I'm liking Dawnforge by Fantasy Flight Games.
The basic idea is that it's kind of a precursor world. It's very much standard D&D, but a long time ago. So, there are dawn elves and night elves, but they don't full on hate each, yet. The seeds of a typical D&D settings hatred between drow and surface elves are definitely in place, but it's still early enough that things could be patched up between the two sub races. I like the setting because there's a whole bunch of stuff like that that's kind of at the tipping point, giving the players a chance to really be movers and shakers in the major events of world history. Or, since it's a young world, there's still plenty of untamed wilderness, so if you aren't so interested in the epic, world shaking stuff, Dawnforge can certainly acomodate that too.
As for the base races and classes, Dawnforge was written as one of the settings in WotC's settings search, thus it's designed to accomodate all standard D&D races. They're just like in the PH, except they develop more over time, making them more powerful than standard races. If you know Tolkien, think about how Noldor elves in the first age were more powerful than third age elves. The cool thing about that is the races have a lot more stuff going on to help players customize their characters. Race means a lot more in dawnforge than a +2/-2 to a couple stats and maybe darkvision. Of course, roleplaying does the best job of differentiating the races, but having some crunch is nice too.
I like the way the setting feels fresh, yet familiar. It accomodates pretty much all standard D&D stuff, but it's kind of tabula rasa (sp?) for the players to shape the world. I've always been a fan of epic stuff, and dawnforge has epic written all over it.
The basic idea is that it's kind of a precursor world. It's very much standard D&D, but a long time ago. So, there are dawn elves and night elves, but they don't full on hate each, yet. The seeds of a typical D&D settings hatred between drow and surface elves are definitely in place, but it's still early enough that things could be patched up between the two sub races. I like the setting because there's a whole bunch of stuff like that that's kind of at the tipping point, giving the players a chance to really be movers and shakers in the major events of world history. Or, since it's a young world, there's still plenty of untamed wilderness, so if you aren't so interested in the epic, world shaking stuff, Dawnforge can certainly acomodate that too.
As for the base races and classes, Dawnforge was written as one of the settings in WotC's settings search, thus it's designed to accomodate all standard D&D races. They're just like in the PH, except they develop more over time, making them more powerful than standard races. If you know Tolkien, think about how Noldor elves in the first age were more powerful than third age elves. The cool thing about that is the races have a lot more stuff going on to help players customize their characters. Race means a lot more in dawnforge than a +2/-2 to a couple stats and maybe darkvision. Of course, roleplaying does the best job of differentiating the races, but having some crunch is nice too.
I like the way the setting feels fresh, yet familiar. It accomodates pretty much all standard D&D stuff, but it's kind of tabula rasa (sp?) for the players to shape the world. I've always been a fan of epic stuff, and dawnforge has epic written all over it.
