What is your favorite non-traditional setting?


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My all-time favorite for any system is Classic Deadlands. Its creepy, campy, fun, and disturbing all at the same time.

For d20 stuff, Midnight is by far out in the front. Its the only world I have seen that encourages the PCs to be heroes, not for money, profit, or power, but for ideological and social reasons. Its a focused campaign setting, but still leaves a lot up to the DM so he has tons of wiggle room. Having played and run a good amount of Midnight now, it plays and runs unlike anything else out there.

I like Iron Kingdoms so far, but haven't had a chance to play it yet. Its a little too steampunk/mecha crazy for me, but I really like the world background and tone. I'm not likely to run it as-is, but I will probably steal liberally from it.

Testament is a great setting too. I've only played it a few times, but what we have done has been great, and GR did an incredible job of presenting a potentially touchy subject with class.

I am also looking forward to the Thieves' World stuff from GR coming soon. I have all the old Chaosium Theives' World stuff, and the setting is so rich and bizarre, you never know what to expect.

I like Dark Legacies from what I've seen so far, but with only one book out right now, its kind of hard to know what direction the world will take. I'll definitely be picking up the next book though.

Finally, I loved Grimm. We played it until our group of kids hit 5th level and escaped, but it was a blast. I'm REALLY psyched up for the big hardback version of Grimm FFG is releasing later this year.
 


mhacdebhandia said:
Dark Sun is kinda cool, but I never got into it in Second Edition primarily because it just didn't have the mechanics to back it up. I mean, how much did Second Edition psionics suck?

Only reason I didn't get Dark Sun was that the psionic system was so bad in 2E. Now I wish I had bought it, because it sounds like a lot of fun. :\ I'd love to run a 3E Darksun game. I've read athas.org and I'm sure it would make much more sense if I had the source material!

Sunderstone said:
Ravenloft was good too. ;)

Ooh, Ravenloft. I loved Ravenloft. :)
 

Arbiter of Wyrms said:
Thank you for the link, ST. The setting looks interesting but the site is hopelessly inconvienient to navigate. I'll have to look through the d20 system guide for a review. From what little I could glean from the Bastion Press site, I can see why Oathbound might share a fanbase with Planescape - it looks to reley heavily on the conflict between factions.

Oathbound also shares with planescape another feature...allowing an "anything goes" mentality while remaining extremely coherrent and self-contained.

It's without question my favourite 3e setting, I can't wait for the new Players guide.
 

Oathbound is first by far.

Morningstar has some concepts that are just awesome. I do want to run a game on it some time.

I have a love/hate relationship with Nyambe. I wish I knew enough to drop the elves, orcs, dwarves, etc. and replace them with more African races.
 

Its really nice to see so much love for Oathbound. I got involved with the setting very early on in my freelance career and I was basically encouraged to be as creative and weird as possible, but in doing so, don't throw consistency and game balance out the window. I had a very small role in making the Domains of the Forge book, and then a larger role in Plains of Penance, and I was the primary author of Wrack and Ruin. In face, the only Oathbound book I haven't had anything to do with is Secrets of Arena. I'm one of the co-authors of the soon to be released Wildwood. Anyway, its nice to see that those efforts are appreciated by the gaming public in general. Psion, it's great to see you finally came around. :)

As for my favorites, believe it or not, I'm not a big Planescape fan. I wasn't a fan of the art, I didn't like the dialect, and I felt that it was unnecessary to split the planes off from the rest of the multiverse by making it its own setting. But, whatever, I know there's a lot of love out there for it.

My favorites are Spelljammer, Midnight, and Dark Sun. I'm not including Modern settings like Darwin's World because I'm assuming that this thread is about non-traditional fantasy settings.
 

There are many great settings mentioned here, and I have enjoyed several of them over the years.

But my favorite non-traditional setting is Omega World. It is Gamma World for d20 done right using the 3e rules. Brilliant.

I have to give an honourable mention to Judge Dredd. Again, I feel that it's an appropriate non-traditional setting choice because it's based on the D&D 3e rules.
 

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