Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

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Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

Post by Prak »

Exactly what it says on the tin- which is the least bad? The ones I know of are:
  • Birthright
  • Blackmoor (nominally both part and not part of Greyhawk, so far as I can tell)
  • Dark Sun
  • Dragonlance
  • Eberron
  • Forgotten Realms/Al-Qadim/Kara-tur/Maztica
  • Ghostwalk (Ha!)
  • Greyhawk
  • Kingdoms of Kalamar
  • Lankhmar
  • Mystara/Hollow World/Savage Coast
  • Planescape
  • Ravenloft
  • Rokugon
  • Spelljammer
  • Warcraft
I kind of want to run D&D again, but am currently too lazy to create a setting whole cloth. I'm leaning towards Greyhawk, but if there's something objectively less bad, I'll look into that. Conceivably I could make up something from the bits and pieces dropped by Tome, but, as I said, I'm lazy.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Dark Sun

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Post by TiaC »

First, I suggest you toss all the 3.0 settings as they won't accomplish your goal of less work. I sort of like Eberron and it sets up a lot of adventure hooks for you, but the books have the worst organization. The Planescape factions all piss me off, but the rest of the great wheel is fine. FR has enough material that it's hard to get new players into it, so I wouldn't use it if anyone is unfamiliar. Dark Sun relies pretty heavily on bookkeeping rules that everyone hates.
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Post by Longes »

Can any setting where existence of level 10+ adventurers is unexplained (much less the influence of top tier magic) count as good? I mean, why are there ever plagues and hunger in most settings, when clerics exist?
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Post by Prak »

Well, I've got gazetteers or campaign setting books for Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Eberron, as well as a couple of Dragon magazines which provide 3.X material for them.

Vast amounts of material is kind of a good thing as I can then say "Let me check the books" when someone asks me a question and try to find an answer. If it turns out the answer I found is bad, then I can blame it on the book.

If I were to run Dark Sun I'd ask if anyone was going to play something not human and then hand them a reworked stat block that doesn't have a ridiculous ECL--lookin' at you, Thri Kreen...

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Post by darkmaster »

Longes wrote:Can any setting where existence of level 10+ adventurers is unexplained (much less the influence of top tier magic) count as good? I mean, why are there ever plagues and hunger in most settings, when clerics exist?
Well the easiest and, I think, most obvious reason is that while there are good clerics who would be glad to cast cure disease all day, there are also evil clerics who would be equally happy doing things like cast raise dead all day to form legions of undead to overrun the world. So while it's tragic when old lady Laura from down the street dies of a flue or whatever it's more important that the Clerics of Pelor put down the Death Cults of Nerull before they raise legions of the undead and unleash them upon the world.
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Re: Which is the least bad published D&D setting?

Post by Koumei »

Let's see...
Birthright: I've heard good things about it by people who like 2Ed (but still play 3E) and have a hard-on for "monsters are unique, and will fuck you up!" Apparently the whole setting is "fucking metal".

Blackmoor: No idea

Dark Sun: less bad than some, I guess, but full of ideas that are equal parts stupid and crazy

Dragonlance: fucking stupid on every level, including the very base concepts of it. It is based on a bad religion.

Eberron: WARFORGEDWARFORGEDENGORGEDFORGED WANKWANKWANK IT BREEDS TRUE!

Forgotten Realms: you can't throw a stone without hitting an Epic level NPCfailing to hit an Epic NPC because of their AC. But it has big spooky areas to wander into, generically evil organisations to smack about, and if you flip through their pantheon you'll eventually find a deity you like enough to worship as a Cleric.

Ghostwalk: this isn't a setting, it's a single splat book that theoretically fits into FR (lies). If Nazis would limit their book-burning to this, the world would be a better place.

Greyhawk: Generic Eric McCleric. Much of what's good about FR also applies here. You can basically take your whole campaign idea and just slap it down in Greyhawk. Bonus points: your players won't even know what parts of it you made up and what are actually from Greyhawk.

Kingdoms of Kalamar: unknown

Lankhmar: unknown

Mystara/Hollow World/Savage Coast: unknown

Planescape: it has some interesting ideas, which are then wrapped in multiple layers of stupid, like a very disappointing toffee apple. People don't actually like Planescape as much as they think they do (unless they specifically like the idea of high level everything bossing low level PCs around all the time or are the kind of stoned philosophers who play Mage), what they actually like is Planescape: Torment.

Ravenloft: 2dark2edgy4me (also, really stupidly written in many parts. Most rules will have to be completely erased and replaced with sensible ones.)

Rokugan: it's not really a setting for wizards and stuff. Indeed, many feel you're better off using the actual L5R rules for this, and they might be right. It's very very "I love feudal Japan" in a way that normal D&D isn't very "I love feudal Europe". But if you keep it low-level, so that dragons don't rock up and make the samurai feel small in the pants, then I guess you can get your weeaboo on and enjoy it. But at that point, why not just make it actual ancient Japan, with Nobunaga being a Warlock?

Spelljammer: it has some really cool art, and some really stupid races. Honestly, "The Underdark is now space" isn't the worst idea they've ever had.

Warcraft: Azeroth is a really fucking boring setting. You can use either set of Warcraft d20 rules or just use D&D in the setting, it will still not be very good.
So my suggestion is go Greyhawk or FR, then just bullshit everything that you want to put in, and nobody will even know half the time (and the other half of the time, they won't care).

PS. If you do run D&D again, and it's in play-by-post format, let me know, I'm getting bored during weekdays and wouldn't mind getting my D&D on some more (and all I can find on RPoL is unappealing). But I'm going back to work soon, where I won't be able to use IRC.
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Post by hogarth »

Out of all of those listed, the least bad one is probably Eberron IF you're into it. If you don't want trains and private detectives and shit in your D&D, it's probably a no-go though.
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Post by Username17 »

D&D works best with no setting. The core conceits of D&D are a bizarre mishmash of post apocalyptic and pseudo-medieval elements. You walk down the round, and you fight a manticore. Consider how brain breaking that is. Roads imply people travel on and maintain the roads. How is that fucking happening if there are fucking manticores anywhere near it?

For fuck's sake, your characters walk to a place where they find a lost tribe of man eating lizard people. How can a tribe possibly be "lost" if they eat people and live within walking distance? What the fucking hell?

D&D just sort of assumes that things are sort of medieval Europe-like except that there are also forgotten civilizations all over the place and the lands between any two points you care to talk about are full of wilderness and man eating fire breathing monsters. It's incoherent. The roads would only exist to be cleared if the invasion by monsters was fairly recent. But there would only be fallen empires, musty dungeons, and lost civilizations if society had collapsed hundreds if not thousands of years ago.

So obviously the only D&D setting that makes any real sense is RIFTS. The obvious (and probably only) answer to how you can have ancient Kuo-Toa civilzations living in sea caves yet still have kingdoms and cities that need help fighting off monster attacks is that the world had a bunch of planar rifts dump crap from a fuck tonne of different worlds into a jumbled geography in the sufficiently recently past that no one has a map of it. In short: the setting that makes the most sense for D&D is 4e Forgotten Realms.

"We had a history and maps and fucking civilization, and there were countries and cities and kingdoms. But then the spell plague came and fucked up the landscape and now there are mountains where there didn't used to be and dragons with boobs and no one has the slightest idea of what's going on. And now there are like monsters everywhere and shit."

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Post by radthemad4 »

I kinda like Jerry's Midnight. Planning on trying something somewhat loosely based on this, except I'd probably ignore the part about the planes being closed.
Jerry wrote:I think that the Tome series are spot on, and I'm planning on bringing them over to the fluff of the various campaign settings. As the Tomes cover Planescape and Greyhawk quite well, I'm going to start with some of my favorite settings:

1.) Midnight

2.) Freeport: City of Adventure

3.) Kingdoms of Kalamar

Some of you folks are probably wondering how this is going to make sense, so I am going to need input from you guys.

My Midnight is not your Midnight

Midnight is a game where Sauron has won, where the only forms of organized resistance are that of the Elves and Dwarves. Life sucks, but the Player Characters are special. However, my idea of Midnight is vastly different; I plan on the PCs making a difference, and by difference, I mean big, world-shattering, make the Dark Lord piss his pants difference. Fighting against an infallible evil that can't be destroyed seems more Call of Cthulhu than D&D, and seriously, when D&D reaches high levels, you're trading blows with demon generals, warping reality to suit your needs, and making the big players of the planes considering you "a not-so-deniable asset."
My interpretation of the setting is different, where the players can win against evil, and that their high-level characters won't break the setting and have an entire battalion of Legates tracking them down every time that they cast a Heal spell.

Maybe this isn't for you

If you want a game where the players are the underdog, where their pitiful efforts can only keep the flame of resistance shining for a while longer, then I suggest playing at low levels, probably 1-5, with 8 or 9 being an absolute max.

As for the game setting itself, let's look over a few things:

Hopeless Valor

An ideal Midnight game will have the PCs being fresh recruits into La Resistance at low levels, doing odd jobs and throwing a wrench into the cogs of tyranny. At mid levels, the characters are starting to make a difference, and earn positions of power themselves. The battles should become gradually larger scale, with the players leading armies of men, conquering, I mean "liberating," one town at a time, gradually building their numbers and gaining levels, until at high levels, the Fighter is leading armies of men, dwarves, elves, and monsters fed up with Izrador, the Wizard is flying in sky on a pair of magic wings, taking out dark nexus mirrors with disintegrate spells, while the cleric opens up long-forgotten portals to heaven, calling in a holy war against the legions of the night, while the Rogue/Thief-acrobat will be climbing the backs of Giant Barbarian Commandos, Sneak-Attacking them in the back, and using Feather Fall/Boots of Jumping to get onto the next towering monstrosity and repeating ad nauseum. Yeah, that's what I envision high-level Midnight to be, not a bunch fearful adventurers huddling around the Wizard to cast the Greater Planar Binding spell to get some monster to do the jobs for them, them fleeing while the Legates trace the spell residue back and send an Orc army in.

As for the class setting, Legates operate like Core Clerics. Also, let the players start out as Clerics, Druids, or Wizards.

The sort of Wish Economy

Izrador closed the portals to Heaven, and as such, you're trapped. That means no Planar Binding, no Commune, no inter-dimensional spells. Yes, that sucks, but the Core casters still kick ass. Instead of using monsters that are summoned to fight for you, you do the fighting... that, and your army.

Two, most of the world is stuck in the Turnip Economy, while Izrador and his hand-picked yes men are reaping the benefits of unrestricted Walls of Iron, Create Food and Water, and all the stuff that power-gaming is known for. Don't get me wrong, the players will benefit from this by stealing/recruiting men of power, but the players are assumed to be heroes fighting for the common folk, or people fed up with Izrador.
The heroes need to build up valor for the mook army that they're going to get, so that the PCs don't need to worry about things like attrition, farming land, and having to cleave their way through the Ogre army just so that they can get close to General Jornskarr, Balor General of Northern Erenland. That's what the armies of men are for, folks; distracting Izrador's lesser elements, while still making the players feel special.

Rules: Have the Goblin, Hobgoblin, Orc and Half-orc races from the Tomes serve as a replacement for the already existing races.
Half-breeds are a mess, so take the game stats for one parent.
Value Points are fine for the low levels, but when the Wizard gets Wall of Iron, you break the economy. not that it matters, because you can meld that armor into weapons and armor in your secret base.

Izrador's domains are Evil, Death, Magic, and War.

Clerics, Druids, Sorcerers, and Wizards have found lost lore that the Shadow was trying to hide, and know they can use the arts of magic!

All the Tome classes are fine. However, you should be cautious about allowing Fiendish base classes; those guys work for Izrador, so unless you have an extremely good reason to play one, it should not be allowed. Scratch that, that doesn't make sense, and defeats the purpose of the setting; you can't be a fiend.

Fighters serve as the leaders of man, expert combatants, and wilderness scouts; Barbarians are warriors from the wild; Monks are those that learned to fight with their bare fists, as weapons are illegal for civilians to have; Thief-acrobats are spies, smugglers and thieves working on all sides; rogues are fine, but end up relying a lot on UMD and throwing flasks.

P.S. Commander is very important near high levels, especially if you plan to go Aragorn and take back the homeland from the Shadow with an army.

Got to go, now. How do you like so far?
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

3E Forgotten Realms. Seriously. Mind you, it doesn't mean that it's a good setting, but it does have a lot of things going for it. Like the fact that it has a lot of video game and novel adaptations and you can get everyone nodding your heads in agreement when you say that you're going to time travel right before the plague in Neverwinter and stop it in its tracks. Or the fact that there is a lot of shit just to do in the setting, enough that you can get from level 1 to 20 without having any real gaps in the progression requiring the DM to do a training cutscene. Which is a problem that Dark Sun and Dragonlance have. Plenty of shit for low and high-level characters to, but mid-level characters sort of flail around without any real guidance.

The major sticking point seems to be the existence of high-level NPCs. But seriously, that should be one of the easiest things to rationalize away if it's sticking in your craw. Just keep them busy elsewhere or give them a reason to keep their heads low and their hands out of politics (like, say, they're worried about getting ganked by a lucky teleport ambush) or just flat-out kill them and the game opens right where there's a power vacuum.
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Post by Koumei »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: The major sticking point seems to be the existence of high-level NPCs. But seriously, that should be one of the easiest things to rationalize away if it's sticking in your craw. Just keep them busy elsewhere or give them a reason to keep their heads low and their hands out of politics (like, say, they're worried about getting ganked by a lucky teleport ambush) or just flat-out kill them and the game opens right where there's a power vacuum.
Honestly, it's even easier than that. Yes, there are certain offenders like Halaster and Elminster. But if you read the setting books, every guildhouse or anime club has a small statblock for the leader, who is typically something like Wizard 15/Archmage 10/Seeker of the Past 5. So they just populated the whole world with these epic characters who never actually do anything. So here's the trick: don't read the stat blocks (or indeed, large parts of any of the books), and just go "Okay, so the leader of this thing is like seventh level I guess, that puts him decently on the chain of command for something like this" when it crops up.

They're all there, which is used as ammunition against the setting (understandably), but in most cases, it's not even ignoring them, it's overlooking their existence.
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Post by MisterDee »

Ptolus.

It's a single "City of Adventure", not a fully developped world, but it's bar none the best-organized setting book I've ever seen.

It's also full of potential adventure hooks, including some fully-described locations for instant dungeoning.
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Post by Koumei »

Ptolus, that was written by Monte, right? I... have my doubts about its execution. He's been very hit-and-miss with a lot of things, and seems to work best as an ideas guy when he has someone else who works as a shit-filter. Vince Russo of roleplaying, if you will.
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Post by Ancient History »

D&D is not all things to all people. For "generic fantasy medieval-ish setting" your basic contenders are Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance - and fuck Dragonlance, so that means OG (Greyhawk) and FR, and of the two FR was the better detailed of the two settings. Neither of which made a lot of sense, but both of which tried to be generic D&D. (Yes, you could make an argument for Kingdoms of Kalamar. No, I'm not going to make it.)

As far as the other settings go, the best of them are trying to push a specific concept - Dark Sun is post-apocalyptic psionic survival, Ravenloft is weird gothicesque horror, Eberron is pre-industrial magical age, Spelljammer and Planescape were both about adventuring in multiple worlds, etc. So those were more independent premises borrowing the D&D system (and giving back for "in multiverse" settings); think of them as specific implementations of how you could play D&D rather than definitive ways to play D&D.

I think they all have good ideas and flaws, I don't think any of them is the best setting.
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Post by Previn »

Koumei wrote:Ptolus, that was written by Monte, right? I... have my doubts about its execution. He's been very hit-and-miss with a lot of things, and seems to work best as an ideas guy when he has someone else who works as a shit-filter. Vince Russo of roleplaying, if you will.
Ptolus was the actual campaign setting that Monte ran for several years. If you're going to pick up a new setting, you could do worse. It's a book that's about 650 pages. It's very detailed as it's essentially just about 1 sprawling city.

I would probably go with either that or Eberron depending on how grand of a scale I was intending to end up at.
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Post by fectin »

Forgotten Realms. There's a reason that every successful DnD adaptation has been set there.

Also, spelljammer, but that's may be just me.
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Post by Wiseman »

Planescape, but more for the exotic locales of the planes themselves then the stupidity of Sigil and the factions and I'm not all that interested in discussing philosophy.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Ptolus also has a CD included with the book with a ton of information. I have not looked at in years, so I'm not sure if it is all information contained within the book, or if it also includes expansion material.

I know that I was able to pick up some print copies of a 'Player's Guide to Ptolus' for like $1.00 each, and a PDF is included on the CD.

As far as a setting goes, Ptolus tries to embrace a lot of 3.xisms. It's totally acceptable for a Minotaur to be wandering around the city - it's a little unusual, but it's not 'lynching mob' worthy - just raised eyebrows. For those kinds of reasons, there's a lot of good about Ptolus.

But while the city (and catacombs beneath) are extensive, I've never tried to run it as a setting.
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Post by Prak »

darkmaster wrote:So while it's tragic when old lady Laura from down the street dies of a flue or whatever
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Sadly, all the halfling rogues were busy rescuing orphans from wells, none of the clerics could fit to pull her out.
Koumei wrote:So my suggestion is go Greyhawk or FR, then just bullshit everything that you want to put in, and nobody will even know half the time (and the other half of the time, they won't care).
That's literally part of why I want to use Greyhawk. It's the basic assumed setting for D&D material, so, as long as the names are right, I can drop pretty much anything in.
PS. If you do run D&D again, and it's in play-by-post format, let me know, I'm getting bored during weekdays and wouldn't mind getting my D&D on some more (and all I can find on RPoL is unappealing). But I'm going back to work soon, where I won't be able to use IRC.
Unlikely, because I'm not fond of the text format--IRC or PBP--for running. But possibly, and I'll let you know if I do.
Frank wrote:So obviously the only D&D setting that makes any real sense is RIFTS. The obvious (and probably only) answer to how you can have ancient Kuo-Toa civilzations living in sea caves yet still have kingdoms and cities that need help fighting off monster attacks is that the world had a bunch of planar rifts dump crap from a fuck tonne of different worlds into a jumbled geography in the sufficiently recently past that no one has a map of it. In short: the setting that makes the most sense for D&D is 4e Forgotten Realms.
I'm working on a setting based on Pacific Rim in between working on DMH again and a brothel demiplane writeup to be dropped into any setting. This actually helped solidify some ideas for it. Thanks, Frank.
Lago wrote:The major sticking point seems to be the existence of high-level NPCs. But seriously, that should be one of the easiest things to rationalize away if it's sticking in your craw. Just keep them busy elsewhere or give them a reason to keep their heads low and their hands out of politics (like, say, they're worried about getting ganked by a lucky teleport ambush) or just flat-out kill them and the game opens right where there's a power vacuum.
I'm actually tempted to write a campaign where the PCs are upstaged a couple times, and credit for their work is given to Elminster and doucheco. more than once to make them really hate those high level named characters in-character as quest givers keep saying shit like "Well, we wanted Elminster, he could have gotten this done yesterday, but... we can't reach him, so you'll do, I guess. Don't fuck it up." all leading up to a BBEG with Elminster et al. in cages with a hero-killer weapon aimed at them. After they beat the BBEG, it's just them, the epics in cages, and no one around to know what really happened.


Might look into Ptolus. I've never been able to put my finger on what rubs me the wrong way about FR, so maybe I'll take a look at that and see what it is. I think it's the way that it takes itself too seriously and writers seem to think stuff like The Weave, the Harpers and the Spellplague are these amazing epic things (in the actual literary sense of epic), when they're just ridiculous.
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Post by Prak »

So I was looking at FRCS, and I just noticed that it is emblematic of one of the biggest problems with FR: Elminster's dickstats are on page 7.

Page 7 is the introduction. If you're paging through the book like a book (rather than a reference material) you see Elminster before you even learn how to make a character in the setting. It's in the section that, were this a core book, would be saying "here's what you need to play," but in a campaign setting book says "this is what this world is supposed to be about."

In the section where FRCS gives you it's elevator pitch, it ends with "Oh yeah, and there's this totally sweet level 35 character who fucked the goddess of magic and is totally badass and I just want to suck his cockmake you suck his cock!"

Seriously, the only thing after that before the chapter on characters is a list of abbreviations and what they referred to.

There's really nothing more to say. Forgotten Realms is really all about a self insertion DM-penis extension character and everyone else can suck it.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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silva
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Post by silva »

I love Planescape, even with its flaws, so thats my (totally biased) suggestion.

But if you really dont want to have work, why dont you run D&D with no setting/with its implicit setting only ? Just make a dungeon with a village by its side and go for it!
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
caladfel
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Post by caladfel »

Prak_Anima wrote:If you're paging through the book like a book (rather than a reference material) you see Elminster before you even learn how to make a character in the setting. It's in the section that, were this a core book, would be saying "here's what you need to play," but in a campaign setting book says "this is what this world is supposed to be about."
Well, the back of the AD&D boxed set (the gray one) had his picture and him saying "Welcome to my world...", so, Elminster is to FR what Giant Frog is to limbo.

That said, if the idea is classic stabination and robbery D&D, Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms are your top two choices.
TheFlatline
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Post by TheFlatline »

I loved Dark Sun. I don't love what they did to it.
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Aryxbez
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Post by Aryxbez »

Prak_Anima wrote:Conceivably I could make up something from the bits and pieces dropped by Tome, but, as I said, I'm lazy.
Ever since the idea document that was [Tome] it's always given me the idea that more and more DM's should seriously run their campaigns in the Planes. There's these pre-written worlds that are fantastical in nature, and can still have all the low level crap that most DM's are fond of. So it can be less work than a homebrew, and likely far more interesting as well. Though I suppose the idea documents are just that, and lack the info that setting books have with their politics and junk? Otherwise, I suggest using some plane that's been mentioned in Tome, and sounds interesting (Brass City I've always wanted to do some adventures/campaign in).
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries

"the thing about being Mister Cavern [DM], you don't blame players for how they play. That's like blaming the weather. Weather just is. You adapt to it. -Ancient History
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