Settings you want to like

[Nightfall]

Infernal Teddy,

Care to elaborate on just WHY the Gaz turned you off to the Scarred Lands?

feydras,

Well...they can change and quite frankly I can understand why you felt like that because the gods are involved, the "titanspawn" don't stand a chance. What I think isn't conveyed well is the fact that while they did lose, the Titanspawn are FAR more numerous than the divine races. Geography can be a tricky thing I'll grant you, but I think one must understand not every country is going to war with each other. If that were the case, the divine races would be almost not existant. Now maybe more border wars aren't a bad thing, I'll grant you. But constant fighting, at least to me, isn't what the Scarred Lands is about.

Class wise...not sure how to recieve that as I felt both classes were more than adequate about showing off something beyond the big four core classes.

Far too few TRs? Well only if you have those books. Otherwise, trust me there's plenty more out there.

Solas,

I'm working on fixing that!

 

[DMH]

For me its Oathbound

Its just so ...

<waves his hands in the air in frustration>

I really wish I could pinpoint it more precisely than that.

If you have questions or comments, there is always oathbound.net.

 

[Morpheus]

I really wanted to like Kalamar, but just can't find anything to hook me.

DM

Ditto...

 

[EricNoah]

Birthright is WotC's strongest world.

I ran a pretty nifty BR campaign. All of that kingdom stuff was great background material if nothing else.

I think if I do Iron Lore I may want to break out my old BR box and just use the countries/kingdoms from it as the setting.

 

[Pants]

I said it in the other thread; Iron Kingdoms. Love the flavor, hate the rules. Even if the rules were better I'm not sure I'd want to run it. There's just waaaaay too much info for me to digest and process into a good campaign. I'd love to play in it though

Planescape is another of my 'favorite' settings marred by a few issues. Mainly, it made the planes and the creatures residing on them more 'commonplace' than what I like. What's a demon (sorry, Tanar'ri!) but just another addled berk on the corner o' the street? I also don't like the Lady of Pain... at all. But, damn, there's just so much else to love, it's just those two issues are too big to just ignore.

 

[Wombat]

Worlds I wanted to like...

Tekumel is right at the top of the pops. It seems so intriguing, but there has never been more than hints of what the world is really like, so it is all but impossible to play (though I hear that the current incarnation is much, much better that way).

Midnight sounded great, especially for the "low magic aspect", but then it cancelled this out by providing the Paths, which basically give you non-droppable, predictable magical items; I felt that undercut the whole feel of the world.

Theah is a big one. I like specific aspects of the world well enough, but they don't work in tandem. There was no reason for the pirates to be where they were or to have the impact they did, given there was no New World or Spice Islands analogs. The sheer number of troops under arms in any given country was absolutely insane. The system was fun enough and I loved most of the magic, but the world drove me crazy.

There are a lot of game worlds that drive me crazy simply because there appears to be no interaction at all, socially or religiously, between abutting nations. While I am not asking to be playing a game in The Real World (tm), I do like to have some sense that the nations of a given world do not merely sit side by side but actually have effects on each others existences.

 

[MrFilthyIke]

Theah. I love 7th Sea, and I don't hate the setting; there's a lot I like about it. But the "metaplot" they dragged into it just makes me shake my head.

Swashbuckling is fun enough on its own. Who needs the rest of that crap?

AMEN BROTHER.

I stopped buying L5R and 7th Sea the MOMENT the card game meta-plot started creeping in.
F-ing card card!? My hat of...dear gawds, I'm turning into diaglo, Aaaiiieeeee!!.........

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I ran a pretty nifty BR campaign. All of that kingdom stuff was great background material if nothing else.

BR rocked.

The setting I most wanted to like? Wheel of Time. I used to LOVE the Robert Jordan books. We played through the campaign book, and discovered some serious flaws. Granted, many of them were with the adventures themselves*, but yeesh. It felt like we were playing D&D with training wheels.

Also, Midnight. It's a neat concept (...and easily portable to Birthright, too, if Azrai survived Deismaar), but, seriously, it's so doom and gloom that I can't imagine playing it.

"Yay! We defeated the orc garrisons! The villagers are free now"
"Okay...two weeks pass, and all the villages in a twenty mile radius are razed for supporting you. Half the villagers are crucified along the road; the other half are death-marched to the Pit of Doom for use as breeding stock and light snacks."
"...so...why did we do this again?"

Brad

* - Healing turns damage from lethal to nonlethal, and then you walk or sleep it off. Which is fine...EXCEPT WHEN THE BLOODY ADVENTURE THROWS THREE ENCOUNTERS AT YOU IN A ROW WITH NO REST BREAKS!!!!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Theah. I love 7th Sea, and I don't hate the setting; there's a lot I like about it. But the "metaplot" they dragged into it just makes me shake my head.

Swashbuckling is fun enough on its own. Who needs the rest of that crap?

Heh, even before it was revealed I had decided to ignore the Avalon metaplot.

My biggest problem is the the map, not a particularly believable geography.

Montaigne fit what I expected, just a little sooner. If I ever run a Montaigne game it will be about the Revolution becoming the Terror. And I don't think anybody was unhappy to see the king die.

Ussurra... I may leave the metaplot in place, a friendlier, gentler Baba Yaga...

Castille... I don't much care about.

Eisen, like the metaplot, leaving it in.

Vodacce, okay, they spend most of their time spinning their wheels.

Mostly though I want the PCs to be able to influence events.

The Auld Grump

 

[wingsandsword]

Settings I wished I could like more than I do:

Greyhawk The great old lady of settings. So many "old school" fans, but I just was never able to understand it. All I've ever seen is the utterly generic "Default 3e Setting" Greyhawk, which isn't even really a setting. The 3e Gazeteer was deeply lacking in explaining the setting. I've looked at the old 1e Hardcover Greyhawk Adventures book, which was equally unhelpful and seemed like just a collection of new spells and random new rules for a setting it assumed you already knew. Second Edition had almost nothing for the setting, and certainly nothing that explained the setting to a novice. A big, fully detailed hardcover treatment of the setting akin to the ECS or FRCS might help me understand what the big deal is about, but for now it looks like Greyhawk is more of a lack of a setting than a setting.

Rokugan Now, I played the CCG, and a lot of the basic tenets of the setting made for a really good CCG, but could fall flat when turned into an RPG. The clans. Nice themes for card decks, but making such huge swaths of the land and culture into thin stereotypes fell flat. All Crane are prissy tempramental artists obsessed with honor? All Crab are uncouth barbaric thugs? Scorpion are all honorless ninjas who know everybody's secrets, and Dragon are all enigmatic monks and two-sword wielding samurai who recite zen koans and get lots of tattoos, Maybe it was just the campaigns I played in the setting, but all the depth, all the lore, all the sweeping metaplot (which was sometimes silly, since it was dictated by card game tournament results) sometimes ran right in the face of things put in because it is a CCG setting first and foremost, and an RPG as an afterthought.

Urban Arcana The whole "magic and monsters are real and unseen in the shadows" isn't exactly new ground for RPG's, White Wolf had been doing it for more than a decade, and Lovecraft was the grandfather of it all. Here was WotC's take on a modern day magical setting. It seemed undecided whether it was grim horror, or slapstick comedy. Oompa Loompa-esque humanoids working in magical Warehouses of Holding, a major campaign organization which is a sidelong reference to Steve Jackson Games & Illuminati (the Swiss Juncture of Gnomes, referred to in the book as the SJG), a chain of fantasy themed fast food places called The Prancing Pony, magical action figures which come to life, cursed hairclips which give you a "bad hair day", Magic 8-Balls which are really magic. Then you turn the page and they've got some actually horrifying, dark & grim monsters like breathsnatchers, grendelspawn, leechwalker and the urban wendigo, grim malevolent murderous cults. Half the art is silly and almost self-parody (drow rock bands, bugbear mafia hit-men) and other half is dark and grim. What's the setting supposed to be, dark or silly, you really can't have both. Also add in the fact it didn't really include any actual setting materials, just guidelines on how to write up your own cities for gaming use. Now I love the actual rulebook as a huge mine of stuff for d20 Modern (which I love as much if not more than D&D), and for converting between d20 Modern and D&D, just the actual setting as provided seemed trite and lifeless.