Your least favourite setting

[Darth K'Trava]

SL = Scarred Lands.

Gee. You people would think by now that I'm a Sage and I have a tag line...

Heh.

Never played in that setting.

 

[Turjan]

Hmm, let's look at the pantheon and faiths of the Roman Empire. You've got the Olympian deities, which were borrowed and renamed from Greece, with a few new ones like Janus just invented.

It's a little bit different. The 'Olympian deities' are in principle genuinely Roman (or at least regional), but originally they didn't have their own mythos (or none that we know of) and were not really thought to be anthropomorphic. Upon contact with Greek civilization, the Greek deities and their myths were equated with Roman counterparts according to their function. Sometimes this went well, like with Zeus and Jupiter, and sometimes it went less well. Just look how completely different Mars and Ares are, or Saturn and Kronos. Janus simply had no counterpart in Greek mythology.

But in principle I agree with your point about monolithic pantheons. Even the FR pantheon is much too ordered to resemble real world pantheons. However, I stick with the point that I don't like whole real world pantheons transferred into a fantasy setting; this somehow takes away from the fantasy aspect, IMHO.

 

[Sarellion]

A pantheon in a fantasy setting with active deities is probably more ordered because the gods have to arrange the pecking order and can tell their priests who is actually up there on the mountain.

And for least favorite settings besides post war DL, I would name Diamond Throne. It just struck me as bland, besides the idea that giants rule. The game system itself is great but the book about the setting wasn´t so good.

 

[Orius]

I don't really hate any particular setting, though I'm a homebrewer, and rarely run anything outside my own campaign world. I prefer using my own stuff, and the biggst problem I have with a published setting is always figuring out how and where to start a campaign.

As for my thoughts on the published settings:

Don't really hate the Realms, if you get rid of the high-level NPCs and play it with an old school D&D style it can't be that bad. After all, it did start out as a 1e homebrew. Take a look at the storyline for Baldur's Gate, and that's pretty much my idea of a low level Realms campaign done right. And even though Elminster does show up, it's pretty much a cameo role; everything is still in the hands of the PCs. However things to dislike include uber-NPCs that are a bunch of irritating goody two shoes to boot, dorky villains, and a totally illogical geography. And this doesn't just include landforms, I could live with the existance of Anauroch, but do we really need the Bedine there? They don't really make sense. I'd say Realms are probably best with a DM that keeps out the railroading and fanboyisms.

Draonlance I think overdid the metaplot with the novels. The original modules are classics and well remembered by those who played them, but how many times can you blow a world up and keep it believable? I don't really mind kender, gully dwarves or tinker gnomes, but they should be kept in Krynn as campaign specific adaptations of D&D races.

Spelljammer seems silly, but I think too much silliness turned players off. I don't mind the idea of D&D in space, Grubbian physics or giff. But shoehorning it into pre-existing D&D worlds was a bad idea.

 

[Banshee16]

From what I understand, WOTC aren't selling licenses to their old settings anymore, and if they were they'd charge ridiculous amounts for it - I vaguely recall someone mentioning that they had asked them about the Planescape or Dark Sun license, and they wanted five-figure money just to sit down and talk about it.

Well, I promise this....if I ever win the lottery, I'm going to try and revive Planescape, and maybe Dark Sun while I'm at it I'm sure the teams running the official sites would love a crack at writing those books, and I'm sure White Wolf or someone would be willing to try publishing them..

One can always hope.

Banshee

 

[mhensley]

GURPS - I have fallen asleep during every GURPS game that I have ever played. In one of those games I didn't even stay conscious through character creation. Numbers upon numbers upon skill numbers and *seizure at the memory*

I do hope that you realize that GURPS is not a setting. (and my gurps characters usually have far less numbers on their sheet than my D20 ones do)

 

[mhensley]

I celebrate Storm Constantine's entire catalog.

Please, that no talent ass-clown?

 

[Spiteful Dwarf]

Heh.

Never played in that setting.

pwned!!

 

[demiurge1138]

I find it interesting that a lot of settings that get the most love on the "Best Fluff" thread (before it got threadjacked into antiEberron ranting) and the most hate on this one are the same settings...

Coincidence?
Or conspiracy?
Demiurge out.

 

[Trance Fiend]

I would have to say...Birthright. Now the idea behind it is not so bad, but the DM had no idea what he was doing. Another is Dragonlance, but yet again, I would have to blame the DM, not the setting. If those settings were DMed right, I might have a different opinion about them.