Give me a setting... that I can dig.

[Relique Hunter]

Grab a shovel. Youll be able to dig any setting.

 

[Erik Mona]

If you can wait another couple of weeks until it comes out, you might want to check out the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer. I was the co-author and original mad architect of the setting, and I think it fits your criteria remarkably well.

--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing, LLC

 

[Starman]

If you want grit, you want Midnight from FFG. It is without a doubt one of the best settings out there - grim, dark, moody. Can't recommend it enough.

 

[WhatGravitas]

If you can wait another couple of weeks until it comes out, you might want to check out the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer. I was the co-author and original mad architect of the setting, and I think it fits your criteria remarkably well.

--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing, LLC

From what I gathered - maybe! It certainly has similar influences as my tastes (I know that, because I like the tone of many Paizo products), and has even Greyhawk-y influences to the boot. Let me ask you a question: How resilient is the setting to dropping stuff into it? Can I fit huge mercantile houses (i.e. things inspired by the Dragonmarked houses) into it? Can I drop a whole city filled with victoriana into it? Without screwing the setting over entirely, I mean.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Graf]

I've considered Eberron (and used it in the past),
[

Your wish list basically reads like Eberron.

I'm not saying you should play Eberron, or whatever, and I know you've given it a try, but your interpretation of the setting doesn't match with mine.
I guess what I'm saying is that you don't really need to do much "ripping and injecting" because Eberron is already the way you want it to be.

[sblock=Caviate]One problem with Eberron is that it's a relatively empowering setting for PCs. With the existence of transportation, a relatively strong degree of communication and so forth the characters (and the players) have the ability to make choices about the kinds of adventures they want to have.
But if you're struggling with that I see it really as a communication problem with the DM and the players.

We had something similar with Age of Worms in Eberron. At some point (say level 9) the group got very passive aggressive about risking their lives for little monetary reward to stop evil.

Being in Eberron did make it easier for them to just pick up and leave (or try to).[/sblock]

but there are some hindrances:- The map. The scale just... bothers me to no end, it gives me mile-wide rivers (because some rivers are broad enough to be more than a blue line).

I don't really get the problem. It's bothering you on a simulationist level right? Like it doesn't match some expectation you have for population densities and travel times and so forth?

I'd just forget about it. Since you obviously have strong views just pick a scale that works for you. And do what I did with the Scarred Lands (which also was blessed with some massively funky geography in spots): During the first session arrange to give the players a map that's a game version of the the map.
So their characters actually have a copy of the map. When the players are looking at the map say "your characters pull out the map".

The map is just a map, it's not a cartographers map, it's a normal traveling map.
Are the rivers too wide? The artist got a bit excited. If the party tries to travel there they'll find that the river is about as wide as you think it ought to be.

In other words, the map doesn't define some kind of perfect objective reality, it's a game prop. The real reality is whatever you decide it will be.

- The over-abundance of civilization: Too much explored on Khorvaire, especially for its size. Even if I use the original scale to get more "wilderness", the distances between centres get insanely large. [cut see next comment] I don't like that a lot is shoved into Xen'drik.[

Seriously?
Like, half the "nations" are explicitly wilderness.

• Darguun
• Demon Wastes
• Droaam
• Mournlands
• Q'barra
• Shadow Marches

I would also argue that the following places include massive tracts of unsettled and potentially hostile places

• Eldeen Reaches
• Mror Holds
• Talenta Plains
• Valenar

I would also add the Lhazaar Principalities, the edges of places like Karrnath, Zilargo; but it's a matter of perspective.

Oh and there's Argonnessen; which approaches Scarred-Lands-levels-of-PoL (which is to say massive stretches of black with occasional bursts of darklight -> civilized in a way that doesn't really make things easier on the PCs).

Shoved into Xen'drik is a problem caused by Wizard's marketing of the setting (and the obsessive need of writers to make their character's adventures seem hard-core by having them run off to Xen'drik).
The setting would have been served much better if they'd kept to their original promise and left Xen'drik as something for each DM to fill out according to their own campaign needs.

Basically, I want a bit more medieval/dark age/PoL atmosphere.

I believe everything on the first list above is basically pure PoL; the second list has strong PoL influences.

Just look at at Q'barra. It's got a capital city, some smaller towns and then thousands and thousands of untamed (but technically claimed) square miles of wilderness. Basically all the Pure PoL list is like that.

Players for some reason see Q'barra (and all of Khorvaire really) as some sort of "weak sauce" and always want to go to Xen'drik but Q'barra is pure PoL.
(WotC marketing and obsessive focus on Xen'drik is really to blame here).

But more than half the continent, huge chunks of both west and east, are basically untamed wilderness with a few gritty settlements crying out for heroic types to do their duty. Some, like the Shadow Marshes have their own identity (read: swamps instead of traditional forests) but I'm glad they aren't all boiler plate.
It's got every kind of PoL wilderness you could ever want really.

- Sometimes too happy: Well, the empire of Galifar is a notch too perfect for me - over 800 years of peaceful development.

I think that Galifar is written as 800 years of happiness because it's views through the rose-tinted glasses of the last war.
Every one of the Five Kingdoms (plus Q'barra), until recently, claimed to be the "second coming of Galifar". So they'd talk up how awesome Galifar was to no end.

Just because nobody's developed it in detail doesn't mean it's really 800 years of pure goodness.

There is no reason why you could "wrack it with various schisms". Your "problem" really is just that it'd pale to the Last War and the Morning.

I mean, so King X was sleeping with his sister and her husband stabbed him 200 years ago? However big a tragedy/scandal it may have been then it's not going to register on the popular consciousness the same way as an unexplained extinction level event happening one country over.

- Sometimes tries too hard to be different: Less of a bother for me, but for my players - they want normal Drow.

So make normal drow down in Kyber. Maybe they're affected by madness of the entrapped dragon, maybe they've got some of that ol' giant magic and they've resisted the worst of it. There, drow-for-Eberron in two sentences.

Honestly, if some little bit of Eberron bothers your players you can just ignore it. If they need/want bog-standard old-skool DnD then you can just run Greyhawk, but you can run basically the same adventures in Eberron just by shifting the emphasis around a little bit.

The broad magic is sometimes too pervasive (I also have the feeling that this changes a lot from book to book).

Do you mean "magical industry"?
Or the existence of small useful magic items?

Torch or glowing rod with continual light? Not very important really.
The rod is more convenient but it's not like its a panacea...
If your torch goes out (or gets wet or what have you) you probably have a spare. But if something knocks the rod out of your hand do you have another?
:evil:

Either way magic in Eberron is extremely regular and thus scientific.
The "trick" is that it's linked to dragonmarked houses. Being dominated completely by a bunch of racially divided entities who collude to maintain their economic control is anti-scientific in the modern sense, but common if you look at the development of science and knowledge in the past.

And as a DM, I want a looot more ancient empires. I don't like that a lot is shoved into Xen'drik.

This is really the statement that made me think you haven't read the books carefully.

Eberron has so many different possible sources of ruins as to make listing them more effort than I'm going to put in [edit: ok, so maybe I put in a bit of effort].

Briefly:
In the Age of Demons the vastly powerful demon lords ruled everything, subjugating even the dragons. They each had their own kingdoms, vast powerful and lost. These kingdoms of blood and despair lasted for 10,000s of thousands of years.
They have a whole "country" that's just ruins from this era (the Demon Wastes) and a few other examples scattered throughout the setting (c.f. Haka'torvhak). Whose to say that other ruins, protected by similar powerful magic aren't hidden throughout the world?

Plus, if you are willing to go the wizards web site they have even more stuff floating around: like the idea that the Elder Evils (who rule aboleths per Lords of Madness) ruled Eberron's Seas during the Age of Demons the way that the Rajah's ruled the land.
[The blurb alternatively seems to suggest that the elder evils were contemporaries of the Rakshasa Rajahs and the same set of forces. Personally I prefer the former; but either way you have lots of under-sea and coast ruins.... or anywhere really. Even if Eberron doesn't have natural environmental change there have been enough cataclysmic fights in the 100,000 odd years since; Aboleth ruins could wind up anywhere, including on land somewhere.]

The Age of Giants focuses on them, which is Xen'drik and we'll skip it. I think that people will "fill in" the gap later with ruins and empires in Eberron that have been forgotten. I have to note that the ancient the fortress of Krezent on the Talenta Plains is suggestive of civilized (aka ruins producing) activity in that era. See this dragonshard about the Shulassakar.
I'm not a tremendous fan of the Quori as written but it's worth pointing out that
[sblock=Quori spoiler] Keith Baker has said that the Quori of the current age are different from that of the prior age; i.e. much as the current Khalastar are trying to create a "new age" and the Dreaming Dark is trying to stop them.
So the prior Quori are a vaguely defined force could have had bases on Khorvaire.[/sblock]
For that matter the idea that the giants never had anything on Khorvaire is silly. They probably did, even if they were just "second homes" the giants would periodically visit to relax.

The Age of Monsters has many different sources of ruins.

• Lost/Abandoned Temples of The Sovereign Host -- the Sovereign Host is completely underutilized
• Lost/Abandoned Temples of The Dark Six -- if possible even more underutilized
• Dhakaani ruins throughout, humanoid, but not human themselves with powerful magic, ancient traditions
• the Gatekeepers (did the orcs have a civilization before Vvaraak came to them?; if they did that could be a completely separate source)
• The daelkyr; each daelkyr is weird and different, so you can have a lot of variety here
• Elvin ruins in Valenar from their initial attempts at colonization at the beginning of the Age (and whose to say there wasn't some short lived attempt to form a community somewhere else, something that the elves view as a sort of Roanoke)
• Dwarven ruins either on the Northern part of Khorvaire (or Frostfell of course). While they eventually all settled in the Ironroot Mountains there is nothing that prevents them from having landed on other locations, setting up shop and either getting wiped out or eventually abandoning them.
• Giants -- no, I'm serous. The degradation caused by the curse of the dragons took time to take effect. Dodging the dragons, fighting with the elves it's entirely possible that smaller groups of giants could easily have moved to an isolated part of Khorvaire. They build a bunch of ruins and then wipe themselves out. Or they don't and they're still there. Degraded and wretched, in some cases locked out of the homes their ancestors built because they've lost the magic required to call off the guardians created to protect them.

The Current Age; again really numerous
Original settlements of various races as the immigrated in and about. Just a few possibilities

• Aberrant Marked Strongholds from the time of the War of the Mark, while Tarkanan's base was Sharn there is nothing to say that other strongholds didn't exist.
• Earlier human/gnomish/half-elven/dwarven/gnomish settlements. The history of this time is basically a few paragraphs. While the Kingdom of Galifar was ultimate victor it seems inconceivable that everyone else was basically just living the mud waiting for Galifar I to ride by waving his flag. I see lots of Malleon The Reaver's floating around.
  When you add in all the other ruins mentioned previously it's easy to imagine a small Dhakaani store of knowledge; raided by a daelkyr during the war and infected it with madness. A madness that was hidden until a tribe of [insert race of your choice] found it. The remaining taint of the daelkyr warped them granting great knowledge at the expense of their sanity; patterning them after the warlike Dhakaani this tribe grew into a force of great power, threatening the whole region until they were stopped by X. But the original stronghold, hidden by ancient Dhakaani wards (and possibly more sinister forces), was never found....
  Until your player's characters stumble upon it of course....​
• Lost/Abandoned Temples from the time of Tira Miron; when it started out the Silver Flame was a lot more rough and ready

And there are a bunch of Misc. Ruins I'm leaving out but you could easily work in like

• Cults of the dragon below, crazy and not terribly inclined to build things, but their ability to call random chaos, and worse things, could easily lead to a "ruin" a la the 13th warrior (lots of caves filled with savages, over time they get monsters, leave behind crazy writings and so forth)
• Yuan-ti (in ages past the Yuan-ti could easily have ruled a hotter version of the Shadow Marches or some other souther area like Q'barra)
• Quori inspired ruins or civilizations (not a fan, because the modern quori have some issues as a game foe, but it's another option); there could be items around that allowed them to contact/possess creatures in the past where they built/practiced "dry-runs" before they started to take over Sarlona in earnest.
• Ruins of lesser races (Kuo-Toa, Saughin) whose glory has largely been forgotten by modern scholars
• "Hidden Drow Civilizations" could easily have left behind ruins (I wouldn't do it, but if you want to it's easy to say they came over after the Dragons smacked down the Giants and got themselves wiped out by a) their own greed b) evil supernatural forces c) daelkyr invasion force d) disease/curse/low birthrate visa vie existing monster population
• The Mournland, obviously is a major source of ruins

I guess I'm saying that Eberron was constructed to have lots and lots of ruins everywhere. You -would- have to struggle a bit to get, saaaay, dwarven ruins in the middle of the Shadow Marches, but I have trouble believing you have a problem with the "setting not having old ruins".

If anything, like with other parts of Eberron, the setting is a bit "full".

Right now, I'm planning to rip Eberron apart, inject a bit of Iron Kingdoms, a bit of Call of Cthulhu, and a bit of Points of Light. And I guess I will get my "dream setting" out of it.

IK is a very cool setting.
Eberron + IK + Lovecraft = mad cool in my mind.

Very curious to see what you come up with in any case!

 

[Mamacat]

Try Black Company, by Green Ronin. It's excellent, one of the best dark settings I've seen in quite a while.

 

[Puggins]

Easy stuff, but it's not an official setting- Look up the four Dark Border novels by Paul Edwin Zimmer. they're out of print, but easy as pie to find- Amazon has thirty resellers with copies. The guy who wrote them was obviously an old school D&D gamer and was one of the original members of the SCA. Easily one of the darkest, grittiest and most heroic series this side of Conan. It's a damn shame they were considered too mature in the '80s... they easily rank up there with Song of Ice and Fire and Wheel of Time.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Based on your recommendation, I got the two first novels of Ebay for £1.12

Looking forward to reading them. If they are as cool as you say, I for sure will get the remaining two.

 

[sinecure]

I like it. We steal from everywhere and make a patch quilt setting, but that isn't for everybody. It's just easier to steal things you already know are cool. Plus, I can swap stuff out for my players' tastes.

 

[WhatGravitas]

We steal from everywhere and make a patch quilt setting, but that isn't for everybody. It's just easier to steal things you already know are cool.

One of the reasons why I've opened the thread - even if I get nothing, I get inspiration! And Graf's post was full of Eberron goodness (though it only addresses my problem partially, as the misconceptions of Eberron are a) somewhat popular misconceptions, b) some that my players picked up through me and through official material - getting a blank slate is sometimes useful in such cases.).

Cheers, LT.