D&D settings

I have an interesting and complicated relationship with D&D settings.  In general, I like them, I like to see more of them, I like to read them, and I like to borrow from them.  But at the same time, none of them ever do anything quite the way I think that they should, and I rarely have much motivation to use them as is in print; rather, I'll liberally carjack ideas that I like and incorporate them into a homebrew instead.  That said, there's a spectrum; on one end are settings that I think are quite clever and that I like to see novels in, I wouldn't mind playing in, and at least in the short term, I could run games in.  On the other end are settings that I think are poorly conceived, and I with their authors would be drawn and quartered and their body parts thrown on a pyre of the burning books for the setting.

Because I like doing annotated lists, here's a list of the official D&D settings, as published by Infogalactic, with annotated commentary by me.

• Birthright—in theory, this was loosely based on Lord of the Rings, although I suspect very loosely.  I'm not really very familiar with this setting, but the idea of being a kinda sorta demigod running a turn-based kingdom rather than being a regular adventurer is something that I wouldn't necessarily expect for D&D, and I think it probably has been well-served by games like Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might and Magic and even Civilization, for that matter.
• Blackmoor—famous as the "first D&D campaign setting", run and later developed by Dave Arneson while there wasn't even (yet) a coherent D&D game available, this struggles, in my opinion, to rise to the level of what we'd consider a campaign setting today.  It's more... some alternate rules and a few handwavey lists of places.  At least until "modern" interpretations of the game came out, including a 3e one by Goodman Games in 2004 and Zeitgeist released a 2009 4e version.  The setting was kinda sorta implied to be located somewhere in Mystara too, although that might have merely been a case of a Yog-Sothothery type reference.  I'm not very familiar with either of those, but by the time they came out, I'd long since moved on from where something like Blackmoor was likely to interest me much.
• Council of Wyrms—This was an odd idea, where you played as a dragon.  It was too esoteric of a concept to be used for anything other than a break from a more traditional campaign, I think.
• Dark Sun—The first of these settings that I'd have been interested in playing had it been around when I was playing (it's a 2e setting, so I missed it.  It later was reprinted for 4e, and a mini version of it was published in Dragon and Dungeon Magazines for 3e.)  Meant to be both more savage and more exotic than normal D&D, the designers specifically referenced Barsoom and Dune as a source of inspiration.  However, it seems to have become darker and grimmer than the more swashbuckling heroism of Barsoom, certainly.  It was probably too divergent from the default assumptions to ever be a major, super popular setting, but it's certainly got its fans and deservedly so, from those who don't mind exploring something a bit different.  This is one I could probably sink my teeth into.
• Dragon Fist—This was just a one-shot web product that's got a bit of an "Oriental Adventures" vibe to it while being different nonetheless.  Not interested.  
• Dragonlance—more famous for its long-running and extremely successful novels than as a playable setting (although it was, of course, one of those too) I actually think this would be a difficult setting to use.  That's what happens to any setting that's too closely associated with novels (or movies, or whatever) that is epic enough to enact major setting changing details; what in the world does anyone else do besides the protagonists of the novels?
• Time of the Dragon—While technically a subset of Dragonlance, in reality, this was an unconnected continent that served as a completely discrete setting in its own right.  It also did a lot of unusual things, like Roman-culture minotaurs.  It's a darker, grittier version of Dragonlance, if it can really be a called a version of Dragonlance at all, and I'm not clear what, if anything, TSR ever really did with it other than publish an initial boxed set.
• Eberron—This is the setting developed for 3.5 and the result of the magnificent idea of the "setting search" where, supposedly, over 10,000 people (including me, as it happens) submitted briefs for setting concepts.  I've always liked this idea of a more overtly pulp/noir version of D&D; Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Maltese Falcon and Brotherhood of the Wolf in a fantasy D&D setting.  It didn't do everything "right" but it's still one of my favorite official settings, and one that I'd be more likely to use than many of the alternatives.
• Forgotten Realms—This is the biggest, baddest, most well-known campaign setting for D&D, and it pretty much is iconic for the strange hybrid of extruded high fantasy product with some weird sword & sorcery influences as squeezed through a beta-male hippy Canadian wishful thinking filter.  If that doesn't sound very complementary, well, it's not actually meant to be insulting either, although it does kind of highlight that I'm not a huge fan of the setting, especially as it grew and developed.  A common refrain, which I'd also echo, is that the setting was much better when it was a little more light and breezy, not after hundreds of novels and detailed anthologies and articles and whatever else was squeezed into it over the years.  Another unfortunate side effect of the setting is that it's tended to gobble up a variety of other cultural hook settings over the years and place them somewhere on the edge of the original pseudo-European setting, although I suppose it doesn't really matter that much if you're running a game in Kara-Tur if it's "attached" to the Forgotten Realms or not.
• Al-Qadim—as the name implies, it's an Arabian Nights style setting, as it could only have been done when the source material was Arabian Nights books and movies and before anyone in the West was intimately familiar with the actual peoples and cultures of the Middle East.  While I could have done something with this at one point, but exasperation with having the Middle East in my face over the last many years means that I couldn't now.
• The Horde—Having a Mongol subsetting in Forgotten Realms may seem a little odd.  I'm not very familiar with this at all, and it seems to have made little impact on anyone anyway.  
• Kara-Tur—The original setting for the 1e Oriental Adventures book loosely based on "medieval" China, and it was later added on as a distant part of the Forgotten Realms.  Personally, I'm not a huge fan of chinoiserie, so my interest in this has always been relatively low.  I'm curious how people who are fans of the vibe compare Kara-Tur to Rokugan.
• Malatra—Originally a spin-off of Kara-Tur, like the latter, this was also appended to Forgotten Realms.  If you want fantasy Thailand and Vietnam, this is the setting for you, I suppose.  I know very little about it.  It looks like most of its development happened in Polyhedron for the Living Campaign stuff that they used to manage.
• Maztica—A precolumbian Meso-American setting, complete with an "incomplete" conquest by "Europeans."  Although I'm not really very interested in this idea, the fact that I did something similar with North America and the Viking New England colonies means that... I dunno, maybe I should check this out some day.  It's been one of those things that I've not paid much attention to in the past.  Cultural hook D&D settings require that the participants be fans, at least to some degree, of the culture, and I've never really been all that interested in Meso-American cultures.  That, honestly, has been a big part of my problem with all of the "sub-settings" under Forgotten Realms.  They just don't have the broad appeal, given that the audience is almost completely of European descent, as a culture based on fantasy Europe.
• Ghostwalk—This was kind of a fun idea, but it also feels more like a one-shot or mini-campaign than something that you could really sink your teeth into long-term.  While the idea of a haunted campaign that features ghosts is kinda cool, the setting made undead rather routine rather than interesting, and the idea of getting up after being killed and continuing the same combat as a ghost isn't nearly as cool as it must have sounded to the two developers.  The whole idea just tries a little bit too hard; either that, or the high concept simply wasn't sufficient to support the weight of a campaign book.
• Greyhawk—The classic campaign setting, where all kinds of adventures nominally take place, not that it matters.  Greyhawk is very "vanilla" to D&D in the way that Forgotten Realms is, but with a bit of a stranger, slightly more gonzo vibe to it that hews a little bit closer to sword & sorcery vs high fantasy.  The thing about Greyhawk isn't its merits as a coherent setting in its own right, though—it's a bit more the fact that it's kinda the background of the game overall.  Characters like Bigby, Mordenkainen, etc. who have spells named after them, lots of iconic setting info, etc. just assumes a Greyhawk default.  That's not to say that a coherent campaign setting wasn't eventually published, just that it's not really ever been the focus of Greyhawk, more of an afterthought.  Your love of Greyhawk is probably, therefore, going to correlate strongly to your acceptance of D&Disms in D&D in general.  I'm sometimes kinda skeptical of them, so I remain often skeptical of Greyhawk, but I don't really have anything against it.  I've played in (and run) several games that were nominally set in Greyhawk, including a complete run-through of the Age of Worms adventure path.  But the thing is, you never really feel like you're in Greyhawk when you do, even if you're actually in the freakin' city of Greyhawk itself.  It's just... D&D.  This is both Greyhawk's strength and weakness; it makes me much more likely to use it, but much less likely to care about it specifically.
• Sundered Empire—WotC briefly developed a Chainmail miniatures combat game, I presume to get their foot in the door of the market captured by Warhammer and Warmachine, etc.  It didn't last very long, and it was replaced by another game that used the Whiz-Kids business model instead, but briefly, it suggested another "half" of the world of Greyhawk that was in a state of open warfare between several factions.  This maybe doesn't really qualify as a D&D setting per se, because no product was ever released for it under D&D, and you have to get the setting info out of a series of articles in Dragon Magazine instead.  Too bad; it's no weirder or worse than the other "half" of Dragonlance, for instance, and may well have had plenty of potential that never really got developed.
• Jakandor—A brief setting that only had a few products, and I'm not very familiar with them.  Described as such online: "Long story short? Barbarians made by blending Vikings and Native Americans (with a dash of Celts) invade the island of a post-apocalyptic magocracy of Aztec-Japanese necromancers and declare a holy war on the natives, who're equally determined to wipe out the foreign invaders. Bloodbaths ensue."  That doesn't really seem conducive to long-term D&D-style play, honestly, which is sometimes a problem that more "unique" setting set-ups bring to the table with them.  
• Kingdoms of Kalamar—another "vanilla" setting, which is officially licensed, even though TSR does not publish it.  This one's gig is that it's consistent and realistic compared to, say, Greyhawk, and lower magic and more believable compared to, say, Forgotten Realms.  Of the three, it actually probably is a little bit more up my alley.  Plus, I like the fact that it's considerably less well known, giving you more room as a potential DM to play around with things the way you want them.  I am a little wary of it occasionally purity-spiraling into attempting to make their specific hook; the "realistic approach" as if it's the only noble attribute in setting design, and getting too deeply into esoteric details that nobody else really cares about, but luckily, decent editors seem to have kept that mostly in check and only occasionally does it wander into that arena.
• Lankhmar—The setting of the Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.  Better explored through those stories than through the D&D products, in my opinion.
• Mahasarpa—a web enhancement mini-setting for 3e Oriental Adventures that said that fantasy India was just as "oriental" as fantasy China/Japan.  Not well known at all.
• Mystara—The final of the "generic" fantasy worlds (until 4e came along and upset the apple cart, of course) famous for being the default setting for D&D (after the split between D&D and AD&D, that is), the default context behind most of the D&D modules, and even the setting for Capcom's side-scroller video games.  I don't have a ton of interest in generic D&D settings, although I acknowledge that I also don't have a ton of animus against them and could readily use them for a quick backstory context if needed.  If I were to actually go out of my way to set a campaign in an official vanilla setting that was heavily developed, though, this is probably the one I'd be most likely to use. Like Forgotten Realms in particular, it accreted sub-settings that were "attached" to it, but which differed enough that they really qualified as unique settings in their own right.
• Hollow World—If you want a combination of Pellucidar and Aztecs and lizardmen, then this is the subset for you.  It actually kinda reminds me at least a little bit of my own ODD D&D setting.  It's probably too odd for long-term use, but it's interesting nonetheless.  That seems to be a problem with the more unusual settings in general; either you can't figure out how to use them, or there's only limited ways to use them, which get old.
• Savage Coast (also known as Red Steel)—what would otherwise have been a great setting with swashbuckling musketeers and pirates and stuff is kinda messed up by being a furry setting with weird cat people, dog people, turtle people (sadly, I'm not kidding) and spider people, as well as mechanics for turning regular characters into strange mutants.  One of the many examples where going too "out there" ended up kind of alienating the potential audience for the setting.
• Thunder Rift—an early concept similar to Nentir Vale.  Thunder Rift itself was a very slim booklet detailing a small section of Mystara, i.e., the Known World, and then a series of modules set within said geography.  Although I'm not personally very familiar with this line, this is exactly the kind of setting that I've really come to love, so I'll probably try and track it down and check it out one of these days.
• Nentir Vale—the default setting for 4e, but which never got any kind of setting book at all.  Lots of details came out in the products, though, so quite a bit is known about the setting, for whatever it's worth, and technically many products for 4e are setting supplements for this setting.  I think one of the things that Nentir Vale did as a setting as "rationalize" the scattered default setting assumptions for D&D into a format that made a lot more sense and had a lot more classic resonance.  I've talked before about what I like about this setting, but what I like it often what many other D&D grognards specifically don't like, to wit, the abandoning of many hoary, esoteric D&D tropes.  Actually, I greatly prefer this one even to Mystara, but I'm not 100% sure that it counts, given that the setting was deliberately never really developed very much, no product that spelled out the setting ever appeared, even in a slim gazetteer only style, and you'll by default have to make up a lot of stuff on your own to fill in holes that the official setting never even bothered trying to plug.  To many, myself included, those are features not bugs, however.
• Pelinore—no relation to Pellinore, as it happens.  Only published as a series of articles in a magazine that TSR used to run for the UK market that reprinted a bunch of Dragon Magazine articles, but had some local content as well, it's almost completely unknown to anyone who wasn't in the target market for that magazine.
• Planescape—the Planes were technically part of Greyhawk, but Planescape took them and decided to not only develop them further, but develop them in such a way that entire campaigns could and would be set there that never really made any reference to the Material Plane.  Such was Planescape.  It eventually got folded into the Greyhawk default (from whence it grew, keep in mind).  While not officially supported, many elements of it were subsequently gobbled up and have appeared in every edition of D&D since.  While 3e literally assumed Planescape was the "expanded detail" version of the Greyhawkian planes, 4e and 5e were a bit more circumspect and cherry-picked elements as they pleased, and ignored the rest.  This is one of the few "out there" high concept setting ideas that actually had pretty broad appeal, and it retains a pretty vocal fanbase even now that it's been out of print for many years.  It's also one of the only official settings that I've ever attempted to run a game in myself.
• Ravenloft—another highly evocative setting with a strong theme, the Gothic Horror D&D setting of Ravenloft is another one that I could potentially have used (although I've played around enough with Ustalav in Pathfinder and my own Timischburg that I'd have to wonder why I'd bother using someone else's take).  Strongly associated with a module that's been re-imagined no less than twice, with the setting having been licensed out during the 3e era to White Wolf even, and made part of the Shadowfell officially during 4e.  The take-away here is that if you're going to do a D&D setting that's a little "out there" pick a concept that is itself broad enough to support a lot of stuff (like "Gothic Horror") and popular enough that people aren't going to be scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make a playable game out of a concept that's too esoteric or limited to use.  But make it a strong enough thematic hook that it stands out from the vanilla settings.  Gothic Horror is a great example.  I can think of a few others, but it's harder to come up with a thematic hook that works as well than many people think.  Ravenloft is therefore notable for being so successful.
• Masque of the Red Death—a Ravenloft spin-off that moved the thematic trappings from pseudo-Medieval Europe to Victorian Europe, I suppose to better approximate the Dracula novel.  Although this seems to have its fans, I suspect that it moved too far away from D&D as recognized by it's traditional fans to ever be more than a minor niche product.
• Ravnica—It's kinda funny that it took until... well, until a few months ago, really, for Wizards of the Coast to combine their two biggest brands, D&D and Magic: The Gathering into a single crossover product; the setting of Magic as a D&D setting.  I've actually not even looked at this yet.  Any opinions on it?  I don't play Magic or know anything about it much anyway, although what little I do know seems to coincide with the somewhat flippant description I've seen of it as a "dungeonpunk fantasy ecumenopolis."
• Rokugan—Originally the setting for the non-D&D game Legend of the Five Rings, this was licensed and used as the 3e Oriental Adventures setting, and subsequently had a d20/D&D treatment that was rather extensive.  Perhaps a bit more Japanese than Chinese, like Kara-Tur, it was a little off my radar as a setting I'd have much to do with, being a bit of a Europhile when it comes to my fantasy, but I have read the treatment in the Oriental Adventures book, and I do have the d20 setting book (although I've never read it) and I even read a Legend of the Five Rings novel once.  This creates a strange set-up where a decisively non-D&D setting was at one point one of the better supported D&D settings published.  If chinoiserie D&D is your thing, this seems like a good option, I suppose.  I'm not very familiar with it personally, having somehow managed to put off reading the setting book for the better part of 15 years that I've owned it.
• Spelljammer—a setting that kinda sorta got gobbled up by the default setting, i.e., the notion of spelljamming crafts are referenced here and there, although they now usually are seen in the Astral rather than the Ether, while the worst ideas from it (like Napoleon-like hippo people and flying from Dragonlance to the Forgotten Realms) have kinda been studiously ignored and we all pretend like they never existed.  Sometimes people have proposed that the animated Disney flop Treasure Planet is a pretty decent visualization of what this setting would have been like.
• Warcraft—done under license by Sword & Sorcery Studios (division of White Wolf) this updates the famous computer game into D&D.  I never had any interest in it, and am not very familiar with it, but it got a good half dozen or so supplements, I believe.
• Wilderlands of High Fantasy—The very first Third Party setting, published by Judges Guild initially back before AD&D even came out.  The original Judges Guild material is way too garage band and Spartan for my tastes; I wouldn't even know what to do with it, it's more like a bunch of charts and tables for encounters and treasures and stuff than it is a setting in the more traditional sense.  (Although I'll certainly point out that to its fans that's exactly why it's so good in the first place.)  The nearly 450-page 3e re-imagining of the setting is something that I've always been curious about, but I do prefer more high level treatments than the hex-crawl treatment that this gives us.  Although I am kinda OCD about letting the PCs drive the game, I will point out that hexcrawls aren't really my style, though, and I expect that I'd bore of them over a relatively short time.  I find the concept of this setting intriguing, but really more in a theoretical rather than useful perspective, since it's not really my style.