Catching up on old posts
Apologize to anyone sick of hearing from me. Finally got enough free time to go through this section of the forum instead of clicking on the lattest posts things on the rating page. Some great stuff in here and I will probably be responding alot.
Okay campaign worlds:
I love them. I am a time strapped DM so campaign sourcebooks are a near must for me. Often they are worth it just for the set pieices. Even if you don\'t like the world or the specific setting you can get a ton out of one of these. Including but not limited to, NPCs, unique items/magic/skills/equipment, racial and societal flavors, political systems, rivalries. I often ran my old campaign world but would \'steal\' tons of stuff from existing campaign worlds (mainly Dragonlance myself) in order to populate and better represent my own. I was/am not going to spend the time to come up with a whole new equipment list for clothing items (one of the best lists is in Dragonlance) nor do I want to roll up or assign stats for generic characters like Innkeepers and town guard.
My personal favourite of the TSR settings is to this day DarkSun. I love Darksun, my players loved DarkSun. I loved the near hoplessness of it and the fact that even the grass could kill you. It was a great change from the usual rush in swords swinging and spells flying D&D game.
The one problem as DM \'o Doom mentioned though is beware a player knowing too much about the world you use. Always explain that this is your version of the world. If you really have a stuborn player you can use this one:
\"The history of this world as you know it was written by the winners, this is my tale. A tale that will tell the actual events that occured.\"