I don't really think any of TSR's products are actually bad.  Some of them are simply mediocre rather than good.  I resisted mentioning settings I thought were actually bad in another thread.  After all, there is such a vast amount that has been published by so many publishers that it easier to just focus on what one finds is good.

Even so, I will mention the Star Frontiers default world, The Frontier Sector.  It's not for D&D, but it was one of TSR's.  It is completely superficial.  I think the historical setting campaign guides in the HR series were awful treatments too.

There a few I just found disappointing, but I wouldn't actually call them bad, like From the Ashes, Blackmoor in the DA modules and Hyboria in the Conan modules.

Dragonlance.

Made some well-sold novels, but as a campaign setting it is a great example of why a storytelling approach does not work well for a role-playing game. Gully dwarves and kender are not only annoying at the game table, they are stupid plot complications best used in a story. Sure you could play as one of the Heroes of the Lance, but that is like saying that any character a Player makes is substandard compared to the GMPCs of Weis and Hickman.

Dragonlance, hands down. Biggest piece of shit was never written. It fails at every possible thing you can fail.

Picking a worst from the late era TSR settings is tough, they all sucked in some way or another.

Dark Sun-I really liked the idea, hated the execution.

SpellJammer- Again loved the idea, but anything that puts Tinker Gnomes in space deserves a special punishment. (and militaristic lawful elves wtf)

Ravenloft- Great module, but they couldn't leave well enough alone.

Planescape- The Outer Planes should be places of awe and terror, breathtaking in their literal other-worldliness. Planescape turned them into just another place to go with a stupid vocabulary to boot.

But the winner of suck started before 2e-

Dragonlance- Gully Dwarves, Kender, and Tinker Gnomes, every single one is a candidate for most annoying race of all time and their all packed into one setting. There are plenty of other bad things about Dragonlance but even if they didn't exist it would win based on that tri-fecta of crap alone.

Quote from: RPGPundit;524197So which one was it, out of all the ones they made?  Which was the worst piece of shit in the bunch?
 
Blackmoor?
Gygax-era Greyhawk?
Tekumel?
Mystara?
Kara-tur?
Dragonlance?
Forgotten Realms?
Ravenloft?
2e-era "From the Ashes" Greyhawk?
Al-qadim?
Hollow World?
Dark Sun?
Spelljammer?
Planescape?
Birthright?

I'm sure there's a few I'm missing in that list.  Say which one you thought was a total waste of paper that the designers should be shot for having written.

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Forgot to put Forgotten Realms on your list.  Al-Qadim and Kara-tur both had better material and weren't just another take on Greyhawk.

Cuz that's the worst piece of shit, in all editions.  And the runner up is Birthright.

I gotta go with Dragonlance. Because, as has been noted, you can't even pick anything good out of it.

Dragonlance after they blew it up and rewrote it removing the gods.

Because the only thing worse than a setting built entirely around a bunch of NPCs and their iconic story is a setting that's made out of what's left when you take those things out.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;524348I always hear, "2e had great settings," and scratch my head in puzzlement, because I sure don't see it.

I 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.).

Quote from: Melan;524221Sigmund: I see it as a case of great concept, shoddy execution. They had something going, but the writing in the books is so bland, the initially interesting ideas so neutered it felt like a colossal disappointment. (From what I've read, TSR's self-censorship considerably toned down the setting from the original submission.)

I don't deny there is a good deal of subjectivity involved in my perspective. Birthright was really the last in a series of TSR products that disappointed me and made me quit gaming. There were worse offenders, BR just happened to be the last.

I get ya I suppose. The concepts appeal to me so much, the toned-down writing has never bothered me, since as i said, our group always brought the sparkle anyway. But I suppose I do see what you're talking about.

Quote from: Premier;524345I'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".

Yeah.  I can see that being a problem with the presentation.  Fortunately, it's not really necessary to understand the bulk of it.  The Professor surely was enthusiastic about the languages, but that's not going to stop a sensible GM from having a warrior in the trees, even if he is more properly a gurek in the gapul-trees.  The world may appeal to those most easily tempted to bust out the moonspeak, but there's no real reason not to think about it in plain English most of the time.

Quote from: Xanador;524385Dark Sun-I really liked the idea, hated the execution.

Setting aside the question of rules and stuff, the 4e presentation of the non-mechanical aspects of the setting is far better than that of the original release. FWiW the 4e version was put together by Rich Baker, who also wrote some great stuff for the original version e.g., The Valley of Dust and Fire.
Were I to run it today, I'd use the 4e fluff, B/X and house rule in some simple PC psionics. The 2e monster books are pretty cool.

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.

Hyél"ű Na'ayanár Mítá'rgyayiál Chiték'küüss-shéker*

________________
* "Glorious Hero of the Distinguished Straw Clan", a term which should be familiar to even the most lowly savant of the Mu'ugalavyá period. Lá, so it is recounted.

I'm calling out the three of you so far going on about Tekumel's languages. The examples you gave are all pulled from your rich loamy imaginations. Swords and pretty much all weapons, nobles and other social classes, trees, etc. - they're all referred to in English. It's not like Harn where magicians are Shek-Pvar or whatever. In Tekumel, there is zero reskinning of ordinary things with exotic names. The non-English names are all proper nouns with no English equivalents.

Quote from: Melan;524468Hyél"ű Na'ayanár Mítá'rgyayiál Chiték'küüss-shéker

"People called Romanes they go the house"?

Quote from: ggroy;524208Maybe not a total waste of paper, but in terms of usability, the 3E/3.5E Forgotten Realms was absolutely horrible with groups of players that were FR "canon lawyers".

Note that the title says TSR settings.

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