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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 2119259" data-attributes="member: 14159">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.</blockquote>

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