Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Nov 29, 2014 5:03 am

Does monte's arcana unearthed count as dnd? I guess I still would vote eberron for the same reason given above and the setting is easier to make sense of since alignment's importance is greatly reduced.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Nov 29, 2014 6:19 am

Prak wrote:So what do people think of Golarion?

Most of the countries are too gimmicky and/or too modern for my personal D&D taste. I have no idea what you're looking for in your Pokemon game, though.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Nov 29, 2014 6:25 am

Basically I just need a setting to drop pokemon and the pokemon league into. I'd use Greyhawk, except that my other campaign is set in Greyhawk and I want to make sure that if I get this side game off the ground it doesn't detract in any way from the main one, since it's more of a "while we're waiting for The Dad's holiday schedule to calm down" thing, and he'd be a bit miffed if he was all ready to start up again and the main game had been completely taken over by the pokemon game.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Nov 29, 2014 8:10 am

Forgotten Realms with the named NPC's removed (or as Gym Leaders). You have diverse environments, major hub cities, and a good amount of folks know about the setting in some way.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 7:32 am

Ok, so last night I was looking at an old Dragon magazine that had stuff for various classic campaign settings because I was hoping* that their thing for Planescape might be useful for the Planar Metropolis I need to design for my game. It talked about exiled factions and gave some new weapon abilities. whoopdifuckingdo. But it also has a prestige class for Ravenloft/Masque of the Red Death that I glanced at since it's sort of lantern themed and I'm looking at using the Plane of Shadows city of lanterns Balefire.

The class is also dumb, but it got me thinking about a victorian horror themed D&D game. I'm reading through the Realms of Terror OSSR and have gotten the idea that Ravenloft was terrible. But I'm thinking something more along the lines of bootstrapping together Nightmare Creatures, Penny Dreadful, maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, and, yes, the Van Helsing movie** and putting it on a d20 engine. Like, not even changing classes or anything- with the source material I'm looking at here, you're totally rolling into Victorian London as a D&D style rogue or samurai or whatever.

I'm sure I could get a group to play a Victorian Horror D&D hack more readily than a new system, and most of them would probably roll with it***, but I'm curious as to what people think of the viability of something like this

*I should have known better, really
**Fault me or not, the movie may be shit, but it was entertaining and it's hard to claim that that Van Helsing was not, essentially, a murder hobo in the finest D&D traditions.
***And I'm just... out of energy to care about optimizing a game as far as running it and playing it. The majority of players and DMs don't give a shit, so I'm not going to anymore. I'll save that energy for design.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:05 pm

I've just stumbled in this little OSR supplement called "Tales of the Gortesque and Dungeonesque" which looks neat. Perhaps it could serve as a source of inspiration for your games.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:53 pm

Prak wrote: I'm sure I could get a group to play a Victorian Horror D&D hack more readily than a new system, and most of them would probably roll with it***, but I'm curious as to what people think of the viability of something like this

Playing Bloodborne makes me want to try out such a game. The questions you'd have to answer are:

*What's the level range (probably something single digit)
*What do guns do in this setting and who gets to use them
*How much magic is commonly available (PC class and so on)
*What are we gonna kill
*How much talking vs killing is expected

Bloodborne also shows that you can have the aesthetics of being a smartly dressed werewolf hunter doing a murderhobo city crawl (the people with homes even denounce you as a murderhobo from behind closed doors) with minimal talking.

shlominus · Post by **shlominus** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 9:42 pm

Prak wrote:it got me thinking about a victorian horror themed D&D game. I'm reading through the Realms of Terror OSSR and have gotten the idea that Ravenloft was terrible. But I'm thinking something more along the lines of bootstrapping together Nightmare Creatures, Penny Dreadful, maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, and, yes, the Van Helsing movie** and putting it on a d20 engine. Like, not even changing classes or anything- with the source material I'm looking at here, you're totally rolling into Victorian London as a D&D style rogue or samurai or whatever.

you should definitely check out the blog silva mentioned:

http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesq ... pot.co.at/

you might have to dig a bit to find posts relevant to your interests, but it's well worth the effort.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Jul 28, 2015 10:36 pm

Prak wrote:Victorian Horror D&D hack.

Okay, the thing to bear in mind is that Victorian Horror is basically the dawn of where monsters know they have to fear human society.

And as such the adventures are more mysteries centered around

Figuring out who the monster is: Jack the Ripper
Figuring out what the monster is and how to stop it: Dracula
Figuring out what the true difference is between man and monster The Isle of Dr. Moreau
Figuring out what is turning a person or people into monsters Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde
Figuring out whether the supernatural is real or just someone's delusion why anybody reads this dry psychobabble shit Turn of the Screw

than traditional D&D dungeoncrawls or hex-exploration.

K · Post by K » Wed Jul 29, 2015 3:58 am

When I look for a setting, I'm less worried about the flavor and more worried about how much design work is done for me.

Flavor is always going to be heavily DM-dependent. I can make a setting grimdark or cartoon-bright as needed, but the actual work of DMing that nets the most value is often in maps that have had some thougyht put into them, pregened NPCs that feel like authentic characters, plots that aren't stupid, and backstory that supports those things.

Balefire sounded awesome when I read it in Dragon, but it's a small article in a Dragon Magazine. It's not doing any work for me at all.

By contrast, I have a small pile of 2e Forgotten Realms campaign books that I could adapt into a full campaign with only a few nights of conversion and flavoring work.

Daniel · Post by **Daniel** » Mon Aug 03, 2015 1:59 pm

Speaking from personal experience.
Dark Sun (1st version), Mystara, Spelljammer, Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms all work very well with only some very modest tweaking.

But that is the problem isn't it? The need for adjustment before a setting works.

The least bad? Possibly Ravenloft, because the tweaking we needed there was mostly ignoring a bunch of bad modules.