Worldbuilding: What are your favorite worlds /settings?

[WarChiefZeke]

Yep, I hear you. An underwater setting would be a dream come true for me. I even started to homebrew one for 5e, but it's really difficult to pull off. The biggest hurdle IMO is the Atlantis is Boring trope. Solving that problem is not as easy as it may seem. The setting itself might be cool, but then you have to write up an interesting adventure for your players, with plot hooks that make sense and that will keep them engaged, and for me that's incredibly difficult to do with an underwater setting, at least beyond the first two or three sessions, after the novelty of the setting has worn off.

DnD oceans aren't "just fish and seaweed" as that link implies, that they are full of actual sentient NPCs, with towns and potential companions and problems to solve. Aquatic elves, sirines, sahuagin, aboleth, storm giants and their underwater castles, getting to see the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls, an entirely underwater city on the Elemental Plane. Many possibilities.

As an aside, I make almost all of my PnP characters followers of Trishina.

 

[JustKneller]

that's incredibly difficult to do with an underwater setting, at least beyond the first two or three sessions, after the novelty of the setting has worn off.

I think that's the double edged sword of it. It's really easy to do an underwater adventure on a lark and just coast (no pun intended ) on the novelty. At the same time, if someone built a really robust setting for an underwater civilization and found an interesting and sensible way to handle the logistics of living underwater as it would apply to a game, that's definitely an untapped area with a lot of potential.

 

[InGameScientist]

I've got to second some of the mentions here, including Mass Effect and Babylon 5 (I'm so glad there are others who remember that show on here!).
Both set in space and with a plethora of space-faring creatures and cultures make for a really vibrant world that I would also love to explore further!

I'll offer up two others that haven't been mentioned yet. One is NK Jemisin's Broken Earth setting. The magic system itself isn't particularly novel, but I enjoyed the picture she painted of that world through the characters in the story and would love to see an RPG in that setting (I think I read that maybe a live-action series is in the works?). There's also a lot of real-world discrimination built into the setting so I think it would be fun to explore how you would navigate those situations.

Another one that at this point I guess might never happen, is the world of Beyond Good and Evil. I never played the first game but heard good things about it, and the trailers that were built for the second game were fantastic! I'd love if that became a reality one day and I could explore it through a game like BGE. Mutant Year Zero I think has a similar premise, although that one is set in a much darker, post-apocalyptic world.