Favourite or Best Original RPG Fantasy Setting?

[Voros]

Did Tekumel ever had a decently playable edition? For all the praise it gets it seems the original OD&D box was significantly arcane and hard to parse.

From the little I've read, it seems as original and ingenious as Glorantha. I'd love to see a modern take on it.

I found the Empire of the Petal Throne's variant D&D ruleset much better designed and explained than OD&D.

Not sure you'd need the OD&D set to play it at all but that may just be my familiarity with D&D talking.

The Petal Hack, which is a Black Hack version of Tekumel, is pretty cool, concise and free!

 

[Zimzerveran]

I've always had a soft spot for Dragonlance, but my favorite version is 5th age. A post apocalyptic setting where all the tropes from the novels are present, but now the player heroes are the movers and shakers. Recover dragonlances to fight the dragon lords? You can do that! Reform the Knights of Solamnia and bring the order to power again? You can do that! Find the Hammer of Kharas and unite the dwarves? You can do that! (and this is what my character did), Save the elven nations from powerful magic? You can do that!

The brilliant thing about 5th age is that it is still Dragonlance but now it is primarily a rpg setting, and not a setting for books

I never got past the Legends II novels, so I'm not familiar with the 5th Age. Recommend any appropriate game material for it, or novels?

 

[Armchair Gamer]

I never got past the Legends II novels, so I'm not familiar with the 5th Age. Recommend any appropriate game material for it, or novels?

The tie-in novels, unfortunately, were one of the weakest points of the line. The core game and all supplements are great and available on DTRPG ... but you won’t get the cards, which are fundamental to play. You can still use the source material, though.

 

[Kardinal Tabbe]

I never got past the Legends II novels, so I'm not familiar with the 5th Age. Recommend any appropriate game material for it, or novels?

As Armchair Gamer said, the tie in novels were crap. It was Dragonlance at its soap-opera-worst.

But the game, Dragonlance SAGA, is one of my all time favorite games. A post apocalyptic Krynn where magic is more primal and the gods have left and god-like chromatic dragon tyrants have divided the continent among themselves. Card based, rules light, player facing. Years ahead of its time (perhaps so many years ahead that it didn't sell well).

Unfortunately you need the card deck to run it.

 

[AsenRG]

It was a rushed product with a lot of problems, like missing spells. It also assumed PCs would be Tsolyani and a part of their intricate social system, whereas the original products assumed you were barbarians showing up at port looking for work; the latter is more conducive to easing players into such a unique setting, as well as dodging the incredibly static social conventions of the locals.

I sold my copy a long time ago. It was too thorough and intricate to call a cash grab, but it was not a solidly produced product.

...except why would you want to dodge the social conventions of Tsolyanu if you're going to play in Tekumel, is frankly beyond me:shocked:!

I mean, chirine ba kal had explained (even on this forum, IIRC, though no guarantees on that part) how to use the society to drive adventure, not to impede it...

I found the Empire of the Petal Throne's variant D&D ruleset much better designed and explained than OD&D.

Not sure you'd need the OD&D set to play it at all but that may just be my familiarity with D&D talking.

The Petal Hack, which is a Black Hack version of Tekumel, is pretty cool, concise and free!

Yeah, the Petal Hack is really nice, and the Petal Hack probably ranks among my favourite versions of it!

As @Armsaid, the tie in novels were crap. It was Dragonlance at its soap-opera-worst.

But the game, Dragonlance SAGA, is one of my all time favorite games. A post apocalyptic Krynn where magic is more primal and the gods have left and god-like chromatic dragon tyrants have divided the continent among themselves. Card based, rules light, player facing. Years ahead of its time (perhaps so many years ahead that it didn't sell well).

Unfortunately you need the card deck to run it.

That sounds way cooler than I'm used to associating with Krynn!

 

[Silverlion]

...except why would you want to dodge the social conventions of Tsolyanu if you're going to play in Tekumel, is frankly beyond me:shocked:!

I mean, chirine ba kal had explained (even on this forum, IIRC, though no guarantees on that part) how to use the society to drive adventure, not to impede it...


Yeah, the Petal Hack is really nice, and the Petal Hack probably ranks among my favourite versions of it!


That sounds way cooler than I'm used to associating with Krynn!

It is pretty neat, I'm fond of it. Marvel Saga is slightly better despite loving DL Saga, it's just a better iteration of the ideas behind the game. I wish it had gotten a 2nd Edition.

 

[Armchair Gamer]

As Armchair Gamer said, the tie in novels were crap. It was Dragonlance at its soap-opera-worst.

But the game, Dragonlance SAGA, is one of my all time favorite games. A post apocalyptic Krynn where magic is more primal and the gods have left and god-like chromatic dragon tyrants have divided the continent among themselves. Card based, rules light, player facing. Years ahead of its time (perhaps so many years ahead that it didn't sell well).

Unfortunately you need the card deck to run it.

According to the sales figures from TSR that were posted last year, it sold about as well as the 2E Tales of the Lance set at start. I think it suffered from being underpriced/overproduced, being planned for marketing to the novel fans without taking chain bookstore shelving and the like into account (this is something I heard from a member of the design team), the collapse of TSR soon after launch, Peter Adkison sacrificing it to bring Weis & Hickman back, and WotC's commitment to "One Game to Rule Them All."

 

[Kardinal Tabbe]

Yeah and it didn't help that this game that presented itself as a rules light heroic game, actually was pretty gritty and grim in play. This wasn't a game where you could slay ogres left and right. In fact you most likely needed magic weapons to do that (or use ranged combat). This didn't sit well with the AD&D crowd who wanted their high fantasy game.

Now you can argue that it probably should have tuned down the deadliness a bit. I'm not sure even the designers themselves understood how hard they made melee combat. As Silverlion said: SAGA would have been a fantastic game with a second edition.

 

[Armchair Gamer]

Yeah and it didn't help that this game that presented itself as a rules light heroic game, actually was pretty gritty and grim in play. This wasn't a game where you could slay ogres left and right. In fact you most likely needed magic weapons to do that (or use ranged combat). This didn't sit well with the AD&D crowd who wanted their high fantasy game.

Now you can argue that it probably should have tuned down the deadliness a bit. I'm not sure even the designers themselves understood how hard they made melee combat. As Silverlion said: SAGA would have been a fantastic game with a second edition.

"Ogres deserve some respect now."--one of the design team talking about the game in the Game Wizards column in DRAGON #231. And the intro to Heroes of Defiance points out that the Heroes of the Lance tended to avoid a lot of fights, and big battles often resulted in the loss of characters. I think the game needed some fine-tuning (Physique being so high, and serving as both target number and NPC hit points was a problem), but I think bringing it down to earth was intended, just not appreciated by the fans coming from AD&D.

 

[Kardinal Tabbe]

That sounds way cooler than I'm used to associating with Krynn!

I know!

But the game sort of double-communicated the nature of the setting. It had this really dark setting and managed to present it as a normal high fantasy game.

The Knights of Takhisis rules large areas of the continent, the Qualinesti elves were subjugated by a green Dragon Lord and a small resistance was fighting the quislings of their own people. Half the kender population was so traumatized by the wars that they had become cynical opportunists.

This was a really dark and cool setting

 

[Kardinal Tabbe]

"Ogres deserve some respect now."--one of the design team talking about the game in the Game Wizards column in DRAGON #231. And the intro to Heroes of Defiance points out that the Heroes of the Lance tended to avoid a lot of fights, and big battles often resulted in the loss of characters. I think the game needed some fine-tuning (Physique being so high, and serving as both target number and NPC hit points was a problem), but I think bringing it down to earth was intended, just not appreciated by the fans coming from AD&D.

Oh I agree with you 100%. But I'm not sure they understood just how much they nerfed melee fighters. The real muchkins of this game were the archers, since they used Coordination as target number. And it this meant that it was a lot easier to hit an ogre with an arrow than with a sword blow. Very realistic, but perhaps a bit too much for Dragonlance.

 

[Fenris-77]

Eversink, the city setting for Swords of the Serpentine, is easily one of the best settings I've ever read. It just makes you want ot put pen to paper.

 

[Spartan]

I found the Empire of the Petal Throne's variant D&D ruleset much better designed and explained than OD&D.

Not sure you'd need the OD&D set to play it at all but that may just be my familiarity with D&D talking.

The Petal Hack, which is a Black Hack version of Tekumel, is pretty cool, concise and free!

I don't think the original box set is hard to deal with rules-wise. I haven't read it in a minute but I don't recall having any issues going through it. It seemed fairly straightforward, but quite detailed. Still lighter than anything in the AD&D lineage, IIRC.

 

[Lofgeornost]

I found the Empire of the Petal Throne's variant D&D ruleset much better designed and explained than OD&D.

Not sure you'd need the OD&D set to play it at all but that may just be my familiarity with D&D talking.

You wouldn't need OD&D; it was designed to be a stand-alone game and works fine that way.

...except why would you want to dodge the social conventions of Tsolyanu if you're going to play in Tekumel, is frankly beyond me:shocked:!

I mean, chirine ba kal had explained (even on this forum, IIRC, though no guarantees on that part) how to use the society to drive adventure, not to impede it...

I'll agree with pawsplay about the G.o.O. Tekumel game. It is less approachable that E.P.T. because of its emphasis on Tsolyani social intricacies, which it tends to approach from a 'no, you can't' standpoint rather than a 'see what this allows you to do' one. All games water down the etiquette and restrictions of Tsolyani society, if only because they don't require players to specify which of the numerous levels of diction, pronouns, etc. their characters use when speaking with others. But that's the tip of the iceberg, of course.

I don't think the original box set is hard to deal with rules-wise. I haven't read it in a minute but I don't recall having any issues going through it. It seemed fairly straightforward, but quite detailed. Still lighter than anything in the AD&D lineage, IIRC.

I think that's precisely right. It's resolutely old-school, and might not appeal to some people today for that reason, but it's not a hard game to understand.

 

[sharps54]

I do find it interesting how many of the games considered hard to learn were played, possibly wrongly but played, by us as teenagers when they came out.

 

[Cornelius]

1. Homebrew. Because I'm old school enough to prefer creating my own rather than relying on someone' else work (though I'm more than happy to steal from him... ehem, pay omage to them)
2. Gurps Cabal. Best setting for gurps 3rd ed.
3. Numenera
4. Ad&D Zakhara

 

[StonesThree]

I do find it interesting how many of the games considered hard to learn were played, possibly wrongly but played, by us as teenagers when they came out.

Every fellow teen I played red box/2e DnD with back in the day understood how THAC0 worked. Never encountered anybody saying it was "too difficult" until the 3e days.

 

[Teyrnon]

Every fellow teen I played red box/2e DnD with back in the day understood how THAC0 worked. Never encountered anybody saying it was "too difficult" until the 3e days.

I was in my twenties in the 1990s and encountered many people complaining that THAC0 was counterintuitive and hard to grasp. It usually came from people whose first RPG was Vampire: The Masquerade. I think it was more a matter of not wanting to learn another game system than anything else.

 

[Savage Schemer]

I've never encountered anyone who said that THC0 was "too difficult" or "hard to grasp", pretty much ever. Even now. However, that it is counterintuitive should by now pretty much be irrefutable. People, even those who pulled up to D&D for the first time way back when, naturally gravitate toward the idea that higher armor values should be better. Treating lower values as better is learned, and is absolutely counterintuitive when first encountered.

 

[Lessa]

Nobody cited Talislanta or Skyrealms of Jorune. No love for these classics?

I've never encountered anyone who said that THC0 was "too difficult" or "hard to grasp", pretty much ever. Even now. However, that it is counterintuitive should by now pretty much be irrefutable. People, even those who pulled up to D&D for the first time way back when, naturally gravitate toward the idea that higher armor values should be better.

Yep, I agree. Not a fan of THAC0, specially when by the same time (more or less) we had pretty intuitive rulesets like Runequest, Traveller and CoC.

 

[Torque2100]

Kind of surprised by how many Harn fans there are in this thread. I think out of all of the options here Harn actually manages to be Medieval Authentic in a way that lots of other settings fail at. After running Harn, I feel like I understand how the Fuedal system actually worked.

I would like to suggest the Lands of Legend from Dragon Warriors as an honorable mention. It gets instant points for remembering that Wales exists. That's something a lot of TTRPG settings fail at.

 

[AsenRG]

Nobody cited Talislanta or Skyrealms of Jorune. No love for these classics?

Posts #61, 63, as well as #16, 35, 36, 64 and 94 are crying foul...

 

[TheoryofGame]

Shadowrun's Sixth World. Just untouchable.

If it's only sword & sorcery, then Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age (GURPS Conan).

 

[AsenRG]

I've never encountered anyone who said that THC0 was "too difficult" or "hard to grasp", pretty much ever. Even now. However, that it is counterintuitive should by now pretty much be irrefutable. People, even those who pulled up to D&D for the first time way back when, naturally gravitate toward the idea that higher armor values should be better. Treating lower values as better is learned, and is absolutely counterintuitive when first encountered.

That depends...

Do you think that in sports, the award of Number One means "you're the greatest newbie"?

 

[Savage Schemer]

That depends...

Do you think that in sports, the award of Number One means "you're the greatest newbie"?

Being the first to do a thing (reach a finish line, achieve X number of points, whatever) in a competition, thereby taking the winning spot, is a fundamentally different thing than rating something on a scale, which is what THAC0 and other armor abstractions do. So, I call bullshit.

 

[Lessa]

Shadowrun's Sixth World. Just untouchable.

Shadowrun came to mind too. But I feel the OP wants something more classic and SR is kinda too far into cyberpunk.

 

[Fenris-77]

it amazes me that people still find reasons not only to discuss THAC0 but to actually argue about it. It's really not that interesting. It's like a lot of mechanics in RPGs, some people might struggle with it initially, but it's neither complicated nor incoherent and people get there.

 

[AsenRG]

Being the first to do a thing (reach a finish line, achieve X number of points, whatever) in a competition, thereby taking the winning spot, is a fundamentally different thing than rating something on a scale, which is what THAC0 and other armor abstractions do. So, I call bullshit.

And D&D armour class is really "Full Plate Armour" and everything that's worse than it. So armours are rated by how close their protection is to full plate...

 

[AsenRG]

it amazes me that people still find reasons not only to discuss THAC0 but to actually argue about it. It's really not that interesting. It's like a lot of mechanics in RPGs, some people might struggle with it initially, but it's neither complicated nor incoherent and people get there.

When did that ever stops us?!?

 

[Self Saboteur]

I like THAC0 but understand complaints against it. It just preferences. Like lube dudes or dry guys.

 

[Lessa]

it amazes me that people still find reasons not only to discuss THAC0 but to actually argue about it. It's really not that interesting

Agreed.





We should be discussing Mythras' armor system instead, which is objectively better. XD

 

[Fenris-77]

We should be discussing Mythras' armor system instead, which is objectively better. XD

There are a lot of games and genres where the Mythras system is way more than I need for combat. I love it for Historical and adjacent games though, and for certain flavors of fantasy it's also pretty keen.

 

[AsenRG]

Agreed.


We should be discussing Mythras' armor system instead, which is objectively better. XD

...also agreed, FWIW!

So can we come up with an optional system that turns Mythras' damage and AP values into a working damage save/status-based system?

 

[Mangoplum]

Homebrews are my true favorites, and they usually rub up against science fantasy more than straight Tolkienesque Eurofantasy.

One of my favorites that's fairly 'trad' is Aarklash, the setting for Cadwallon.
It was originally created for a wargame, but then so was WFRP's setting. I think it's a French fried take on WFRP but a bit less grim and still plenty weird when you peek into the corners (other planes to explore, frankensteined demon dwarfs, Technomantic alchemists creating an army of bizarre clones, serpent men plotting in secret libraries).

Arduin deserves a mention as well, though AFAIK it has never been presented as encyclopedically as Glorantha or Tekumel (what has?). I think Arduin would be a fun vacation spot for a DCC group.

Also, Agone, another French RPG, has a really nice setting that doesn't feel all that beholden to D&D tropes or Tolkien.

 

[Kardinal Tabbe]

How could I forget Agone?! Cosmopolitaine, baroque fantasy where the big bad is a veeery thinly veiled metaphor for the GM.

Love it.

 

[Acmegamer]

Homebrews are my true favorites, and they usually rub up against science fantasy more than straight Tolkienesque Eurofantasy.

One of my favorites that's fairly 'trad' is Aarklash, the setting for Cadwallon.
It was originally created for a wargame, but then so was WFRP's setting. I think it's a French fried take on WFRP but a bit less grim and still plenty weird when you peek into the corners (other planes to explore, frankensteined demon dwarfs, Technomantic alchemists creating an army of bizarre clones, serpent men plotting in secret libraries).

Arduin deserves a mention as well, though AFAIK it has never been presented as encyclopedically as Glorantha or Tekumel (what has?). I think Arduin would be a fun vacation spot for a DCC group.

Also, Agone, another French RPG, has a really nice setting that doesn't feel all that beholden to D&D tropes or Tolkien.

Arduin's one of those fun to add into your existing campaign. A dash here, a dash there. Always good stuff. I wish it wasn't so hard to get prints of the books, I only had the first three and Ardiun Dungeon 13 Caliban. Giving those up, big mistake on my part. Even back when they were coming out and even with me in California, they were hard to find.

 

[sharps54]

Arduin's one of those fun to add into your existing campaign. A dash here, a dash there. Always good stuff. I wish it wasn't so hard to get prints of the books, I only had the first three and Ardiun Dungeon 13 Caliban. Giving those up, big mistake on my part. Even back when they were coming out and even with me in California, they were hard to find.

They are back in print and PDFs are in sale on DrivethruRPG

ARDUIN – empcho.com

empcho.com

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[sharps54]

They are back in print and PDFs are in sale on DrivethruRPG

ARDUIN – empcho.com

empcho.com

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

And yes, Emperor’s Choice is shipping unlike years ago.

If I wasn’t at work I’d post pics of all the books I’ve bought the last year or so. The cool thing is the font is big enough to read unlike the originals, which I also have.

 

[Pampero]

1. Krynn (Dragonlance) especially around the War of the Lance, a bit before or right after.

2. Golarion. So many cool places. I cheat a little and tend to include Freeport as a city here.

3. Creation. I have never played Exalted but it is one spiffy place to read about.

Would love to get on Glorantha and Talislanta's worlds but there are only so many hours in the day...

 

[Telok]

I nerdgasmed on Spelljammer when it first came out and never really got over it. Now I'm running Dungeons the Dragoning 40k which is an unholy mutant love child of Spelljammer, WH40k, and a bunch of other stuff.