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So I’m starting up a new D&D 3.5e campaign and have been trying to determine which campaign setting I’d rather run. The choices have basically boiled down to:

• Forgotten Realms, with a focus on the city of Waterdeep
• Kingdoms of Kalamar, with a focus on the city of Genavue
• Eberron, with a focus on Sharn, the City of Towers

Funny coincidence: Waterdeep and Geanavue were both created by the same man, Ed Greenwood, who is in my mind a towering genius of fantasy world design.

You may notice that all of the options I’m looking at are based in or around cities. I’ve found I tend to like urban campaigns a great deal, primarily for the wealth of options they offer the player. When any good you want or any service you require is readily available it means you can spend more time figuring out how to do what you want to do, rather than whether or not it’s feasible or possible. But, all three cities are positioned in areas designed to offer easy access to a wealth of other areas — subterranean, jungle, forest, water, etc. There’s also absolutely no reason other than convenience and roots to keep the players in any given place. If they find they dislike the city and want to go somewhere, then far be it from me to stop them. My job as the DM isn’t to restrict their choices so much as encourage them to make the right ones.

Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of each setting.

Forgotten Realms

Pros

• Exceptionally well-supported by Wizards.
• Large world, lots of locales and people for players to experience.
• Has been around for decades, so there’s an overwhelming amount of content.
• Standard-fare fantasy, which more people are going to be familiar with — a so-called “high-magic” world, where magic-use is rather widespread.

Cons

• Very expansive world means it can be tough to decide where to set down.
• Wanting to stick to canon can leave one feeling restricted.
• Can seem kind of bland and played-out since it feels a lot like LotR.
• The abundance of content can result in players (and DMs) who become Realmslore Lawyers

Kingdoms of Kalamar

Pros

• High levels of verisimilitude lend a very realistic feel to the world and its inhabitants.
• I like the “renaissance faire” kind of texture that the world has.
• Very cohesive, “realistic” setting.
• Very detailed and thought-through.
• Could adapt a large volume of third-party adventures and modules to the setting without feeling like I was messing with something whose contents were written in stone by Wizards like I would with The Realms and Eberron.

Cons

• Not a first-party Wizards product, so it’s not as well-supported.
• Somewhat bland in that it’s not quite as high-fantasy as Forgotten Realms or Eberron — it’s what we call “low-magic” like Greyhawk in that powerful magic isn’t all over the place.
• Not as familiar to me as the Realms — my D&D education was on Toril, so I feel like I know it well.
• Content updates have been few and far between for a while now, and I’m worried that the vibrancy and life that new content (including setting, rules, and adventure releases) tends to bring will be minimal, leaving things feeling stale.

Eberron

Pros

• First-party, so it’s going to be well-supported.
• New and different.
• I think the Action Point system is cool — it puts the hero back in heroics — but I suppose we could strip that out and adapt it to another setting.
• The environment and world is really quite interesting.

Cons

• Completely new and unfamiliar to me, as I’ve at least read through most of the Kalamar stuff and have been in the Realms for years.
• I personally think Warforged are dumb and only serve to complicate the party dynamics, especially when Clerics are involved.
• Not quite like what people think of when they think “fantasy role-playing.”
• Despite protestations otherwise, it does feel like they’ve replicated large chunks of technology with magic.

The bulk of it really boils down to what kind of feeling and environment we’re looking for, I suppose. Forgotten Realms feels like traditional high fantasy, with abundant magic, wonder, and power. Kalamar has a very realistic, historical feel to it, plus Elves, Halflings, etc. as well as magic. Eberron is like fantasy film noir — there’s an ample supply of sinister, the good guys aren’t always good, the bad guys aren’t always bad, and there’s always something new to worry about. I’m leaving it to my players to each decide which they find the most intriguing, and I’ll base my choice on their opinions.