Quote from: Justin Alexander;524239I was going to say Kara-Tur, but I think you're right: Not only did it destroy the setting, but it pushed the idea that the novels were more important than the game.

I was going to say Dragonlance, but have to agree there. I'll add my vote to Dark Sun 2nd edition.

Quote from: (un)reason;524241Dragonlance. All of the others, I can see how to remove or play down the bad bits and get to the good ideas at their core. Dragonlance, on the other hand, has so many annoying comic relief elements and bad plot choices baked right into it's design that it would be more effort to ignore or rewrite them than it would be to start with a blank slate. Even Dark Sun makes it easier for you to ignore all the metaplot stuff if it's not to your taste.

I almost said Forgotten Realms for being a bunch of boring metaplot wankery, but then you mentioned this and I remember Kender.

Kender suck. Everything about Kender suck.  And their players are all uniformly some of the most annoying fucking people in the world, and seem to insist on basically playing a Kender wherever they go, no matter the game.  I'm convinced that Changeling: the Dreaming exists as a game so that White Wolf at the time could attract Kender players, because every fucking CtD fan I've ever met is also a Kender fan.

Dragonlance gets worst prize solely for Kender alone.

Quote from: J Arcane;524245Kender suck.

Yes.  And I believe it comes from being faithful to the novels.

Quote from: misterguignol;524198Kara-Tur always struck me as unpardonably boring.  Asian fantasy has tons of potential, but the setting felt like it was written by folks who had only seen a handful of ninja movies.  No depth there at all.

I'd have to agree with this.

My favorite Settings:Blackmoor, Gygax-era GreyhawkBoth are significant to me because of their historic value. Both were cutting edge in their day and I love the original FFC (Blackmoor) and Folio (Greyhawk) products. This was the era when they provided a skeletal frame for a setting and an imaginative GM filled in the rest.

Decent Settings: Tekumel, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Dark Sun
All of these were clever in titheir own way. Tekumel was very in-depth and a neat blend of scifi and fantasy. Dragonlance brought back dragons and tried to bring in a romantic literature feel. (Girls liked it, and I have always had several girls in my gaming group.) The original Ravenloft modules were edgy and fresh, although the full setting got boring in a hurry. Dark Sun had an empahasis on psionics, broke the stereotype for elves/dwarves/hobbits, and had some really cool artwork.

Not very useful settings: Mystara, Forgotten Realms, 2e-era "From the Ashes" Greyhawk, Al-qadim, Spelljammer, Birthright
Mystara and Forgotten Realms tried to fill in too many details and crushed the creativity of the GM. From the Ashes took a great world and crapped on it. Al-qadim was a different setting but not different enough to be worthwhile. Spelljammer and Birthright were cool concepts but never developed enough to be worthwhile.

Terrible settings: Kara-tur, Hollow World, Planescape
Kara-tur was a poor look at oriental culture. Hollow World just didn't do it for me. Planescape had dumb monsters although the basic concept was decent enough.

Of that list? Hrms. Hard to decide between Forgotten Realms, Kara-Tur and Dragonlance.

I played enough FR to give it a fair go, and it had honestly neat elements, ruined by both their approach to it, and their handling of it via metaplots.

Now good? Dark Sun 1E, Planescape, Birthright, and Mystara. Could have been better yes, but good overall. Especially for giving the Gm's a place to start.

Greyhawk varies, I know it gets a lot of love, but it never clicked for me.

Al-Qadim was awesome. Period.

There was also a mini-setting which had some neat ideas but didn't pan out: Jakandor. Two peoples (humans) different beliefs vying for control of an island. One magical necromancers with a Oriental/Aztec "feel", the other Barbarians blown in by their Goddess with a Viking/Celt "feel" (yet both were there own thing.)  

No fantasy races, just those two. They had very differing beliefs and approaches to living. One remnants of a dead empire, the other barbarians trying to struggle up to civilization from barbarism. One felt magic was "cheating" and the other used it for nigh everything that bound their civilization--and tampering with magic brought about a disease that began wiping them out. One the Barbarians were immune to...

Fun little place for conflict. But not "D&D" tropes, not really. IT should have been for any other game system. Albeit it allowed occasional dungeon crawls it lacked nearly all of the monsters, and reasons to "adventure" that D&D expected. Something other settings managed to keep in part.

Dragonlance is the loser.  Not because it was the herald of a stylistic change (although it does bear that sin), but because it bears a greater sin by far: there's almost nothing worth stealing from it, because it's 99.5% hackneyed high fantasy tropes.  Which, in fairness, is what made it good at its job at the time.

 But other than "these guys explode and shit when they die" and "goddamn empire of faux-Roman minotaurs", there's nothing in there at all worth even looking at.

Despite not playing the rules I bought into several of those lines to mine for ideas... Kara Tur, Ravenloft, Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape... they all had stuff I could make some use of... but the one Dragonlance book I bought was a barren husk of useless twaddle.

Quote from: Nicephorus;524251Yes.  And I believe it comes from being faithful to the novels.

Yeah. The point where Tasslehoff stopped being an interesting character and started becoming the ur-template for the entire kender species was unfortunate.

It's as if every single drow in existence was Drizz't Do'urden.

I love Oriental Adventures, but the modules never drew me in at all.  Al Qadim looked promising as well, but everyone else was just meh about it.  And I had no interest in planescape at all.  My favorite was Gygax's Greyhawk, followed by Forgotten Realms.

Quote from: danbuter;524242Dragonlance should have been awesome. Instead, TSR saddled it with all kinds of odd rules and made it suck.

I never could figure out that if steel was the main currency and worth a ton, then what were all the weapons and armor made of?  They couldn't be steel, otherwise people would loot a battlefield and retire like a king.  The currency system was all kinds of fucked up because of that.

I'll second Maztica as being the worst setting, although it was part of Toril.

I'm going to be unfair here, but I'm feeling ornery.

In 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.

I'm not saying it's the worst, it certainly isn't. It's absolutely brilliant. But at the same time, as far as I'm concerned, it is the closest to being unplayable, in the highly literal sense of "you're actually unable to play it".

I'm underwhelmed by most of the TSR settings.  Some neat ideas and concepts, but often poorly executed, IMO.

I always hear, "2e had great settings," and scratch my head in puzzlement, because I sure don't see it.  But some of those stinkers started in the late 1e period (e.g. Dragonlance).

I didn't think Dark Sun was that bad (cool concept), although I thought it would've been better if they'd divorced it from the standard races rather than trying to incorporate reinvented versions, which seemed gimmicky and forced.  (I'm not sure what version of Dark Sun I read; I think it was the first one.)    

I guess my pick would be Dragonlance; I can't abide it.  I also think that after the "Known World" turned into Mystara and went into super-silly mode it started sucking really bad, too (which extends to Hollow World, I suppose -- another cool idea with bad execution).

Spelljammer imo, though Dark Sun and Red Steel were pretty bad as well.

I loved Ravenloft, Birthright, Planescape and Spelljammer and got a ton of play out of Forgotten Realms. Really liked Dark Sun, at least at first...

Dragonlance is the one setting that I have never been able to get to. In fact, the only time I have EVER liked it is during its reviled "Fifth Age" when they released it with the SAGA system, wiping out most of the major NPC players and making dragons absolutely TERRIFYING (and not because of Fear effects, but because They. Will. Kill. You.)...

I would play and/or run Fifth Age all day long, but the original Dragonlance has never done a thing for me (I already had my "basic" fantasy covered by Forgotten Realms at the time).