I always use a homebrew setting, because I find myself unable to get invested in someone else's fictional world. Plus the published settings I often find a bit bland and lacking of imagination.
Plus the published settings I often find a bit bland and lacking of imagination.
Re: lack of imagination. I find that tends to be the case for me as well.
The corollary to this is most, if not all of the settings they created started as the worlds for their home games.If there are fan-created works that match or exceed their level of quality and imagination in the realm of world building, I have yet to encounter them.
The corollary to this is most, if not all of the settings they created started as the worlds for their home games.
I like to homebew settings not because I'm more creative than the people on your list. I do it because I want to experience the same joy in creating stuff that they did.
I can buy all the other reasons in this thread for going with Homebrew over Published setting, and there have been many. But this one irks me a bit. I guess I happen to think the following designers/artists had quite a bit of imagination:
Gary Gygax
Robert J. Kuntz
Carl Sargent
Laura and Tracy Hickman
Margaret Weis
Jeff Grubb
Larry Elmore
Roger Moore
Doug Niles
Michael Williams
Ed Greenwood
Bruce Nesmith
Richard Baker
Timothy Brown
Troy Denning
Mary Kirchoff
Brom
David "Zeb" Cook
Tony DiTerlizzi
Colin McComb
Wolfgang Baur
Monte Cook
These are just a few of the men and women that created the rich and incredible settings of Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Darksun, and Planescape. This list could easily expand to 100x with more research. If there are fan-created works that match or exceed their level of quality and imagination in the realm of world building, I have yet to encounter them.
This I can really get behind. I think it's probably the main reason why I've so enjoyed running my last two campaigns in Forgotten Realms and Eberron when I normally don't like that sort of thing.It is fun to share experiences of a common setting (module, AP) with others within the hobby.