Those are all fine, I suppose... but don't do anything special for me personally.
It sounds as though you are quite happy with your own home brew setting with your rules for names and such quite clear...
I think that goes without saying, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a home brew setting would it? I mean why would I bother to run a home brew setting if I felt the names weren't any good?
which asks the question why you want to see another person/company's setting published that's also like it?
I don't want it to be like my own. I want the quality to be equal to, or better than my own home brew stuff and that's all.
I'd like to see some quality control. I think D&D has been rather tacky and cheap in its writing for quite some time now. You'd almost think there's a profound lack of writing talent and imagination out there. I'm not asking for the next Song of Ice and Fire Book, but some creativity would be nice. Lets raise the bar a little bit. No more Sword Coasts and Dagger Fords.
Especially considering the odds are very good that while they might do some of the things you want, they aren't going to accomplish all of them. So you're still going to be disappointed in the end.
I'd be excited if they managed to get at least one of those things right. It doesn't take an extensive study to draw a believable world map, or to come up with original names for lands and cities. You could spend 1 or 2 hours examining real world naming conventions, and come up with a ton of names that are so much more credible and less cliche than the standard Forgotten Realms setting.
You make it sound as if what I'm asking is impossible and outrageous. And yet almost every current mainstream fantasy author seems capable of doing these things, so why can't WOTC?
Lets look at some other examples. Lets look at the
map of Khorvaire for Eberron. This is not what real continents look like. Now lets look at a map of
Westeros. The map of Westeros is far more convincing. You can see how the land masses fit together, just like they do here on earth. The shores also resemble the way shores look here on earth. This stuff isn't rocket science.
If your own setting works for what you want, then aren't you already ahead of the game?
But my home brew setting isn't a published setting, and it is not supported, as in: books. I want the stuff that gets published to be of a higher quality. I want it to be of a quality that is at least equal or slightly more original than the stuff I come up with. I'm not a fantasy author, and I do not get paid for this sort of stuff. But I expect of the people that do get paid, to deliver some decent quality world building.
This may come as a shock to people who adore the Forgotten Realms or Eberron, but I think those settings are terrible. They are great perhaps if you are just getting started with D&D, and seek a setting that you can cram anything into. But that's just it, anything goes. I think a proper setting is defined by the very things that do not fly.
So to bring this back to the topic, I'd like to see support for a new setting that is original and not a tacky Middle-Earth wannabe. I want to see good writing, original names, and good map designs that have some thought put into them.
