Greyhawk vs Dragonlance vs Forgotten Realms vs Mystara vs Birthright

[Turjan]

Why do you say there is nothing medieval about FR? Compared to Eberron it certainly would be.

I could pose the counter question: Which aspect of the FR has a medieval feel to you? Plate armor and swords?

To me, the FR have mostly the atmosphere of the Western genre, just with swords and magic missiles instead of guns. You have these huge swathes of wilderness for exploration, old ruins of ancient civilizations, meet lots of wild tribes and animals, and even the ever present nobles have more aspects of a cattle baron than someone bound into rigid societal structures. All of this looks much more like the 18th to 19th century American West than medieval Europe.

 

[Jhaelen]

I think they're all pretty terrible. I vastly prefer settings that are _not_ generic vanilla settings. Having said that, I used the Blackmoor region in Greyhawk as the basis for my 3e homebrew campaign, so I voted for that.

 

[Ajax1979]

I have nothing against Birthright. It just really feels like a world made by committee. To me Birthright is the beautiful house where no one ever lived. Greyhawk and FR were homebrews. Dragonlance had novels and Mystara had a long series of articles in Dragon Magazine. Birthright showed up fully formed, had a huge amount of product over two years, and then vanished.

FR and Mystara get equal love from me though I ignore about 90% of the published material. Both suffer from "generic fantasy kingdoms" welded to "obvious real world cultural knock offs" but I'm okay with that. Between the two of them they cover just about everything.

I never got into Greyhawk much beyond the few nods to it in old Dragon Magazines and modules.

Dragonlance novels were a staple during middle and high school. As far as gaming there goes I have met two sorts of people:

1. Let's play the Companions and do exactly what they did.

2. Let's go out of our way to never acknowledge the events of the novels but doggedly maintain this is the same setting.

The former group seemed a lot more common to me. The latter group had some cool ideas (Taladas, Otherlands) but seemed to go off the rails into either generic fantasy or just plain weird a lot. "There's a spaceship buried under Palanthas and by the way there are two other moons no one knows about and the blue and gold wizards want to kill you.'

 

[the Jester]

Greyhawk, always and forever.

I cannot stand FR or DL; never got the chance to play Birthright but I suspect I would really dig it.

Mystara sits in 2nd place of the ones I've played, though.

All that said, my vast preference is a homebrewed world, and I also like some of the non-generic settings even though I may never run or play a game in them- Dark Sun rules, Eberron is cool by me, Oriental Adventures (before it got shoved into FR), Planescape, etc.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Mystara and Greyhawk are practically tie for me. Mystara won out only because the potential for non-medieval genre adventuring abounds in addition.


Birthright would come third for positive feelings around the cohesive setting or FR would come third for nostalgia towards the gray box era.

 

[lordxaviar]

Ok some of your responses seem to make me think that you read the question too quickly...

it asked which MEDIEVIAL setting

Ebbron with live robots and steampunnky thing going dosent fit

ravenloft is closer to the 18's in feel...

Greyhawk snob

 

[Jhaelen]

it asked which MEDIEVIAL setting

Ebbron with live robots and steampunnky thing going dosent fit

If Eberron doesn't fit because it features the warforged then none of the settings fit, because they're ALL high-magic settings with some of them even featuring _actual_ sci-fi material (Greyhawk, Mystara).

If the OP was really looking for a medieval setting, i.e. a setting with low or no magic, he'd have used different choices in the poll.