D&D 5E Sell me on a Campaign Setting

[Ravenheart87]

Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Despite it's name it's a sword & sorcery setting with tolkienian and science-fiction elements. It's a sandbox where a lot of the background info is left vague, so the individual DMs can wok out the details and create their own campaigns. This setting was "points of light" before Wizards of the Coast's marketing departing came up with the phrase. There are no real kingdoms and empires, just a few city states with the nearby towns and villages. The rest of the setting is undiscovered wilderness full of old ruins, monster lairs, weird stuff left behind by the people of a bygone era. There is no strong canon or game literature that binds your hands, and even the strongest NPCs are mortals. And there are very few heroes, most people are selfish and struggle for their own survival, and the powerful rulers are usually tyrants who got their throne by bloodletting or treachery.

 

[Cadriel]

Wilderlands of High Fantasy is really good, but very large and a bit gonzo if you follow it literally. One resource I've used with a lot of success is Rob Conley's Points of Light. There are two books, both system neutral but assuming D&D as their setting, that each have 4 small hexcrawls. They're great for sandbox gaming. I like Wildland, the first map in book 1, if you want that heroes matter sort of feel.

 

[guachi]

I'm a big fan of Mystara aka The Known World. It's old, it's a bit of a mess, and it has tons of support on dndclassics for cheap setting and adventure material. The BECMI setting is a setting where you can become gods. The design of the game is for players to matter.

I also picked up all the al-Qadim material on ebay for $25-30 shipped for everything with the core rules cheaper. About half is on dndclassics as a pdf, but all of my material was in phenomenal shape and since everything but the core rules are a box set it was nice having all the fiddly bits. One supplement is still in it's shrink wrap!

 

[Ravenheart87]

Wilderlands of High Fantasy is really good, but very large and a bit gonzo if you follow it literally.

I would argue with the very large part. Geographically it's smaller than Europe with the base 5 mile hexes. As for content, yeah, there's an awful lot of that, but I've never heard of any campaign using more than a few of the eighteen regions, which is vastly smaller amount of information than what you need to go through for the average WotC setting.

As for the gonzo elements, nothing is written in stone, feel free to alter things. If the gonzo stuff in several classic TSR modules didn't bother someone, these won't either. It's very far from the craziness of Arduin - now that's what I call gonzo!

 

[Remathilis]

Planescape cutter.

Its any setting you want. You want gritty, urban warfare? Let them bash around the hive with the berks. Want some political intrigue? Hang around with the high-ups in the factions. Looking for some killer adventure hooks? Go find an ancient artifact in Mt. Clandeggin or seek some nugget of wisdom from the Pillar of Skulls. Hankering for something epic? Lead an army of Angels into Baator to recover a proxy. Want heroes that matter? They can literally reshape the universe via the power of belief! Need an unstoppable villain? There's an Abyss full of them.

Oh, you also have EVERY OTHER D&D setting at your fingertips, if you need them.

Try it blood, you'll find Planescape might cure what ails ya.

 

[JeffB]

Wilderlands is awesome. The original is where a am at, as I like the the lesser detail, compared to the big expensive, hard to find nowadays Necromancer Games box set.

The little Gazetteer in the original Palace of the Silver Princess (orange cover) is a great place to start when not sure where you will end up or where you want to go.