Please Help Me Select a Campaign Setting

[tec-9-7]

Kalamar is awesome - one of my favorite campaign settings. I'm going to toss out The Wilderlands too tho - the Boxed set should be out soon, and what better base city could you want than the City State of the Invincible Overlord?

 

[Pramas]

If you can wait just a few weeks, our new Thieves' World line sounds like a good match. The Thieves' World Player's Manual is out first, followed by an adventure, Murder at the Vulgar Unicorn. Later this year is Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary (a big city book) and the Thieves' World Gazetteer (a book about the wider world).

http://www.greenronin.com/catalog/grr1801

http://www.greenronin.com/catalog/grr1802

 

[Christoph the Magus]

My ideals:

1. The magic level isn't super-high. I'm willing to run Forgotten Realms if it's best for the other criteria, but I'd prefer something lower magic.

2. There are adventures available that readily fit the setting. I ran one Nyambe adventure one time, but the lack of sufficient supporting material made it impossible to turn it into a real campaign without a lot of work.

3. There is some kind of "home base" setting available, like a town or city the players spend their downtime and training time in.

4. It's D&D, 3.0 or 3.5. I know there are lots of other great games, but my players have Player's Handbooks and such, and want to play D&D.
QUOTE]

Kingdoms of Kalamar all the way, IMO. Here's why:

1. KoK is a fairly low magic setting. There just aren't 20th wizards/sorcs hanging out in every city.

2. There are plenty of high quality adventures for KoK, many of them arced together to form mini-campaigns.

3. There are a couple of city supplements. Loona would make a good home base for PCs that need to lie low for awhile as the law is pretty loose in Loona. Geanavue, on the other hand, is a orderly city where the PCs could breath a little easier. There are plenty of adventures to be had there, but it's not the kind of place where assasinations take place on the streets in broad daylight. It's also a city of craftsmen, so it would be a good place for the PCs to go when they need to sell their swag.

4. It's not only D&D 3.0/3.5, it's OFFICIAL D&D. 'Nuff said!

Christoph

 

[MonsterMash]

Do you need a whole world? A big enough adventures (or series) might do the same thing. And if you are really pressed for time, might be more efficient for you.

Necromancer has a number of adventures with towns and cities as bases. Lost City of Barakus is a popular one.

Lost City of Barakus is good fun and can be used as pretty much a campaign in itself. I like the Wilderlands a lot and a campaign can easily be run with the Players Guide and the downloads from the website.

Kalamar has been extensively pimped by Mark, but it is popular for a good reason.

 

[S'mon]

Lost City of Barakus is good fun and can be used as pretty much a campaign in itself. I like the Wilderlands a lot and a campaign can easily be run with the Players Guide and the downloads from the website.

For playability I definitely recommend Necromancer (except for Necropolis, which is a nice sourcebook but terrible scenario). If you get LCOB you have a mini campaign setting & scenario with about 40 sessions worth of play, & plenty of room to add stuff, and the other Nec scenarios can be plugged in too. This would be a good halfway house between a totally prepackaged setting & doing it all yourself. City State also looks fantastic.

 

[Mystery Man]

...and what better base city could you want than the City State of the Invincible Overlord?

Indeed. CSIO (again) rocks!

 

[Turanil]

I think the choice is clearly either Kalamar or Wilderland. As for Greyhawk, I never heard it was published for 3.5... Some other suggestions, such as Midnight wouldn't apply as they have heavy houserules and thus PHB may not fit. Eberron also dosn't seem to be what you really seek.

In any case tell us what you eventually chose and bought!

 

[Li Shenron]

I go against the grain and suggest Forgotten Realms indeed.

1. It is high-magic mostly because it is relatively common to become a high-level character in Faerun. However you can just not have the PCs interact directly with those high-level characters... The typical FR spellcaster PC isn't particularly more magically supplied than the average D&D spellcaster.
Eventually just be stingy with PrCl access, don't allow characters to take material from more regions at the same time, and of course disallow spellfire, and you'll be fine.

2. Not that there are really many FR adventures after all, but generic adventures fits FR well (as long as you change deities and organizations names). CotSQ can take you a long time to finish anyway. There are short adventures in regional books, and a couple of free ones on the web page.

3. Nothing else I know has as much material support as FR. You can pick your favourite regional book and start from there. Although there's no "capital" of Faerun, there are many towns well detailed enough to use as a base.

4. The only problem here is that there's an extra expenses because of the 3.0-3.5 rifts: you'll want the FRCS for the setting, but need the PGtF for the updated crunch, and the early regional books were 3.0 as well. If you don't bother that (I do), then there's way enough material for 3ed anyway.

 

[DaveMage]

Well, White Wolf Quarterly says August 2005, which doesn't sound like 'a couple of months' to me. Has it been postponed? I'm already waiting for this one .

I know it will be at Gen*Con, but for some reason I think I remember someone on the Necro boards saying that it would be available to the general public in September.

However, I would be most happy to be proved wrong and have it delivered in August.

 

[Ron]

Your best choices would be Greyhawk or Kalamar. Kenzer has published quite a lot of material to Kingdoms of Kalamar whereas Greyhawk has a long tradition of products. Despite the fact that the only sourcebook available to 3.x is the Living Greyhawk Campaign, it is very complete and work with both 3.0 and 3.5 editions, as it lacks any additional rules. Oddly, this is a great advantage, as there are already too many rules in the core books and it makes the book edition free. Still, if you insist, Dragon released a couple of issues with Regional Feats for Greyhawk last year (check Paizo website for back issues availability) and there are a few additional Prestige Classes available at the RPGA Living Greyhawk site). Additionally, Dungeon magazine has Greyhawk adventures and setting info in nearly all issues nowadays. Several cities suitable for a base to your party were described in recent issues (check Paizo's site again) or grab the Return to Temple of Elemental Evil (to get Homlet) or the Dungeon Master Guide Volume 2 (to get Saltmarsh).

Freeport is not a complete setting but rather a city sourcebook to be dropped anyware. It is pretty good and would probably be of your liking. Wilderlands will probably fit the bill too. But, as far as I know, it was not released yet. Forgotten Realms and Eberron are too high magic to met your requirements.