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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6442056" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, Ravenloft didn't start out as a kitchen sink.  If you confine yourself to the original gothic scope and ignore some of the material that doesn't make as much sense in the setting, you should be fine.  There is a core idea that is high quality.   I don't even give the Forgotten Realms that much.  What the Forgotten Realms self-evidently is, is some high school kid's completely average unremarkable homebrew filled with every generic idea you'd expect such homebrews to have.  It's the sort of setting you'd expect every early beer and pretzels game to have if it was organically created through the process of play.  Heck, Grayhawk shows some of the same problems around the edges - TSR published 2 modules early on based on Alice in Wonderland after all.  But the problem with the FR is unlike average evolved beer and pretzels games it got itself published and locked into its fundamentally flawed structure and fleshed out.  The a not great but above average writer novelized a part of the setting and popularized it.  After that, it was too late.  It frankly should have never been published in the first place.  I don't know how that happened.  If you held a competition to get a setting published these days, it wouldn't even have made the first cut.   I feel great for Ed getting his setting published, but if I was Ed I'd probably be a little embarrassed by what it has become and be inclined to deny I had any involvement in it.Planescape and Spelljammer, oddballs that they are, would be fine if you just focused on the unique alien setting and ignored the idea that each setting is a sort of meta-kitchen sink that contains all the other kitchen sinks.   Each could be done well, though in Spelljammer's case, that would take a lot of work.Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with a 'kitchen sink' setting provided you are careful in crafting it.  As a default setting, 'kitchen sinks' work better than trope worlds - the kind you normally see in sci-fi for example, Dune the Desert Plant, Hoth the Ice World, etc.   There isn't anything wrong with trope worlds like Krynn or Athas, but they really exist only to support a single campaign.</blockquote>

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