Best campaign setting you've played in or DM'd

[Sorcerer Blob]

What is the best campaign setting you've participated in, either as a DM or Player. These settings can either be homebrew or official or 3rd party, it doesn't matter! Any system setting is fine too, from D&D any edition to Dark Heresy to Steampunk to whatever!

I'll go first:

My favorite setting was my second campaign that I ever played in, Ravenloft. I've had a love affair with this setting since my group took on Strahd in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, despite how anti-climactic the final battle was. It was still a blast and the "dark fantasy" tones were right up my alley.

Sadly I've never played in a homebrew setting, something I hope to remedy soon.

[Yora]

That'd easily be Forgotten Realms: The North. High Forest and Silver Marches are by far the best parts of the whole world.
There are others I like much more, but I havn't actually played in them yet.

[Ivellius]

I vote for Warcraft, mainly because I've been a fan ever since Tides of Darkness and it's the setting I've run slightly more than anything. The book line is actually pretty good.

My other D&D campaigns have been somewhat...setting-less, I guess? I've played in and run a couple of generic homebrewed worlds, though I'm fond of the ones I created.

[beyond reality]

One of my favorites has always been Dark Sun, although sadly I haven't had the chance to play or DM games in it, just a few short ones back in the times of 2nd edition.

[Zerter]

My favorite campaign setting (doubt it is the best) is called Omega City. It's a homebrew world me and my friends play: a city with 10.000.000 inhabitants of all different races, alignments, coming from different planes and living in entirely different ways (some races being flying, others being collosal, others being undead, etc.) that somehow have to live together.

We rotate DMs with every DM running an adventure for several months and afterwards the PCs are incorporated as either NPCs or PCs in the next party (or a player playing a previously introduced NPC as a PC in the next adventure) and the world expands naturally as a new DM introduces new parts of the city or expands on old parts.

[Sorcerer Blob]

One of my favorites has always been Dark Sun, although sadly I haven't had the chance to play or DM games in it, just a few short ones back in the times of 2nd edition.

I love Dark Sun, but sadly my play experience has been limited as well. I've read quite a bit of the fluff from both 2nd edition and 4th edition and love it, the low-magic/magic-at-a-cost feel just harkens to my days as a kid reading Howard's Conan. I had a chance to play 4e's Dark Sun during the Encounter's season, and it was killer to say the least (both figuratively in being cool and literally in that we lost 3 PCs in one encounter.)

[Iceforge]

I hate and love Dark Sun.

Participated in a campaign a while back where we was hopping between realities, i.e. different campaign settings, basicly premise was we each choose a setting we was from and then we had to collect 5 pieces of an artifact, one piece from each setting, after we had been ressurected into a new human body on a 6th reality.

The portals to take us between realities...well...they was not flawless, saying the wrong name of the world you wanted to go to, would mean you ended up in a random plane or reality.

Our trip to Dark Sun was....very painful... I had no OOC knowledge of the setting, which I figure is best when my character has no knowledge either.

Turns out introducing yourself as a steel-merchant from another world is not excatly a good thing....

That being said, my personal favourit might just be Mystara now, as same GM is currently leading a Mystara campaign as the other campaign feel apart due to scheduling conflicts

[randomhero00]

Unique.

My DM made a setting based on how we previous played the previous setting. So all our changes were there. Very neat. This took place over years of real time.

[GoatToucher]

Greyhawk. Word.

[Telasi]

My favorite setting that I've played in goes to Al-Qadim/FR (same world, and both are represented in the campaign).

My favorite that I've run is my own homebrewed world. Hardly spectacularly well-designed, but it was fun.

[Kaun]

If steping away from DnD settings ok i love both deadlands and Dark heresy!

So much golden fluff.

[Vella_Malachite]

Best I've ever played was an urban-style thriller run by a friend of mine. Sadly, it only lasted one session, but we barely talked at all during that session, except for on-game-topic stuff, because it was that hair-raising. Homebrew, btw.

I haven't DM'd a good setting yet (my first two were homebrew, before I really got the hang of it), but I'm looking at doing a better one soon, more thought out, more actual danger, and a bit more of a complex plotline. Fingers crossed.

[Jay R]

I ran a Silver Age comic campaign with the Champions rules. I thought it was pretty cool, and the players enjoyed it, but I can't claim it was the best, so I'll call it the campaign I most enjoyed running. The intro to the campaign included:

"The world has always had heroes. Gilgamesh, Achilles, Robin Hood, Scaramouche, Zorro, Phantom Eagle, Tomahawk, the Blackhawks, the Lone Ranger, the Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Cheyenne Bodie and Kwai-Chang Caine are all historical figures, well-documented in any history book. The super-powerful ones don’t exist (yet). You may assume the existence of any well-known Golden Age comic hero (except the ultra-powerful -- Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Captain Marvel, Spectre, etc.) if you have a specific need for him or her. (Your character was saved as a child by the Red Bee, which is why he wants to be a hero, for instance.) You may not have an established relationship with any such earlier hero without special permission. Special permission is not hard to get if I like the character design and persona story.

The term “super-hero” exists, but is not as common yet as “mystery man”. (This is 1959, ten years before the self-conscious approach to gender terms in our language. Yes, the term is “mystery man”, and yes, that includes women, and no, nobody gets upset over that. It’s common English, like “peace on earth, good will to men” or “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.)

Most of the mystery men are not known to have any actual powers. In fact, most of them don’t have any powers, but it is also true that they are not really public figures. They’ve learned that it’s important that the crooks not know too much about them. Many simple people in masks are assumed to have powers even if they don’t. When designing your characters, remember that a power describes an effect, not a cause. A skills-based stealth hero could have Invisibility (only can be turned on when nobody’s watching). That doesn’t mean he has super-powers, but that his stealth and movement are so good that it’s easier to simulate that way. Similarly, heroes might be believed to have powers that they don’t really have. There are rumors of a half-man, half-flying-predator creature seen flying around the streets of Gotham at night. Don’t assume that that means the creature can fly, or even that it really exists.

Heroes are vigilantes, at least at first. You will all be based in the same town, one in which there are no other current heroes. (I’m thinking of putting you in Metropolis.) There is a certain amount of public fascination with the heroes, especially now that there are so many fewer than there used to be. 1938-1950 is called the “Golden Age of Heroes”. It seems like every city had a masked protector, and some had several. It was a grand and glorious time, in which many gangs, mobs, spy rings and crime bosses were put out of business. surprisingly, business got much better, and the United States has pulled far ahead of other countries in wealth and prestige. By the late 1940s, crime was at an all-time low, and the mystery men slowly slipped into obscurity and retirement. No point patrolling all night if nobody’s committing any crimes. For the last ten years, there have been very few heroes, and very little need. But there’s a new breed of teenager with less respect for the establishment, and older criminals are slowly getting out of jail. The crime rate is slowly creeping back up, and rumors of Communist spy rings are flourishing.

Rumors about heroes are also extremely common. In fact, there’s a supermarket tabloid that specializes in them. “The Brave and the Bold” is a source for any rumor about any hero you could ever want to read about, from Forbush-Man to the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. hey are responsible for the rumor that Captain America didn’t really die at the end of World War II. They are currently writing an “expose” about a putative hero team called Sugar and Spike, (who nobody else thinks exists), and are trying to convince everyone that these are merely new costumes and identities for the Golden-Age Fox and the Crow. Nobody takes them seriously, but everybody seems to know what they’re saying, and they outsell the National Enquirer by millions of issues each week."

All PCs were required to have the Disadvantage Silver Age Code, defined as: "With great power comes great responsibility. These powers aren't for self-aggrandizement, but for a higher purpose. The most important priority is to rescue people, and to not endanger them. Second priority is to stop crimes & capture criminals. Save the children first. (The adults are assumed to be trying to help, with all the skills they have.) The greatest heroes of all are the policemen, firemen, rescue workers and others who risk their lives daily with no powers -- just naked courage. We owe them our highest level of respect."

To keep to the Silver Age theme, the PCs got additional points any time they managed to bring an obscure science fact or lame moral into the story, or any time they praised the policemen and firemen who saved lives without super-powers.

In the PCs' second adventure, they heard about a rocket landing on earth and a monster seen coming out of it. They got there, started battling the super-powered denizens of the spaceship, and the battle lasted for awhile until one of the aliens spoke - in English. The PCs had blundered into the origin of the Fantastic Four.

They had a run-in with the Haly circus that had been taken over by the Ringmaster. One member of the circus had escaped his hypnotism - a young acrobat named **** Grayson. (With no Batman in the world, he never became Robin.) They never could stop the strong man - Fred Dukes.

From "The Brave and the Bold", they heard about occasional murders in Gotham City -- first a clown whose makeup wouldn't come off, then a short, squat man wearing a tuxedo and carrying an umbrella, etc.

They occasionally heard about new heroes appearing in other cities - Ant-Man, the Atom, Hawkman, etc. I even included Captain Sprocket. They heard about weird weather patterns in Central City and an unusual green glow sometimes seen in Coast City.

They fought Amos Fortune and the Royal Flush Gang, in an episode straight from an early JLA. A man with a strange costume and a green glow coming from his hands stole a weapon from Stark Industries. They tracked him down and almost caught him, but he evidently had a super-fast ally who helped him get away. But they recovered the weapon, as well as a plane that had been stolen from Ferris Industries in Coast City.

They also faced Dr. Ivo and Amazo, who stole their powers at first.

They kept hearing rumors about a man dressed as a nocturnal flying predator in Gotham City. But I never once used the word "bat".

All of this was lead-up to the main villains, and the reason there was no Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash or Wonder Woman. They eventually faced their evil versions, the Crime Syndicate - Ultra-Man. Owl-man, Power Ring, Johnny Quick, and Superwoman.