Campaign Settings We Hate

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Greyhawk: Played in a game long ago where the DM borrowed some stuff from the original box but have otherwise never read it, played it, and of course if they had just taken the original box and RERELEASED it people could actually have had legitimate experience and opinions about it.

Forgotten Realms: Played and ran FR-set games for what seems like forever. Even in moving the setting around the world from Waterdeep to Cormyr, to unknown corners, screwing with the map, the timeline, the NPC's... I finally got SO tired of it that I vowed NEVER to run another game there. However, it served well and faithfully as a basis for a game setting so I can't hate it.

DarkSun: Meh. Played one campaign therein which was alright but I didn't quite get into it. Maybe if it had been a different DM. The one who ran it found it very hard to commit to a sustained campaign. I even started thinking of him as the "campaign of the week" DM because he changed settings and even game systems so often.

Dragonlance: Did nothing for me. Tried to run a couple of the adventures but they didn't adapt well to a "normal" campaign.

Ravenloft: Definitely parts of it were great but I think it was a mistake to try to spin it into and "All Horror All The Time!" setting. It was a great place to visit but I wouldn't want to run entire campaigns there except on an intermittent basis.

Planescape: Was so off-putting just reading the parts that I did that I couldn't stand the thought of actually trying to run it or play it. The entire concept around it just did NOT work for me. This could be one of the few that I could actually use the word "hate" about legitimately.

Spelljammer: Loved it. Massive design flaws and all. Really it was more the swashbuckling fantasy pirates aspect that worked for me. I just studiously ignored the gonzo whackiness that divided others so strongly on the setting. They were either embracing the wierdness or it was making them ill while for me it almost didn't register as being there.

Birthright: This is one setting I simply know nothing about and thus do not care.

Eberron: Great source to steal ideas from but never actually gamed there. I never could quite get a read on how to approach it so for me it would have to be a good DM to bring it to life for me.

"Single-flavor/single-region" settings such as Al-Quadim or Kara-Tur never held any appeal for me. I vastly preferred a setting with a broad mix of cultures - even clashing and anachronistic mixes - to ones attempting to pattern themselves more closely after the real world.

 

[Psion]

"Steeling" from Steel Wind.

• Greyhawk: Classic, but don't hold any longings to ever play it again, and especially not to engage with any longstanding fans about it.
• Forgotten Realms: Playable, lots of great material for it, terribly spoiled by 1) the "too many cooks" syndrome 2) Elminster and other signs of Mary-Suism.
• DarkSun: Nice setting, if fundamentally made unplayable if you follow the novels that solved all the problems for you.
• Dragonlance: Blech. Ick Ptooey.
• Ravenloft: Nice, moody, but a little overdone. Much as with FR, I like it more for its source material than to play/run with it.
• Planescape: Love it. BEST. SETTING. EVAR. It probably feels like the most mythic fantasy of all settings. I also love the rare juxtaposition of loads of source material and complete GM freedom.
• Spelljammer: Nice "spacefaring" feel, but it ran against my thoughts of how "D&D space" looks and acts. The setting also seemed to lack a central conflict to use as the basis for campaign, and the setting was way too infected with silliness.
• Birthright: Nice setting. Ley lines and iconic monsters are awesome. Though didn't get much actual play out of it; hard to reconcile with the typical D&D experience.
• Eberron: Seems nice, yet somehow utterly failed to intrigue me. Along with Weapons of Legacy, pretty much marked for the the beginning of the end of my love of official 3.x products.

Third Party Setting Bonus Round:

• Scarred Land: Great synchronicity between the setting and the D&D rules, great feel in the mechanics, and great adventure fuel in the underlying conflicts.
• Oathbound: A little over the top and some mechanics are out there, but nice over-the-top setting.
• Second World: Nice synthesis of D&D and modern with a fun "tech tree" theory and the added bonus that you can run adventures in places you know, and the "based on the real world" aspect helps nullify some bits of unbeleivability that is often expressed in the system.

Theory of My Settings Preferences: I like fantasy and engaging backstory. Things that evoke a mythic feel work for me. Things that give me good components for adventures or campaigns instead of just telling me "where elves live in this setting" are preferred. Finally, I prefer a good feeling of self-consistency.[/QUOTE]

 

[Wik]

Forgotten Realms: Love/Hate. Love how there's a lot you can do with it - hate how there's so much info that it leads to "overload" on the part of the group. Find it doesn't "work" with us, because we have a pretty casual group. 1e FR supplements, though, are incredibly cool. I could get behind a 1e FR game.

Dragonlance: Never played, hated the novels, so I'd say "Don't know" in regards to the actual setting. Draconians seem like pretty cool bad guys, though.

Greyhawk: Love/Hate. Love it for all the old school adventures, and I like the kingdoms and whatnot a lot more than FR. Some of the silliness and the awful names, though, bug me.

Planescape: At times, this setting oozes with coolness. In practice, most of the adventures bugged me. And we just wound up doing the same ol' things, with different dungeon dressing. Mind you, the first time I played it, my tiefling rogue got caught up in a weapons deal... which was kind of fun. But the adventure itself was really just an urban crawl. Some of the weird planar exploration could be kind of fun. Love/Hate.

Ravenloft: Love/Hate, as well. Love that it's a gothic horror setting... hate that the D&D rules don't really support that very well. Also hate that this setting tends to encourage railroading more than others.

Spelljammer: Love the setting and the silliness. At the same time, hate the setting and the silliness.

Birthright: From what I hear of it, I would love this setting. When I was a young teen, a friend's older brother would regale us with his birthright adventures. Every tuesday, they would play kings... and I think once a month, they'd do a seperate campaign, playing basic adventurers in this fictional realm. Not all players in one group belonged in the other. To our minds, it was the coolest thing ever. That has peppered my view of this setting ever since.

Dark Sun: Love pretty much everything about the original setting. Don't like to talk about some of the "revised" changes that went on since. "Rajaat" is a bad word in my house.

AND A FEW YOU MISSED:

Eberron: Love it at times, because I feel like I can use my history degree when running it - there are always unions forming, casablanca style deals, and all that stuff. At the same time, I hate the naming conventions of the setting more than any other setting out there, the religion (except for the silver flame) bugs me, and the maps/population demographics are completely bogus. In fact, while the core idea of the setting is cool, many of the particular design choices bore me.

Jakandor: Barbarians versus Wizards. A mini campaign that just oozes flavour. I love this setting.

Al Qadim: Love the idea. Some of the D&Disms seem a bit weird (arabian halflings? Hunh?). Would love to see it again, but it doesn't seem likely in today's political climate (though an orcish taliban would be kind of neat, eh?)

Oriental Adventures: Meh. I repeat: meh. There are parts I love about oriental settings - but the eastern trend against individualism (as opposed to the west, which celebrates the individual) doesn't really excite me.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Bah, the silliness of Spelljammer was awesome sauce
Spelljammer silliness = Captain Jack Sparrow daftness!
well, you needed it as a foil from the fact that you could be jacked by a ship full of illithids, and promptly cranially reamed 4 ways from Sunday, lol! In normal games meeting 1d4 illithids is bad, in Spelljammer it can be 5d4, eek!

Plus things like the "Witchlight Marauders"...orcish bioweapon "shoggoths"...talk about bowel loosening...!

Spelljammer though needed better ways to work combat with massed groups, like minions in 4th ed, and concept of the ship "as a creature" in combat to make it easier to play, again, 4th ed introduced that. So, IMHO, Spelljammer woudl work great in 4th ed...that's a hint..*cough*

Agree that Spelljammer needed more of a central point to work around, which they tried to introduce but didn't do well enough, with the Rock of Bral, and "Refuge".
it DOES have several main themes to work with: the "Unhuman Wars", the Elven Imperial navy (in decline and racist bigots, which is a ncie reversal of elves), the neogi and mindflayer slave trade, the POTS anti-slavery commando and udnergorudn network, and the Arcane.

Spelljammer is HIGH fantasy, swashbuckling spell slinging fun!



Darksun is bloody awesome But dark brutal and grimy, the opposite of Spelljammer.
you need opposites.




the FIRST boxed set of Forgotten Relams was outstanding, loved it!
from there on it became the "Goggle Map and Wikipedia setting"...*barf!*
not a damn thing "forgotten" about it, sigh. A setting that lacks mystery, lacks fear and wonder...which destorys the atmosphere
and the quality went to hell, 1st boxed set is probably the best designed D&D product ever, a truly beautiful thing, but number 2 boxed set was meh, #3 was GARBAGE , omg, it felt like poor quality 3rd party stuff


Al-Quadim was interesting.

Planescape was damn good, but sorry, I HATE DeTerlizzi's artwork, everyone of his critters was a freakin' refugee from a pastel-coloured concentration camp, jeesh!

Greyhawk, couldnt' care about, don't hate it though.

Birthright, interesting but very VERY limited, pretty bad for D&D play because of the limitations IMHO. would need lot of work on it but potentially it was amazing.

Undermountain I consider an actual campaign setting, oddly I don't like dungeon crawls except as a player, hate 'em as a DM mostly, but...Undermountain I adore!
I aint' forgiven WOTC for killing off Halaster, frikkin anti-mage bigots, that's what it is, a conspiracy by the wand-less!! hehe

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I dislike any campaign setting that has "official" metaplot and timeline advancement.

This even lessens my love for Shadowrun, which is otherwise IMO one of the greatest campaign settings ever published. It doesn't ruin my love for Shadowrun because SR is so dependent upon "bleeding-edge" tech and the ramifications of it, so updating the world is semi-excusable.

(But I've said many times that a products I would gladly buy for SR is a collection of timelines of events (mundane and magical) and advances (tech and magical) in the SR universe, so that, for example, instead of feeling forced to begin play in the current SR year of 2072, I could begin in 2050, or 2063, or whatever, and have a good idea what information and equipment to make available to my players.)

I'm also biased against any campaign setting that has world-shakingly powerful -- personal power, not political power -- NPCs that regularly interact with the PCs. There are a number of reasons for my dislike of this, most of which have been discussed at length on EN World, so no need to hash them out here.

Put those two dislikes together, and the only campaign setting I'm familiar with that I "hate" is Forgotten Realms. And it doesn't help that the production values for FR products in the 3E era helped make other campaign settings look like red-headed stepchildren.

 

[Klaus]

Love:
Dark Sun
Ravenloft
Planescape
Eberron

Like:
Greyhawk (pre-Greyhawk Wars)
Red Steel
Al-Qadim
Kara-Tur
4e FR

Don't Like:
pre-4e FR
Dragonlance

Don't Know Enough to Judge:
Birthright
Taladas (DL)
Mystara (outside Red Steel)

 

[Abraxas]

• Greyhawk: Love It - First setting I played in/ran - Love it, mostly for nostalgic reasons.
• Forgotten Realms: Don't Care - Longest running campaigns I played in were in FR - but I never really cared enough to learn more about the setting than I needed to play. It also had to many characters that should have been concerned with what was going on that weren't and to many reboots.
• Dragonlance: Hate - it was a bad novel.
• Planescape: Hate - Mostly turned off by the art work and the writing style.
• DarkSun: Don't know/Don't care - No one in my gaming circles was into the style of the setting so I've had little exposure.
• Spelljammer: Love/Hate - I really really liked the idea of a D&D space opera, but the rules got in the way. I could never get anyone else interested in playing it. My current DM tried to get the players to try it by dropping a operational spelljamming ship into the FR game he was running years ago - the players had their characters just walk away from it.
• Ravenloft: Love/Hate - I liked the flavor and feel of the setting, but it was overwhelming - the fact that you never really succeed for any length of time and really can't change anything wears on the players.
• Birthright: Love it - The bloodline rules/powers needed to be tweaked a bit, but other than that it is hands down my favorite setting in idea and execution.

And some others

• Eberron: Love/Hate - some elements are nifty - magic being integrated into the society - warforged, artificers, shifters, and changelings - dragonmarks. However, to make them work needs a different framework than the standard 3.5D&D system
• Ai-Qadim: Don't Know - much like Dark Sun, no one around here was interested.
• Jakandor: Love - I just really liked this setting thematically.
  

 

[Herschel]

I like them all. Yes, all of them, even the ones I never got to game in but just read through. I'm not a fan of emoRaistlin or even a number of the novels in Dragonlance, but that's about as close as I come to disliking a setting.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

Dragonlance: Love it! It is my favorite campaign setting and it is a lot deeper than most people seem to think.

SpellJammer: Love it! I like the idea of DnD in space.

Ravenloft: Love it! I liked the idea of a setting that deals with a more "Humanized" evil as opposed to the mindless evil of the Planescape Demons, Devils, and Daemons.

Planescape: Love/Hate it! I like the idea behind the setting, and I admit I have really only read over fan material for it, but some things about it rub me the wrong way.

Greyhawk: Neutral to it.

Eberron: I like it well enough.

Forgotten Realms: Love/Hate it! I like the Pre-4E version of the setting. Not so much the 4E version.

Darksun: Do not know enough to make a judgment.

Birthright: Same as Ravenloft.

 

[Dorn_the_warrior]

Nyambe is amazing, too.

^ This. I would really like to play or run a Nyambe game someday...oh well.

Love Dragonlance...I remember a campaign I was in back in the day with my brother and some of his friends. Good times.