Campaign Settings We Hate

[TheClone]

I don't like FR, at least in 3e. The world is so crowded with everything, that you can_'t move without stepping on a supplement info. I'd like to dm/play without reading an encyclopedia first.

I love the dark part of Dark Sun. I really enjoy dark fantasy, so Dark Sun just hits the spot. And it's also not much populated so you don't have to know that much and have room to play and build your story.

 

[ferratus]

Dragonlance - (Love/Hate)

My favorite setting because I really like romantic fantasy of an epic. When you play a DL game, you fight a continent wide struggle between good and evil from the back of a dragon. That's pretty special to me and I definitely spend a lot of time thinking about how to make that setting better.

I hate it however because it has always taken a backseat to its pulp novels. There was no room made for a campaign in which the players are the great heroes instead of the Heroes of the Lance and their kids. On top of that, neither the pulp novels or the few game modules had editorial control to keep them consistent. So you have several story lines which contradict each other. The 5th Age for example ran roughshod over the setting's themes and established lore of the setting that came before.

The other problem with Dragonlance are the one joke comic races of the kender, gully dwarves and gnomes. Everyone has a story about a DL campaign that was derailed or even fell apart because a kender PC was toxic. Gully Dwarves are a race that was designed to make fun of the mentally disabled. Gnomes, like wild mages, were also something that made people groan when someone wanted to play one because they were as much of a liability to the party as they were a contributor.

Forgotten Realms - (Don't care) Pre-4e a ren faire world with magic up the wazoo. In 4e, a ren faire world that has been hit with a gritty reboot. Either way it is too vanilla to be interesting for its own sake, and you are always going to be a small act in a much larger world. I mine the crap out of it however for dungeons, monsters, and magical items for my homebrew settings.

Greyhawk - (Love/Don't care) The 1e modules are great. I love Maure Castle, the Temple of Elemental Evil, the GDQ series. Many characters and villains are also great. Outside the modules and their characters and demons however, it is a bunch of 'meh'. I just don't care about the Sea Princes, the Frost Barbarians, Keoland or the Duchy of Urnst. So I'll gladly play the modules and ignore Greyhawk.

Birthright - (Love/Don't care) To round out the basic vanilla D&D settings, we have this rule set about managing kingdoms and domains. I love the idea of managing domains and strongholds (I think it should be a key part of paragon level play) but like Greyhawk I don't care about the setting.

Spelljammer - (Love it) - I don't know if I'd ever want to DM this setting, but I certainly like the idea of playing in it. A good mix of sci-fi and fantasy, with the freedom of soaring through the heavens. I just like the idea of being a pirate in a universe full of Mos Eisley cantinas.

Planescape - (Hate it) - Too convoluted, and makes the awe and terror of the gods and demons pedestrian by having them all drinking in the same tavern in Sigil. I like my otherworldly enemies to be otherworldly thanks.

Ravenloft - (Hate it) - D&D is a game about collecting experience points, leveling up, and becoming mighty heroes. Ravenloft is about being trapped in a dimension of utter hopelessness and gothic terror. If you treat it like a standard D&D game, you'll run roughshod over the spooks and defeat the campaign setting. If you don't, you can look forward to a year of failure, defeat and sorrow. 4e has it exactly right. Ravenloft is a great place to visit, but I wouldn't have a campaign there.

Eberron - (Hate it) - Simply because I hate magi-tech. I also have to admit that I'd rather play a pulp noir game rather than a pulp noir fantasy game any day of the week.

Dark Sun - (Curious) - I like the gritty R.E. Howard-esque post-apocolyptic desert world. I probably wouldn't want to play it past level 10 though, as quest for survival and an oasis of wealth and calm seems to be the point of the setting rather than overthrowing tyrants and becominglegendary heroes.

Oriental Adventures/Al-Quadim etc. - (Like it) - I'd always be up for playing an alternate culture to European fantasy, though not enough that I'm planning my own 'exotic culture' campaign.

 

[amerigoV]

Greyhawk: I enjoyed it long ago (pre-Greyhawk Wars). It has been a long time since I played in it.

Forgotten Realms: Mixed feelings. For a long time, I did not like it. I had the same reaction as if I saw someone with an AOL email address - "Ugh, some 12 year old got ahold of their parents account". But, I did use it alot under 3.x. So, much like AOL, it got a bad rap in my mind due to a bunch of abnoxious youngsters. Now, I view it as a homebrew on steriods -- 75% what people come up with is "here is Grognardia - it is like Germany. Here is Spandardia - it is like Spain...". FR is what most people would come up with if they had money and time to "finish" their homebrew. I find it is a great setting I can put about any idea into given its span. Since there are no FR fanboys in my group, I do not feel restricted by the novels/history.

DarkSun: Never played, but I loved the premise.

Dragonlance: I enjoyed the books, but not the early modules.

Ravenloft: Love the module (running Exp to version right now), but I am not interested in the setting.

Planescape: Only played it once - no opinions.

Spelljammer: It came out when I was late HS/early college. It always sounded hokey to me. I never played it, so no real opinion.

Birthright: Never played it.

Eberron: (for completeness) Love it. It is my default setting now. It has more theme than FR, and that theme seems to hit what I like.

 

[Nymrohd]

44 people hate Planescape? I guess I need to track them down and kill them . . .

 

[billd91]

Greyhawk - love it. Still my favorite published campaign setting for D&D. Love it best as the folio version, with areas briefly sketched out and waiting for a DM's individual influence.

Forgotten Realms - love/hate. Some really nice areas and nice ideas, far too silly in many other ways. Volo's Guides really helped undermine my appreciation for FR as they really drove home just how silly magicked up some placed like Waterdeep really were.

Dragonlance - love it. Just different enough from standard D&D to be fresh yet familiar. Never read more than the first 3 novels, so never felt particularly bound to canon in how I viewed the setting.

Planescape - love/hate. I like the structure behind it and some of the ideas. Love DiTerlizzi's art. But found any sources with the stupid cant too annoying to actually read.

Dark Sun - don't care. Some cool ideas, some terrible execution. Not nearly interested enough to consider investing in it under 4e even if I did like 4e.

Spelljammer - hate it. Never liked the premise. When a friend's old campaign ran into spelljamming issues, it was all I could do to attend. My interest in the campaign dropped right out, and that was too bad.

Ravenloft - hate it. Another case of some good initial ideas destroyed by subsequent developments in extreme cheese and silliness. Too many adventures better run through It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show and too many tacked on villains from other settings and bizarre locations in the demiplane.

Birthright - neutral. Didn't know enough about it.

Stuff not on poll

Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim - love them. Though tacked on to FR, they're certainly distinct from the Faerun materials in very strong (and good) ways. Best stuff TSR was cranking out in late 1e/2e timeframe, if you ask me.

 

[Dragonbait]

I can't say I ever hated a setting..

The Dragonlance "hate" surprises me. I don't get it, really. In 2ed I thought it was quite a unique setting and I liked th 3E material.

Forgotten Realms has always been a love/hate relationship, so having that option on the poll made me smile. The setting is great, if vanilla (by 3E standards, anyways) but the inner workings and constant setting updates were difficult to follow. I also both loved all the NPCs and hated that my players wanted to interact with them and (strangely) seek them out for help.
Lazy, cowardly players..

 

[Nifft]

The Dragonlance "hate" surprises me. I don't get it, really.

Kender.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Dire Bare]

The other problem with Dragonlance are the one joke comic races of the kender, gully dwarves and gnomes. Everyone has a story about a DL campaign that was derailed or even fell apart because a kender PC was toxic. Gully Dwarves are a race that was designed to make fun of the mentally disabled. Gnomes, like wild mages, were also something that made people groan when someone wanted to play one because they were as much of a liability to the party as they were a contributor.

I've never played in a Dragonlance game, so I've never experienced the groans when players choose kender, gnomes, or gully dwarves . . . but I can easily imagine myself groaning . . .

I have a problem with these races in the fiction. I've read most of the Dragonlance novels, but I've come to loathe the almost obligatory kender/gnome/gully character. I'm reading the final volume of the Dwarf Home trilogy right now, and I HATE the gully dwarf characters with a passion that is distracting me from the rest of the story, which is pretty good.

I liked the character of Tasslehoff in the original books, as well as the silly gully dwarves and gnome characters . . . but you're right, the "races" are one-joke character types that soon begin to grate.

The tragic flaw of an otherwise great setting . . .

 

[Dire Bare]

I can't think of any setting I actually hate overall, although there are various elements that I can't stand, such as the "joke" races in Dragonlance (as my above post discusses).

Greyhawk never got me excited, it's always felt very bland to me and with all the terrible (IMO) place names and I never felt the need to dive into the setting. Oddly enough, I did enjoy the "Greyhawk Lite" default setting of the 3rd Edition, but I used it as a generic backdrop in my games where setting was unimportant. I was introduced to Blackmoor as the ancient past of the Mystara setting, and I never understood the appeal of time-traveling from a pseudo-medieval setting back millenia to another pseudo-medieval setting. Of course, both of these classic campaigns were vanilla fantasy settings, and as I was introduced to the Realms first, more of the same didn't appeal to me.

I've always enjoyed the more "out there" settings like Planescape, Spelljammer, and Dark Sun. It was fun to take the D&D tropes and tweak them into a twisted mirror genre setting. These types of settings will never be used as my "main" campaign world, but they are fun for short campaigns that are a bit different.

I've never run games in the Realms, but I've read most of the fiction and RPG books, and steal all the good ideas liberally for my own homebrew. Eberron is another twist on the classic D&D tropes, but doesn't go as far as the "out there" settings above, and I like to steal the good ideas from that world as well (Sarlona, warforged, shifters, changelings).

I'm looking forward to D&D 4th Edition versions of Gamma World and hopefully other classic TSR/WotC settings (and newer settings/genres as well). Using the same ruleset I've come to enjoy for different genres that can be blended into a D&D game is going to be fun!

 

[Obryn]

Alrighty, let's give this a try...

Greyhawk - Love it. It's got such a deep background, without getting overburdened by canon, that it's phenomenal. It's been one of my favorites since the 1e days. I think it has probably the best setting map in the history of gaming settings, too - in both artistry and "cool" value. Yes, there's some silliness to the place names, but that's easy to look past. My favorite is the 1e-era box set, but the Gazetteer version is pretty okay, too. I'd prefer to ignore all the Greyhawk Wars stuff, personally. If I want relatively vanilla fantasy, and I don't want to homebrew, this is my fave.

Forgotten Realms - Which one?
Old Grey Box: Love it. Heck; I'll add in most of the FR series supplements.
2e Box: Meh. Avatar, schmavatar.
3e: Hate. This is what happens when the canon from an exhaustive fiction collection are allowed to drive a setting.
4e: Pretty okay. The map hurts my enthusiasm a lot, but the setting is actually pretty good.

Dragonlance - Hate it, mostly for the aforementioned joke races. Also, the 1e Dragonlance Adventures hardcover was a travesty.

Planescape - Meh. Unfamiliar with it, and it looks to suffer from the same canon overload as late-era FR.

Dark Sun - LOVE, but particularly the original box set. Sadly, it was thoroughly trashed by the novel line. The early supplements are pretty awesome, but the mechanics had some flaws in the original release. I'm looking forward to the 4e version; even if they mess with the setting, they can't do anything worse to it than TSR did!! And besides, I'll always have my box set for setting flavor.

Spelljammer - Like it okay. It was a fun idea, and a better implementation of it could be cool.

Ravenloft - Hate it. Conan Meets Count Dracula. No thanks; horror is best handled by a game system suited to it.

Eberron - Like it. May love it if I ever actually get to use it. I dig a pulp-style campaign.

Birthright - Shrug. Mostly ignored it.

Kara Tur - Double-shrug. Asian-themed adventuring is probably better done in L5R.

Al Qadim - I'm fond of it, but didn't get much into it. It was not the direction I was heading during the Great Setting Glut of 2e.

-O