Late to the party but...

Dark sun 2nd version. Was really... meh.

Karatur... very bland in odd ways that it shouldnt have been.

Red Steel. Interesting, but never really played up on and Birthright was Red Steel ramped up to the hilt. (They share very simmilar premises.)

Forgotten Realms. It has a weird blandness to it or a lack of spark somehow. Just never really got into that one.

Taladas. Just bleah. Didnt appeal at all for some reason.

Spelljammer.

Dragonlance at least had the book The Atlas of Krynn.

Oerth had a geodesic world, Spelljammer had some kind of weird atmosphere and gravity in space.

Any setting that has a book written by Karen Wynn Fonstad is golden imho, even with Gully Dwarf (and Kender were okay, it gave a class that no one wanted to play to young kids).

Quote from: TristramEvans;701139Spelljammer.

3e Spelljammer. What a botch.

Planescape. Take the awe and majesty of the gods and the outer planes and turn it into a bad Dickens parody.

Probably 2e Dark Sun. It suffers "game 2ndary to tie-in novels" disease Even worse than Draonlance does imo (doesn't help that the DS novels Are way worse than the DL ones - Mary Sue overdrive!!! - and pretty much ruin the setting). I mean DS was pretty cool and different and then ARGH!

For something else, there's Maztica. Seems very uninspiring.

I basically like the rest of the bunch that I know about (I never got my hands on Kara-Tur, Al-Quadim, or TSR era Greyhawk).

Add to that Metamorphosis alpha 2, not because it was a bad setting overall. But because of executive meddling it was not as good as it could have been.

And any iteration of Gamma World past 2nd ed.

Quote from: JeremyR;701168Planescape. Take the awe and majesty of the gods and the outer planes and turn it into a bad Dickens parody.

I never managed to phrase it quite so succinctly. I'll steal that line.

Dragonlance. I mean it has cool elements: Magic tied to the moons, Order of Stars Priests, the Knights....

And then it has things like Kender, Gnomes and Gully Dwarves, which might be amusing to some people but really don't work for me.

Never mind there are other problems, its just those items are most prevalent.

I dislike "silly only," races, features, etc.


Forgotten Realms is mostly forgettable, except in the hands of a good GM.

Whatever you might think of it, Dragonlance brought in a lot of new gamers, many of whom are still around.  And many of them are female, for which I am grateful.  Was it clumsy and ham fisted and arguing for bizarre morality?  Yes!  Heck they argued that evil was necessary and we should embrace it in the second trilogy.  And as others have noted Dragonlance really resonated for teenagers.

It had some fantastic stuff in it: the flying citadels, the towers of high sorcery, the immortal sage guy and his library.

Of course it also gave us Kender and Tinker Gnomes.  Gully Dwarves don't bother me as much because people don't want to play them, even if they're a little more offensive really.

One thing I can't ever understand is why Dragonlance got the AD&D treatment.  It would have fit better with Basic.  I suppose it's because the success of the novels was a bit of a surprise and Advanced products sold better.

The problem with Mysteria was that the Gazateers were pretty uneven.  And the setting as a whole was very piecemeal.  The two mega empires pretty much ruined the setting for me.  Alphatia with its council of a thousand 36th level wizards and so on.

Quote from: Silverlion;701200Dragonlance. I mean it has cool elements: Magic tied to the moons, Order of Stars Priests, the Knights....

And then it has things like Kender, Gnomes and Gully Dwarves, which might be amusing to some people but really don't work for me.

Never mind there are other problems, its just those items are most prevalent.

I dislike "silly only," races, features, etc.


Forgotten Realms is mostly forgettable, except in the hands of a good GM.

I liked the "no clerics" element. Then they added clerics...

I liked the ever shifting alignment system. Core D&D should adopt that system.

I liked the magic based on moon phases. Neet idea that. Also could be adapted to core D&D.

Didnt like kender or tinker gnomes as they were very one-dimensional unless you rolled up some aberrant that was an actual person rather than a gag.

Past the first 6 books things just deteriorated. I am never reading the last books.

oh, and the cartoon was just awfull. (mostly due to budget problems Im told.)

Quote from: David Johansen;701234One thing I can't ever understand is why Dragonlance got the AD&D treatment.  It would have fit better with Basic.  I suppose it's because the success of the novels was a bit of a surprise and Advanced products sold better.

According to notes. Dragonlance started out as an AD&D campaign and the more robust system was better suited to a campaign setting. That and it sold AD&D books.

Dragonlance, not the worst. Irda, the three Gods of Magic and their Towers, Raistlin, Taladas; I really like Taladas. If you mean what happen to the setting when they killed everyone and some of those aspects off and brought in mega-dragons - then sure. That was a poor decision and led to an awful setting.

For me though the worse is Eberron, it has nothing that I would even consider redeemable. Shoehorned D&D races and it reads like a bad teenage attempt. I cannot understand how people like it or think it is novel. Surely there were better entries when it 'won' as a setting.

My memory is blurred (passage of time) but I loved the idea of Dark Sun, the actual playing of it was less than interesting.

Players: "What do we see?"

GM: "Sand."

Once you'd done a few sandstorms uncovering ruins in the desert, I was pretty bored of it.

Dragonlance I only have experience with thanks to the War of the Lance novels, a book I bought in one volume. Took bloody ages to read, and that put me off ever visiting the place ever again.

Spelljammer was another which seemed like a great idea, but ended up being a version of Star Trek with swords for us, finding strange new worlds and civilisations, going boldy where no man or hippo creature thing had gone before. We went back to generic fantasy world with Elmore people all about soon after that, and were content.

To be honest we mostly took the maps and did our own thing. Mystara was familiar to the players after a while, then it became our generic fantasy land for other fantasy rpgs too. Even though one of the players had every gazetteer (bought new when they came out, and before the current arm and a leg ebay prices market) we pretty much had our own ideas of every land and just used maps.

I don't see much point in bashing a campaign setting.  Unlike monsters or classes that are assumed to be generally transportable between settings, the setting itself is easily taken or left.  Personally, I dislike Forgotten Realms, but that's because it seems with the high number of ultra-high-powered characters running around, there really never seems to be a reason for the PCs to exist.  If what they were doing was really important, Elminster would show up and take over for them.  

But I don't play in Forgotten Realms for that reason.  As a setting, though, I'm glad it exists.  They spend a lot of time and effort on developing aspects of the setting.  I could grab a race or culture if I wanted to and port it into my setting pretty easily.  In that sense, most campaign settings have a lot of useful pieces that can be taken away, have the serial numbers filed off, and dropped somewhere else.  

I don't buy a lot of setting specific material, but I do think that having lots of setting material is a really good thing.  

The very best settings aren't compatible with each other.  They have major differences that actually make the game play differently.  For example, having a different basic magic system.  Darksun achieves that.  Obviously, I wouldn't expect a setting that does that to appeal to all gamers because its something like learning a new game (and not that I necessarily care much for Darksun).  I just like it when a setting is willing to say 'this is how this works in this world' and actually take some creative liberties.