What I love about the Goodman Games adventures is that they feel like they were written by writers on some really great mind-altering substances. The Purple Planet series is a prime example of that; you are thrust into an entirely new world, even at level zero, and it is a constant fight-or-die struggle in a world that is a strange mix of Dying Earth, Planet of the Apes, John Carter, Conan, Tarzan, Gamma World, Flash Gordon, and many of the other great campy but very fun adventure serials.
With Wizards, you ask them to write an extra-planar adventure, and it will be some nebulous adventure hub, often presented as an ideal society or mechanic, and a sort of adjective-noun game lobby (Radiant Citadel, Infinite Staircase, etc.), to safely visit the adventures in the anthology. It is a level selection dialog with a few shops and NPCs. Even your bastion floats out there in the ether, as another level to visit, without being grounded in the real world, at risk, or in an actual campaign setting.
With DCC's Purple Planet, you get a full sandbox with wandering monsters that can TPK you, strange locations to discover, warring factions, a full hex-crawl, and a list of adventure sites to take on in any order. You even have room for your own! And since you are "not in Kansas anymore," there is no easy way home, no safe place to rest unless you make one, and survival is difficult in a strange, new world. There is a "way home," but it is not easy, and many have died trying.
This setting blows my mind and is easily a whole campaign in its own right.
This is how you do a "strange world" setting, and it has the guts to leave the party stranded with no way home. In DCC, there is no easy way to "plane walk" and leave. In D&D, there are so many spells that break this style of game that you need to start banning them or coming up with reasons why they do not work here.
If Goodman Games were to create a version of "Alice in Wonderland" as an adventure module series or boxed set, I am convinced it would be an epic experience. This was done once for AD&D, and the list of banned spells was a paragraph long, since there are far too many "cheats" in that game. In DCC, it is much easier to run a "lost world" setting and keep players engaged in a sandbox.
DCC, with its "fish out of water" campaigns, is a far better choice than 5E, primarily due to the imagination factor and the fact that the characters are straightforward, while the rules are deadly. The threat of a TPK here is real, and you could just pick up again with a new party of heroes, and leave the previous group's corpses out there somewhere to find. They may have some good loot on them, after all.
The fact that a previous party died should be sufficient motivation to be more cautious, or perhaps more risk-taking, the next time. This is DCC, you accept this when you walk in the door.
Party loss and multiple campaign tries do not happen in 5E with that game's over-protected heroes. In DCC, it can, and that is thrilling. These adventures are simply a cut-above what we get in 5E, far more imaginative, and far more compelling to me than mass-market nostalgia and level-select compilations.
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