The main relevant area of the FR, for D&D product purposes, is the Sword Coast: if you look carefully at the map, and do the math, most of the territory is dangerous wilderness chock full of random encounters (as seen in the Adventure books). The "safe" or "civilized" areas are the exception, not the rule.
Greyhawk's magical distribution matches the core rulebooks, which is what matters for the question at hand. The DMG discusses lower and higher magic Settings, but Greyhawk is not low magic.
One could argue that, if one wished, but those are the guidelines laid out in the Dungeon Master's Guide, where Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are also cited as primary examples of these assumptions at work.Dangerous wilderness does not neccesarily mean untamed.
Someone could argue that the people of the civilized places of the Forgotten Realms know of the inhabitants of the wilderness too much for it to be considered unknown. And the inhabitants of the wilderness are often too intelligent or civilized themselves to consider it untamed. If every dang "wild place" is littered with warring known "barbarians", how untamed is it?
The DMG suggest a default where evidence of magic is spread out.
Someone could argue that Greyhawk's magic is too concentrated into the hands of few and to few places of note to be the baseline. And due to the static inactive nature of thos individuals, Greyhawk has a lot of magic but it's barely magical.
One could argue that, if one wished, but those are the guidelines laid out in the Dungeon Master's Guide, where Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are also cited as primary examples of these assumptions at work.
Lo and behold, someone did, and you quoted me. Forgotten Realms is repeatedly cited in the first chapter as the prime example of the core rulebook assumptions, which is the "vanilla" flavoring of D&D Fantasy.FR and GH are given as examples of D&D, not as vanilla D&D or any synonym of the word.
If it were, there would be no point to this discussion as someone would have pointed to the page and line in a book on the first few posts.
On the other hand, 3.x Greyhawk and all that was thrown in the mix there.For me it's definitely Greyhawk. The Forgotten Realms have been expanded upon as nauseum; I don't think you can really be a kitchen sink setting and vanilla. You can find basically anything under the sun somewhere in the Realms. That's not vanilla
Meanwhile, the the greatest arbiters of Greyhawk (or at least its loudest gatekeepers) have argued to keep it as pure and close to the original as possible
DL doesn't really belong on this list. It's off doing its own thing. It might be incredibly tropey (or dare a day, cliche) but it's certainly not vanilla
Lo and behold, someone did, and you quoted me. Forgotten Realms is repeatedly cited in the first chapter as the prime example of the core rulebook assumptions, which is the "vanilla" flavoring of D&D Fantasy.
I was going through your criteria step-by-step and winnowing out FRPGs.I dunno about Prince Valiant, does that have a pantheon? I think having a really dumb pantheon is a big part of being Vanilla. I always assumed Prince Valiant was set in a Christianised setting.
Pendragon definitely not because it is post-Christian and has multiple separate religions and there's no "dumb pantheon". Religions are actually treated with a degree of respect.
The Forgotten Realms have the double factor of following the five base assumptions of the rulebooks, and hewing to the default Heroic Fantasy genre tropes the rules also assume as the baseline.It says FR, GH, DL, and Mystara don't stray very far from the default assumptions. That doesn't state any are the base assumption nor the vanilla.
French Vanilla and Vanilla Bean are not very far Vanilla but neither is Regular Vanilla. I don't really think any published setting is raw based vanilla D&D. Some are very close and come down to preferences.