There is currently a thread in this forum asking what RPGs folks have played, and reading down it I was unsurprised to see most everyone has played Dungeons & Dragons.
This being the case, I think there’s plenty ofpeople to post about their favorite settings, because I’m curious what is more popular.
While not the first D&D novels I read, when I finished the Dragonlance Chronicles I was hooked. DL is my favorite setting. Overall, I appreciate the feel, romance and pacing of novels. The chartacters and their desires and lives hold center-stage alongside whatever the “adventure” at hand is. Sometimes they even overshadow it.
I’ve read scores of D&D books over the years, and no setting does it for me like DL.
Strangely, DL is the only setting I’ve not actually roleplayed in, though I may get to run a campaign soon. None of my friends are very familiar with the setting for some reason, so I’m forced to come up with all sorts of ways to introduce them to it.
I hope we can actually talk about the fine points of settings here and why we set one above another. Geeks ahoy!
My mates and I have been taking it in turn to run dungeons for 25 years.
At first we all used **Forgotten Realms ** - basically European Medieval e.g. Castles, Crossbows and Market Days.
Then one DM picked up Dragonlance (the world of Krynn), which had about 15 modules. Two of us players (with occasional help) worked right through the War of the Lance until:
We helped the God Paladine thwart the God Takhisis
However the modules were not well written and relied on pretty much following the books. At one point the party beat off an attempt to capture them. the module assumed this happened, so the DM had to rewrite it from then on.
Al-Qadim has been enormously popular with our group. Everybody relates to genies, flying carpets and dodgy Viziers.
I am currently running a campaign set in a neutral area, with bordering powers such as an Empire, Barbarian sea adventurers, a gnome kingdom and a druidical forest.
I haven’t seen Babylon 5, but one can get inspiration from anywhere!
We use Forgotten Realms, heavily modified for my own use.
I think with my group it’s just ease of play, as when I say D&D thats the kind of world that pops into the players heads. We’ve got enough to learn and remember without getting confused over the details of the universe.
I’m played most of the D&D settings at one time or another.
I hate Dragonlance. I do. To me, it reeks of soap opera. Though I like the Kender.
I also hate Dark Sun. The elements are so bizarre as to seem random. Cannibal halflings?
Ravenloft is hit-or-miss for me; it was a source of amusement to me that the inescapable demiplane included a method of escape in almost every published adventure module. It was like the D&D cartoon. “Aww, we almost got home this time!”
Al-Qadim is neat, and I dig it. Wish I’d gotten to play it more.
Spelljammer is pretty darn cool, though it has a few elements that stick out like sore thumbs - a revamped version of this setting could be one of the coolest things ever.
Greyhawk’s okay, just a little dull.
Forgotten Realms and Planescape are my two favorites, and I own a nontrivial portion of the supplements produced for both.
My group almost never uses a premade game setting, we always cook up our own. We do sometimes borrow liberally from DL, FR etc. Right now my group is on a rotating schedule, 4 games so the GMs have one game a month to plan for and it’s working out pretty well. D20 modern, Classic D&D, D&D Oriental Adventures and my game which is a huge mish-mash of D20 Modern, D&D and other non D20 games adapted for play (it’s a sliders/Many Universes type of setting).
For fantasy, Forgotten Realms, modified whenever needed. We’ve also been playing Eberron recently and enjoying it. My favorite is d20 Apocalypse, though. I love post-apocalyptic RPGs.
I started playing in the original D&D world Mystara, so I have a bit of fondness for it, but I’ve kind of outgrown it.
Forgotten Realms is my favorite setting at this point. Most people are familiar enough with it that you don’t get blank stares when you mention something from the world (‘Drow? What’s a Drow?’). I like the 3.0/3.5 material that’s been done for it too.
Dragonlance, while it has a great story, isn’t a very good world to play in. At least, if you follow the rules as set out. From what I’ve read (and played), they basically looked at the main trilogy, and then defined the rules to support what happened in the books. Wizards get the shaft big time. I like the world, but it’s not favorite place to play.
I’ve done a little with Ebberon, and it strikes me as just another hacked together homebrew world. ‘You know what would be kewl? Robots!’. It didn’t do much for me.
Planescape is always fun. I’ve had some ridiculous games there.
Forgotten Realms pretty much exclusively, as a backdrop. The scope is just so huge – we’ve had adventures in Maztica, Kara-Tur, and Zakhara. We just like the feel.
I love the Forgotten Realms. Each nations has a slightly different feel, so you get plenty of variety in the same setting. You’ve got classic Cormyr, greco-roman Chessenta, wild Rashemen, sinister Thay, the lawless Dragon Coast, sweltering Chult, and dozens of other exotic locales, all without losing the classic fantasy core (and plenty more beyond the continent of Faerun). I love the history as well; Lost Empires of Faerun is my favorite D&D supplement by far. I love the plethora of deities, each of which somehow manages to remain distinctive. Oh, and let’s not forget that it’s a very high-magic setting, which I really like.
I’m glad to see that it’s the most popular setting in this thread so far. On the WotC boards, Eberron (which I don’t care for) is alarmingly popular.
I still run an old fashion AD&D campaign with my own add on rules.
Over the last 28 years I have alternated between worlds of my own creation and ones based on Middle Earth. I am just closing out a campaign designed up around a powerful dwarven kingdom and its allies. I will probably start up another Middle Earth Campaign next. It will take place in the early fourth age starting in King Ellesar’s reign.
When I design up my own worlds I attempt to build an outline of history to work with and build upon. What I enjoy with Middle Earth is that the history is already in place. Over the years I have modified and used the old MERP modules into my game. I have had characters reinvented from campaign to campaign. It provides continuity to my refereeing. I have built genealogies for the Houses of Telcontir, Rohan, Ithilien, the Beornings and several Hobbit families. I have slowly mapped out the lands to the East and South and added an additional language and runic alphabet for it. I even followed out the paths of the Blue Wizards and what they wrought in the East.
I usually like the players to play two characters at once and then round things out with a steady group of NPCs and occasional characters they interact with regularly.
Forgotten Realms would be my favorite too, but I must admit I haven’t looked too deeply into Eberron or Dragonlance. I’ve played a few custom melting-pot settings online, but right now I’m getting pretty deeply into Greyhawk due to the Living Greyhawk campaign. The setting isn’t a mere backdrop, either; LG strongly involves its players in regional politics. It is kind of dull compared to Faerun, but it’s growing on me.
My group usually used original settings…supplemented with modules from various sources from time to time. I ran the Temple of Elemental Evil by plunking the village of Hommlet and surroundings into an existing map. Also ran several modules taken from Dungeon Magazine…each issue had 4-5 modules that were easy to plug in pretty much anywhere. One of my favorites was one my players still call “Honey, I shrunk the party”–about a house with a spell that shrank everybody down to toy soldier size.
It’s been a while since I’ve played, but when I did, my friends and I almost always just made things up as we went along. There are several advantages to this. First, it lets the entire group take part in world-creation. If a player decides that his character was a veteran of a war some 20 years ago, well, then, there was a war 20 years ago. If another comes from the village of Kragnak, far in the frozen north, well then, somewhere up north, there’s a village called Kragnak. If the DM loses his notes one day, well then, that thriving metropolis is officially named Blah-blahblah (this last one actually happened).
It also allows flexibility. For instance, the party is at a crossroads, and the DM asks them which way they’re going. The party decides on west. Well, then, a couple days’ travel west, they encounter the town of Creekford, which is at that moment under attack by a band of orcs. Alternately, if they had gone south, then a couple of days travel south, they would have encountered the town of Creekford, at that moment under attack by a band of orcs. If you decide that your campaign needs a big city, or an abandoned haunted mine, or a great river, there’s always one exactly where you need it, since you put it there.
Of course, you can get items from other campaigns creeping in, too. If someone wants to play a kender, then you can always put a kender homeland somewhere on your vague map. This gets back to the flexibility and collaborative creation aspects above.
I know this doesn’t count as a D&D setting, but I just love Glorantha, the setting that the RuneQuest system was designed to explore. See www.glorantha.com for what’s currently being done with the setting.
You have a point. In fact, it’s the big point for my trying to run it: Some of my players aren’t very good at the actual roleplaying aspect of gaming, and I’m worried they’ll either dilute the game or just not enjoy themselves.
Ebberon, on the other hand, is just too fast-paced for me. Everything in the novels, adventures and sourcebooks is non-stop action without breaks, adn when real character plot is seen it gets dropped suddenly for more adventure.
When we first started playing, “generic” D&D was Greyhawk as Chronos spoke about it, but not having any resources we didn’t even know the name Greyhawk to begin with.
Today, all my players see the Realms as “standard” D&D. I do concur about the wonderful splendiosity of the setting’s sourcebooks (well, not some of the newer ones that are built around adventures).
My favorite D&D setting is, without a doubt, Eberron. This is due in large part to the fact that I only started playing D&D a couple years ago. While I’ve heard a lot about Forgotten Realms, I’ve consciously avoided it for the most part. From what I’ve seen of FR and the comments I’ve seen from others, I’ve come into the game too late in FR’s existence, and there’s just too much canon to absorb at this point. So I figured that, since I was new to the game, I’d just go with the “current” setting. I like the fact that I can watch the whole thing unfold from the beginning.
There’s also the fact that the “official” timeline of Eberron is not going to advance. Officially, Eberron will always be just a couple years past the end of a great war, and published supplements will reflect this. Novels are not allowed to introduce world-changing events. Actual time passing will take place only in actual games. This way, theoretically, DMs can orchestrate world-shaping events in their campaigns and not have those events invalidated by a later novel or supplement. I’ve heard this is a problem with the Realms (and probably Dragonlance, too) - a DM will set an adventure in a particular city, only to have a player protest, “But that city was wiped off the map in [some novel the DM didn’t read]!”
However, I do enjoy reading the Dragonlance novels. I’m currently reading theDragonlance Chronicles. I had to finally track down a list of the “correct” order in which to read the Dragonlance novels, after reading the War of Souls trilogy and realising that I had just read the end of the story. There are just too many books to make it practical to stand there in the store looking at every book’s copyright date!
There’s a problem that never happened in my games. Bottom line is that the DM makes the call. Nothing that happened in any novel, movie, or drug induced rambling had any effect on my world unless I said it did. When someone else was the DM, they usually had a similar policy.
