Agreed 100%....it has enough broad brush strokes to base a campaign, but with all the elbow room needed to really make the world your own.

Part of it it probably nostalgia as well....Gary Gygax's module settings (Against the Giants, Tomb of Horrors, etc).

Dungeons and Dragons Online is based in Eberron, and I do like that setting.

I'll also throw Athas/Dark Sun in for the twist on vanilla D&D tropes and whichever setting I come up within my head for Burning Wheel.

Love the books, but the setting is very sparse.

Where do you go with it that you wouldn't go with a from scratch creation?

Let's see I really like farland. I have to give a nod to Army of Darkness and Discworld but they're adaptations. I'll have to think about it some more.

I know it is computer based but I really dig the world that is built in the Elder Scrolls series, Tamriel.

For a tabletop setting, the one that I have enjoyed playing the most is Exalted.

Tamriel is a continent. The world is Nirn. AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH!!!!

I came to Earthsea very late, and I'm not even sure how the books fit together, let alone how to make a game setting of the varied magic levels

I liked the underground labyrinth of dead gods (my memory may have completely misrepresented that)

The sparse nature of the setting is exactly what attracts me to it -- there's a lot of room for your own islands and your own mini-cultures within the Archipelago, with a few touchstone 'big' islands to act as hubs. Magic is a very earthy sort of thing—no flashy special effects, just willpower and the names of things. There are dangerous things everywhere, like a palace enslaved by a cold, inhuman spirit contained within a single stone in its basement. There's political conflict hinted at everywhere in the books, and people rather than monsters are the main causes of conflict. So it's sparse, but there's a lot of hooks and a particular tone already in place in the setting.

ok, I'm convinced.