As I see it, I fall on the more traditional side of gaming. In my homebrew, I strive to create an internally consistent, relatively dark world that conforms to a lot of the assumptions of western european society broadly between the medieval period and the early reformation era. (No firearms, but I do look to the imperial free cities of the reformation for inspiration, for instance). I also canned all of the races except human.
That is not to say there were not fantastic elements. A hidden chapel built of jade that can only be found by walking through a waterfall and is guarded by a demon who challenges the PCs to ritual combat. A land ruled the by the last undead apprentice of an ancient archlich who raises the bodies of his enemies to serve as his armies. And while I probably would not have used beholders, dragons, remhorraz, sphinxes, ghosts, demons, etc would have been fair game.
I have occasionally run Greyhawk. The way I prefer to run that setting, it is also dark and violent, filled with xenophobic elves who generally (with a few exceptions like prince Melf and the knights of luna) look at humans as either useful pawns or dangerous beasts, dwarves who hide within their mountains and care nothing for the troubles of other races, and a collection of human kingdoms that run the gamut from fanatical devotees of order to corrupt and collapsing kingdoms to machiavellian city states who will betray the rest of the world for a small advantage to outright empires of darkness ruled by evil demigods who pave their roads with the skulls of their victims. Magic is not uncommon, but it is practiced as a secret means to gain power and advantage, rather than as a kind of technology. Those who pursue it are as likely as not to be pursuing some quest for immortality or godhood or opposing those who are. The rest are trying to keep their heads down.
I never cared much for Dark sun or Ebberon, but I did like Arcanis (complete with its god emperors, harvesters, and secret societies).
As I see it, the wahoo that I dislike is throwing in every element from every other story or genre you can find without regard to how it fits together into a cohesive whole with the end result that your party of a drow dark pact warlock, a gnoll bard, and orc barbarian, a warforged shaman, a kobold rogue, and an undead cleric of Kelemvor walk into a town besieged by gnolls and are asked, "can you obviously trustworthy adventures help us with our problem, you see we're being attacked by undead and gnollish armies led by the drow?" You quickly end up with parties that have nothing in common except that their players are in the same game and no real connection with the rest of the setting except that they are all freaks that are completely disconnected from the rest of the setting. Does any of this make sense? Who cares? Wahoo!
In that sense, my problem with Ebberon is probably more with the Ebberon campaigns that I have experienced--all my Ebberon experience was with the Mark of Heroes RPGA campaign than the setting itself. Well, probably that and it seems to deal with making sense of the standard D&D assumptions in rather the opposite way to the one I do. It embraces the humans in funny suits who mostly get along in a cosmopolitan, star wars cantina type way rather than emphasizing their alienness. (This habit also tends to eliminate the nature of some creatures--which a planescape example may serve to make clear. When an angel walks into a bar and sits down with you to have a beer, he ceases to be a mythic emissary of god and becomes another character from the cast of cheers). Likewise with magic. Ebberon uses magic to power skyships and trains and makes it a part of everyday life, at which point, it ceases to be magical for me. I'd rather just play a game in the 1920s with steam trains and elephant guns. I prefer to deal with the consequences of magic's presence in the world by increasing its rarity and emphasizing the paranoid an irrational nature of its practitioners to turning it into a kind of technology. When the magicians go in for the cthuluesque side of D&D magic, the magic can seem like the magic of myths and stories. If they go in for the technological side, it seems like technology with a different texture map applied.
