Do you use an established setting?

If not, what's your homebrew setting like?

I started a short-lived one just running the Temple of Elemental Evil with the character funnel being the meat-grinder of the moathouse. It uh...  well, you can probably imagine how that went. I even gave everyone four dudes to start.

I'd like to do that again, but maybe do some things to help the players out a bit.

I've been playtesting most of the modules put out by Goodman Games, so my "campaign" has mostly been a series of unconnected adventures. My long-term plan is to run something similar to Nehwon and the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser setting.

I started down that road a while back and posted some of my thoughts on this forum: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=23217

I lost some steam though when I discovered nearly all of my potential players had no previous knowledge of Lankhmar.

Actually, re-reading this thread, I notice you posted in it and probably already knew about it.

Creating patrons was more difficult than it appeared!

We're just rooting around in a generic game-world. In good news though, my Elf just got his giant cricket familiar! It's got a mean bite on it.

My own game has only been two sessions, but they were amazing sessions.

My game setting is a world where humanity is nearly extinct, and the world itself is some kind of immense life-preserver at the end of the universe; a superspecies trapping the last star left in the universe and used it to escape the end of all things; only now the super-species is gone, their AI ("G.O.D.") has gone senile, his living programs (daemons) have rebelled, terrible mutations have arisen in the original species, and everything has basically gone to shit.

The humans had apparently originally been called up to be indentured farm servants, the elves were supervisors, dwarves worked deep in the underground "world-machines" and halflings' role is not clear.  But after the "Ancient Ones" vanished, the halflings became almost feral bandits in the woods, dwarves were forced out of the deep places by horrific goblin hordes, tentacle things and their gnomish masters; the elves continued sleepily into a helpless decadence in their automated pleasure-domes, very slowly losing all their knowledge and wisdom to become shallow, self-absorbed drug-addled dilettantes, and the humans were slowly wiped out by plague, mutation, undeath and attacks by monstrosities.

Its possible that there's still other human survivors besides the PCs out there, there were other human settlements in the time of the Ancient Ones,and its not clear how they might have fared in the thousands of years hence; there is even a legend about a great human city named Vornheim, on the other side of the world.
But the PCs only know that their village, the last in the five valleys, was overrun by Zombies; their party survived escaping through a deep tunnel into the Rose Pleasure Dome of the Elves.  Now they're based there; and recently helped the Elven Elder (the only one there who more or less still knows something, or cares about something) to retrieve a Power sphere from the 9th dimension, from the grey men and their dreaded Queen Priscilla.

Unfortunately the absolute earliest we'll be playing again is late June.  It was awesome.

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