Interactive fiction has always held a tension between puzzle and story. Some of that is solved by doing Aristotle right: where your plot does Catharsis on the last third of your staged tragedy, this plot resulted from that worldbuilding you (ideally) did in its first third. So let's look at D&D campaign settings... again.
With Tolkien, whose heirs are Dragonlance and Midnight, you know what you are getting: a clear goal. The ancient evil has reärisen and everything you do is to fight that. More D&D follows the Conan model, which was the Heracl[ew]es model before that and B/Gilgamesh before that. You solve mini-goals, in a quest to become a hero. Figurative and literal Immortality, if playing the Master Set.
In the latter case, the evil isn't Sauron; the evil is the whole world, set up against you. Ishtar (Aramaic Ashtarthé) sent her minions against Enkidu and Gilgamesh. The wicked and weak Tirynsian king Eurystheus set Heracles onto his labours. It is unclear to what degree Grendel and the dragon interrelated, but Beowulf fought both.
Somehow a lot of D&D just works, in its aim to challenge players' avatars. Diamond Throne keeps nagging me as a setting which I never figured out if it did or did not work. It may have bugged Monte Cook also which is how come it kept getting expanded, retconned, and "evolved".
I think when you start any setting from the ground up, you have the choice of Elder Evil or to assume there isn't one. Another, less bothersome Monte setting was Ptolus: it had the Spire. If you were playing in Ptolus you literally had the Elder Evil over your head all this time. Yes there was some guff about Galchutt and Chaos, technically more primordial, but honestly if you fixed the Spire you were done there.
There's probably always something in the past that was Evil. Diamond Throne had the dramojh. They're dead though. So you're playing Mario after you rescued the princess for... what, exactly?
Sure, a DM could cook up banes (evil artifacts) and scatter them around old dramojh ruins. Mike Mearls did that Thrice Cursed Crown; Monte himself did those electrodes Between Life And Death. I do not think either adventure particularly worked. Looked, er, artificial.
If there is no Elder Evil then evil (or good) lies in our own actions. Life, then, is its own reward and has its own purpose. That leaves open, what about life that ends up parasitic and/or predatory on other life - starting on your life. That's probably why Monte brought bullywugs. I'd argue the philosophy was trite and its implementation didn't work either. Note how even bullywugs got sequestered onto an otherwise-irrelevant island.
If life is good and we expand that to The Balance - called the Green here - one clear enemy (for gaming) is undead. Indeed undead got brought into this setting so early it distorted everything. Another enemy is outsiders, up to the level of selfish gods, who don't care about the setting for its own sake. Put 'em together and you get Orcus.
One outside threat, that tied many of these threads together, was the Tenebrean Seeds. They're a Legacy of the Dragon retcon, I admit. That can be resolved by pushing them west of the map, or on some plane accessible through Thartholan. Most LoD is best treated as a collection of Tier Two monsters that you only meet in the mountains or deep underground, not in the Ghostwash core which the Diamond Throne actually rules.
So far our tally is: undead, disinterested invaders, and the seduction of the Seeds. Basically: that whole cluster / barrier of Verdune, Thartholan, and (second-hand) the Bitter Peaks. That should suffice for at least three mostly-unrelated Adventure Paths. Even before we get started on the nagpaharrids. To sum up, Diamond Throne might have some problems in its implementation, but as of LoD it wasn't a failure. To the extent Greyhawk has always worked, Terrakal works.
To restate with more precision: as of 2004, Terrakal's ethical matrix used to work.
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