TSR/WotC gameworlds

""I mentioned in my 2nd post in this thread the redundancy of hundreds of settings out there that follow the traditional "medieval europe" or LotR model of fantasy.""

That's why Violet Dawn is such an interesting concept. It much more closely follows the Dark Sun model than the typical Mideval model (I think there is some space exploration in Violet Dawn as well).

Another setting that sounds interesting and different (bud sadly is in Portugese only) is Tormenta. Once again, we have a world that follows the Dark Sun/Ravenloft model.

This is from the wiki page.

Tormenta is a word in Portuguese that means storm. A magic storm threatens the world's lives.
The scenario is Arton, the main continent, where is the known world. The coast is bad for sail and the seas are not explored.

From their website:
An Alien World
Crimson sunlight refracts among the crystals of the Forest of Waethe, where reptilian beasts feed on the mystic energies that resonate in the air. Bones the height of mountains arc toward the sky across the Throne of Karnn-the remains of godbeasts dead for millennia, but still the goal of pilgrims. Within the Whitemarsh, swamp vapors coalesce into spirits and illusions, and only the natives can determine one from the other. In the Kaarad Lands, rivers of flesh churn under the watch of wary druids.
Avadnu's environments are as strange and distinctive as the beings which inhabit them. Pastoral fields and lush green forests are cherished as refuges in a world where nature is as frightening as it is nourishing. But Avadnu's peoples have adapted to their land, draping themselves in living leather and riding six-legged mokara on long journeys. Secretive guilds collect flowers that make the weak invincible and foolish kings wise. Clay rich in calite-the metal that dilutes magic-is more valuable than gold.
Travelers through Avadnu must learn to expect the alien in every aspect of their lives. But learning is difficult in a world where scholars are few. . .

A World of Mystery
Wars recent and old have devastated hopes for unity in a dangerous land. Ancient kingdoms know little of their neighbors, and rely on the legends of bards for information on regions beyond their influence. Colleges of wizardry struggle for each piece of magical lore they collect, and are reluctant to use what they have. The followers of the old gods are a minority, their faith shrinking as the worship of spirits and godbeasts grows and the inward-looking philosophy of Vohalden wins the minds of nobles and peasants.
At the fringes of memory and consciousness, the Void and its ravenous denizens linger. The xxyth await their chance to end all creation, fulfilling the mandate given to them by a jealous god. Few of Avadnu's people remember the last time the xxyth entered their world, and xxythite cultists exploit this forgetfulness to expand their power.
Knowledge is a rare commodity on Avadnu, but not one often sought. Survival is foremost on the minds of all but the privileged. The chitinous vulnar are among the few cultures whose organization spans the continent of Kaelandar, and many of their beneficiaries also fear the control of their economic network. The arcanists of Morgathog perform bizarre experiments in their citadel while their people starve in the desert or are captured as slaves.
Valiant individuals may be able to turn away the fog of mystery, but whether or not they choose to do so is another question. . .

Like I said, we've got something here with a similar concept to Dark Sun. (I thought there was also some space travel involved, but I think I must have confused that with another setting...)

Another interesting book that I've heard good things about (but never looked at it myself) is the Redhurst Academy of Magic (a wizards' academy that can shift between prime worlds)

Possibly more original still is the Dragonmech setting. Now, I have not looked at it myself, so I don't know how good the books are, but the concept is unique. An excerpt:
DragonMech is a medieval fantasy campaign setting unlike any other. It is a world destroyed by relentless lunar meteor storms called the lunar rain. To survive, the surface races have used magical and mechanical means to build thousand-foot-tall city-mechs, which now house most of civilization. Kingdoms have been replaced by mobile mechdoms, and the mounted knight is anachronistic in the face of steam-powered combat mechs. While lunar creatures launch invasions from the skies, fleets of smoke-belching steam-mechs battle for scarce supplies of wood, steel, and coal.

There's also Broken. (no, it's not a parody system). I haven't looked at this one either, and it's not quite as original as the above, but:
Broken is a fantasy campaign set in space after the destruction of the world of Solaris 40 years ago. Once richly populated with magic and psionics, home to a variety of cultures, Broken explores the story of a civilization reduced to fragments drifting in the void, softening stone so it can be eaten, recycling precious food and air and struggling to create a trace of heat for comfort. Come explore space fantasy with a grim dose of reality where there is no air and normal sails do not work.
Only problem is that this would be difficult to encorporate into a Spelljammer setting, I would think.

Ave Moloch 3E/2E sounds pretty good, as well (though it sounds like anything other than the core book kinda sucks)
Excerpts once again:
a post-cataclysmic mediaeval fantasy world with steampunk inventions and a Wild West attitude.
...
Due to the catacysmic events of the past, much of the population has been living underground or floating high above, and only the past couple of hundred years has seen more than the most adventurous venture out on the surface. Now both magic and technology are being harnessed to make the surface a fit place on which to live again. Much knowledge, especially the detailed history of what took place, has been lost; but some remains to be discovered.
...
basically, fragmented outposts of various sizes each doing their best to survive against the remnants of alien invasions and hostile neighbours. However, different groups bring a range of talents, skills and knowledge to the world community as a whole - there is even a primitive Internet to enable different settlements to keep in touch with one another! Magic exists alongside technology, being of the familiar arcane and divine persuasions as well as 'ancient magic' from which all else stemmed. Most divine magic comes from a belief in oneself rather than in an external deity, as veneration of gods seems to have vanished during the cataclysm and its aftermath... and the gods themselves appear to have gone to sleep.

Oh, feel free to be insufficient and dismissive, if you want. I'm not trying to convert you to Greyhawkdom or anything; I was just trying to explain why I personally like it.

Hm. While recognizing your right to find whatever you want distasteful, and still not trying to evangelize in any way, I'll note that these things are very, very minor parts of the setting. They go basically unmentioned outside of the old, old modules they originally appeared in, and don't affect the setting around them at all. There's only one robots-and-laser-guns adventure, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and it's never mentioned again. Greyhawk Ruins placed a spelljammer in the Barrier Peaks instead. The Alice in Wonderland stuff does get an extensive mention quite recently, in 2007's Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, but it doesn't affect anything outside a castle created by a mad demigod. There are no official portals to our own Earth in Greyhawk; the adventure "City Beyond the Gate" in Dragon #100 isn't officially placed anywhere on Oerth, though it does mention St. Cuthbert.

There are, of course, similarly silly things in the Realms, notably Elminster's habit of regularly visiting TSR game designers and throwing extravagant parties in Ed Greenwood's basement. Portals to our own Earth was a fundamental part of the Realms as Ed Greenwood originally conceived it (he imagined it as a sort of parallel world where mythological races and beings from Earth disappeared to, thus the name "Forgotten Realms"), though it's mentioned only vaguely in official materials (as the origin of the Mulan people, for example, and probably the origin world of immigrant peoples who brought in several Faerunian deities like Loviatar, Mielikki, Oghma, Tyr, and so on). Just as in Greyhawk, these things don't really affect actual gameplay in the setting in any way.

You should probably avoid Mystara, by the way, cool as I think it sometimes is. It's far, far sillier than Greyhawk ever was, and the robots and laser guns adventure forms a crucial and transformative part of its ancient history, explaining how the setting came to be.

Yeah. The iconic mages aren't such a big deal, since they're only eight NPCs that you really don't have to use in a game (and there are lots and lots of similar anagrams and homages in Planescape books), but it's much harder to ignore the many, many place names in the Greyhawk setting that are anagrams. The Dramidj Ocean, the Duchy of Ulek, the County of Urnst, the City of Gyrax, the Nutherwood, etc. You either have a tolerance for such things or you don't.

Then again, Forgotten Realms has arguably sillier names like Marco Volo (named for Marco Polo, of course) and Regis and Cattie-brie (named for talk-show hosts Regis and Cathy Lee, groan).

You know what setting has really great names? Birthright.

He'd probably be more polite than that, but yeah.

Like I said, it's a lot darker, grittier, more fully-fleshed out, more flavorful, and more intense. Carl Sargent ran his own Greyhawk campaign for many years, and he portrays the world in a very straight-faced, dramatic manner, ignoring any of the silly parts (though he's stuck with the names).

None. You don't need any, really, and it might be more interesting to run a campaign where "medieval Europe" isn't even an option. I also thought it might be fun to run a Planescape campaign where the only prime-material world was a fantastic version of our Earth.

I've often argued that it was pointless to use Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms in the same campaign because they're so similar. To me, though, Greyhawk is a basic part of the D&D "story," so it's hard for me to conceive of Planescape without Oerth and its events somewhere in it. The demon lords Fraz'Urb'luu, Graz'zt, and Zuggtmoy are intimately tied in with the world (Lolth, Imix, and Demogorgon are as well, to a lesser extent), so it'd require some reworking to fit them into another. The Forgotten Realms seems less fundamental to me, but it's part of the story too, and I like the idea of accepting all things D&D into a greater history - yeah, even including the 4th edition stuff.

Most of the ones I mentioned were more things I thought were useful for Planescape than prime worlds specifically, which was contrary to the purpose of the thread, so I apologize. Of what I mentioned, the most innovative/distinctive world is Serran, the world of the Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved RPG (based on the d20 OGL, so fairly close to 3rd edition D&D, but with entirely different classes and non-Tolkienesque races). Beyond Countless Doorways is a planar supplement introducing a number of distinctive worlds and planes (designed by Monte Cook, Wolfgang Baur, Colin McComb, and Ray Vallese), so the emphasis is very much on making things as fantastic and nonstandard as possible.

Here is an attempt to fit all the worlds detailed in Malhavoc Press products into the same crystal sphere.

Worlds (not all of them d20) that I think are particularly flavorful, nonstandard, and distinct include:

Talislanta (just about everything published for the setting is available for free here)
Glorantha (http://www.glorantha.com/)
Tékumel (see http://www.tekumel.com/)

Oathbound sounds interesting, but I don't know much about it. Here's a review.

I'm intrigued by the Skyrealms of Jorune for its very non-standard alien races, but I know virtually nothing about it. http://www.jorune.org/

All of the Greyhawk deities eventually got fleshed out in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer and the Living Greyhawk Journal #3. Iuz was invented and described long before Gygax decided who his parents were. Initially, he was maybe a human who had evolved into a demon,or a son of Orcus, but Gygax made him Graz'zt and Iggwilv's son in order to tie him into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth backstory, which introduced Iggwilv and Graz'zt to the game.

Keoghtom was fully detailed in the 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set, and originally in Dragon Magazine, along with Heward, Murlynd, and Kelanen.

As for the in-character reasons, Iggwilv isn't a blood-relation of Baba Yaga; she's adopted, so Iuz doesn't carry any of her genes. However, keep in mind that the appearance that Iggwilv normally shows isn't her true one. Her true form is supposed to be a shriveled, hideous old hag, very much like Iuz's "Iuz the Old" form.

Yet Iuz only looks like a withered old man some of the time; the rest of the time, he looks like a bloated, red-skinned demon. He does look more like Orcus than Graz'zt, but tanar'ri bloodlines are chaotic enough that this isn't necessarily indicative of his ancestry. A number of Graz'zt's children don't closely resemble him (Thraxxia, for example, looks like a standard alu-fiend).

Iuz is supposed to have looked entirely different, being remarkably handsome, until the battle between Iggwilv and Graz'zt (when Graz'zt escaped from Iggwilv's control) took place in his presence, the forces unleashed in that melee tearing him in two, creating the "withered old mannikin" form and "bloated demon" form he switches between today.

Metamorphosis Alpha, not Alternity. Alternity didn't come out until the tail end of 2e or so, Barrier Peaks was a 1e module.

Ah, that's right. I was confusing it with the Tales of the Comet module (whose purpose is indeed to convert D&D characters to the Alternity setting)

Truespace, where something like our world's physics applied, was the crystal sphere in which the artificial illithid world of Penumbra is found, described in Dawn of the Overmind. That's probably what you're thinking of.

Tale of the Comet was a paperback novel as well as a boxed adventure. I'm not sure which came first.

There's some seriously bad blood between Graz'zt and Malcanthet. Graz'zt is "chief among her enemies." (Dragon #353) Graz'zt did indeed want to "tap that," but when Malcanthet refused him, he sent his armies to invade her plane (she just barely managed to turn them back). Since then it's been mostly a cold war between the two, each sending spies and double agents into each other's realms. Recently Graz'zt managed to embarrass Malcanthet by posing as her and seducing Kostchtchie, something that didn't bother him but was terrible for her reputation. Kostchtchie didn't take it well either.

That said, there's a very nice scene at the beginning of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits where Graz'zt and Malcanthet put aside their differences, despite obvious paranoia and hatred, to plot against Lolth.

Basically. Some Greyhawk fans still bear a lot of ill will toward everything that happened after Gygax's buy-out, and some don't consider anything written after that point to be true 'hawk. The fact that a number of countries were devastated by the Greyhawk Wars (which were, if I recall correctly, Jeff Grubb's initial idea, and fleshed out by David "Zeb" Cook) left the impression that the setting had been needlessly trashed, its theme of dynamic balance between good and evil replaced by darkness and woe (though hope was also a theme - it was called From the Ashes, after all). I actually think Roger E. Moore's attempts to bring the setting back into a state of balance in 1998 were a mixed bag, cutting some of Sargent's themes off abruptly and artificially instead of giving them time to develop. The question of whether or not it's ethical to continue to expand something that had been someone else's personal creation after you've taken control of it against their will... well, it's dubious, but I can enjoy the results without bearing any personal responsibility for how they came to be. TSR is long gone, anyway.

...I didn't realize there were 1E fanboys. 1E + UA was basically identical to 2E - it was probably less of a change than 3e to 3.5 was, even - what's their problem with 2E?

...I didn't realize there were 1E fanboys. 1E + UA was basically identical to 2E - it was probably less of a change than 3e to 3.5 was, even - what's their problem with 2E?
I can't remember exactly, but there were things about 2E that they most certainly disliked. Basically, for starters, because Gygax didn't make it. I can't remember their other reasons, though I think part of it is that they hate that there are more rules (rather than leaving everything up to the DM's whim and player creativity) more or less. Also, a lot of the 1E fanboys hated the 1E UA and claim that it was just a cheap piece of crap book TSR had Gygax make because the company was hurting for cash.

Some people didn't like the addition of nonweapon proficiencies, character kits, and specialty priests, some didn't like the loss of the monk, barbarian, illusionist, assassin, cavalier, and original bard classes, some people didn't like the changes to the ranger class, and some people just didn't like the way the new books were organized. And some few people just try to avoid everything non-Gygaxian.
Yeah, that prettymuch sums it up. That and their seething hatred of the Player's Option supplements and called shots. NWP's was a huge factor, however. Also, the monk actually did make several comebacks in 2E, but it was a divine warrior class sorta like the Paladin and Ranger rather than a pure warrior class.
Aside from the pain in the ass that NWPs were, they also made things a bit easier for the players survival-wise. Where characters before had only a 1% chance of spotting certain dangerous things (including things that even rogues cannot spot, such as camoflaged killer moss or something), they now have between a 2-20% chance of spotting.

I wasn't aware that the 2E Greyhawk setting was a gritty dystopian one, though.

Aha, okay. I guess I can understand people not liking those aspects (and I forgot that monk, barbarian, and assassin were dropped in the transition).

Which I have to say, I never understood. I mean, I get the fervor that a lot of fans of the setting would have against the idea of Oerth being a dying world, but the idea of Oerth being in decline was nothing new. The very first thing you read in the original Glossography, one of the first Greyhawk publications (I think the box set was the second after Supplement 2?) was how magic in Oerth was within a mere four centuries of the then-present day a fading art. In my personal canon, I'd always tied that OHG comment into the whole "coming end of the Epoch of Magic" thing. In fact, I'd always assumed that was the intent.

Indeed. And I know the meta-reason for it, yeah, but I liked the idea of that merely being a symptom of the whole thing and all. I believe there was an article on Boccob in Dragon not long before Paizo lost the magazine that mentioned the fading magic as a future problem of his he was hoping to stop but knew he couldn't possibly?

And I suppose the question then is "what does it mean that Oerth is dying?" But that's probably a question for another thread, I imagine. Probably another forum too; it's not exactly a Planescape question. But then again, I can't imagine it could be posted on Canonfire without getting most people arguing the premise itself.

Hyena mentioned edition changes as a cause of "fanboyism" but I'm not sure why anyone would view an edition change as being even remotely as threatening as a metaplot.

As far as I know, most of the 1E fanboys I've been mentioning don't even LIKE Greyhawk. They usually build their own campaign setting from scratch. They like the modules (particularly the Tomb of Horrors), but not the campaign settings, and they hate 1E Unearthed Arcana and 2E-4E because they're more rules-intensive rather than just letting the DM do whatever he decides on a whim or based on player creativity.

There was NO reason to change this up. Planescape absolutely nailed it, they had such an elegantly simple, yet wonderfully rich organization to the entire multiverse - and now we have garbage like the Elemental Soup or whatever it is being called.

I agree 100%, but nonetheless, I still recognize the class balance and beauty of 4E's powers system. I've had many people (not on this board) deride me for such hangups, stating that if I want The Great Wheel and the Elemental, Paraelemental, and Quasielemental planes back, then I should just do that, and that if I'm not creative enough to come up for 4E rules for it, then I have no business whatsoever being a DM.
Granted, the only people who argue this have ALWAYS thrown out all traces of 2E-4E's campaign-related rules, including alignments (they remove the alignment system altogether except in the context of monsters and villainous NPCs), planar cosmology, cosmological history, monster backgrounds (most of them just put all fiends, both demon, devil, on the same side, remove the 'loths altogether because "they're stupid and useless", and have a single lower plane and a single upper plane which contains only angels, removing the archons, eladrins, and the guardinals. The Slaad are likewise removed or placed on the lower plane.) I haven't asked them much about the content of their campaign settings, though from what I've heard from them, I suspect they ALWAYS involve post-apocalyptic campaign settings where the whole world is either a midieval Fallout setting (as per the game series), post-Zombie invasion, or post-Demon invasion, and the campaign consists of a hack-and-slash to free the world (except sometimes in the Fallout setting) >_< They're also not very pleasant people to post around.

No thanks. Why did they have to mess with perfection?
Basically, they wanted to start over, I guess. They were apparently sick and tired of referencing to 40 years of backstory material. I don't understand it either, because with the way the 4E multiverse is, the cosmology basically is tipped towards chaotic alignment. Supposedly most of the changes they made in 4E were player-requested, though I highly doubt this was the case for the cosmology. I think they merely did this because they wanted to create a new setting. I haven't looked at it myself, but supposedly the 4E Manual of the Planes includes rules for using The Great Wheel and traditional 3x inner planar cosmologies. The problem of course is that The Great Wheel is not part of the official setting, and that 4E is so much more different than previous editions, that it would be difficult to retrofit the monster/etc. rules to the bestiary, paragon paths, etc. It's the most irksome thing about 4E by far, IMO, though their new Essentials product line may well top EVEN that (there's some scary language in the book they've released thus far, and oh my gosh does the book suck horribly.
First of all, the rules aren't even COMPLETE, they're not well explained, and the rules as given don't flow together very well. It sounds more like you won't get the complete rules unless you buy all friggin' 10 products of the line.
Second, they apparently didn't hire a proofreader; that thing's loaded with typos, and probably errors as well.
Third, the option for every single class sucks.
Basically, it appears to have been an attempt to draw back the 1E-3E fans by eliminating 95% of the powers system. Really? Is this really the top complaint of 3x lovers?
Unfortunately, all it really does is bring back most of the worst aspects of 3x, such as the fighter not being able to hold his own against the other classes, and yet, the full casting classes are somehow WEAKENED.)
Scary thing is, the book/website states something along the line that Essentials will "shape the future products of 4E" or some such, but ALSO states that it's an introductory product line, akin to the Rules Cyclopedia/D&DBasic... Yes, they're claiming both those things at the same time, WTF?! Honestly, the Powers system is one of the few things about 4E that I like. Wizards is essentially making a product line that nobody is going to enjoy.

Back to the subject, the people I'm referring to as "fanboys" are the ones who see no redeeming value whatsoever in the other settings, and a lot of them have flat out refused to even try out 3.5 and 4E. Some even refused to try out 3.0.

I honestly don't see the problem with that. I mean, I can see that it's not your cup of tea, but if they're having fun, who cares how they play? The purpose of the game is to have fun, and they were having fun. I mean, if I can quote Colin McComb here:

Absolutely nothing at all. I don't like the 4e cosmology either, but all you need to do is not use it in a 4e game.

I have to admit, I don't understand this complaint. I mean, if you object to different people's games in the same edition having different cosmologies, it's too late for that; there were tons of 1e, 2e, and 3e people that didn't use the Great Ring. Though I can't imagine this is what you meant.

But if you're objecting to different settings having different cosmologies, that was the case even before 4e. There was the Forgotten Realms' cosmology in 3e, of course. But back in 2e, Weis and Hickman were from the very beginning against Dragonlance's inclusion in Planescape (and the other meta-settings), and always insisted as the creators of the setting that no, it wasn't Primes getting stuff wrong, the cosmology of the universe as understood by the people of Krynn was the correct cosmology for the setting of Dragonlance. The outcry over the usage of Lord Soth in Ravenloft especially was huge from them, and they still say that according to true Dragonlance canon it never happened.

Or did you mean something entirely different from those two interpretations?

Remember, folks. In the end, WotC's copyright police will not come to your house, rifle through your GMing notes, cross out the parts that conflict with canon, and force you to read pretyped text the next time the game runs.

If you want to run a game in which the Faction War never happened, or did and ended a different way, or in which the Beastlands and Arborea switch places, or the Abyss has exactly 666 layers, or the gods all fled the Outer Planes at the advance of the Far Realm and now Good, Evil, Primus, and Ssendam are all gathered on the elemental planes together plotting how to take back the afterlife, you can. The more different your campaign is from standard, the more work it is, and that's a tradeoff any setting requires.

Jem, did you not read my last post?
The reason people here have such a hangup with 4E fluff and cosmology is because, unlike 3x, it will take a TON of work to retrofit the whole shebang to Planescape rules. Add to the fact that (despite what people on the Gamefaqs P&P board have claimed), there is no easy way to convert 1-3E rules to 4E rules, because 4E rules are so radically different. Yes, 3E rules are radically different from 1&2E rules as well, but not nearly as much so-- the most difficult parts of the conversion by far is converting monster stats and converting character kits into prestige classes. Retrofitting 3.5 rules to the Planescape setting requires a major overhaul that hasn't yet been completed on Planewalker (character rules have been overhauled, and much of the monster conversions are finished, but the planes have yet to be converted, particularly the Deep Ethereal and the Paraelemental and Quasielemental planes.)
With 4E, EVERYTHING is going to be a challenge, because the rules are so drastically altered, including the difficulty level. Converting monsters will be an even greater challenge, because 4E no longer has the racial subtypes that were present in 3x, and because the alignment system doesn't follow the same rules.
This doesn't require a major overhaul, but rather, a complete reworking of the system. The basic rules for character creation and play will remain the same, yes, but the rules for monsters will need a drastic overhaul, and the deities and planar cosmology will require monumental changes.
In addition to that, the setting/genre will need to be changed, as both the default setting and FR setting are peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic (in the default setting, there's a major Far-Realm invasion currently going on, while in the FR setting you have the Spellplague. In the mainstream/flagship and default 2E-3x settings OTOH, the gates to the Far Realm are closed, and creatures from therein are either holdovers from the Firestorm Gate disaster or are new invaders based on a module.)

I think you can be curmudgeonly without concern on a board dedicated to a retired setting. I'm betting that nobody's gonna call you out. Hehe...

That's so lame I can only shake my head and give a wry smirk. I never really fancied THE REALMS OF THE GODS as a casual stomping ground for level 1 PCs that should be focusing on clearing out a local kobold den that is raiding the town, not confronting Hades on his home turf. It's not unexpected they would carebear the setting, but it's disappointing nonetheless.

Indeed. The problem however, and a major reason for the complaint from DMs and players alike, is that MOST people only like to play low-level games, or mid-level at the highest. This has been the case ever since 1E. One of the reasons, apparently, is that a lot of people find the 9th level spells to be "too ridiculously overpowered" and think that the high-level classes are too overpowered as well. Plus the higher your character's level, the more bookwork you have to keep track of.
So most people, apparently, only play up to 5th or 9th level and then call it quits. This leaves planar travel out of the question.

As for WotC's Carebear treatment of 4E, are other areas where they put on the kid gloves, as well. For instance, I'm told that permanent ability damage and permanent level loss no longer exists in 4th edition.

I've always thought the complaints about Krynn being "forced" into the Great Wheel cosmology were overstated and revisionist.

First, Krynn wasn't the sole brainchild of Weis and Hickman. Tracy Hickman was the project leader, but it was a group effort involving a number of people, including Hickman, Larry Elmore, Jeff Grubb (who created the Krynnish pantheon), and others. Jeff Grubb, of course, is the creator of the Spelljammer setting, which first prominently included Krynn as part of a greater AD&D multiverse. I say "prominently," because there were numerous references before that that made it clear that Krynn was connected to the other AD&D worlds and planes.

In 1984, before Tasslehoff Burrfoot appeared in a novel, he appeared in the story "A Stone's Throw Away" by Roger E. Moore, in which the kender met Demogorgon. Yeah, that Demogorgon. In 1987, the 1st edition Manual of the Planes (by Jeff Grubb) made reference to kender in Acheron and the fact that Tiamat was known as Takhisis to her followers on Krynn. And, remember, Jeff Grubb created Takhisis, inventing her name and adapting her from the original OD&D Chromatic Dragon for his homebrew D&D campaign. If anyone's going against the original authorial intent, it's Tracy Hickman talking about his personal preferences regarding something he didn't create.

Dragonlance Adventures (1987), credited to Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, is the source for claims that Dragonlance "originally" had its own cosmology, but you'd look in vain through that book for proof of that. What the book has are realm names assigned to various deities: it says Paladine rules "the Dome of Creation," Chislev and Zivilyn dwell in "Zhan, the grandest of forests," Gilean lives in the Hidden Vale, and Morgion dwells in a Bronze Tower "on the far borders of the Abyss." What you won't find are indications that Zhan, the Hidden Vale, or the Dome of Creation are planes in their own right. The first book to really explain what these names meant was the Planescape boxed set, which used the same names and made them realms in the Great Wheel. So the Hidden Vale was placed in the Outlands, the Dome of Creation in Mount Celestia, Zhan in the Beastlands, and Morgion's tower was named the Fortress of Disease and placed in the Gray Waste. Not only did this not contradict anything (recognizing that "the Abyss" is a general term for the lower planes), but it was the only way they could be consistent with the totality of Dragonlance canon, including Spelljammer, "A Stone's Throw Away," subtle references to the Great Wheel in the Dragonlance Monstrous Compendium, etc.

Much later, in 3rd edition, a new cosmology was created for Krynn, turning the Dome of Creation, Hidden Vale, and Abyss into outer planes in their own right and Zhan into a realm within the Hidden Vale (though Dragonlance Adventures never implied Zhan was a lesser realm than Gilean's valley). Claims that this is really the original Dragonlance cosmology are distortions of the real history of the setting. Dragonlance was always part of the Great Wheel, depending on what sources you looked at, and nothing until that point had explicitly stated anything different. From my point of view, the 3e cosmos was the "forced" imposition to the setting.

The issue with Dark Sun is similar. The Dragon Kings hardcover was the first Dark Sun book to really deal with cosmology, and it used the same cosmology as the 1st edition Manual of the Planes, even using the same charts. Later on that was partially retconned, with Athas getting different paraelemental plane names. But I think The Inner Planes, which incorporates Athas into the standard elemental cosmology, is as much "true" Dark Sun as anything else.

Tangentially, the 4th edition version of Dark Sun is very true to the original setting, I thought, and proof that 4th edition isn't all about running roughshod over previous canon. 4e Dark Sun, Eberron, the 4e treatment of Sigil, and 4th edition Tomb of Horrors were all characterized by great fidelity to the original sources. There are a few pesky differences (Zadara is served by maruts instead of sword archons, there was kind of a half-hearted attempt at working tieflings into Athas as a minor, desert-dwelling race, there's a mention of the Raven Queen in Tomb of Horrors) but really, it's a substantial improvement over some of the 3rd edition retcons (their avoidance of modrons, elimination of the paraelemental planes, giving the Lady of Pain an alignment, the whole 3rd edition Realms cosmology retcon, the Dragonlance cosmology retcon, the Paizo attempt at fitting 3e psionic races into Dark Sun, and I could go on).

Yeah, Dragonlance was never anyone's homebrew campaign. It was like Birthright, Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer, and Ravenloft, created by staff at TSR. It used Jeff Grubb's homebrew gods, and contributions from Roger Moore, Douglas Niles, Larry Elmore, Michael Williams and others in the initial design phase. Margaret Weis didn't become involved until later, when they needed someone to help write novels. Not to diminish her contributions, but it wasn't originally her brainchild.

Incidentally, Greyhawk was never Dave Arneson's campaign. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign was created before Greyhawk. When Gary Gygax began his Greyhawk campaign a year later, in a different city, he seems to have used the same continent map as Dave Arneson (the continent used by Gary Gygax's Castle & Crusades Society for their wargaming campaigns), but the two campaign settings didn't overlap. Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz did once bring their characters Mordenkainen and Robilar to play in Dave Arneson's campaign, but they didn't regularly game with him; most of Gygax's correspondence with Arneson seems to have been by mail and at conventions. An "Archbarony of Blackmoor" was included in the published World of Greyhawk Fantasy Setting as an homage to Dave Arneson's campaign, but it's a very different place than Dave Arneson's Kingdom of Blackmoor. It's an homage, not the same place.

And I don't think the existence of the primordial stuff is stupid as it in some form across many culture's mythologies in the real world. What's stupid about the primordials is they made it too one-sided in depicting them as all bad.

As for Ioun, well they've had Ioun stones ever since 1e, if they were going to make a new set of Core Gods for the edition, they might as well name one Ioun.

And I don't think the existence of the primordial stuff is stupid as it in some form across many culture's mythologies in the real world.
That's not the part that I think is stupid. The stupid part is that the elemental gods get lumped into the same group as the Titans et al. when the latter came into existence far later than the former.
And yes, making them all evil is dumb considering that the four Elemental Lords and elementals are supposed to be neutral, as well as the existence of the Princes of Elemental Good.

Oh, yeah, another dumb thing about Aseroth being a former archomental: So we're expected to believe that there were once TWO Princes of Elemental Evil Cold? Yeah, right. Especially considering what we know from Dragon 354 (that the princes of elemental good were spawned spontaneously from their home plane to counteract the evil princes. Presumably, the Paraelemental Plane of Ice has never had a need for a prince of elemental good cold because Cryonax has always had his hands full with rivals.) Of course, with 4E's retconned cosmology, they're probably just claiming that Cryonax and Aseroth ruled separate cold regions of the Elemental Chaos, but that still causes the exact same problem that we'd have in 1-3x (in that two evil princes of cold would likely tip the plane AND paraelemental cold towards evil, which would have serious ramifications on spell/power use.)
Then again, it doesn't seem like these rules apply anymore, anyway. After all, the 4E cosmology is tipped towards chaos, yet this doesn't seem to have any effect on lawful characters or their abilities.

As for Ioun, well they've had Ioun stones ever since 1e, if they were going to make a new set of Core Gods for the edition, they might as well name one Ioun.
I disagree; they already explained away the origin of the Ioun Stones for the core/default setting in Dragon Magazine 174-- Crystalle cultivates them in the Gemfields/Ioun region of mineral (which could just as easily be made a region of Earth in the 3x cosmology) Also, like I said, they retro-fitted her into the setting, which I find inexcusable. At least with the Raven Queen (at least from what I've been told), they explain how she came into being between 3x and 4E.