Favourite Fantasy Settings

[Herobizkit]

Spira - I like how everything is designed in spirals, a nice nod to intelligent design. The South Pacific influence threaded through a European needle is really something that has impacted how I look at world building in general.

I completely forgot about Final Fantasy X's Spira. Add that one to my list.

 

[brewdus]

I really like Paizo's Golarion. It's very fresh, yet familiar at the same time

 

[Gilladian]

There are settings I love because I love the stories told in them (LoTR, for example) but I'd never run a GAME there.

Then there are settings that seem to me to just beg for games (certain portions of the Witch World are just ripe for using). And then there are game settings I've just never gotten into.

I ran in the Forgotten Realms during 2e extensively, yet I never really liked the world. I happily gave it up to homebrew when I had the time. Now, I don't have the time to homebrew, but my world is 20+years deep, so I can use it the way I used the FR earlier on, and just "run the surface".

Harn is a GREAT setting; it taught me a LOT about worldbuilding that I incorporated into my campaign setting. Weather, climate, economics, history, etc... are all carefully used in that setting. And it is a world that lives and breathes.

 

[questing gm]

Forgotten Realms, Eberron and still finding time to dig into Golarion.

 

[Dragonhelm]

My big love is Dragonlance. There's too many individual reasons why, but it boils down to a great high fantasy flavor and storytelling based on the tropes of D&D. Check my sig for the Dragonlance Nexus website.

My first campaign was in the Forgotten Realms, so I like it as well. Also liking Dark Sun, Eberron, Spelljammer, L5R, and Star Wars. I want to learn more about Golarion, Iron Kingdoms, and Al-Qadim. They all look neat.

I wish the Legend of the Seeker TV show was an RPG. That would be fun. Starting to read the novels by Terry Goodkind right now.

I'm certain I'm forgetting something.

I never did get into Planescape. Everybody comments on the art, but I wasn't a huge fan of it. I will say it's distinctive, though. I didn't care for the slang at the time. Maybe, though, this is something I could get into after the fact. *shrugs*

I like elements of Greyhawk, but I think I'd rather pillage them for another setting. Ditto with Mystara. Ptolus sounds like something good to put into a setting somewhere.

 

[Quantum]

Is there a period in the Realms' development that you like best? How do you feel about the 4e take on the setting?

II like all four editions of D&D from Basic to d20 D&D. I am partial to 2nd Edition as that is my favorite.

As far as 4e goes, I'm a grognard. I won't touch it. Simply because I've been through four different versions of the game, as I've been playing the game since roughly around 1980, starting with 1st Edition and then playing Basic for a while, then came 2nd, and the books are just getting to be too much for my budget and too numerous to collect. I like to keep things simple.

As for what I love, well, I really have a dislike for Waterdeep but I like Undermountain. But I put that in Calimport because the players were reading ahead (Especially when they wanted to go after the gem room with almost 16000 gems worth 5,000gp each and that huge ruby worth 250,000gp each). There was a lot of lore about it. Really like the chaotic nature of the Wildmage and the war of the gods when they were cast out of their heavens by AO. I also like the Netheril supplement as well.

Plus that it was completely Epic. For me, it seemed far more epic than Greyhawk (Although I like that setting too it's just that The Realms are my favorite setting). For example of the epicness to me the Great Glacier and Anauroch seemed to be living entities who were locked in mortal combat with each other, but this was my imagination because of the way they were drawn on the map. So I pretty much imagined that they were actually the remains of gods of some sort.

 

[Woas]

Avalon and Arthurian Earth/Briton is my favorite!

 

[Oni]

3e Forgotten Realms - Nothing screams D&D to me like the FRCS. It's a wonderful guilty pleasure and it sucks me in like no other generic fantasy setting. Rich and quirky, I love it. Plus the Shades are too cool as villains.

Bas-Lag - It's so weird and awesome. I love the bizarreness and the tone. I'm not sure I would or could run a game there, but I sure do enjoy reading about it.

PLANET ALGOL - Weird, quirky and awesome. A place totally fit for D&D but not at all generic. It's got aliens, robots, drugged out sorcerers, ray gun toting earthmen, crazy cthulhu entities, cactus men, mutants, and way more! Go check it out.

 

[lin_fusan]

I will always had a soft spot for 2e Planescape. Maybe it is because it was pushing D&D toward steampunk. Maybe it is because it tried so very hard to insert theme into the game. Or maybe because I really like the British slang in the flavor text. Regardless of how clunky it was in execution, I love the ideas.

 

[Hejdun]

I love Greyhawk because adventurers drive the action. There's plenty of stuff going on anyways, but there are tons of opportunities for the PCs to just go somewhere and do something important. The world isn't so big that the actions of the PCs feel irrelevant, which I sometimes feel with other settings. It's a nice, lowish-fantasy default setting, which is exactly what I like.