D&D General [+] Tell me about your favorite official D&D setting...

[Jacob Lewis]

Dark Sun has always been one of my favorite fantasy settings, but not my favorite D&D setting. It has a different feel to it than your run-of-the-mill dungeon crawling, powering up, D&D-style game. Or at least it should. It really deserves its own system that will cater to the specific needs and style of the setting, which focuses on more on survival and exploration, as well as a magic system that makes more sense both mechanically and thematically.

There's a lot more ground to cover on this subject, but I'll leave it there for this thread.

 

[MoonSong]

The OG Greyhawk, before TSR advanced the timeline. The Boxed Set provided an awesome map by Darlene that gave plenty of different regions to work with. The information in it and the folio is enough to stir the imagination, yet there's not a whole lot of details, allowing the DM to customize it to their needs. Despite peoples complaints about it being "generic," it has a pretty interesting history that sets up the current (576 CY) volatile political structure.

Even post-development Greyhawk has a lot of things going for it. It remains dark and down to earth. And while it has huge NPCs that can in theory solve every problem, they have yet to be on speaking terms with each other first, ineffectual not out of laziness, but due to their own flaws and bad choices, so there is room for your group to succeed where they failed or to take advantage of their failure for your own benefit, nothing forcing you to be a hero...

Edit: Also, the good Gods are actually good, instead of passively benefiting from an effed cosmic arrangement keeping souls captive in order to extract as much worship as possible from them...

 

[ersatzphil]

I want to say Planescape, but while it's undoubtedly an incredible piece of worldbuilding, I found it to actually be pretty poorly done as a campaign setting to set campaigns in.

I hate to admit it, but I kind of feel the same way. My absolutely favorite setting to read sourcebooks from, but I could never figure out how to really use them in a game.

I honestly feel kind of the same about Dark Sun, as much as I love it. I've introduced a number of new players to the game during lockdown - the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk work because I can just say, "You've seen the Lord of the Rings movies? It's kind of like that, think of a character that makes sense in that sort of world." As much as I want to, I can't reasonably assign them all The Verdant Passage as homework.

 

[Hex08]

I want to say Planescape, but while it's undoubtedly an incredible piece of worldbuilding, I found it to actually be pretty poorly done as a campaign setting to set campaigns in.

I kind of felt the same way. I loved reading the books and I really wanted to run a Planescape game but never did. In the end I mostly used the books to give me ideas for games I ran in the Forgotten Realms, with the occasional jaunt to other planes.

 

[fba827]

Mystara
Nostalgia but also it had cultures I was easily able to grasp and extrapolate on the fly when DMing. Also the concept of the hollow world stuff was a great way of taking old cultures and keeping them alive for PCs to interact with the society and have a bit of fish out of water exploration rather than simply exploring hidden ruins

 

[Voadam]

Jakandor. Small Sub continent sized island setting. Advanced magical empire fell to magical disease leaving high magic wizard enclave dungeons full of magical creations including spells, magic items, and monsters.

The scant remnants of the empire generations later are making a comeback in part using neutral mindless undead as a labor force and soldiers and trying to reclaim the magic that is out there.

The Island is also now home to a migrating barbarian warrior people who are into nature spirit magic but really hate undead.

Three sourcebooks, one for playing the warrior peoples trying to make a home in a land of abominations, one for playing the civilized mage culture trying to claw back their civilization and power amid monsters and now an invading army. One to show where the dungeons are and layout a bunch of campaign ideas and adventure seeds and more fledged out adventures.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Al-Qadim. I really loved the flavor and sandbox adventures, including exploring lost tombs and archipelagos. It had its own vibe that made it a nice change of pace.

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I adore al-Qadim; it's part of why I wrote the 5e campaign guide for it.

My second favorite has always been Spelljammer, though technically I encountered Spelljammer first.

I also have a deep and abiding love for Dragonlance, though I always found Ansalon a difficult setting to actually run games in. Taladas seems it would work better, but despite owning the Time of the Dragon boxed set I never actually ran it.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Eberron for the way it subverts tropes while also leaving room for everything that's ever been in D&D. I still haven't had the chance to run a noir-style detectives game in Eberron, but I will someday.

 

[TwoSix]

Eberron has pretty much everything I want from a heavily detailed setting. Everything has a place, but there's tons of room to put my own stuff in where I want to. Its cosmology is more interesting than the Great Wheel. Its religions aren't just standard D&D henotheism.

 

[not-so-newguy]

Mystara.
What everone else said plus the maps are incredible (check them out at pandius[dot]com click on "atlas")