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Favourite D&D Setting?

  • Greyhawk

    Votes: 4 11.4%
  • Dragonlance (Krynn)

    Votes: 1 2.9%
  • Forgotten Realms

    Votes: 2 5.7%
  • Known World/Mystara

    Votes: 9 25.7%
  • Dark Sun

    Votes: 3 8.6%
  • Planescape

    Votes: 7 20.0%
  • Birthright

    Votes: 2 5.7%
  • Al-Qadim

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Ravenloft

    Votes: 6 17.1%
  • Ebberon

    Votes: 1 2.9%

  • Total voters
    35

Voros

Doomed Investigator
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So which of the many, many official or even semi-official D&D settings is your favourite?

There are so many I couldn't even fit all of them (Nehwon/Lankhmar, Ghostwalk, Council of Wyrms, Spelljammer, Kara-Tur and Matzica, although the last two were technically retroconed into FR) within the Poll limit of 10 choices so you can add them below. Semi-official settings include Imagine's Pelinore, Valoreign and Mahasapara.

PS. Yes, I'm so unfamiliar with Eberron I misspelled it in the poll!

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The Known World is the only one I've ever played in...that's the one with Threshold and Specularum and Karameikos and The Black Eagle Barony, right?

Other than that, I'd be interested in checking out al-Qadim to see if there are any useful resources for a game set in the Islamic world of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights.
 
Of the official TSR/WotC settings, I'd say Plan escape. For third party, it would be a toss up between Ptolus and Midnight.
 
The Known World is the only one I've ever played in...that's the one with Threshold and Specularum and Karameikos and The Black Eagle Barony, right?

Other than that, I'd be interested in checking out al-Qadim to see if there are any useful resources for a game set in the Islamic world of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights.

Yes, that is the Known World, later named Mystara. It was my pick as well as the Gazeteers are my favourite setting material in D&D and Night's Dark Terror is set there as well.

But this was actually a hard choice for me as I love elements of DL, Dark Sun, Planescape, Ravenloft and Al-Qadim as well. I even like the much put-upon Spelljammer. Birthright I'm less familar with but the ideas behind it are intriguing.

Al-Qadim certainly has loads of stuff to steal for an Arabian Nights/Sinbad setting. I generally found Al-Qadim settings material of consistent quality. In particular you may want to look at the Sha'ir who instead of being standard D&D spellcasters have to summon genies and request spells and services from them.

To me many of 2e's settings, especially Planescape and Dark Sun, largely refute the truism that 2e was a 'kiddification' of D&D.
 
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I remember using the Known World material that was in the Basic and Expert boxes, although I don't think the setting had a name at the time, or at least I dont remember it being referred to as such. I also had the Karameikos gazetteer and maybe another one, which is probably know if I saw it. No idea where the gazeteer disappeared to. I'm pretty sure I just took bits and maps and created a setting around that as I've never been keen on using someone else's setting, mainly because for me it's always been simpler to roll my own than try to "fix" what I dislike about published settings.
 
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This was a hard choice, but I've run Eberron the most so I'll be honest and pick it. Eberron isn't my favorite setting aesthetically, but it allows me to run the kind of pseudo-modern magitech adventures that come so easily to my mind.

Ravenloft is cooler than Eberron and I've run it a fair amount, but it just doesn't mesh with D&D's tropes very well.

Dark Sun
is just as cool, but too depressing for me given the possible future we're heading for in the real world.

Birthright
gets a lot of stuff right that I appreciate more now that I'm older, but the domain system has always sounded like too much of a headache and even without that I'm worried about the various spellcaster restrictions leaving the place ironically vulnerable to player spellcasters.

I'll probably give Spelljammer a spin one of these days, as it can be used to resurrect the space opera adventures that hard sci-fi killed for me.

I have a total outsider's fascination with Dragonlance, never having experienced it in its heyday and having read only the first book, which sucked. I may run a heavily fine-tuned version of the setting some day as a pretext to explore this dusty museum piece further.

Next time I run D&D however, I'm going in the opposite direction of Eberron with a homebrew. I'll be emulating feudal tropes more closely (though not slavishly), restraining the tech level, working with a more limited palette of supernatural setting details. A bit Like Birthright.

... I'd say Plan escape.

Like any good adventuring party should! :wink:
 
Birthright
Eberron
Dark Sun

3 great settings that deserved a better game system. Dearly wish these IPs could go to other companies.

However as I could only choose one it’s Birthright.
 
I voted Mystara, since that's the D&D setting I'm most familiar with. I liked Greyhawk, and I have fond memories of reading the original Forgotten Realms grey box. Never been exposed to any of the other settings.
 
The Known World is the only one I've ever played in...that's the one with Threshold and Specularum and Karameikos and The Black Eagle Barony, right?

Other than that, I'd be interested in checking out al-Qadim to see if there are any useful resources for a game set in the Islamic world of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights.
Green Ronin did a setting called Caliphate Nights you might want to check out.
 
Call me when Spelljammer becomes an option.

Because gun-toting anthro-hippos, fantasy-spider warships of death crewed by death-loving fantasy spiderpeople, and landing in the middle of a stereotypical fantasy village in a giant, flying dragonfly! That's why! :shade:

Spelljammer was the original Rifts. :thumbsup:
 
Planescape is my favourite of the 'official' TSR settings, as it's the most 'pure' AD&D setting (i.e., its cosmology, metaphysical assumptions, creatures, etc., are more 'internal' to AD&D than any other setting). And it's quite unique.

I'm also fond of Mystara, Greyhawk, and (certain parts of) the Forgotten Realms.

I like the idea of Dark Sun, but I'm not that familiar with it.
 
Call me when Spelljammer becomes an option.

Because gun-toting anthro-hippos, fantasy-spider warships of death crewed by death-loving fantasy spiderpeople, and landing in the middle of a stereotypical fantasy village in a giant, flying dragonfly! That's why! :shade:

Spelljammer was the original Rifts. :thumbsup:

Good comparison, it pained me to leave it off due to space but I agree about its appealing gonzo nature. And some inspired art too.

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The Known World for me. But not Mystara. I know, a bit weird, but I like there to be lots of blank space that I can fill in for myself when it comes to settings. And Mystara is just too detailed for me. And because it was made in a series of booklets over a fairly long period of time, it's kind of haphazard, too.

But the setting as described in the Expert and COmpanion boxes, plus the early B and X modules is one that I really feel you can make your own.
 
Greyhawk, no doubt. It blows my mind when people refer to it as "vanilla" or "generic," when I see the exact opposite: gonzo, kitchen-sink, genre-mixing-and-bending goodness.

I should say that Greyhawk was my default setting all throughout my early D&D days and I'm still fond of it. I'm a big fan of the City of Greyhawk boxset, one of the few remaining RPG releases I kept all these years and it was recently made available POD via Drivethru, highly recommended to all!
 
The Known World for me. But not Mystara. I know, a bit weird, but I like there to be lots of blank space that I can fill in for myself when it comes to settings. And Mystara is just too detailed for me. And because it was made in a series of booklets over a fairly long period of time, it's kind of haphazard, too.

But the setting as described in the Expert and COmpanion boxes, plus the early B and X modules is one that I really feel you can make your own.

Yeah, that is my feeling that maybe I didn't express clearly up above.
 
I don't actually have that strong an attachment to any of the D&D settings despite liking D&D. I started with B/X, and I was really inspired by the map of the Known Worlds, but I never actually used it aside from running X1. I generally made homebrew worlds.

The first setting I ever bought was the World of Greyhawk boxed set, and I found it a little disappointing. I had the unrealistic expectations of a kid, and I saved up money to buy the box that promised to give me a whole world for my players to explore. The map was pretty cool. I thought the weather tables were interesting. On the whole though, there was very little that box that I found any use for. There was a book full of paragraph-long descriptions of dozens of countries. It was a mile wide and an inch deep. I had more of an expectation of it being a hex crawl, with lots of keyed locations.

Drawing a map and giving countries cool names was the easy part of making a campaign. The hard part was actually fleshing out adventure locations. If I was going to pay someone to do game prep for me, I wanted them to work on the latter.

I've come to appreciate Greyhawk over the years both by understanding its role in gaming history and through viewing it as the modules set in it rather than the boxed set that I bought.

I was in 7th grade when I encountered the Dragonlance novels, so I like the first trilogy well enough, and slowly grew tired of the setting over the second trilogy. I never had any interest playing through the adventures based on the novels, and neither did my friends.

I didn't touch the Forgotten Realms boxed set when it came out. I was never really into Ed Greenwood's articles in Dragon, and I was already wary of world sets. I picked up the 3E version, but I backed away from running it when a couple of my players turned out to be FR fanatics who had read a lot of the novels. I didn't want to be that locked into canon.

I sat out AD&D 2E, so that means I missed a large number of the most loved settings for the game.

I've run some Eberron, both with 3.5 and Savage Worlds. My feelings are close to Shipyard Locked Shipyard Locked . It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it was something that I could shape into what I wanted to be, especially after I dumped the 3.5 rules.
 
Drawing a map and giving countries cool names was the easy part of making a campaign.

See, this is one of the hard parts for me. I have this irrational aversion to accidentally using a name associated with something else, or that something else more famous will come along and invalidate the name I invested in, or that the name will turn out to sound laughably stupid once players start mangling it. I was called out on this as a kid (I genuinely didn't know who Gimli was at the time) and the angst remains.

One appeal of pre-made settings is that they take this naming pressure off.
 
The first setting I ever bought was the World of Greyhawk boxed set, and I found it a little disappointing. I had the unrealistic expectations of a kid, and I saved up money to buy the box that promised to give me a whole world for my players to explore. The map was pretty cool. I thought the weather tables were interesting. On the whole though, there was very little that box that I found any use for. There was a book full of paragraph-long descriptions of dozens of countries. It was a mile wide and an inch deep. I had more of an expectation of it being a hex crawl, with lots of keyed locations.

Drawing a map and giving countries cool names was the easy part of making a campaign. The hard part was actually fleshing out adventure locations. If I was going to pay someone to do game prep for me, I wanted them to work on the latter.

I've come to appreciate Greyhawk over the years both by understanding its role in gaming history and through viewing it as the modules set in it rather than the boxed set that I bought.

My older brother had the boxed set that came out in 1983. I remember thinking the map was cool but I don't know that we ever used the set for much of anything. I dont know that we even knew it was a different locale or world from Threshold and places like the keep on the Borderlands. I never liked the name Greyhawk.
 
See, this is one of the hard parts for me. I have this irrational aversion to accidentally using a name associated with something else, or that something else more famous will come along and invalidate the name I invested in, or that the name will turn out to sound laughably stupid once players start mangling it. I was called out on this as a kid (I genuinely didn't know who Gimli was at the time) and the angst remains.

One appeal of pre-made settings is that they take this naming pressure off.
There is definitely something nice about having a quality map to place your own stuff on.
 
I
I sat out AD&D 2E, so that means I missed a large number of the most loved settings for the game.

Same here. I missed 2e AD&D and only came to know and appreciate Planescape because of the CRPG Torment. It was so intriguing and atmospheric that I bought a used copy of the core setting box set (then 10 years OOP).
 
Read that link to the capsule reviews of the Known World gazetteers...I'm curious about the Emirates of Ylaruam. If anyone has a copy, does it have good rules and information for Arabic traders and merchants and seafarers?
 
I believe I have a pdf copy from when the gazeteers were on sale as a bundle. I’ll look it over and report back.
 
Read that link to the capsule reviews of the Known World gazetteers...I'm curious about the Emirates of Ylaruam. If anyone has a copy, does it have good rules and information for Arabic traders and merchants and seafarers?

Answer, not really. It has some simple rules for travel, horse-riding and water in the desert but it is literally about two pages. They're pretty good but nothing that will blow you away.
 
Greyhawk! I missed out on 2nd edition and avoided BX as a youth so really I've only played Greyhawk and Eberron. I enjoyed the hell out of both but Greyhawk wins out. I have so many good memories of playing in that with my childhood friends.
 
Answer, not really. It has some simple rules for travel, horse-riding and water in the desert but it is literally about two pages. They're pretty good but nothing that will blow you away.
Ah, sounds like they went the popular misconception route of Arabs = deserts.
 
Ah, sounds like they went the popular misconception route of Arabs = deserts.
I spent three years of my childhood on the Arabian Peninsula, and there was an awful lot of desert.
 
You didn't notice the surrounding seas and oceans?
I did, and I agree that rules for nautical trading would make a lot of sense. I just think desert and water rules make a lot of sense too.
 
Well, of course you need both!
I believe the sea travel rules are in the core rules so it does make some sense that they would only include setting specific travel rules like improved desert travel in the supplement.
 
I don't actually have that strong an attachment to any of the D&D settings despite liking D&D.

Yeah, I've enjoyed bits and pieces of certain D&D settings (Dark Sun is my own favorite). But there are so many better ones, these days especially, that I can't even keep up with them.
 
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