affected if things don't go well for the party and where the DM can take things from there, with the three- or four-module 3e adventure paths discussing a half-dozen breakpoints in addition to the "what if the villain wins at the end" section.

Not only that, but FR has time travel built into the setting (Netheril dabbled in chronomancy quite a bit, the Arcane Age supplements talk about bringing "modern" PCs back to Netheril and Cormanthyr, and things like time conduit spells and time gates are explicitly placed in the setting for anyone to learn about and try to use), so it provides more support for individual parties subverting or ignoring canonical events than even Dragonlance does.

In Eberron there isn't a series of written adventures where you invade Droaam and set it to rights, and reigniting the Last War is generally agreed to be a bad thing even if it's inevitable in the long term. The pieces are there if you want to set one of those games up though. Yes, the default enemies are terrorists, organised crime, crazed cults and so forth. So?

Not only are the pieces all in place to reignite the Last War, but they go out of their way to give three of the four remaining major nations a reason to want to do so, so that they can easily serve as the designated bad guys in Last War II. Aundair wants to go all Lebensraum on the Eldeen Reaches, and Queen Aurala really wants to establish and rule a Third Reich Second Kingdom of Galifar; Cardinal Krozen wants to pin all of Thrane's woes on those damn dirty heretical shifters and goblins, hand out "Gott Silver Flame Mitt Uns" belt buckles, and purify the continent of the lesser races; the Karrn warlords were humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles Thronehold forcing Karrnath to submit to various penalties, like surrendering its colonies Valenar to the natives, and they'd really like to pay the other nations back.

Hell, Karrnath is a blatantly expy of leading-up-to-WW2 Germany, with German-sounding names for everything, a strongly martial culture with compulsory military service, and a straight-up Nazi Party analog in the Order of the Emerald Claw, which is an uber-patriotic slightly-occult extremist organization that constantly talks about wanting Karrnath to "rise again!" and is obsessed with bloodlines and blood purity. The parallels couldn't be more obvious without literally having the Emerald Claw go around yelling "Heil Vol!" all the time.

[erik]

I did living Greyhawk too. Nobody gave a shit about "Greyhawk" stuff. Most people who played living Greyhawk couldn't tell you about the "circle of eight", or the empire of Iuz. They didn't know that Vecna was a bad guy in the setting before he was a god in the PHB.

Dunno what to tell you. I played it for over a year, and played with easily a hundred different players and most could tell you at least a bit about Iuz, or even Verbobonc since that was my home region. The folks in Furyondy region (Michigan) seemed pretty invested into their region too the one time I went to a con up north. Certainly a lot didn't care about the setting and were just there to get their DnD on, but the modules and rewards and organizations I think did a very good job of fleshing out the setting and I found myself buying into a setting that I previously hadn't given two shits about. Surely some selection bias in my interactions since the people who just used it to download free modules to play with their home groups I didn't meet, but instead I met the people who wanted to play it when at conventions who probably were more gung-ho.

[souran]

Everybody's experience is going to be annecdotal. I found that that Kansas City area was not super engrossed in the living Greyhawk world building stuff.

Then again it was not much better with living realms in 4E.

The biggest difference to me is the video games. There is exactly 1 D&D video game set in Greyhawk (temple of elemental evil). It is good but didn't have much cultural impact.

By comparison the video games set in the realms include:

6X Goldbox games (1988-1992) [ and 1 more if you include the pseudo mmo]
4X Eye of the Beholder games (including Menzoberanzan)
3X Late 90s Isometric games (including icewind dale)
2X Neverwinter Nights games
1X Pools of Radiance (2000s remake)
1X Sword Coast Adventures
1X Mobile Game
2X MMOs (Dungeons and Dragons Online/ Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter)

Those are just the ones that I played. Looking at Wikipedia they list 2 Greyahwk Video games and about 3 dozen Realms video games.

People who have never played D&D at the tabletop know things about the Realms. This is by design. TSR didn't want to use Garry's setting because they were trying to make it so that they didn't really owe Garry anything.

Again, I actually think that greyhawk is a better default setting (except for the stupid ass circle of 8. The idea that we want a balance of good an evil is just stupid.)

The realms is D&Ds default setting, TSR and WOTC have basically made sure of that. That is what I mean the Greyhawk does not have any traction. There just isn't a lot of reason for Greyahwk when you have the realms.

[erik]

I could see a circle of 8/balance being nominally ok if they’re that way for a good reason. Like they’re all needed to fend off eldritch horrors. Need someone powerful enough to call on and command each plane for armies come reckoning day, so cannot wipe out your chaotic evil gods since you will need those balor later. Ugh. Can’t believe I’m using order or the stick as inspiration, but there it is.

On LG, our region had a pretty active forum and network of neckbeards for making setting material for Verbobonc. Might not have been too typical. Lotsa modules, lot of regional setting organizations to interact with as well and in game rewards we just good enough to make it worthwhile to put in the effort of getting more setting immersion for your character.

[Emerald]

I could see a circle of 8/balance being nominally ok if they’re that way for a good reason. Like they’re all needed to fend off eldritch horrors. Need someone powerful enough to call on and command each plane for armies come reckoning day, so cannot wipe out your chaotic evil gods since you will need those balor later. Ugh. Can’t believe I’m using order or the stick as inspiration, but there it is.

It's not just OotS that does that, there are plenty of other "Good and Evil unite against Much Bigger Evil" stories and properties out there. The big one I can think of is Worm, where the superheroes and supervillains explicitly stick to comic book morality and KO or capture each other instead of doing anything lethal because they need every last cape alive to hold off the Endbringers, major threats that show up every few months and would wipe out city after city indefinitely unless the capes band together and fend them off.

Positing that the Circle of Eight's was actually formed because the moronic Elder Elves created the Vast Gate centuries ago and left Oerth open to Far Realm invasion forever after, so the Eight deal with minor Far Realm phenomena all the time and need to preserve all the alignment factions in case a serious Far Realm incursion ever happens and causes a potential-end-of-the-world scenario, would both give the Circle a better raison d'etre and rescue the Far Realm from its pathetic "the place where tentacled things come from" portrayal in recent editions.

That premise even has precedence in canon, since several beings from the Far Realm supposedly ended up on Oerth when humanoid life was first arising and it took an alliance of Pelor, Obad-Hai, Nerull, and Kord to deal with them, and the four gods sacrificed some of their power to create the anti-Far Realm seal (which the Vast Gate causes occasional gaps in) to prevent a reoccurrence. If the NE God of Death and the Undead and the NG God of Stopping People from Dying and Hating the Undead could put aside their differences to do that, the Circle's plans seem quite reasonable by comparison.