What are the setting niches?

[Yair]

I'm wondering about catagorizing settings into niches, or roles. Here's what I've got so far -

A Baseline Setting provides for the archetypal game of D&D. It has medieval-like kingdoms, evil organizations, ties in to the multiverse, ancient dungeons, and so on. The prime example would be Greyhawk. The Forgotten Realms serves this niche too, but is expanded to include more diverse portions a la Egypt and so on, and is influenced more strongly by novels. Mystara or The Known World serves this role in past editions.

Unofficial baseline settings include Kingdoms of Kalamar, Murchad's Legacy, and so on.

A Kitchen Sink setting is intended to have a place for everything in it, and showcase or fit the rules. It is often an excercise at considering the "consequence" of the rules, but offers its own twists. This includes Eberron, Planescape, and Ptolus. FR is also such a setting to some degree.

Then there are Focused Settings settings. These are settings that are heavily focused on a single style or theme. These include Birthright (focusing on political games), Dark Sun (focusing on dark twisted post-apocalyptic tales), Al Qadim (arabian adventures), Ravenloft (horror), and so on. There are a host of 3rd party settings of this type, from Midnight to Hamuneptra.

 

[jdrakeh]

Unofficial baseline settings include Kingdoms of Kalamar, Murchad's Legacy, and so on.

Actually, Kingdoms of Kalamar is an official setting (it bears the actual D&D logo), despite the fact that it is not published by WotC. Other than that, your breakdown seems to be dead-on (for your purposes, anyhow).

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

Eberron is also a Toolbox setting: a world in which large portions of land, places, people, history and events are intentionally left completely blank or are just very loosely sketched so that the DM can decide what he wants to do with them. While Forgotten Realms supplements offer you a factual and comprehensive description of the setting, Eberron supplements such as Secrets of Xen’drik or the Explorer's Handbook offer you elements that you can drop in your campaign and rearrange as you wish.

Other Toolbox settings include The Diamond Throne, Spelljammer and the new World of Darkness.

 

[irdeggman]

I agree with your assessment, but FR has evolved to the point now where it has to be considered in the kitchen sink area and no longer a baseline setting IMO.

In the beginning it was more of a baseline but when (in 2nd ed) they started adding on to it mini-settings and making them actually part of the realms that is when they started the crossover to the dark side to me. This is one of the reasons that I have actualy grown to hate FR (as a D&D game not the novels).