Originally it was. But the confounded convicts made off with the bloody thing in the night, can you believe! Just pulled up anchor and floated away. They were halfway across the globe before anyone was the wiser.

Misread this at first -- thought you were deriding D&D as "virgin lessons". XD

Bollocks. Dark Sun is easily just as rewarding as those two, if not more.

the books for the table top AD&D are loose guidelines for your alternate reality, you as the DM (dungeon Master) set the parameters of the adventure your players are going to face, whether it be medieval with high fantasy (Elves, Dwarfs, etc.) or something closer to current day, the last campaign I DM'ed for, they started out being recruited to chase down a band of goblins that was pillaging the outlaying villages of a nobles fiefdom, approx 200BC timeline, when they arrived at the main encampment the Mage blundered an attack spell, causing a magical artifact to explode, throwing them into the future, approximately 1800 years, where a band of Chinese warriors were using black powder hand cannons to fight off a rival faction, not only did the party have to deal with the goblins in the immediate area, they needed to deal with the warriors who suddenly found strangers fighting on their battlefield, it was all totally off the cuff improvisation on my part, but the campaign lasted three months while they evaded the irate warriors hunting them down with weapons they had never seen.

So don't just think your limited to one sliver of time or area when you think of D&D, it's a basic premise, with loose laws to govern with, but it's your imagination and RNG that reveals the story.

Blasphemy!

Best way to learn D&D or AD&D is having a few buddies with some dice pen and paper ready.. Large table.. Good GM, 2nd Edition rules and various stories ready.. You will learn all there is about dungeons and dragons. Read some classic books could add spice to the universe. Make sure you bag of holdins is holding some enchanted dice..

Wink wink,

Woo, I just started it yesterday.
Nothing else to add, just that I asked for the book for Christmas and got it and you mentioned and now I read it and everything's peachy and sky is not pink.

Chaarcters: Some people have them
Arargorn: Samuel Vimes
Morgoth: Havelock Vetinari
Zeus: Om
Human Faction: Klatch

I had a literal lol at this.

Also look at Pathfinder by Paizo Publishing. It's descended form D&D 3.5 and is quite an interesting setting. :)

Holy Word, I mean, I agree with your judgement.

Others have said this, but D&D doesn't have much in the way of lore. It is a system for playing a game in any setting, and it is the setting that has lore. So if you are playing D&D in a Tolkien setting you have Tolkien lore, D&D in a Warhammer setting would use Warhammer lore, D&D in the Planescape setting would use Planescape lore, and so on.

You mentioned Total War: Warhammer, and that's an excellent example to explain the concept. "Total War" is a series of games that provides a system for playing out a war in a given setting. Many of the Total war games are set in the real world, such as Rome: Total War or Total War: Attila. Total War: Warhammer is set in the Warhammer world, and so would use lore from that setting instead of the real world. So "Total War", like "D&D", is the system; and "Warhammer" is the setting.

Typically when people play D&D they develop their own world with its own history that's different from that of any other D&D group. There are quite a few published settings though - the closest to being a "default" setting is the World of Greyhawk (although that doesn't get much attention these days). That's sort of like an early Middle Ages Europe with many kingdoms frequently going to war over territory, but all purely fictional instead of drawn directly from the real world, and with plenty of fantasy elements such as magic, elves and gods that actually do intervene in the affairs of mortals.

Another setting is Dragonlance, which is one of those typical homebrew game worlds that grew organically around one D&D group's game. This particular group happened to contain several skilled authors who wrote a series of stories about what happened in their game. The stories were popular and a published setting based on the stories was developed. The idea is that all the gods and dragons of the world had long ago decided to separate themselves from the world of mortals, but one of them isn't happy with that arrangement so she sent all the dragons loyal to her to go and conquer everything. Eventually the other dragons arrive to help the defenders try to push the invaders back, and you end up with a sort of World War III scenario, but with knights riding on dragons.

Forgotten Realms is a slightly non-standard but well-known setting, popularised by numerous fiction authors who use the setting as a shared universe, as well as a string of high-profile games from Bioware. Part of the appeal of this setting is the shared-world aspect and strong tie-in with a very large body of fiction from many popular authors, which means that players regularly encounter and interact with some of the numerous famous heroes and villains that they may have read or heard about from books or computer games. Some of the most famous characters are Drizzt Do'Urden, a renegade drow (a race of cruel "dark elves" who live deep underground) who went on to become a renowned hero to surface-dwellers; and Elminster Aumar, a prominent wizard and something of a mascot for the setting.

There's Planescape, a setting that focuses on travelling between different realities. The idea is that there are hidden gateways between worlds, mainly to and from a enormous city (and self-contained world in its own right) called Sigil. There's the Ravenloft setting, which provides for spooky ghost-story games where everywhere you go is beset by some sort of horror. There's Dark Sun, which is about a post-apocalyptic desert world.

So, lots of different settings, each with their own lore.

Of course. There are no laws about where you may or may not set your D&D games. Of course if you wanted to publish Warhammer-related material you'd need a licence from Games Workshop.

Thanks.

pre 4th ed. stuff inc.

Dragonlance is the setting on the planet Krynn; 3rd planet of its solar system (Krynnspace). The little bit experience I have with it is thats its (similar to Greyhawk) a rather grounded fantasy setting. It does not tend to get as weird as FR do or at least not as "easily". Players on these settings might explain better.

Forgotten Realms is (together with Al Quadim and Mazica) the setting on the planet Toril; also 3rd planet of its solar system (Realmspace).

They are 1d10 x10 days apart in average spelljamming ship speed.

Or... well... a teleport. Just don't end up in stone.

They are both part of one multiverse. I hope that clarifies a bit :)

edit:
+ that what Barefoot_Monkey said ;)