Quote Originally Posted by Yakk View Post
A variant of this is, well, Fallout.

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A bonus to this is I don't need an evil-race (tm) trope. The disaster could have been a world war, an experiment gone wrong, or whatever. There will be prejudice from the past, and there will be new evils; but not a people assigned the "these are the bad guys, kill kill" taped to their forehead.
Yeah, I think the setting of Fallout: New Vegas is actually a fairly good example of the sort of territory you really want for a D&D campaign. Lots of stuff to do, big colorful set pieces, a chance for expansion, and major factions with interesting philosophical differences.

I'm thinking through racial coalitions and I do at least want to try to re-work the Orc Problem. A bit more on that toward the bottom.
Quote Originally Posted by Trask View Post
I think I share your idea of what a fun d&d setting is like, but I think that a lot of what you describe happens in adventures and not the setting. Almost any tolkienesque, gygaxian, medieval fantasy setting can facilitate points of light adventure as long as the adventures and characters are framed to play out as such. As described, most fantasy settings are have ridiculously sparse populations and settlements anyways (seriously, look at a map of the sword coast. Its about as big as New England with less than a dozen actual settlements on the map, its practically a wilderness).
I don't think that the Sword Coast is really analogous to the Wild West, partly because it has Waterdeep in it, a city bigger than Chicago in 1900. I also think Tolkienesque and Gygaxian haven't really been reconciled in a way I find satisfying. Gygaxian fantasy is very much a Western (eg Keep on the Borderlands), The Lord of the Rings is about people struggling to preserve their homes and lands from invaders. You see this in the development of Orcs from being the imperial servitors of the devil into being dangerous tribal savages. I think this was a severe wrong turn, in moral implication and also just stylistically.

Personally I think setting is largely optional anyways, to capture that feel you're better off creating adventures with that feel and leaving everything else vague ("the kingdom" is over those hills...). But if you want to actually put effort into making a setting that feels like a place where "d&d happens" in my opinion its best to make a loose, relatively stable, backdrop for adventure with lots of vagueness and gaps so you can inject whatever you want into it later. The platonic ideal of this kind of thing is Conan's Hyborian Age, its a continent filled with an ahistorical mishmash of cultures and environments with vague details (Aquilonia (NotFrance) and Nemedia (NotGermany) are the two great rivals, the Picts are stirring on the border, Zamora's king is dominated by an evil sorcerer) and just make D&D happen inbetween these things, just like how Conan regularly gets into all kinds of crazy nonsense without ever caring what Zingara's political structure is like. Zingara is just a place to have dusty frontier adventures in fantasy Iberia and then catch a ship to sail off to the Barachan isles and be a swashbuckling pirate boarding Greek triremes from Argos.
You're not wrong that a generic setting can work just fine, but I feel like the tradition of ancient kingdoms as old as Egypt in its prime really fits well with the disorganized, every town could use a couple young bucks to risk their lives. Even between dynasties China still maintained complex bureaucratic systems. I feel like that pushes against the Wild West, too far from government, vibe? The Wild West wasn't stable and most settings that have adventurers are unstable, especially if they're going to be there for long. I do agree a lack of gaps is really problematic but since I'm mostly doing this for my amusement and love of the game, that shouldn't be too hard to resist.

Think of it this way, what would the Wild West be without the context of it being the American frontier? Without knowing it borders Mexico with its vaqueros, or being filled with ex-confederate officers in exile, Apache raiders, Chinese railroad workers, and the iconic cowboy driving cattle for the hungry markets of California and the Midwest? Its something we maybe dont think about, but it makes the largely mythical idea of the Wild West feel real to us. A suitable D&D-land should work in a similar way, just simplified and calibrated for the needs of the game.
I think the Mythical West, as opposed to the actual West, does have a bit less of this. But of course you want to color it in.

One of the ways I'm hoping to work through the Orc Problem is that I hope to make most of the "monster races" into members or parts of the Imperial society emerging from the depths. Profiteers and colonizers are much closer to an acceptable target than native peoples and it more closely syncs up the Gygaxian and Tolkienesque vision by changing the valence. I picture the Empire as one ruled by the undead and trafficking with fiendish forces, the urge to expand offerings to these dark masters and use their power drove them out of the Underdark and into the day lit world. That should give me plenty of tombs housing now lonely undead lords and evil temples and it should provide me with lots of old imperials who haven't abandoned the empire's ways that players can smash in a satisfying manner without moral complication.