Quote from: Premier;524476"People called Romanes they go the house"?

Not exactly, pazhú tusűm nyéü'gguál*.

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* "Accomplice who should be writing the campaign journal".

Quote from: JRR;524352Spelljammer imo, though Dark Sun and Red Steel were pretty bad as well.

Red Steel would have been fucking awesome, were it not for the red steel.

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Quote from: Blackhand;524400Forgot to put Forgotten Realms on your list.  

Um, no. Its right there on the list, right after "dragonlance"; I did forget to put Taladas and Maztica, and Red Steel, though.

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Quote from: Premier;524476"People called Romanes they go the house"?

You win, sir.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Premier;524345In all but one of these settings, if a module's author or a DM wants to describe a noble warrior with a sword walking beneath the trees, he'll say something along the lines of "There's a noble warrior with a sword walking under the trees." In the wider context of fantasy, Tolkien might also give us four paragraphs on what type of tree it was, what colour its leaves were and the patterns and materials that make up the decoration on the sword's hilt, but the words "noble", "warrior", "sword" and "tree" would still be featured somewhere in there.

There's one setting on this list, one, where none of these words would actually appear. Instead, you'd have a Salayáni Tschótamba with a Srak-srí walking under the Pschi-Tsáyin. Guess which one it is.

Dude. Jorune is not on the list. It wasn't even published by TSR.



Seriously, what's with Tékumel and the language canard. I own the books and I don't see this "ZOMG must know the language top play/run" anymore than you have to speak Japanese to run Sengoku, or Klingon to run Star Trek.

Quote from: Premier;524433I think it might be fairer to say that 2e had great ideas for settings, but they were regularly brought low by the fact that they tried to turn them into actual products under the design paradigm of 2e (story-orientation, self-censorship, etc.).

This is right, though. Lots of good ideas, bad execution, mostly owing to transmedia IP building (read: must sell novels) and Pat Pulling-compliant PG-rated presentation.

I actually like The Known World/Mystara (which started life as a bunch of B and X series adventure backdrops sewn together as a setting, and benefited from very little IP building or metaplot up until Wrath of the Immortals), Dark Sun (as presented in the original boxed set and initial supplements; fuck the Prism Pentad novels and metaplot), Birthright (a far better attempt at "high fantasy D&D" than heavy-handed, novel-centric, dracophiliac, kender-ridden Dragonlance) and Planescape ("let's take the crazy D&D cosmology created by a probably drug-addled Gygax in the 70s, and run with it"; a better gonzo setting than Spelljammer, too).

Even Dragonlance has a couple of good ideas in it, though (Taladas!). Forgotten Realms, like Dark Sun, is a much better setting if you stick to the gray box and the first few supplements.  Greyhawk is one I can't claim a lot of familiarity with. Spelljammer has fantasy spaceships, which is pretty cool and all, but I could never wrap my head around what is it that PCs actually do.

Tékumel is on a league of its own, hors concours really.

Quote from: The Butcher;524592...and Pat Pulling-compliant PG-rated presentation.

Overdone for sure, and that took away from the original game.

What about players, profanity, and cursing? Not because their characters are in any kind of distress, but because they think it's cool to be able to cuss and curse in-game?

Same for music these days. It's like the music must have explicit lyrics, or it won't make it onto the billboard charts.

Is it really relevant to the story? Is it even relevant for the gameplay?

As a GM, when is a good time to rule enough-is-enough, let's get on with the game-at-hand, instead of the meta-game one (or more) of the players at the table decided to create?

huh...so Amazing Engine settings (yes there were a couple gems in there) and Gammarauders are right out then.

I've always been underwhelmed by the 2e era TSR city boxed sets with their lovely maps.  It's just the pretty little picture buildings don't really give a sense of a cramped and dirty medieval city I guess.  I don't know, I wanted to like them and didn't.

More broadly the later, post Gygax, Greyhawk stuff always seemed to be trying to hammer a metaplot onto a sandbox.  I don't mind a setting with a built in history and a flow but I hate it when a setting is tied to events in a series of novels that leave the PCs as second banana bit players.

But no, I never liked Dark Sun or the Forgotten Realms.  Mystria always felt forced, contrived, and childish.  I think there were good ideas here and there but the forced, laugh track, humor just undermined them.

Spelljammer made my head hurt. It's a personal thing, but the setting just looked too cheesy to enjoy. A friend of mine ran it for awhile and when he talked about the game it never really made me want to jump in and play. I mostly just thought that I'd rather play Traveler. Also elves and dwarves in space? Meh. That's probably the reason that I never got swept up in the Warhammer 40K frenzy along with my friends.

Of all the settings offered Al-Qadim was my favorite. Though I did have a friend who ran Blackmoor and it was a blast. I'm not sure if its because the setting was great or he was just a good GM.

Quote from: The Butcher;524592Seriously, what's with Tékumel and the language canard. I own the books and I don't see this "ZOMG must know the language top play/run" anymore than you have to speak Japanese to run Sengoku, or Klingon to run Star Trek.

I even broke out my copy of EPT yesterday evening just to double-check. It is still one of the most clearly written RPG books out there. All that experience writing textbooks must have helped; the prose is crystal-clear with an undercurrent of dark humour, and the weird stuff is explained very carefully not to overwhelm the reader.

Quote from: David Johansen;524597More broadly the later, post Gygax, Greyhawk stuff always seemed to be trying to hammer a metaplot onto a sandbox.  I don't mind a setting with a built in history and a flow but I hate it when a setting is tied to events in a series of novels that leave the PCs as second banana bit players.

I don't know that there was really a metaplot as intended.  It's just that they kept reinventing the setting and consequently moving the setting forward.

I actually really like the Carl Sargent After the Ashes stuff.  It just sits poorly with the original Gygax Greyhawk atmosphere.  What I would do if I wanted to run it now, is kick away the original Greyhawk, by changing all the names and removing the Gygaxianisms (and draw a new map too, but along similiar lines) to make a more coherent dark high fantasy setting that doesn't clash with the more sword and sorcery tone of Gygax's earlier setting.  (And probably use it with a group not familiar with Gygax's Greyhawk)

Eberron.

The problem is that Spell Jammer is a Tunnels and Trolls setting.

The absolute worst T$R setting ever published is whichever one you like. The more you enjoyed that setting, the worse it actually is. Now go stand in the corner of shame.

Quote from: Spinachcat;524689The absolute worst T$R setting ever published is whichever one you like. The more you enjoyed that setting, the worse it actually is. Now go stand in the corner of shame.

The one you are occupying? Or is there another one?

All I have to say is Dragonlance is my all time favorite setting but that is directly attributable to the fact that it interesting and central organizations like the Solommic Knights and the Moons governing magic not the metaplot. It was the only setting where Dnd magic users make sense and trashes the generalist concept as it deserves.