birthright campaign setting the spiderfell

You can choose not to have a common tongue and just make do with the 5 regional languages.

You have the equivalents of British, Scottish / Irish, German, Russian, and Middle Eastern cultures, each with their own common language. If your players suddenly decide to go on a long overland trip well away from where you were focused, your not totally screwed for coming up with ideas about what you might try to do. It also lets you know about historic rivalrys, internal dissent, and a handfull of other things. Every kingdom gives you the ruler, and the movers and shakers within that kingdom. Interesting powers, a detailed backstory, and the resources of a kingdom to draw on. The Awnsheileign make for great villians. Numerous well defined, powerful villians integrated into the setting. That aside though, the setting does have several things that setit apart from other settings. In theory, it is interesting, but in practice, D&D players usually arent going to leap at the chance to let the administration of a kingdom get in the way of adventuring. I have never used the rules for the wargaming aspect though. I have found it to be a surprisingly solid setting. The last few campaigns I have run used Birthright as their setting. So am I barking up the wrong tree with this, do you think?

As the setting's going to have to be converted to 3e as it is (yes, I have located that netbook), I want to make sure that the game is different from your typical D&D game without being overly complex and alienating. As much as I want to run Birthright, I'm worried that some of the 3.5-only novices may have trouble with it. Everyone's enjoying a 3.5 homebrew at the moment. I ask all this because my current gaming group is a dog's breakfast of 1e/2e veterans (including myself) and 3.5 newbies. What works well? What doesn't? What's cooler in theory? Why did your campaign end? How does the feel compare to your typical 3.5 D&D? (In other words, is it just regular D&D with alternating phases of Risk? Or more than the sum of its parts?) How are the published adventures? So what I'd like is for some honest opinions from people who have played and (especially) DMed the setting. Sure, it gets a fistful of mentions here and only one or two here, but overall it makes me think that the whole product line has just disappeared into the Void of TSR's mid-to-late-nineties downward spiral. I discovered that there's actually very little said about BR on this site (at least, that I can locate). I'd been to and the section devoted to the game's 10th 'anniversary', sure, but diehard fans of a 'dead' setting like Birthright aren't really the ones to give you an honest evaluation. I made it a point to scour through as much of EN World as I could to find out what people thought about it. D&D plus wargaming? Sounds great in theory. So I recently picked up a bunch of old Birthright materials, and I'm really intrigued by the concept of the whole thing.

Birthright campaign setting the spiderfell