My history with D&D is kind of spotty. This is probably an overly self-indulgent tangent to lead up to the point I'm actually blogging about, but it's my blog, so you'll indulge me or move on; whatever, I don't care. Although I played D&D fairly early (1980 was my first game, I believe) and played a lot of early versions of the game; OD&D, BD&D, B/X (but not BECMI or RC) and AD&D in the early to mid-80s, but I stopped paying too much attention to D&D specifically before 2e came out. One side effect of that vintage of entry into the hobby is that settings written by setting developers weren't really a thing. OD&D had a Blackmoor and a Greyhawk supplement, but both were much less campaign settings as we'd consider them today and more like expansion optional rules; more classes, more monsters, more magic, etc. Back in those days, running the game and homebrewing your setting were basically seen as synonymous activities. Only much later did they split into two different activities and people start to behave as if using the built-in setting was a given. Because I wandered away from D&D before 2e, which is especially famous for its settings, I never really "got the memo" and changed my perception away from the paradigm that running the game = creating the setting.
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| A gazetteer cover from the Known World |
This change was a long time coming. 3e, for instance, had Greyhawk as the "default" setting in the books that weren't specifically about another setting, but that didn't amount to too much that was actually substantial; the Greyhawk pantheon was given as a sample list of gods, the subraces for elves and dwarves, etc. were specifically Greyhawkian, although generic enough that in theory they could apply anywhere, and a bunch of adventures, especially in Dungeon Magazine, were set explicitly in Greyhawk. But even then, the developers went out of their way to assert that this was just a sample way of doing things, and most products had alternatives for how it would fit to another setting or two that WotC supposedly supported. In terms of very explicitly Greyhawk setting information, there was really only one book that I recall that would qualify as a "setting" book as we think of it today, and that was the early 3e product
Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. I couldn't help but not be at least somewhat familiar with the setting, although I hardly was any kind of deep lore kind of guy, but I was familiar with the names of many of the important NPCs, many of the locations, etc. You couldn't
not be.
Similarly, I absorbed some of Mystara, another old school setting more closely associated with the D&D line after D&D and AD&D officially split. By familiar, I mean of course that I played some modules set in this "Known World" as it was originally called, like "Keep on the Borderlands" or "The Isle of Dread" and a few others, and I remember the early hex maps of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos from the Expert set. And I knew a little bit about some of the differences, like Shadow Elves vs Drow, etc. between the two settings. But again, the fact that these settings existed didn't imply that people were really using them religiously, and they weren't even structured in such a way to facilitate that anyway.
Through the 90s, I was back into RPGs as a hobby, but explicitly not D&D. I read a bunch of Traveller. I read a bunch of World of Darkness (super chic in the 90s, I know). I read a bunch of Top Secret. I read or played a few other games here and there. I paid more attention to these non-D&D games than to D&D, obviously, but I was at least a little familiar with stuff going on in D&D. I was aware of Forgotten Realms and its immense popularity. I read about a dozen Forgotten Realms novels, including at least 8-9 of the original Salvatore novels; the Icewind Dale trilogy, the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, and probably about 2-3 books that followed, before I gave up. I read some later Paul S. Kemp FR novels. I knew a bit about Planescape, but mostly because I read about it rather than because I read it. Because I was going through a phase of valuing novelty over tradition, Planescape in particular was much more interesting to me than other settings at the time. I knew about Dark Sun; the kind of "sure, it's D&D, but it's also Barsoom and Mad Max just as much" setting. I knew about Kara-Tur, Al-Qadim, Maztica, Hollow Earth, and many more... although knowing about them and knowing anything significant about them were obviously two different things. I started to like the idea of seeing settings as interesting things to read about that I could raid at will for my own homebrew, but it was really in the era of 3e that I started digging into some of these settings. Many of these settings I actively was still disinterested in in many ways, as I was still on a novelty kick, and FR, Greyhawk, etc. hardly seemed novel; they seemed pretty vanilla, in fact. Dragonlance was another major setting, and I read a bunch of the novels, and even the Endless Quest books set there, but it seemed so caught up in the metaplot that I admit I didn't really think of it as a setting that you'd actually play in. I know that a lot of people did, but I never had much interest in doing so, and was less interested as I learned more about it. That one's relationship to me is kind of weird. And as I've gotten older, I've found that the novels weren't as good as I remembered them being either, although that isn't to say that they're bad. But Dragonlance to me was always a setting for novels, not games.
As I got back into caring about D&D specifically following the release of 3e, I thought it was a good opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of some of the settings as they were coming out. Other than the aforementioned Greyhawk gazetteer book, WotC officially supported two campaign settings; a cleaned up and revised Forgotten Realms, that had is own trade dress separate from D&D, and which is fairly highly regarded among fans of the setting as probably the best iteration of the setting (with the possible exception of the original AD&D "gray box" depending on who you ask and what they're using it for) and the new setting, Eberron. I gradually got most of the Forgotten Realms products, hence my ongoing Forgotten Realms trawl, from 3e, but I didn't ever care too much about it, and honestly am only even now cracking some of them open decades after I bought them. Sad, I know. Many were bought used and relatively cheap, in my defense. But I have a problem where I buy books and then don't get around to reading them for years. I know. I never cared that much about FR, as I said, but I liked Eberron's core conceit quite a bit, I liked many of the ways it was executed, and being in on the ground floor, buying the actual campaign setting manual when it was brand spanking new, etc. I felt like I had buy-in on Eberron that I never did on any of the older settings, where I flitted around the edges of them while they got popular and mainstream. With Eberron, however, I was there. It's one of the maybe three or four published settings that I'd seriously consider using, possibly.
Another one is Golarion. Although not official, Paizo had been doing Dragon and Dungeon magazine for years, and many of their employees had written a lot of official D&D products. I always saw Golarion as a kind of para-official D&D setting, if that makes any sense. And being there at the ground floor, it's another one that I always kind of liked, even though I had (as always) my problems with some of the choices that they made. I have a few other third party settings, like Midnight, Dragonstar, etc. but the only truly third party (again, Golarion is para-official) setting that I was at the ground floor on was Iron Kingdoms.
For Golarion, it got too big, too detailed, too easy to lose track of what was going on, and too easy to find details that I didn't like. But for at least a couple of years, I really loved the original campaign setting book and the earlier waves of products that expanded on it before I lost the plot of Paizo's obsession with rules and charop builds. It also looks like it drifted away from being too explicitly a D&D setting over the years and picked up a lot of its own thing. In general, I'd applaud this as a good move, but in this case, I think what they implemented was actually worse than D&D default in many ways.
Iron Kingdoms is another one that I liked a lot when we didn't have a lot of information on it. The original Witchfire trilogy and the setting that you could just see around it was fascinating to me. The original Lock & Load brief setting treatment was mostly pretty fascinating. The Five Fingers book was phenomenal; one of my favorite RPG sourcebooks of all time, honestly. But the big two volume campaign setting books underwhelmed me and I kind of lost my way with Iron Kingdoms. I even dabbled a bit in Warmachine because I liked the setting, and I have more than a dozen issues of their magazine, No Quarter. But the wargame inevitably changed the tone and themes of the setting; now instead of a brooding, dark setting with a few interesting industrial elements, it became a loud and proud turned up to 11 steampunk war setting that was all fighting, all "coolness" all the time, and honestly; it lost a lot of its original charm by doing so.
So those three settings are the ones that I have at least some level of buy-in on; Eberron, Golarion and Iron Kingdoms. And Forgotten Realms is the one that I can't quite avoid, and although there are plenty of things not to like about it, there are plenty of things that aren't bad too. And outside of D&D, the Warhammer Old World is a setting I could potentially think of using. Maybe.
Now; all that said, that's background context. What am I specifically talking about today? Because I just read Rise of the Runelords recently, I'm thinking about the Runelords, and honestly, I've never really liked them. The idea of a powerful magocracy is nice, but mages who are focused on the seven deadly sins, and mapping the sins to the 3e schools of magic? Kind of weak and corny, honestly. Although it seems obvious, I don't think it really occurred to me until this time around that the Red Wizards are better in every way than the Runelords, and if you really needed to, you could use them in place of the Runelords. I mean, I know that Paizo couldn't use the Red Wizards because they weren't open content, but as a player, I'm looking at the two of them and thinking; there's no good reason not to swap the Red Wizards in where the Runelords were, and treat Thasillon as if it's basically Thay. There are a couple of reasons why they aren't exactly the same, though, in terms of theme and tone. To wit: 1) Thassilon is an ancient realm that's been gone for 10,000 years even though its zulkirs... er, I mean runelords are all in stasis and can be recovered. 2) Thassilon's schtick is runelords jockeying for power as sub-kings in a single confederacy against each other, and nobody knows what relationship (if any) they really had with most of their neighbors. Thay is like that too, but strongly driven by an expansionist ideology, and their context is that as powerful as they are, they are only one among many rival nations. 3) In 3e in particular, the Thayan enclaves and Thayan magic items business is one of their most important things going, and while I could easily use that if needed for Thassilon, there's nothing like it in Thassilon as described. But again, the various domains of the various zulkirs stand in almost perfectly with the runelords and their sin-besotted nations; what's exactly the difference between Karzoug the transmuter; super high level wizard king of Shalast which in a hoaky way is associated with greed, and Druxus Rhym, the zulkir of transmutation during the 3e era anyway? Especially if the guy's in stasis and only makes a few remote phone calls to the PCs before showing up at the very end of the campaign to be (supposedly) defeated anyway?
I dunno; maybe I'll feel differently after reading Return of the Runelords, but I doubt it. I think the Red Wizards are superior in every way. Heck, honestly, I think the ties to sins of the runelords was super hoaky and silly; even just generic archmages from long ago would have been better than the runelords
