What is your favourite D&D or Pathfinder campaign setting, and why do you love it?

[EisenKreutzer]

Which campaign setting for D&D or Pathfinder do you absolutely love to play in and run games in?

Any edition, official or 3rd party.

I have many I like. Forgotten Realms is nice and deep, steeped in lore, while Ravenloft and Eberron have a unique flavour to them that makes them unique. I also like Midgard, the third party Pathfinder setting by Kobold Press, and it's unique eastern european style.
But my absolute favourite of all time has to be Planescape. Planescape has so much flavour, and a really unique identity. It's scope is amazingly broad, with tons of locations, realms and planes to explore and adventure in, and it's all tied nicely together with the City of Doors, Sigil, which has to be the most awesome fantasy city setting ever designed. I love the fluff, the setting material is just amazing, and the unique style of Planescape and it's signature themes are always new, fresh and exciting.

So, whats your favourite?

[Brookshw]

Planescape by far, great depth, variety, opportunities, very interesting from the roleplaying/fluff perspective. Love the Canon and where they just left things open ended.

[afroakuma]

I'm (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265884) feeling (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=272393) a (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=299450) little (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?317316-afroakuma-s-Planar-Questions-Thread-IV) indecisive... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?372289-afroakuma-s-Planar-And-Other-Oddities-Questions-Thread-5!) but I'll go with my gut and say Planescape.

[nedz]

My own, because

[EisenKreutzer]

My own, because

This is a perfectly legit answer! But could you tell a little bit about your own setting and why it's awesome?

[Venger]

My favorite is eberron. It's got a lot of thought put into its campaign world, it's a lot more realistic/permissive with alignment stuff, and I really love its racial/political background elements, especially in books like five nations and dragonmarked. plus it's gor a lot of fun prestige classes and such.

[Orderic]

Dragonmech, because of Steampunk Mechs in D&D, a lunar invasion and the most important species being dwarves, who have several city-mechs patrolling large areas of the surface. Also, there are ten size categories above colossal. Six of them exist only to describe how large city-mechs actually are.

Eberron, of course, is a very close second.

[Vhaidara]

For published settings, tied between Forgotten Realms and Eberron
I grew up on Baldur's Gate and NWN, so FR holds a place in my heart.
Eberron, however, is a fascinating setting that introduced Warforged, one of my favorite things in 3.5.

As far as actual settings, one of my friends has a custom setting he uses that is turning out to be very well written, and he allegedly has stuff planned for all over the continent. 4 campaigns have been run in it with no overlap of areas, and we got to choose where we were starting.

[mephnick]

Forgotten Realms is too high magic/high NPC for me.

Golarion is a huge crazy mix of stuff. I love some of it, I hate some of it.

I never played Eberron but it sounds like it would up my alley.

Sooooo, I guess I'll take...Call of Cthulhu :)

[EisenKreutzer]

Forgotten Realms is too high magic/high NPC for me.

Golarion is a huge crazy mix of stuff. I love some of it, I hate some of it.

I never played Eberron but it sounds like it would up my alley.

Sooooo, I guess I'll take...Call of Cthulhu :)

i suppose Call of Cthulhu d20 counts. I have the book on my shelf after all.

How about fantasy settings, do you have one you like? Third party, maybe a favourite homebrew setting?

[Honest Tiefling]

I haven't played them, but I really want to try X-Crawl, or Spelljammer one day, because silly.

[Yael]

Dragonlance, Five Rings, Kalamar, Faerûn, Eberron, Greyhawk, Warcraft, Midnight, DragonMech, Iron Kingdoms...

I just love playing D&D, so I love every setting.

[BWR]

Planescape and Mystara generally have to fight for first place.
Mystara because it was my first, it's got the perfect blend of wacky and epic, there are so many great countries and people, tons of amusing adventures, the Hollow World, and I like the system of Immortals.
Planescape because it was different. A different feel, a focus on adventure as discovery and exploration, not adventure as tomb raiding and killing. The weirdness, the way they made the planes their own thing rather than just a something tacked on and subservant to whatever game world you were running; basically, the sense of wonder and excitement.

Second place is generally fought between Ravenloft, Dark Sun and Dragonstar.

[Novawurmson]

I currently do a mix of Eberron+Golarion. Golarion seems like a fantastical place where anything could (and does) happen, while Eberron feels like a campaign setting made by liberal arts majors, for liberal arts majors (meant to be a compliment).

[nedz]

This is a perfectly legit answer! But could you tell a little bit about your own setting and why it's awesome?

I doubt it's anything special, it's just that I have been running sandbox games in it for ~30 years and so it has acquired a lot of history. It's quite large, but still has areas I've not developed. A large part of the fun of DMing, for me, is creating this stuff — you can always add more detail.

Also, I don't really know any of the published settings since I've never used them.

[The Insanity]

FR for its extensive lore and the fact that there's barely anything in it that I dislike.

[Alleran]

Planescape. Or perhaps the World Serpent Inn and everything it connects to, which is kind of Planescape + everything by default.

[Eldan]

Planescape. Or perhaps the World Serpent Inn and everything it connects to, which is kind of Planescape + everything by default.

Of course, Planescape is already everything. The World Serpent Inn is just more + everthing. :smallwink:

[Der_DWSage]

I'll second 'my own campaign setting.' In this case, a distinct Legend of Mana system where the world starts out a blank slate, and is slowly built up by PC interactions to reflect their work.

But then, I'm a mild narcissist who loves to hear himself speak about how clever he is.

[Psyren]

Tossup between Eberron and Golarion, but I also have soft spots for Athas and Ravenloft. FR and Greyhawk are too milquetoast for me, with the former having way too many uber NPCs running around.

I love the concept of Planescape but several of the details (Lady, lingo) grate on me.

[mephnick]

How about fantasy settings, do you have one you like? Third party, maybe a favourite homebrew setting?

I never played it, but midnight always seemed pretty cool.

My favourite self-made setting is pretty old school standard fantasy, set in the times that elves and dwarves are actually powerful and men are as lame and new as they should be. It's pretty low-magic (it was actually e6, now i'm doing 1-20 5e). Orcs, Drow and Tieflings are objectively evil. Fey, spirits, etc are quite common. Gods rarely intervene.

Probably pretty boring to your average creative DM, but it brings D&D down to the level of fantasy I think it works best in for me.

[Blackhawk748]

I never played it, but midnight always seemed pretty cool.

Same here, always wanted to but never got the chance.

My favorite setting has to be Kingdoms of Kalamar. Barring their pretty god awful crunch (which i can usually fix with a few tweaks) their fluff is awesome. No super powered near epic or epic NPCs getting in the party's face, no pre built world ending events that are going on, just people doing normal stuff. Which makes it a natural sandbox setting for me and my players love that. Its the only setting where i have had characters go literally across the world on a freakin whim and love doing it.

[Max Caysey]

Forgotten Realms all day! Why... One name: Ed Greenwood!

[Forrestfire]

It's a tie between Eberron and Planescape for me. I really love Eberron; I've always found it to be just... really, really cool, and it informed many of my preferences regarding fantasy stories. Great world, very evocative themes, and fun to play in. Planescape's tied here because the Great Wheel just has so much awesome fluff behind it, and it's very fun to read and learn about. Especially when Afroakuma's around to lecture.

[Crake]

To mimic others: I love my own setting. It has a time period for pretty much any setting type ranging from high magic, gritty medieval low magic, magitech, to limited magic d20 modern/future, depending on when you play. For everything after high magic, the gods are dead, so non godly intervention DM fiat boring stuff like that, during the gritty low magic, the planes are locked down and the outsiders are living together in a dystopian, almost 1984 esque planar setting, with a "planar police" that came about due to the death of the majority of the gods. Due to their negligence, they almost allowed a material plane cult (which actually engineered the death of all the gods) to free their old god masters who were trapped within the planet by the recently deceased gods. They failed, but not before the corruption of their gods managed to seep into the strongest nation on the planet at the time, turning it into a wasteland of raving lunatics and twisted corrupted undead.

And all that was from just my first campaign :smalltongue:

[Jeff the Green]

Well, I still have yet to find the time to commit most of it to writing, but my home setting is getting to be my favorite. I get to let my inner anthropology/comparative religion nerd out with the coherent but weird societies, religions that I can actually see people joining in decent-sized groups, and in-jokes I actually get. Plus the fey are center stage while angels and demons are minor powers, which I've never seen in a setting.

Outside of that, Eberron. I love high-magic/low-power settings, so it's perfect there, and the fact that there's little of the Tolkien baggage I've grown tired of is a big plus. I'm much happier when elves are either creepy (but Good) necromancers or expansionist ancestor-worshipers than when they're wise mages or xenophobic woodsmen. (Which is why my least favorite setting is Forgotten Realms, despite my favorite games being set there.)

[Zytil]

Never actually played in anything but my campaign setting, which has the mystical trait of never being thought through in advance, but i've always liked the idea of Eberron.

[Yahzi]

My own, because I made D&D make sense. Even the economics work out.

[Melcar]

For me, it all started when I read Elminster, the Making of a Mage. I was hooked. So I have to say that Forgotten Realms is my favorite setting, because elves are "wise mages or xenophobic woodsmen" :smallwink:

In all fairness I have not played in any other setting so I cant really speak about them, except a small campain that was set in homebrew, but I will say this. The most often critique I hear is about all the high powerred NPCs. Elminters, the Seven Sisters, so on and so forth. We actually, or our DM actually ran that perfectly. We have ever only been contacted by any of them once or twise in the 14 years of playing the campaing, he left it up to us to contact them, if we wanted them i our game. That worked perfect. They were there, which they are kind of supposed to be, but still so far away that they didn't really matter. Even half the time we have tried contacting them they were off on important buisness somewhere, so they were just little extra spice that you could do without, but made the soup just that little bit better.

Now, having reached level 31, they do play a more collegial role, as we have become more equal in power and knowledge. But to this day they are never the center of the quest, or session.

[otakumick]

I would have to say that Planescape is my favorite setting, with Spelljammer coming in second for a similar reason.

Every campaign setting is reachable through planescape(though entering and leaving dark sun is problematic as is leaving ravenloft) this is also mostly true for Spelljammer though the travel times are longer... but you can have pirate ships in space so that makes up for the long travel times. For the most part I haven't created any campaign settings... though I have created a city in a demiplane that like Sigil has access to pretty much everywhere... only without the difficulty with deities and the lady of pain. A city whose main occupants are dragons of all types... also a bunch of dragon descended residents including numerous tribes of kobolds( though they tend to run mining operations in various worlds while guarding portals that access the city and allow the city access to those worlds)

[EisenKreutzer]

I would have to say that Planescape is my favorite setting, with Spelljammer coming in second for a similar reason.

Every campaign setting is reachable through planescape(though entering and leaving dark sun is problematic as is leaving ravenloft) this is also mostly true for Spelljammer though the travel times are longer... but you can have pirate ships in space so that makes up for the long travel times. For the most part I haven't created any campaign settings... though I have created a city in a demiplane that like Sigil has access to pretty much everywhere... only without the difficulty with deities and the lady of pain. A city whose main occupants are dragons of all types... also a bunch of dragon descended residents including numerous tribes of kobolds( though they tend to run mining operations in various worlds while guarding portals that access the city and allow the city access to those worlds)

Speaking of Spelljammer, there was a Dragon (or Dungeon, I can't remember) Magazine around 2002 or thereabouts with an article on Spelljammer. It had some 3.0 conversions of a small portion of the Spelljammer setting material and some damn cool illustrations too! I've been searching for the exact issue, but have had no luck. Do you know anything about this?

[afroakuma]

Speaking of Spelljammer, there was a Dragon (or Dungeon, I can't remember) Magazine around 2002 or thereabouts with an article on Spelljammer. It had some 3.0 conversions of a small portion of the Spelljammer setting material and some damn cool illustrations too! I've been searching for the exact issue, but have had no luck. Do you know anything about this?

Dungeon 92, the Polyhedron content.

[EisenKreutzer]

Dungeon 92, the Polyhedron content.

Thanks a bunch!

[Asteron]

Forgotten Realms is the one I have the mose experience with, although I acknowledge that there are issues with it... I have a lot of knowledge about the setting and a lot of experience playing there. I like high powered games though, so that aspect doesn't bother me at all.

I've recently been reading up on Eberron. It's quite fascinating and I would love to play a game set there.