Greetings!
Well, I certainly think that a vast stretch of wilderness, dark and teeming with unknown teeth and screaming death is great, for any campaign.
However, as Visceris pointed out so well, what about city and urban-based adventures and campaigns? If there is nothing but small, impoverished towns and helpless villages, how much "urban" adventuring can you really have?
*SHARK lights up a fine Arturo Fuente Opus X cigar, and sips on some excellent "chocolate velvet" flavoured coffee*
From another angle, I have to say as a "campaign world"--it sounds pretty weak, and on so many levels. If there are only small towns and villages, where does all the wealth come from? High-technology and skill-specialization require advanced economic conditions in order to develop and flourish--and those conditions are only possible in an urban environment. That is precisely *how* profession and skill-specialization work, is from enough security provided--by a stable, strong government; and from the accumulation of enough total wealth by the larger community to allow some members of that specific community to *not* engage in ativities of mere base survival, but to devote time, energy and resources into other kinds of specialized work. Next, it is critical to have security, stability, wealth, and specialization so that *time* is allowed to other specialists to *think* and *dream* This is where philosophers, thinkers, wizards and so on can develop from. Without such considerations, these professions would never really develop and get off the ground.
All of that, of course, demands a sophisticated, coin-based economy, and a specialized society to support it. This in turn, creates a "market" for such specialized goods, and makes it possible for profit to be gained enough to entice people to become weaponsmiths, merchants, wizards and scribes, instead of staying farmers, hunters, herdsmen, fishermen, or simple blacksmiths.
Having said that, it also creates a kind of false reality, if you will. Human nature, let alone other powerful races like elves and dwarves--do not just collectively sit there generation after generation, in squalor, and laying there as helpless prey to whoever comes by or decides to set up camp in the nearby forest. If it took one generation, or three, or ten--the human inhabitants would gather together and march against such enemies and ruthlessly exterminate them, at least in so far as to create enough of a "safe zone" for the aforementioned sophisticated human society to develop and grow in strength.
To ignore these basic elements of human nature is to in turn embrace a cultural, economic, and psychological malaise, that paralyzes the larger human community in a static bed of jello, generation after generation. Apparently, they are all, in their vast entirety, waiting for a handful of scruffy looking adventurers to "save them"? From whence, of course, no one was ever capable of doing this in any generation previously?
Obviously, though such an environment on first glance has much to be attracted to, on a closer inspection, fully embracing such campaign assumptions would cause a whole lot of internal campaign inconsistencies and larger campaign problems that would not, at the end of the day, be enjoyable, or fully capable of being ready and useful for a Dungeon Master to run a broad campaign of great depth.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
