Assuming you can count them as "2e", I might say Taladas and From the Ashes.  Al-qadim was pretty good too.

If you mean directly "settings that first came out in 2e", then Dark Sun was probably the best.   Planescape was the worst.  Spelljammer was a great idea with a really shitty execution.

I sometimes find myself wondering if Spelljammer could be "pruned" into something useable without radical changes. Just a question of never mentioning (or at least seriously repackaging) the stupid elements and highlighting the inspired ones.

Favorite:

Planescape. While one of the least standard D&D settings, it got me into RPGs in the first place, and then swiftly into writing and freelancing. Its style, tropes, and atmospheric themes continues to be an influence of mine. Cook, Cook, McComb, Vallese, Baur, et al created a truly spectacular setting, and combined with artwork by DiTerlizzi's, Knutson, Ruppel, and others it was a thing of beauty.


Least Favorite:

Spelljammer. Despite my adoration of Planescape's extremes and strangeness, I never really enjoyed Spelljammer as a whole (though the late Nigel Findley's contributions to the line are amazing). For me at least, too often it had elements that crossed over from wild, evocative, beautiful, horrific and crazy (ala PS) to campy and things I couldn't take seriously. Almost entirely an issue of style here.

Shemmy, is your name a reference to Shemeska the Marauder?

Also... wild stab in the dark, but given your self-description as a freelancer and writer... you're not by any chance the Shemeska of Shemeska Story Hour AKA Todd Stewart of Planewalker fame, are you?

Quote from: Steerpike;761157Shemmy, is your name a reference to Shemeska the Marauder?

Also... wild stab in the dark, but given your self-description as a freelancer and writer... you're not by any chance the Shemeska of Shemeska Story Hour AKA Todd Stewart of Planewalker fame, are you?

That would indeed be me.

Quote from: Shemmy;761169That would indeed be me.

Awesome. How about explaining the setting to me. I expected to actually be playing in the planes but I got high concept like Mage the Ascension and Wraith. What the heck am I supposed to actually do? I ask because I want to love it but I don't actually get it enough to use it.

Quote from: Marleycat;761176Awesome. How about explaining the setting to me. I expected to actually be playing in the planes but I got high concept like Mage the Ascension and Wraith. What the heck am I supposed to actually do? I ask because I want to love it but I don't actually get it enough to use it.

Oh, for Planescape? I so wanted to run a group of "police" solving crimes in Sigul.

Quote from: Silverlion;761179Oh, for Planescape? I so wanted to run a group of "police" solving crimes in Sigul.

That was how we played it but I just feel I missed the whole point of the setting.

Quote from: ShemmyThat would indeed be me.

Nice to meet you.  I've read and enjoyed a lot of your stuff over the years.

Quote from: Randaconda;760112It gave me a chance to use all of those dragon gods that showed up in 2e.

I can see this.

Dragon character "Hey Bahamut! Can you dig these twits out so I can eat them?"
Bahamut "Sure thing!" dig-dig-dig-dig-dig!

:cool:

Quote from: RPGPundit;761148Assuming you can count them as "2e", I might say Taladas and From the Ashes.  Al-qadim was pretty good too.

If you mean directly "settings that first came out in 2e", then Dark Sun was probably the best.   Planescape was the worst.  Spelljammer was a great idea with a really shitty execution.

Spelljammers problem is that it was all over the place. You had setting specific stuff which seemed like it would have been better as its own thing. And then you had the original stuff that was pretty interesting. Astrodomini was a bit too overblown. But otherwise viable. Some of the other modules and adventures were darn good for the 2e era.

Planescape set out to be its own thing from the get go and you didnt get as much setting intrusion from outside.

Dark Sun started out interesting. But felt like it lost cohesion and its original focus as things progressed.

Quote from: Marleycat;761183That was how we played it but I just feel I missed the whole point of the setting.

Well Sigil is a sort of dark London. So a group of fantasy detectives would be perfect for the place. I allways felt that Sigil could have used a good analog to Sherlock Holmes.

Favorites - Ravenloft & Dark Sun

Neutral - Forgotten Realms (aka DM-PC wank-land)

Least Favorites - Planescape & Spelljammer

Quote from: The Butcher;759403made even awesomer by dint of being gritty S&S in an age in which D&D was adopting a bowdlerised, kid-friendly Romantic high fantasy trade dress and art direction.

So if D&D is kid-unfriendly it's awesome?  What kind of monster are you?

Dark Sun was weird and cool, love the setting.

Planescape was weird and cool, but Pundit's right about de-mystifying the Planes, also it's very postmodern cosmologically.  Not to mention kind of steampunky, so Hit and Miss for me.

Spelljammer was pure unadulterated awesome gonzo without going off the deep end into parody too many times.  "Scro?" WTFD&D

Ravenloft was kinda cool, in the end I just never bought the premise of this evil sentient plane that brought all the worst evil fucks from the universe together.  Like Planescape and Spelljammer totally changed the fundamentals of how things fit together.

Greyhawk is still my favorite D&D setting with Grey Box FR second.  Sodomize the Time of Troubles with a broken bottle.

I was gone from D&D with the release of 2.5, the Black Border Edition, Skills & Powers Edition or whatever you want to call it, so I never cared what Council of Wyrms was, and have honestly never even heard of Jarkandor before now.

Birthright was the one D&D setting that got away.  I wanted to get into it, but literally was playing so much other D&D I didn't have time.

Quote from: Marleycat;761176Awesome. How about explaining the setting to me. I expected to actually be playing in the planes but I got high concept like Mage the Ascension and Wraith. What the heck am I supposed to actually do? I ask because I want to love it but I don't actually get it enough to use it.

Planescape in a nutshell IMO: the outer planes, their denizens, and even the gods themselves are created and shaped by mortal belief. The cosmos is vast, bizarre, and often paradoxical. Law and Chaos, Good and Evil are physical things and they have struggled against one another in their various iterations since time immemorial. At the center of this all, atop the Infinite Spire, the city of Sigil sits at the metaphysical fulcrum of it all. At least that's how many view it, and much of the metaphysical conflict on the planes (the Blood War, etc) intrudes within the City of Doors, and from within, it has its own conflicts that reach out just the same way (the Factions, etc).

1e laid the groundwork for the Great Wheel cosmology, but it was very often never more than an extraplanar dungeon. The early sources were nice, but they didn't go crazy in terms of detail, ecology, or any "high concept" discussion as you frame it.

While the setting is sometimes criticized for "de-mystifying" the planes, I truly see it as being the exact opposite. There's a difference between something being full of wonder and awe because you've gone out of your way to incorporate open questions, mysteries, and fantastical imagery, and then there's something that just never had a lot of detail in the first place.

The focus of the 1e material really didn't lend itself to going crazy with flavor text, planar ecologies, planar history, etc. Greenwood's Dragon material on the 9 Hells was good and the 1e MotP laid lovely groundwork for what came later in 2e, but I feel that they were constrained by the design ethos of the period.

Obviously a number of people are going to disagree with me strongly here.

2e Planescape turned the planes of 1e from bigger dungeons with stronger, stranger monsters in a landscape littered with mythological material and material new to D&D, into one that was fantastic, beautiful, horrific, and downright odd, where the concepts those planes represented came first in design rather than 'can we kill it and takes its stuff'. It's a very different take on the planes, and it might not be for everyone (FWIW, I didn't play RPGs till 3e D&D, and went back for the 2e PS material, enjoying the style and design much more to my liking). It took the 1e planes and massively expanded them in detail, worked to provide an ecology for the creatures that lived there and explain their interactions and their history. It took a marginal, high level only part of D&D and turned it into a campaign setting of its own, and then went wild.

If I haven't completely alienated everyone yet, here's how I run games in the setting (and keep in mind I never actually ran the setting in 2e, only in 3.x using the 2e source material). Combat in my games or lack thereof is entirely based on where the PCs go and what they do. We might spend half of a session in combat, or we might go a session with only a few rolls of the dice. There's a lot of PCs talking with other PCs, a lot of talking with NPCs, exploration, politics within Sigil (Factions, sects, guilds, powerful movers and shakers in the city, etc) and for most of my campaigns, a -lot- of lower planar politics. Arguably I inject more horror into the setting than is there right out of the box, and I've also never focused as much on the Factions since I've always run the setting post-Faction War since I didn't get into it till after the fact.

I can't say that how I run the setting is typical of other folks and not entirely idiosyncratic to my own style, but at the least it's an example of what -can- be done with the setting. I enjoy it, and since 2001 or so it's been a considerable pleasure to run and an inspiration for my freelancing (including a few overtly PS pieces in 3e and one in 4e).

Reading through my first storyhour over on Enworld is probably a good way to see how I use the setting with respect to taking all of the setting's crazy/amazing/hellish material and throwing the PCs into it in a way that they can meaningfully interact with it all and have a way of influencing things.