This one’s
easy: Planescape. Everything about Planescape is awesome: the art, the writing,
the graphic design, the monsters, the NPCs, the art… All different components
of the setting were cool, and amplified each other’s coolness. A demon is
pretty cool in itself, but a demon drawn by DiTerlizzi talking the chant and
selling you spell-keys is a whole other thing.
I saw the
original boxed set on my monthly trip to
the gaming store and bought it immediately. Even then I was bored with the
usual dwarves and elves and dragons, and Planescape’s weirdness was a breath of
fresh air. It reinvigorated D&D for me.
The Planescape
campaign I ran consisted mostly of small adventures from Well of Worlds, with
freeform role-playing in the city of Sigil between. I also ran The Eternal
Boundary and some chapters from The Great Modron March. I also like Harbinger
House and Something Wild, but I never got around to play them. A large part of In
the Abyss is basically a hexcrawl in the Abyss. It’s pretty awesome.
I think
towards the end of the product line, the quality of supplements and adventures
dropped a little. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and The Inner Planes are
well-done, but they just don’t do it for me. The later adventures were all “Epic Mega-Adventures”, which I don’t like because they don’t leave much room for the
DM to form his own campaign: The Great Modron March, Dead Gods, Hellbound: The
Blood War, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, and Faction War all have some
nice ideas, but when run take over the campaign entirely.
When it
came out, the tagline for the campaign setting was “Fantasy taken over the
edge” and for a while that was what it did. It took fantasy to places where it
hadn’t gone before. However, a funny thing happened in the years following its
release: the edges shifted. Things like Githyanki and tieflings started to pop
up in other D&D campaigns, and the style of D&D fantasy changed. Now, tieflings are in the Player Handbook (even
if they are nothing like Planescape tieflings).
Runners up:
Spelljammer, Al-Qadim, Time of the Dragon (but not the rest of Dragonlance.
Just Taladas).
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